lity
to share it?

And sensible men, those who do not intend to let themselves be deceived,
keep on dinning into our ears the refrain that it is no use giving way
to folly and kicking against the pricks, for what cannot be is
impossible. The manly attitude, they say, is to resign oneself to fate;
since we are not immortal, do not let us want to be so; let us submit
ourselves to reason without tormenting ourselves about what is
irremediable, and so making life more gloomy and miserable. This
obsession, they add, is a disease. Disease, madness, reason ... the
everlasting refrain! Very well then--No! I do not submit to reason, and
I rebel against it, and I persist in creating by the energy of faith my
immortalizing God, and in forcing by my will the stars out of their
courses, for if we had faith as a grain of mustard seed we should say to
that mountain, "Remove hence," and it would remove, and nothing would be
impossible to us (Matt. xvii. 20).

There you have that "thief of energies," as he[12] so obtusely called
Christ who sought to wed nihilism with the struggle for existence, and
he talks to you about courage. His heart craved the eternal all while
his head convinced him of nothingness, and, desperate and mad to defend
himself from himself, he cursed that which he most loved. Because he
could not be Christ, he blasphemed against Christ. Bursting with his own
self, he wished himself unending and dreamed his theory of eternal
recurrence, a sorry counterfeit of immortality, and, full of pity for
himself, he abominated all pity. And there are some who say that his is
the philosophy of strong men! No, it is not. My health and my strength
urge me to perpetuate myself. His is the doctrine of weaklings who
aspire to be strong, but not of the strong who are strong. Only the
feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire
for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for
perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance
of life overflows upon the other side of death.

Before this terrible mystery of mortality, face to face with the Sphinx,
man adopts different attitudes and seeks in various ways to console
himself for having been born. And now it occurs to him to take it as a
diversion, and he says to himself with Renan that this universe is a
spectacle that God presents to Himself, and that it behoves us to carry
out the intentions of the great Stage-Manager