the case of a very intelligent magistrate....
Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested neither
perversion nor violence, but a complete absence of emotional reaction.
If he went to the theater, which he did out of habit, he could find no
pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his home, of his wife,
and of his absent children, moved him as little, he said, as a theorem
of Euclid.[1]

[Footnote 1: Ribot: _Psychology of the Emotions_, p. 54.]

The sense of futility, of the flatness, staleness, and unprofitableness
of the world, which is felt in such extreme forms by
pronounced melancholiacs, is experienced sometimes, though
to a lesser degree, by every sensitive mind that reflects much
upon life. Such an attitude, it is true, arises principally during
moments of fatigue and low vitality, and is undoubtedly
organic in its origins, as for that matter is optimism. Again
such a sense of world-weariness comes often in moments of
personal disappointment and disillusion, when friends have
proved false, ambitions empty, efforts wasted. At such times
even the normal man echoes Swinburne's beautiful melancholy:

"We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure,
To-day will die to-morrow,
Time stoops to no man's lure;
And love grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful,
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful,
Weeps that no loves endure.

"From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives, forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river,
Winds somewhere safe to sea."[1]

[Footnote 1: From _A Garden of Proserpine_.]

Even the eager and exuberant, if sufficiently philosophical
and generous-minded, may come, despite their own success,
to a deep realization of the utter futility, meaninglessness, and
stupidity of life, of the essential blindnesses, cruelties, and
insecurities which seem to characterize the nature of things.
Unless against this dark insight some reassuring faith arises,
life may become almost unbearable. In extreme cases it has
driven men to suicide. Take, for example, the picture of the
universe as modern materialism presents it:

Purposeless... and void of meaning is the world which science
reveals for our belief.... That man is the product of causes that had
no prevision of the end they were achieving, that his origin, his