Finally, I may mention that as regards the sexual
relation, a man is committed to a peculiar arrangement which drives
him obstinately to choose one person. This feeling grows, now and
then, into a more or less passionate love,[1] which is the source of
little pleasure and much suffering.
[Footnote 1: I have treated this subject at length in a special
chapter of the second volume of my chief work.]
It is, however, a wonderful thing that the mere addition of thought
should serve to raise such a vast and lofty structure of human
happiness and misery; resting, too, on the same narrow basis of joy
and sorrow as man holds in common with the brute, and exposing him
to such violent emotions, to so many storms of passion, so much
convulsion of feeling, that what he has suffered stands written and
may be read in the lines on his face. And yet, when all is told, he
has been struggling ultimately for the very same things as the brute
has attained, and with an incomparably smaller expenditure of passion
and pain.
But all this contributes to increase the measures of suffering in
human life out of all proportion to its pleasures; and the pains of
life are made much worse for man by the fact that death is something
very real to him.
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