But the most curious fact is that it is also only towards the close of life than a man really recognizes and understands his own true self,—­the aims and objects he has followed in life, more especially the kind of relation in which he has stood to other people and to the world.  It will often happen that as a result of this knowledge, a man will have to assign himself a lower place than he formerly thought was his due.  But there are exceptions to this rule; and it will occasionally be the case that he will take a higher position than he had before.  This will be owing to the fact that he had no adequate notion of the baseness of the world, and that he set up a higher aim for himself than was followed by the rest of mankind.

The progress of life shows a man the stuff of which he is made.

It is customary to call youth the happy, and age the sad part of life.  This would be true if it were the passions that made a man happy.  Youth is swayed to and fro by them; and they give a great deal of pain and little pleasure.  In age the passions cool and leave a man at rest, and then forthwith his mind takes a contemplative tone; the intellect is set free and attains the upper hand.  And since, in itself, intellect is beyond the range of pain, and man feels happy just in so far as his intellect is the predominating part of him.

It need only be remembered that all pleasure is negative, and that pain is positive in its nature, in order to see that the passions can never be a source of happiness, and that age is not the less to be envied on the ground that many pleasures are denied it.  For every sort of pleasure is never anything more than the quietive of some need or longing; and that pleasure should come to an end as soon as the need ceases, is no more a subject of complaint than that a man cannot go on eating after he has had his dinner, or fall asleep again after a good night’s rest.

So far from youth being the happiest period of life, there is much more truth in the remark made by Plato, at the beginning of the Republic, that the prize should rather be given to old age, because then at last a man is freed from the animal passion which has hitherto never ceased to disquiet him.  Nay, it may even be said that the countless and manifold humors which have their source in this passion, and the emotions that spring from it, produce a mild state of madness; and this lasts as long as the man is subject to the spell of the impulse—­this evil spirit, as it were, of which there is no riddance—­so that he never really becomes a reasonable being until the passion is extinguished.

There is no doubt that, in general, and apart from individual circumstances and particular dispositions, youth is marked by a certain melancholy and sadness, while genial sentiments attach to old age; and the reason for this is nothing but the fact that the young man is still under the service, nay, the forced labor, imposed by that evil spirit, which scarcely ever leaves him a moment to himself.  To this source may be traced, directly or indirectly, almost all and every ill that befalls or menaces mankind.  The old man is genial and cheerful because, after long lying in the bonds of passion, he can now move about in freedom.