ssurance. He reposes in the power which has willed that he should be.
To safeguard this confidence, to see that nothing disconcerts it, to
cultivate it, render it more personal, more evident--toward this should
tend the first effort of our thought. All that augments confidence
within us is good, for from confidence is born the life without haste,
tranquil energy, calm action, the love of life and its fruitful labor.
Deep-seated confidence is the mysterious spring that sets in motion the
energy within us. It is our nutriment. By it man lives, much more than
by the bread he eats. And so everything that shakes this confidence is
evil--poison, not food.

Dangerous is every system of thought that attacks the very fact of life,
declaring it to be an evil. Life has been too often wrongly estimated in
this century. What wonder that the tree withers when its roots are
watered with corrosives. And there is an extremely simple reflection
that might be made in the face of all this negation. You say life is an
evil. Well; what remedy for it do you offer? Can you combat it, suppress
it? I do not ask you to suppress your own life, to commit suicide;--of
what advantage would that be to us?--but to suppress _life_, not merely
human life, but life at its deep and hidden origin, all this upspringing
of existence that pushes toward the light and, to your mind, is rushing
to misfortune; I ask you to suppress the will to live that trembles
through the immensities of space, to suppress in short the source of
life. Can you do it? No. Then leave us in peace. Since no one can hold
life in check, is it not better to respect it and use it than to go
about making other people disgusted with it? When one knows that certain
food is dangerous to health, he does not eat it, and when a certain
fashion of thinking robs us of confidence, cheerfulness and strength, we
should reject that, certain not only that it is a nutriment noxious to
the mind, but also that it is false. There is no truth for man but in
thoughts that are human, and pessimism is inhuman. Besides, it wants as
much in modesty as in logic. To permit one's self to count as evil this
prodigious thing that we call life, one needs have seen its very
foundation, almost to have made it. What a strange attitude is that of
certain great thinkers of our times! They act as if they had created the
world, very long ago, in their youth, but decidedly it was a mistake,
and they had well repented it.

Le