community, organized and governed according to this system, resembles rather an accumulated mass of living and lifeless instruments of action and enjoyment, than a multitude of acting and enjoying powers. In disregarding the spontaneity of acting beings, they seem to confine their view to the attainment of happiness and enjoyment alone. But although the calculation would be just, inasmuch as the sensation of him who experiences them is the best index of happiness and enjoyment, it would still be very far below the dignity of human nature. For how could we account for it otherwise, that this very system, which aims at tranquillity, should yet, as if apprehensive of the contrary, willingly resign the highest human enjoyment? Joy is greatest in those moments in which man is sensible of having attained the highest reach of his faculties, and is most deeply conscious of the entirety of his nature. It is doubtless true that at such times also he is nearest the depth of his greatest misery; for the moment of intensity can only be succeeded by a like intensity, and the impulse to joy or despair remains ever in the hands of invincible fate. But when the feeling of the highest in human nature truly deserves the name of happiness, even pain and suffering assume another character. The inmost heart of man is the true seat of happiness or misery, nor does his feeling fluctuate with the billowy tide of circumstance on which he is borne. The system we have condemned only leads us to a fruitless struggle to escape pain. But he who truly knows the nature of enjoyment can endure and resign himself to pain, which, in spite of all, still speeds on the footsteps of the fugitive; thus he learns to rejoice unceasingly in the steady, onward march of destiny; and the prospect of greatness still sweetly allures him, whether growing up before his admiration in the present, or fleeing away from his eyes into the dimly-receding future. Thus he comes to the feeling (so rare
