In searching for pleasure, we create ourselves pain; and seeking to be more happy, we increase our misery; the less we desire, the more we possess. In fine, whatever we wish beyond what Nature has given is pain; and nothing is pleasure but what she offers of herself. Nature presents to us pleasures without number; she has provided for our wants, and fortified us against pain. In the physical world, there is infinitely more good than evil; and therefore it is not the realities but the chimeras which we have to dread: it is not pain of body, disease, nor death that are terrible; but the agitation of the soul, the conflict of the passions, the mental anxiety, are those only we need apprehend. Animals have but one mode of enjoying pleasure; the satisfying their appetite by the exercise of their sensations. We likewise enjoy this faculty, and have another mode of acquiring pleasure, the exercise of the mind, whose appetite is knowledge. This source of pleasure would be the more pure and copious did not our passions oppose its current, and divert the mind from contemplation. So soon as these obtain the ascendancy, reason is silenced; a disgust to truth ensues; the charm of illusion increases; error fortifies, itself, and drags us on to misery; for what misery can be greater than no longer seeing things as they are; to have judgment perverted by passions; to act solely by its direction, to appear in consequence unjust or ridiculous to others; and when the hour of self-examination comes, of being forced to despise ourselves? In this state of illusion and darkness we would change the nature of our soul. She was given us for the purposes of knowledge, and we would employ her solely for those of sensation. Could we extinguish her light, far from regretting the loss, with pleasure should we embrace the lot of idiots. As we no longer reason but during intervals, and as these intervals are troublesome, and spent in secret reproaches, we wish to suppress them, and thus proceeding from one illusion to another, we at length endeavour to lose all knowledge and remembrance of ourselves. A passion without intervals is madness; and a state of madness is the death of the soul. Violent passions with intervals are fits of folly, a malady of the mind, whose danger consists in its duration and frequency. In those intervals alone it may be said to enjoy health by the resumption of wisdom, but prevents it being a state of happiness, by reflecting on and condemning the past follies. The generality of those who call themselves unhappy, are men of violent passions, or rather madmen, who have some intervals of reason; and as in exalted stations there are more false desires, more vain pursuits, more unruly passions, more abuses of the mind, than in the inferior, the rich man, beyond a doubt, is the most unhappy.