own exhaustion, that pleasure is changed into disgust, and that pain is born of all voluptuousness. Pessimism is in the right; for it is proved by an experience only too long-lived that the only result of happiness exclusively pursued is an increase of the capacity for suffering. Need I speak of moral activity? I desire to do good, but "evil is present with me." I do not do that which I approve, and I do not approve that which I do: I feel myself free in my will, and I am enslaved in action. The more effort I make towards an ideal righteousness, the more that ideal, which I never reach, constitutes me a sinner and strengthens in me the consciousness of sin; so that here again, and here especially, the final result of my search is the opposite of that which I set out to seek. Whence shall deliverance come? How shall I solve this contradiction of my being which makes me at the same time live and die? To free man from the miseries and limitations of his nature men count upon the progress of science and the amelioration of the conditions of his life. But who does not see that here is a new source of despair? How can we forget that, so far from attenuating it, science in its progress aggravates and renders mortal the original condition of life? To make a discovery, to explain a new phenomenon, what is this but to add another link to the causal and necessary network which science weaves and spreads over things? To put sequence, order, and stability into the world, is not this, for science, to put necessity into it, and to make necessity the sovereign ruler of the world? Science, in the strict sense of the word, is determinist. But then, prolong this progress of science indefinitely; multiply it by ten, by a hundred, a thousand; what do you do but multiply proportionately the weight of universal determinism beneath which our soul groans and ceases to strive? We should then end in the still more tragic contradiction--between science and conscience, physical laws and moral laws, action and reflection. The more the one enlarges and triumphs the vainer seems the other. Hence that philosophical dualism in which modern thought ends--a science which cannot engender an acknowledged morality, and a morality which cannot be the object of positive science. We touch the cause of that strange malady _le mal du siecle_, a sort of internal consumption by which all cultivated minds are more or less affected. It is an intestine war which arms the human ego against itself and dries up all the springs of life. The more one reflects on the reasons that may be urged in favour of living and acting, the less capable one is of effort and of action. Clearness of thought is in inverse proportion to the energy of the will. The Pessimists tell us that if we were fully and perfectly conscious we should lose the will to act, and even the desire to be. And which of us is not more or less of a Pessimist nowadays? Who does not complain