stence for us, but can affect us only mediately and
indirectly, so far, that is, as other people's behavior towards us is
directed by it; and even then it ought to affect us only in so far as
it can move us to modify _what we are in and for ourselves_. Apart
from this, what goes on in other people's consciousness is, as such, a
matter of indifference to us; and in time we get really indifferent to
it, when we come to see how superficial and futile are most people's
thoughts, how narrow their ideas, how mean their sentiments, how
perverse their opinions, and how much of error there is in most of
them; when we learn by experience with what depreciation a man will
speak of his fellow, when he is not obliged to fear him, or thinks
that what he says will not come to his ears. And if ever we have
had an opportunity of seeing how the greatest of men will meet with
nothing but slight from half-a-dozen blockheads, we shall understand
that to lay great value upon what other people say is to pay them too
much honor.

[Footnote 1: Let me remark that people in the highest positions in
life, with all their brilliance, pomp, display, magnificence and
general show, may well say:--Our happiness lies entirely outside us;
for it exists only in the heads of others.]

At all events, a man is in a very bad way, who finds no source of
happiness in the first two classes of blessings already treated of,
but has to seek it in the third, in other words, not in what he is in
himself, but in what he is in the opinion of others. For, after all,
the foundation of our whole nature, and, therefore, of our happiness,
is our physique, and the most essential factor in happiness is
health, and, next in importance after health, the ability to maintain
ourselves in independence and freedom from care. There can be no
competition or compensation between these essential factors on the one
side, and honor, pomp, rank and reputation on the other, however much
value we may set upon the latter. No one would hesitate to sacrifice
the latter for the former, if it were necessary. We should add very
much to our happiness by a timely recognition of the simple truth that
every man's chief and real existence is in his own skin, and not in
other people's opinions; and, consequently, that the actual conditions
of our personal life,--health, temperament, capacity, income, wife,
children, friends, home, are a hundred times more important for our
happiness than what other pe