desire for great actions ; remember, as is fair, with the knowledge and the experience of a mad doctor, that four of those who were most desirous of achieving great actions were epileptics: to wit, Alexander, Cesar, Mahomet, and Napoleon ; even Byron was subject to this complaint.
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Knowledge and beauty.—When people, as they still continue to do, reserve their worship and their sensation of happiness, as it were, for works of fancy and semblance, we should not wonder if they feel chilled and dulled by the reverse of fancy and semblance, The rapture which is caused by even the most trifling certain final step and progress of insight and is to so many and so abundantly supplied by the present science—this rapture, at present, is not believed in by all those who are used to be enraptured only by leaving reality and plunging into the depths of a semblance. They consider reality as ugly, but they altogether forget that the knowledge of even the ugliest reality is beautiful, and that the frequent discerner of many things is in the end very far from considering the main items of reality, the discovery of which always inspired him with happiness, as ugly. Is there anything ‘beautiful in itself’? The happiness of the discerners enhances the beauty of the world, steeping all things existing in a summer light ; discernment not only clothes the things in its own beauty, but in the long run even sinks its beauty into the things. May future ages bear
