itself, as if there were really in itself two _beings_, an ideal ego and an empirical ego. Hence comes its torment, its struggles, its remorse, but also the impulse ever renewed, the indefinite progress of its spiritual life, of which each moment seems to be but a degree from which it ought to rise to a stage still higher. May we not here foresee the divine purpose of pain? Without it, it would seem as if the life of the spirit could not have arisen out of physical life. All births are painful. Consciousness, like every other child, was born in tears. The child of pain, it can only be developed by pain. Where do you find intelligence the most refined, consciousness the keenest, inner life the most intense, if not amongst the human beings whose external activities have been repressed by sickness or by some limitation in their social position? How else will you explain the _Pensees_ of Pascal or of Maine de Biran, or the _Journal_ of Amiel? Whence comes that extraordinary development of consciousness of which we are all aware in men like these, unless it be that they feel more profoundly than others that radical contradiction which constitutes at once the misery and the grandeur of human destiny? Continue this observation; follow each of our faculties in its progressive expansion. Starting from a contradiction without which they would not exist, you see them all end in a contradiction in which they seem to perish, so that that which has engendered consciousness seems as if it must destroy it. Everywhere the same discouraging antinomy. Man cannot know himself without knowing himself to be limited. But he cannot feel these fatal limitations without going beyond them in thought and by desire, so that he is never satisfied with what he possesses, and cannot be happy except with that which he cannot attain. I desire to know; my labouring intellect is athirst to comprehend and understand, and its first discoveries enchant it. But, alas, my head soon runs itself against the wall of mystery. Not only are there things it does not know, but there are things which it knows for a certainty that it will never be able to know. How can a man jump off his own shadow, or stand on his own shoulders, to look over the impassable wall? That all which is intelligible to us is real, I grant; but is all that is real intelligible to us? And then what becomes my knowledge save a melancholy feeling of ignorance that knows itself to be such? The same contradiction in my faculty for enjoyment. As my seeming knowledge changed into its opposite, so now I see pleasure and happiness changing into pain and sorrow. Let the superficial and the vulgar lay on fate or things the blame of their deceptions and of their inability to be happy; as for me, I can only blame the inner constitution of my being. It is as the result of that very constitution that enjoyment bears within itself the cause of its