The Pleasures of Life | Page 4

apparition, though he wears about
him the visible affections of flesh."
St. Bernard, indeed, goes so far as to maintain that "nothing can work
me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me,
and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault."
Some Heathen moralists also have taught very much the same lesson.
"The gods," says Marcus Aurelius, "have put all the means in man's
power to enable him not to fall into real evils. Now that which does not
make a man worse, how can it make his life worse?"
Epictetus takes the same line: "If a man is unhappy, remember that his
unhappiness is his own fault; for God has made all men to be happy." "I
am," he elsewhere says, "always content with that which happens; for I
think that what God chooses is better than what I choose." And again:
"Seek not that things should happen as you wish; but wish the things
which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of
life.... If you wish for anything which belongs to another, you lose that
which is your own."
Few, however, if any, can I think go as far as St. Bernard. We cannot
but suffer from pain, sickness, and anxiety; from the loss, the
unkindness, the faults, even the coldness of those we love. How many a
day has been damped and darkened by an angry word!

Hegel is said to have calmly finished his Phaenomenologie des Geistes
at Jena, on the 14th October 1806, not knowing anything whatever of
the battle that was raging round him.
Matthew Arnold has suggested that we might take a lesson from the
heavenly bodies.
"Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights
they see, These demand not the things without them Yield them love,
amusement, sympathy.
"Bounded by themselves, and unobservant In what state God's other
works may be, In their own tasks all their powers pouring, These attain
the mighty life you see."
It is true that
"A man is his own star; Our acts our angels are For good or ill,"
and that "rather than follow a multitude to do evil," one should "stand
like Pompey's pillar, conspicuous by oneself, and single in integrity." [6]
But to many this isolation would be itself most painful, for the heart is
"no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them."
[7]
If we separate ourselves so much from the interests of those around us
that we do not sympathize with them in their sufferings, we shut
ourselves out from sharing their happiness, and lose far more than we
gain. If we avoid sympathy and wrap ourselves round in a cold chain
armor of selfishness, we exclude ourselves from many of the greatest
and purest joys of life. To render ourselves insensible to pain we must
forfeit also the possibility of happiness.
Moreover, much of what we call evil is really good in disguise, and we
should not "quarrel rashly with adversities not yet understood, nor
overlook the mercies often bound up in them." [8] Pleasure and pain
are, as Plutarch says, the nails which fasten body and soul together.
Pain is a warning of danger, a very necessity of existence. But for it,

but for the warnings which our feelings give us, the very blessings by
which we are surrounded would soon and inevitably prove fatal. Many
of those who have not studied the question are under the impression
that the more deeply-seated portions of the body must be most sensitive.
The very reverse is the case. The skin is a continuous and ever-watchful
sentinel, always on guard to give us notice of any approaching danger;
while the flesh and inner organs, where pain would be without purpose,
are, so long as they are in health, comparatively without sensation.
"We talk," says Helps, "of the origin of evil;... but what is evil? We
mostly speak of sufferings and trials as good, perhaps, in their result;
but we hardly admit that they may be good in themselves. Yet they are
knowledge--how else to be acquired, unless by making men as gods,
enabling them to understand without experience. All that men go
through may be absolutely the best for them--no such thing as evil, at
least in our customary meaning of the word."
Indeed, "the vale best discovereth the hill," [9] and "pour sentir les
grands biens, il faut qu'il connoisse les petits maux." [10]
But even if we do not seem to get all that we should wish, many will
feel, as in Leigh Hunt's beautiful translation of Filicaja's sonnet, that--
"So Providence for us, high, infinite, Makes our necessities its watchful
task. Hearkens to all our prayers, helps all our