The sense of futility, of the flatness, staleness, and unprofitableness of the world, which is felt in such extreme forms by pronounced melancholiacs, is experienced sometimes, though to a lesser degree, by every sensitive mind that reflects much upon life. Such an attitude, it is true, arises principally during moments of fatigue and low vitality, and is undoubtedly organic in its origins, as for that matter is optimism. Again such a sense of world-weariness comes often in moments of personal disappointment and disillusion, when friends have proved false, ambitions empty, efforts wasted. At such times even the normal man echoes Swinburne's beautiful melancholy: "We are not sure of sorrow, And joy was never sure, To-day will die to-morrow, Time stoops to no man's lure; And love grown faint and fretful, With lips but half regretful, Sighs, and with eyes forgetful, Weeps that no loves endure. "From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving, Whatever gods may be, That no life lives, forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river, Winds somewhere safe to sea."[1] [Footnote 1: From _A Garden of Proserpine_.] Even the eager and exuberant, if sufficiently philosophical and generous-minded, may come, despite their own success, to a deep realization of the utter futility, meaninglessness, and stupidity of life, of the essential blindnesses, cruelties, and insecurities which seem to characterize the nature of things. Unless against this dark insight some reassuring faith arises, life may become almost unbearable. In extreme cases it has driven men to suicide. Take, for example, the picture of the universe as modern materialism presents it: Purposeless... and void of meaning is the world which science reveals for our belief.... That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving, that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave, that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievements must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.[1] [Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, pp. 60-61 ("The Free Man's Worship").]