The desires are very earnest, almost passionate; they more or less exclude each other; they push exertion beyond the point of pleasure, carrying it over into hard labor; and yet they return in the end with no true power, no real possession, no contentment. Hence pessimism characterizes the close of this development. The more circling and lofty the flight, it is said, the greater the plunge. All lifting up is for this overthrow. We may readily grant the assertion, for our lives are not to be floated on the swollen waters of desires, themselves to be swallowed up in arid deserts. From an experience thus returning on itself empty-handed, having suffered infinite labor and jostle, there spring those hypochondriacal moments in which "the world, viewed from the aesthetic side, appears a cabinet of caricatures; from the intellectual side, a mad-house; and from the moral side, a harboring place for rascals. * * * The few wide, profound and real observers of human life have all known, and known often, this fantastic consciousness of living in a strange, distorted universe of lunatics, knaves, grotesques." * The wisdom of Rabelais' moral is the true wisdom both for one's own repose and that of other people: "To do one's duty so so, always to speak well of the prior, and to let the world go as it lists."+ This is the simple subsidence of the spiritual life to the level of the desires, with the added recognition of the impossibility of any real good on that plane. To this is sometimes joined a moral vision not yet extinguished, and simply

* Diderot, p. 228,

+ Ibid., p. 431.