I have not read many books of philosophy, because when I tried to be a philosopher “happiness was always breaking in,” as someone says; also because I have loved to study men rather than books; but in the little I have read there occurs a passage I remember well, and this I shall quote as my answer to anyone who may call me an immoral person because my passions have not always remained in a quiescent state, like hounds--to quote the simile of a South American poet--slumbering at the feet of the huntsman resting against a rock at noon. “We should regard the perturbations of the mind,” says Spinoza, “not in the light of vices of human nature, but as properties just as pertinent to it as are heat, storms, thunder, and the like, to the nature of the atmosphere, which phenomena, though inconvenient, are yet necessary, and have fixed causes by means of which we endeavour to understand their nature, and the mind has just as much pleasure in seeing them aright as in knowing such things as flatter the senses.” Let me have the phenomena which are inconvenient as well as the things which flatter the senses, and the chances are that my life will be a healthier and happier one than that of the person who spends his time on a cloud blushing at Nature's naughtiness. It is often said that an ideal state--a Utopia where there is no folly, crime, or sorrow--has a singular fascination for the mind. Now, when I meet with a falsehood, I care not who the great persons who proclaim it may be, I do not try to like it or believe it or mimic the fashionable prattle of the world about it. I hate all dreams of perpetual peace, all wonderful cities of the sun, where people consume their joyful, monotonous years in mystic contemplations, or find their delight, like Buddhist monks, in gazing on the ashes of dead generations of devotees. The state is one unnatural, unspeakably repugnant: the dreamless sleep of the grave is more tolerable to the active, healthy mind than such an existence. If Signor Gaudentio di Lucca, still keeping himself alive by means of his marvellous knowledge of the secrets of Nature, were to appear before me now on this mountain to inform me that the sacred community he resided with in Central Africa was no mere dream, and should offer to conduct me to it, I should decline to go with him. I should prefer to remain in the Banda Orientál, even though by so doing I should grow at last to be as bad as any person in it, and ready to “wade through slaughter” to the Presidential Chair. For even in my own country of England, which is not so perfect as old Peru or the Pophar's country in Central Africa, I have been long divided from Nature, and now in this Oriental country, whose political misdeeds are a scandal alike to pure England and impure Brazil, I have been reunited to her. For this reason I love her with all her faults. Here, like Santa Coloma, I will kneel down and kiss this stone, as an infant might kiss the breast that feeds