e is vowed to a total
death; but in these respects the worldly man has hardly an advantage.
The Babels he piles up may indeed survive his person, but they are
themselves vain and without issue, while his brief life has been
meantime spent in slavery and his mind cramped with cant and foolish
ambitions. The voluptuary is like some roving creature, browsing on
nettles and living by chance; the worldling is like a beast of burden,
now ill-used and over-worked, now fatted, stalled, and richly
caparisoned. AEsop might well have described their relative happiness in
a fable about the wild ass and the mule.

[Sidenote: Upshot of worldly wisdom.]

Thus, even if the voluptuary is sometimes a poet and the worldling often
an honest man, they both lack reason so entirely that reflection revolts
equally against the life of both. Vanity, vanity, is their common
epitaph. Now, at the soul's christening and initiation into the Life of
Reason, the first vow must always be to "renounce the pomps and vanities
of this wicked world." A person to whom this means nothing is one to
whom, in the end, nothing has meaning. He has not conceived a highest
good, no ultimate goal is within his horizon, and it has never occurred
to him to ask what he is living for. With all his pompous soberness, the
worldly man is fundamentally frivolous; with all his maxims and cant
estimations he is radically inane. He conforms to religion without
suspecting what religion means, not being in the least open to such an
inquiry. He judges art like a parrot, without having ever stopped to
evoke an image. He preaches about service and duty without any
recognition of natural demands or any standard of betterment. His moral
life is one vast anacoluthon in which the final term is left out that
might have given sense to the whole, one vast ellipsis in which custom
seems to bridge the chasm left between ideas. He denies the values of
sense because they tempt to truancies from mechanical activity; the
values of reason he necessarily ignores because they lie beyond his
scope. He adheres to conventional maxims and material quantitative
standards; his production is therefore, as far as he himself is
concerned, an essential waste and his activity an essential tedium. If
at least, like the sensualist, he enjoyed the process and expressed his
fancy in his life, there would be something gained; and this sort of
gain, though over-looked in the worldling's maxims, all of which have a