And yet no! Alone among living creatures, man has the thirst for
knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things. The least
among us will utter his whys and his wherefores, a fine pain
unknown to the brute beast. If these questionings come from us
with greater persistence, with a more imperious authority, if they
divert us from the quest of lucre, life's only object in the eyes
of most men, does it become us to complain? Let us be careful not
to do so, for that would be denying the best of all our gifts.

Let us strive, on the contrary, within the measure of our capacity,
to force a gleam of light from the vast unknown; let us examine and
question and, here and there, wrest a few shreds of truth. We
shall sink under the task; in the present ill ordered state of
society, we shall end, perhaps, in the workhouse. Let us go ahead
for all that: our consolation shall be that we have increased by
one atom the general mass of knowledge, the incomparable treasure
of mankind.

As this modest lot has fallen to me, I will return to the pond,
notwithstanding the wise admonitions and the bitter tears which I
once owed to it. I will return to the pond, but not to that of the
small ducks, the pond aflower with illusions: those ponds do not
occur twice in a lifetime. For luck like that, you must be in all
the new glory of your first breeches and your first ideas.

Many another have I come upon since that distant time, ponds very
much richer and, moreover, explored with the ripened eye of
experience. Enthusiastically I searched them with the net, stirred
up their mud, ransacked their trailing weeds. None in my memories
comes up to the first, magnified in its delights and mortifications