g formidable, the very crux of the
problem. And this it is in this case. Yes! poor Portuguese Jew exiled in
Holland, yes! that he who is convinced without a vestige of doubt,
without the faintest hope of any saving uncertainty, that his soul is
not immortal, should prefer to be without a soul (_amens_), or
irrational, or idiot, that he should prefer not to have been born, is a
supposition that has nothing, absolutely nothing, absurd in it. Was he
happy, the poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and
of happiness? For that and no other is the problem. "What does it profit
thee to know the definition of compunction if thou dost not feel it?"
says a Kempis. And what profits it to discuss or to define happiness if
you cannot thereby achieve happiness? Not inapposite in this connection
is that terrible story that Diderot tells of a eunuch who desired to
take lessons in esthetics from a native of Marseilles in order that he
might be better qualified to select the slaves destined for the harem of
the Sultan, his master. At the end of the first lesson, a physiological
lesson, brutally and carnally physiological, the eunuch exclaimed
bitterly, "It is evident that I shall never know esthetics!" Even so,
and just as eunuchs will never know esthetics as applied to the
selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever
know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for
happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is
reasoned about or defined.

And you have another rationalist, one not sad or submissive, like
Spinoza, but rebellious, and though concealing a despair not less
bitter, making a hypocritical pretence of light-heartedness, you have
Nietzsche, who discovered _mathematically_ (!!!) that counterfeit of the
immortality of the soul which is called "eternal recurrence," and which
is in fact the most stupendous tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy. The number
of atoms or irreducible primary elements being finite and the universe
eternal, a combination identical with that which at present exists must
at some future time be reproduced, and therefore that which now is must
be repeated an infinite number of times. This is evident, and just as I
shall live again the life that I am now living, so I have already lived
it before an infinite number of times, for there is an eternity that
stretches into the past--_a parte ante_--just as there will be one
stretching into the futur