We are like a man running downhill, who cannot keep on his
legs unless he runs on, and will inevitably fall if he stops; or,
again, like a pole balanced on the tip of one's finger; or like a
planet, which would fall into its sun the moment it ceased to hurry
forward on its way. Unrest is the mark of existence.
In a world where all is unstable, and nought can endure, but is swept
onwards at once in the hurrying whirlpool of change; where a man, if
he is to keep erect at all, must always be advancing and moving, like
an acrobat on a rope--in such a world, happiness in inconceivable.
How can it dwell where, as Plato says, _continual Becoming and never
Being_ is the sole form of existence? In the first place, a man never
is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which
he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he
does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the
end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone. And then, it
is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was
never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it
is over.
At the same time it is a wonderful thing that, in the world of human
beings as in that of animals in general, this manifold restless motion
is produced and kept up by the agency of two simple impulses--hunger
and the sexual instinct; aided a little, perhaps, by the influence of
boredom, but by nothing else; and that, in the theatre of life, these
suffice to form the _primum mobile_ of how complicated a machinery,
setting in motion how strange and varied a scene!
On looking a little closer, we find that inorganic matter presents
a constant conflict between chemical forces, which eventually works
dissolution; and on the other hand, that organic life is impossible
without continual change of matter, and cannot exist if it does not
receive perpetual help from without.
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