The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [48]
19. Yet everyone desires to reach old age; a state of life of which it may be said: ‘It is bad today, and it will be worse tomorrow; and so on till the worst of all.’
20. If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when old, the chief feeling they will have at sight of each other will be disappointment at life as a whole;
21. For their thoughts will go back to that earlier time when life seemed so promising,
22. As it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn: only to end in so many failures and sufferings.
23. This feeling will so predominate that they will not consider it necessary to speak of it;
24. But on either side it will be silently assumed, and form the ground of all they talk about.
25. He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession.
26. The tricks were meant to be seen only once, and when they are no longer a novelty they cease to deceive; their effect is gone.
27. Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say, ‘He is dead’; it means he has done his task.
28. If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue?
29. Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence?
30. I shall be told philosophy is comfortless, because it speaks the truth; and people prefer illusions.
31. Go to the illusionists, then, and leave philosophers in peace! At any rate, do not ask us to accommodate our doctrines to your hopes.
32. That is what those rascals of illusion will do for you. Ask them for any doctrine you please, and you will get it.
Chapter 11
1. Every state of well-being, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative;
2. It merely consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.
3. It follows that the happiness of any given life is to be measured not by its joys and pleasures,
4. But by the extent to which it has been free from suffering.
5. If this is the true standpoint, the lower animals appear to enjoy a happier destiny than man.
6. However varied the forms taken by human happiness and misery,
7. Leading a man to seek the one and shun the other, the basis of it all is bodily pleasure or pain.
8. The chief source of all passion is thought for what is absent or lies in the future; these are what exercise such a powerful influence on all we do.
9. This is the origin of our cares, hopes and fears – emotions unknown to the brutes.
10. In his powers of reflection, memory and foresight, man possesses an instrument for condensing and storing up his pleasures and sorrows.
11. But the brute has nothing of the kind; whenever it is in pain, it is as though it were suffering for the first time,
12. Even though the same thing should have previously happened to it times out of number.
13. It has no power of summing up its feelings. Hence its careless and placid temper: how much one envies it!
14. But in man reflection enters, with all the emotions to which it gives rise;
15. And it develops his susceptibility to happiness and misery to so great a degree,
16. That at one moment he is delighted, at another he is in the depths of suicidal despair.
17. In order to increase his pleasures, man adds to the number and pressure of his needs,
18. Which in their original state were not much more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute.
19. Hence luxury in all its forms: rich food, tobacco and opium, alcohol, fine clothes, a thousand other things he considers necessary for existence.
20. And above and beyond all this, there is a yet greater source of pleasure and pain:
21. Ambition and the feeling of honour and shame; and with it anxiety about the opinion others have of him.
22. It is true that besides the sources of pleasure he shares with the brutes, man has the pleasures of the mind as well.
23. These vary from the most trifling to the highest intellectual