however, be carried further. Lucretius says that passion is a torment
because its pleasures are not pure, that is, because they are mingled
with longing and entangled in vexatious things. Pure pleasure would be
without ideas. Many a man has found in some moment of his life an
unutterable joy which made all the rest of it seem a farce, as if a
corpse should play it was living. Mystics habitually look beneath the
Life of Reason for the substance and infinity of happiness. In all these
revulsions, and many others, there is a certain justification, inasmuch
as systematic living is after all an experiment, as is the formation of
animal bodies, and the inorganic pulp out of which these growths have
come may very likely have had its own incommunicable values, its
absolute thrills, which we vainly try to remember and to which, in
moments of dissolution, we may half revert. Protoplasmic pleasures and
strains may be the substance of consciousness; and as matter seeks its
own level, and as the sea and the flat waste to which all dust returns
have a certain primordial life and a certain sublimity, so all passions
and ideas, when spent, may rejoin the basal note of feeling, and enlarge
their volume as they lose their form. This loss of form may not be
unwelcome, if it is the formless that, by anticipation, speaks through
what is surrendering its being. Though to acquire or impart form is
delightful in art, in thought, in generation, in government, yet a
euthanasia of finitude is also known. All is not affectation in the poet
who says, "Now more than ever seems it rich to die"; and, without any
poetry or affectation, men may love sleep, and opiates, and every
luxurious escape from humanity.

The step by which pleasure and pain are attached to ideas, so as to be
predictable and to become factors in action, is therefore by no means
irrevocable. It is a step, however, in the direction of reason; and
though reason's path is only one of innumerable courses perhaps open to