nt for our English ejaculation "Who
cares?" And the happy term je me'n fichisme recently has been
invented to designate the systematic determination not to take anything
in {37} life too solemnly. "All is vanity" is the relieving word in
all difficult crises for this mode of thought, which that exquisite
literary genius Renan took pleasure, in his later days of sweet decay,
in putting into coquettishly sacrilegious forms which remain to us as
excellent expressions of the "all is vanity" state of mind. Take the
following passage, for example--we must hold to duty, even against the
evidence, Renan says--but he then goes on:--

"There are many chances that the world may be nothing but a fairy
pantomime of which no God has care. We must therefore arrange
ourselves so that on neither hypothesis we shall be completely wrong.
We must listen to the superior voices, but in such a way that if the
second hypothesis were true we should not have been too completely
duped. If in effect the world be not a serious thing, it is the
dogmatic people who will be the shallow ones, and the worldly minded
whom the theologians now call frivolous will be those who are really
wise.

"In utrumque paratus, then. Be ready for anything--that perhaps is
wisdom. Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to confidence, to
skepticism, to optimism, to irony and we may be sure that at certain
moments at least we shall be with the truth.... Good-humor is a
philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her
no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always
talk of philosophy with a smile. We owe it to the Eternal to be
virtuous but we have the right to add to this tribute our irony as a
sort of personal reprisal. In this way we return to the right quarter
jest for jest; we play the trick that has been played on us. Saint
Augustine's phrase: Lord, if we arc deceived, it is by thee! remains
a fine one, well suited to our modern feeling. Only we wish the
Eternal to know that if we accept the fraud, we accept it knowingly and
willingly. We are resigned in advance to losing the interest on our
investments of virtue, but we wish not to appear ridiculous by having
counted on them too securely."[12]

[12] Feuilles detachees, pp. 394-398 (abridged).

Surely all the usual associations of the word "religion" would have to
be stripped away if such a systematic parti pris of irony were also to
be denoted b