be destined some day to disappear.

The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is
"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," or the Horatian _carpe
diem_, which may be rendered by "Live for the day," does not differ in
its essence from the Stoic attitude with its "Accomplish what the moral
conscience dictates to thee, and afterward let it be as it may be." Both
attitudes have a common base; and pleasure for pleasure's sake comes to
the same as duty for duty's sake.

Spinoza, the most logical and consistent of atheists--I mean of those
who deny the persistence of individual consciousness through indefinite
future time--and at the same time the most pious, Spinoza devoted the
fifth and last part of his _Ethic_ to elucidating the path that leads to
liberty and to determining the concept of happiness. The concept!
Concept, not feeling! For Spinoza, who was a terrible intellectualist,
happiness (_beatitudo_) is a concept, and the love of God an
intellectual love. After establishing in proposition xxi. of the fifth
part that "the mind can imagine nothing, neither can it remember
anything that is past, save during the continuance of the body"--which
is equivalent to denying the immortality of the soul, since a soul
which, disjoined from the body in which it lived, does not remember its
past, is neither immortal nor is it a soul--he goes on to affirm in
proposition xxiii. that "the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed
with the body, but there remains of it something which is _eternal_,"
and this eternity of the mind is a certain mode of thinking. But do not
let yourselves be deceived; there is no such eternity of the individual
mind. Everything is _sub aeternitatis specie_--that is to say, pure
illusion. Nothing could be more dreary, nothing more desolating, nothing
more anti-vital than this happiness, this _beatitudo_, of Spinoza, that
consists in the intellectual love of the mind towards God, which is
nothing else but the very love with which God loves Himself (prop,
xxxvi.). Our happiness--that is to say, our liberty--consists in the
constant and eternal love of God towards men. So affirms the corollary
to this thirty-sixth proposition. And all this in order to arrive at the
conclusion, which is the final and crowning proposition of the whole
_Ethic_, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.
The everlasting refrain! Or, to put it plainly, we proceed from God and
to Go