go, the maintenance and strengthening of the feeling of honor occupies an important place.  But it is quite a different matter in its effect on human happiness, of which it is here our object to treat; and we should rather be careful to dissuade people from setting too much store by what others think of them.  Daily experience shows us, however, that this is just the mistake people persist in making; most men set the utmost value precisely on what other people think, and are more concerned about it than about what goes on in their own consciousness, which is the thing most immediately and directly present to them.  They reverse the natural order,—­regarding the opinions of others as real existence and their own consciousness as something shadowy; making the derivative and secondary into the principal, and considering the picture they present to the world of more importance than their own selves.  By thus trying to get a direct and immediate result out of what has no really direct or immediate existence, they fall into the kind of folly which is called vanity—­the appropriate term for that which has no solid or instrinsic value.  Like a miser, such people forget the end in their eagerness to obtain the means.

[Footnote 1:  Scire tuum nihil est nisi te scire hoc sciat alter, (Persins i, 27)—­knowledge is no use unless others know that you have it.]

The truth is that the value we set upon the opinion of others, and our constant endeavor in respect of it, are each quite out of proportion to any result we may reasonably hope to attain; so that this attention to other people’s attitude may be regarded as a kind of universal mania which every one inherits.  In all we do, almost the first thing we think about is, what will people say; and nearly half the troubles and bothers of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score; it is the anxiety which is at the bottom of all that feeling of self-importance, which is so often mortified because it is so very morbidly sensitive.  It is solicitude about what others will say that underlies all our vanity and pretension, yes, and all our show and swagger too.  Without it, there would not be a tenth part of the luxury which exists.  Pride in every form, point d’honneur and punctilio, however varied their kind or sphere, are at bottom nothing but this—­anxiety about what others will say—­and what sacrifices it costs!  One can see it even in a child; and though it exists at every period of life, it is strongest in age; because, when the capacity for sensual pleasure fails, vanity and pride have only avarice to share their dominion.  Frenchmen, perhaps, afford the best example of this feeling, and amongst them it is a regular epidemic, appearing sometimes in the most absurd ambition, or in a ridiculous kind of national vanity and the most shameless boasting.  However, they frustrate their own gains, for other people make fun of them and call them la grande nation.