The physical world appears the work of a good and mighty Being who has had to abandon the execution of part of his plan to a maleficent Being. But the moral world seems rather the production of a crazy fiend’s caprices.
When I hear it argued that, taking everything into account, the least sensitive folk are the happiest, I remember the Indian proverb: “Better to be seated than standing, better to be lying than seated, but better than all else to be dead.”
Living is a disease from the pains of which sleep eases us every sixteen hours; sleep is but a palliative, death alone is the cure.
Time diminishes for us the intensity of absolute pleasures, to use the metaphysician’s term, but apparently it increases relative pleasures; and I suspect that this is the artifice by which nature is able to attach men to life after the loss of the objects or pleasures which most rendered it agreeable.
Some one described Providence as the baptismal name of chance; no doubt some pious person will retort that chance is the nickname of Providence.