"Why," asks Souvestre, "is there so much confidence at first, so much doubt at last? Has, then, the knowledge of life no other end but to make it unfit for happiness? Must we condemn ourselves to ignorance if we would preserve hope? Is the world, and is the individual man, intended, after all, to find rest only in an eternal childhood?" "If the world does improve on the whole," said Goethe, "yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning." But, "'tis a great advantage of rank," said Pascal, "that a man at eighteen or twenty shall be allowed the same esteem and deference which another purchaseth by his merit at fifty. Here are thirty years gained at a stroke." "The whole employment of men's lives," said the same thinker, "is to improve their fortunes; and yet the title by which they hold all, if traced to its origin, is no more than the pure fancy of the legislators: but their possession is still more precarious than their right, and at the mercy of a thousand accidents: nor are the treasures of the mind better insured; while a fall, or a fit of sickness, may bankrupt the ablest understanding.... Caesar was too old, in my opinion, to amuse himself with projecting the conquest of the world. Such an imagination was excusable in Alexander, a prince full of youth and fire, and not easy to be checked in his hopes. But Caesar ought to have been more grave." "Knowledge has two extremities, which meet and touch each other," says Pascal, again. "The first of them is pure, natural ignorance, such as attends every man at his birth. The other is the perfection attained by great souls, who, having run through the circle of all that mankind can know, find at length that they know nothing, and are contented to return to that ignorance from which they set out. Ignorance that thus knows itself is a wise and learned ignorance." "That is ever the difference," said Emerson, "between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual."