Men, when they have advanced a few steps in the world, and as soon as their intellectual faculties begin to open, extend their views, and live in the future; sensual pleasures and bodily pain only detain them in the present; but in the long intervals which exist between the renewal of these sensations, it is by anticipation and memory that they are happy or miserable; and recollection is only interesting, as it is perceived to keep up the connexion between the past and future. Undoubtedly, the influence of the future, on all our moral affections, escapes often our notice; to cite some examples of this truth, we believe, that only the present moment produces happiness, when we receive elogiums, obtain some mark of distinction, or are informed of an unexpected augmentation of our fortune; and still more, when we are pleased with the sport of our imagination, or the discoveries of our reason in our closet or in conversation. These enjoyments, and many others similar, we call present happiness; though there is not any one of them which does not owe its value, and even reality, to the single idea of futurity. In fact, respect, applause, the triumphs of self-love, the forerunners of fame, and even fame itself, are the acquisitions which education and habit have rendered precious, in exhibiting always beyond them some other advantage, of which these first were only the symbols. Often, indeed, the last object of our ambition is but an enjoyment of opinion, the confused image of some possession more real. Every where we see vague hopes hurry away our imagination; we see the expected good, the immediate end of our meditation, or the obscure motive of the estimation we annex to the various satisfactions, of which our present happiness is composed. Thus, indirectly, and almost unknown to ourselves, all is in perspective in our moral existence; and it is by this reasoning that, always deluded, we are seldom perfectly deceived. Subjected by long habit, it is in vain that we would wish to separate the imaginary advantages of opinion from the delusions of hope which surround them, and by which we have been seduced all our life.