A remarkable writer, De Senancour, who under the name of Obermann composed some strange books early in this century, maintained that if men would tell the truth and could predict the weather, nearly all the sufferings which afflict humanity would disappear. There is a great deal in his opinion. At present, all men have a rooted aversion to truth, and neither wish to tell it nor to hear it beyond a strictly limited amount. But as a knowledge of facts is essential to right action, the estimation of evidence and the calculation of probabilities are necessary to a prosperous life. A man who has this faculty is said to be gifted with “sound judgment,” but it is quite as much an acquirement as a gift. There are well-known principles by which the value of testimony is balanced and the weight of evidence decided. They are in daily application in our courts, and can be applied at least as successfully to affairs outside.
Such are the outlines of an education directed toward increasing the sources of enjoyment and diminishing the causes of suffering; and what remains to be said is little more than an extension of the principles thus laid down.
II. The second principle is the maintenance of a high sensibility to pleasurable impressions.
To reach the right meaning of this we must begin with physiology. All impressions of the nervous system, that is to say, all feelings, may be compared or studied with reference to three criteria, their Quality, their Intensity, and
their Persistence. Feelings of the same quality, as a rule, heighten each other’s intensity, but persistence is usually inversely to intensity. The keener the sensation, the shorter its duration. The story is told of a French scholar who, for suspected heresy, was subjected to judicial torture on the rack. When the instrument was extended the first time, dislocating several of his joints, he uttered a cry of agony; but at the second extension he burst into laughter. “At my own ignorance,” he explained, “to suppose that I could feel such suffering twice.”
It is essential to anything like a constant flow of pleasurable feelings that we maintain a high state of vigor in the organs of sensibility; and this can only be accomplished by a careful limitation of intensity in favor of persistence of feeling. Occasional nervous impressions of a very high degree of intensity are not only consistent with health, but increase it; but their frequent repetition, and especially the determined effort to maintain them for long periods, inevitably result in a deadening of the sensibility and a lack of response to ordinary and healthful stimuli.
The ignorance or disregard of these physiological laws explains some of the most disastrous and conspicuous failures to attain happiness where every circumstance seems propitious. The neglect of them is the origin of that morbid condition of the mind which has been called “the disease of the century,” la maladie de la siècle,—Ennui.
The bitter pessimist, Schopenhauer, delighted to show the worthlessness of life, whose only variety is from the toil
of pursuit to the ennui of possession; while the sweet mystic, Pascal, discovering in the same feeling the greatest misery of man, saw in it that which would prove his salvation, for it would lead him to renounce the vanities of the world and give himself unto God. The one opinion is worth as much as the other.
If we make an anatomy of Ennui, as Burton made an anatomy of Melancholy, we shall find that two different, though allied, mental conditions have been grouped under the name.