, a man is committed to a peculiar arrangement which drives
him obstinately to choose one person. This feeling grows, now and
then, into a more or less passionate love,[1] which is the source of
little pleasure and much suffering.

[Footnote 1: I have treated this subject at length in a special
chapter of the second volume of my chief work.]

It is, however, a wonderful thing that the mere addition of thought
should serve to raise such a vast and lofty structure of human
happiness and misery; resting, too, on the same narrow basis of joy
and sorrow as man holds in common with the brute, and exposing him
to such violent emotions, to so many storms of passion, so much
convulsion of feeling, that what he has suffered stands written and
may be read in the lines on his face. And yet, when all is told, he
has been struggling ultimately for the very same things as the brute
has attained, and with an incomparably smaller expenditure of passion
and pain.

But all this contributes to increase the measures of suffering in
human life out of all proportion to its pleasures; and the pains of
life are made much worse for man by the fact that death is something
very real to him. The brute flies from death instinctively without
really knowing what it is, and therefore without ever contemplating it
in the way natural to a man, who has this prospect always before his
eyes. So that even if only a few brutes die a natural death, and most
of them live only just long enough to transmit their species, and
then, if not earlier, become the prey of some other animal,--whilst
man, on the other hand, manages to make so-called natural death the
rule, to which, however, there are a good many exceptions,--the
advantage is on the side of the brute, for the reason stated above.
But the fact is that man attains the natural term of years just as
seldom as the brute; because the unnatural way in which he lives, and
the strain of work and emotion, lead to a degeneration of the race;
and so his goal is not often reached.

The brute is much more content with mere existence than man; the plant
is wholly so; and man finds satisfaction in it just in proportion as
he is dull and obtuse. Accordingly, the life of the brute carries less
of sorrow with it, but also less of joy, when compared with the life
of man; and while this may be traced, on the one side, to freedom from
the torment of _care_ and _anxiety_, it is also due to the fact
that _hope_, in any real