Philosophic Nights In Paris BY REMY DE GOURMONT BEING SELECTIONS FROM PROMENADES PHILOSOPHIQUES Translated by ISAAC GOLDBERG JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY BOSTON MCMXX Introduction Helvétius and the Philosophy of Happiness The Player's Illusion The Beyond The Question of Free Will The Insurrection of the Vertebrates The Pessimism of Leopardi The Colors of Life The Art of Seeing The Rivers of France The Fall of Days Insinuations Footprints on the Sand INTRODUCTION The importance of Remy de Gourmont to the universal world of thought is now beginning to be recognized among thinkers of every continent. During his own life he was a figure apart and aloof even from his confrères; his reputation was a matter more of intensity than of extensive acclaim, although subtly it made its way, as did that of the Symbolist school in general, to many nations. Now, however, he is beginning to receive that wider recognition which during his life he actually shunned. He belongs with the notable few who have devised and lived a philosophy of continuous adaptation to the new knowledge that the new day brings forth; he is a daring, independent, unostentatious, extremely personal neo-Epicurean, too individualistic to have been held long within the circle of a school, too sensitive not to have responded to the multifarious influences of a complex age. Yet just as his individualism was not the ignorant self-proclamation of blatant mediocrity, so was his response to the contemporary world far more than an aimless dashing about hither and thither in a snobbish attempt to be ahead of the times. The man's essentially dynamic personality has a genuine strain of the classic in it; he possesses a rare repose, an intellectual poise, that serves as a most admirable complement to his vibrant ideas. Few writers have ever so well combined matter and manner, which to Gourmont were but two aspects of one and the same thing,--the original thought. He is not, and never will be, a writer for the crowd; he was, by heredity and by choice, an aristocratic spirit, yet as he lived grew to recognize and to admit the importance of true democracy.