rience is not able to efface
it. Of the present state, whatever it may be, we feel, and are forced to
confess, the misery; yet, when the same state is again at a distance,
imagination paints it as desirable. But the time will surely come, when
desire will be no longer our torment, and no man shall be wretched, but
by his own fault."

"This," said a philosopher, who had heard him with tokens of great
impatience, "is the present condition of a wise man. The time is already
come, when none are wretched, but by their own fault. Nothing is more
idle, than to inquire after happiness, which nature has kindly placed
within our reach. The way to be happy is to live according to nature, in
obedience to that universal and unalterable law, with which every heart
is originally impressed; which is not written on it by precept, but
engraven by destiny, not instilled by education, but infused at our
nativity. He that lives according to nature will suffer nothing from the
delusions of hope, or importunities of desire; he will receive and
reject with equability of temper; and act or suffer, as the reason of
things shall alternately prescribe. Other men may amuse themselves with
subtile definitions, or intricate ratiocinations. Let them learn to be
wise by easier means; let them observe the hind of the forest, and the
linnet of the grove; let them consider the life of animals, whose
motions are regulated by instinct; they obey their guide, and are happy.
Let us, therefore, at length, cease to dispute, and learn to live; throw
away the incumbrance of precepts, which they, who utter them, with so
much pride and pomp, do not understand, and carry with us this simple
and intelligible maxim: That deviation from nature is deviation from
happiness."

When he had spoken, he looked round him with a placid air, and enjoyed
the consciousness of his own beneficence. "Sir," said the prince, with
great modesty, "as I, like all the rest of mankind, am desirous of
felicity, my closest attention has been fixed upon your discourse: I
doubt not the truth of a position, which a man so learned has, so
confidently, advanced. Let me only know, what it is to live according to
nature."

"When I find young men so humble and so docile," said the philosopher,
"I can deny them no information which my studies have enabled me to
afford. To live according to nature, is to act always with due regard to
the fitness arising from the relations and qualities of causes and