creatures. As it is, in living wholly for myself, I feel that my
philosophy has wanted generosity; and my indifference to glory has
proceeded from a weakness, not, as I once persuaded myself, from a
virtue but the fruitlessness of my existence has been the consequence
of the arduous frivolities and the petty objects in which my early
years were consumed; and my mind, in losing the enjoyments which it
formerly possessed, had no longer the vigour to create for itself a
new soil, from which labour it could only hope for more valuable
fruits. It is no contradiction to see those who most eagerly courted
society in their youth shrink from it the most sensitively in their
age; for they who possess certain advantages, and are morbidly vain of
them, will naturally be disposed to seek that sphere for which those
advantages are best calculated: and when youth and its concomitants
depart, the vanity so long fed still remains, and perpetually
mortifies them by recalling not so much the qualities they have lost,
as the esteem which those qualities conferred; and by contrasting not
so much their own present alteration, as the change they experience in
the respect and consideration of others. What wonder, then, that they
eagerly fly from the world, which has only mortification for their
self-love, or that we find, in biography, how often the most assiduous
votaries of pleasure have become the most rigid of recluses? For my
part, I think that that love of solitude which the ancients so
eminently possessed, and which, to this day, is considered by some as
the sign of a great mind, nearly always arises from a tenderness of
vanity, easily wounded in the commerce of the rough world; and that it
is under the shadow of Disappointment that we must look for the
hermitage. Diderot did well, even at the risk of offending Rousseau,
to write against solitude. The more a moralist binds man to man, and
forbids us to divorce our interests from our kind, the more
effectually is the end of morality obtained. They only are