trong desire
for greater benefits to come."

"Love of justice is with most of us nothing but the
fear of suffering injustice."

"Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of
interests, a mutual exchange of good offices; it is a
species of commerce out of which self-love always
intends to make something."

"We have all strength enough to endure the troubles
of other people."

"Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we
have done, as fear of the ill that may come to us in
consequence."

And everybody here knows the saying that "In the adversity of our best
friends we often find something that is not exactly displeasing."

We cannot wonder that in spite of their piquancy of form, such
sentences as these have aroused in many minds an invincible repugnance
for what would be so tremendous a calumny on human nature, if the
book were meant to be a picture of human nature as a whole. "I count
Rochefoucauld's _Maxims_," says one critic, "a bad book. As I am
reading it, I feel discomfort; I have a sense of suffering which I
cannot define. Such thoughts tarnish the brightness of the soul;
they degrade the heart." Yet as a faithful presentation of human
selfishness, and of you and me in so far as we happen to be mainly
selfish, the odious mirror has its uses by showing us what manner of
man we are or may become. Let us not forget either that not quite all
is selfishness in La Rochefoucauld. Everybody knows his saying that
hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. There is a subtle
truth in this, too,--that to be in too great a hurry to discharge an
obligation is itself a kind of ingratitude. Nor is there any harm in
the reflection that no fool is so troublesome as the clever fool; nor
in this, that only great men have any business with great defects;
nor, finally, in the consolatory saying, that we are never either so
happy or so unhappy as we imagine.

No more important name is associated with the literature of aphorism
than that of Pascal; but the Thoughts of Pascal concern the deeper
things of speculative philosophy and religion, rather than the wisdom
of daily life, and, besides, though aphoristic in form, they are in
substance systematic. "I blame equally," he said, "those who take
sides for praising man, those who are for blaming him, and those
who amuse themselves with him: the only wise part is search for
truth--search with many sighs." On man, as he exists in society, h