tisfied--the
vanity, the necessity--for it is a necessity--arises of imposing
ourselves upon and surviving in others. Man habitually sacrifices his
life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity. He boasts
even of his weaknesses and his misfortunes, for want of anything better
to boast of, and is like a child who, in order to attract attention,
struts about with a bandaged finger. And vanity, what is it but
eagerness for survival?

The vain man is in like case with the avaricious--he takes the means for
the end; forgetting the end he pursues the means for its own sake and
goes no further. The seeming to be something, conducive to being it,
ends by forming our objective. We need that others should believe in our
superiority to them in order that we may believe in it ourselves, and
upon their belief base our faith in our own persistence, or at least in
the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him who
congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are
to him who recognizes the truth or the goodness of the cause itself. A
rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and
characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius
than hit the mark with the crowd. Rousseau has said in his _Emile_ (book
iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the
truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well
that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports
it because it is his. There is not a single one of them who, if he came
to know the true and the false, would not prefer the falsehood that he
had found to the truth discovered by another. Where is the philosopher
who would not willingly deceive mankind for his own glory? Where is he
who in the secret of his heart does not propose to himself any other
object than to distinguish himself? Provided that he lifts himself above
the vulgar, provided that he outshines the brilliance of his
competitors, what does he demand more? The essential thing is to think
differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists
he would be a believer." How much substantial truth there is in these
gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity!

This violent struggle for the perpetuation of our name extends backwards
into the past, just as it aspires to conquer the future; we contend
with the dead because we, the living, are obscured benea