Thus, too, the belief in fixed Law, versus arbitrary will, modifies the Hâjî’s opinions concerning the pursuit of happiness. Mankind, _das rastlose Ursachenthier_, is born to be on the whole equally happy and miserable. The highest organisms, the fine porcelain of our family, enjoy the most and suffer the most: they have a capacity for rising to the empyrean of pleasure and for plunging deep into the swift-flowing river of woe and pain. Thus Dante (Inf. vi. 106):— —tua scienza Che vuol, quanto la cosa è più perfetta Più senta ’l bene, e cosi la doglienza. So Buddhism declares that existence in itself implies effort, pain and sorrow; and, the higher the creature, the more it suffers. The common clay enjoys little and suffers little. Sum up the whole and distribute the mass: the result will be an average; and the beggar is, on the whole, happy as the prince. Why, then, asks the objector, does man ever strive and struggle to change, to rise; a struggle which involves the idea of improving his condition? The Hâjî answers, “Because such is the Law under which man is born: it may be fierce as famine, cruel as the grave, but man must obey it with blind obedience.” He does not enter into the question whether life is worth living, whether man should elect to be born. Yet his Eastern pessimism, which contrasts so sharply with the optimism of the West, re-echoes the lines: —a life, With large results so little rife, Though bearable seems hardly worth This pomp of words, this pain of birth. Life, whatever may be its consequence, is built upon a basis of sorrow. Literature, the voice of humanity, and the verdict of mankind proclaim that all existence is a state of sadness. The “physicians of the Soul” would save her melancholy from degenerating into despair by doses of steadfast belief in the presence of God, in the assurance of Immortality, and in visions of the final victory of good. Were Hâjî Abdû a mere Theologist, he would add that Sin, not the possibility of revolt, but the revolt itself against conscience, is the primary form of evil, because it produces error, moral and intellectual. This man, who omits to read the Conscience-law, however it may differ from the Society-law, is guilty of negligence. That man, who obscures the light of Nature with sophistries, becomes incapable of discerning his own truths. In both cases error, deliberately adopted, is succeeded by suffering which, we are told, comes in justice and benevolence as a warning, a remedy, and a chastisement.