the world in the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seek
no higher unity. Compared with the complex ecstasies which the
supernaturally regenerated Christian may enjoy, or the oriental
pantheist indulge in, their receipts for equanimity are expedients
which seem almost crude in their simplicity.

[75] For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post
brings me some aphorisms from a worldly-wise old friend in Heidelberg
which may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism:
"By the word 'happiness' every human being understands something
different. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds. The wise man
is satisfied with the more modest but much more definite term
CONTENTMENT. What education should chiefly aim at is to save us from a
discontented life. Health is one favoring condition, but by no means
an indispensable one, of contentment. Woman's heart and love are a
shrewd device of Nature, a trap which she sets for the average man, to
force him into working. But the wise man will always prefer work
chosen by himself."

Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to JUDGE
any of these attitudes. I am only describing their variety. The
securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the
twice-born make report has as an historic matter of fact been through a
more radical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered. We
have seen how the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed off from the
goods of nature. But there is a pitch of unhappiness so great that the
goods of nature may be entirely forgotten, and all sentiment of their
existence vanish from the mental field. For this extremity of
pessimism to be reached, something more is needed than observation of
life and reflection upon death. The individual must in his own person
become the prey of a pathological melancholy. As the healthy-minded
enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil's very existence, so the subject
of melancholy is forced in spite of himself to ignore that of all good
whatever: for him it may no longer have the least reality. Such
sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a rare occurrence
where the nervous constitution is entirely normal; one seldom finds it
in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the most atrocious
cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic
constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its