"
When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that
either it is flagrantly stupid--in which case all comment is
superfluous--or it is something formidable, the very crux of the
problem. And this it is in this case. Yes! poor Portuguese Jew exiled in
Holland, yes! that he who is convinced without a vestige of doubt,
without the faintest hope of any saving uncertainty, that his soul is
not immortal, should prefer to be without a soul (_amens_), or
irrational, or idiot, that he should prefer not to have been born, is a
supposition that has nothing, absolutely nothing, absurd in it. Was he
happy, the poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and
of happiness? For that and no other is the problem. "What does it profit
thee to know the definition of compunction if thou dost not feel it?"
says a Kempis. And what profits it to discuss or to define happiness if
you cannot thereby achieve happiness? Not inapposite in this connection
is that terrible story that Diderot tells of a eunuch who desired to
take lessons in esthetics from a native of Marseilles in order that he
might be better qualified to select the slaves destined for the harem of
the Sultan, his master. At the end of the first lesson, a physiological
lesson, brutally and carnally physiological, the eunuch exclaimed
bitterly, "It is evident that I shall never know esthetics!" Even so,
and just as eunuchs will never know esthetics as applied to the
selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever
know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for
happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is
reasoned about or defined.
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