The prince modestly inquires what is the precise meaning of the advice just given.

“When I find young men so humble and so docile,” said the philosopher, “I can deny them no information which my studies have enabled me to afford.  To live according to nature, is to act always with due regard to the fitness arising from the relations and qualities of causes and effects, to concur with the great and unchangeable scheme of universal felicity; to co-operate with the general disposition and tendency of the present system of things.

“The prince soon found that this was one of the sages, whom he should understand less as he heard him longer.”

Here, finally, is a characteristic reflection upon the right mode of meeting sorrow.

“The state of a mind oppressed with a sudden calamity,” said Imlac, “is like that of the fabulous inhabitants of the new created earth, who, when the first night came upon them, supposed that day would never return.  When the clouds of sorrow gather over us, we see nothing beyond them, nor can imagine how they will be dispelled; yet a new day succeeded to the night, and sorrow is never long without a dawn of ease.  But as they who restrain themselves from receiving comfort, do as the savages would have done, had they put out their eyes when it was dark.  Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired.  To lose much at once is inconvenient to either, but while the vital powers remain uninjured, nature will find the means of reparation.

“Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye, and while we glide along the stream of time, whatever we leave behind us is always lessening, and that which we approach increasing in magnitude.  Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion; commit yourself again to the current of the world; Pekuah will vanish by degrees; you will meet in your way some other favourite, or learn to diffuse yourself in general conversation.”

In one respect Rasselas is curiously contrasted with Candide.  Voltaire’s story is aimed at the doctrine of theological optimism, and, whether that doctrine be well or ill understood, has therefore an openly sceptical tendency.  Johnson, to whom nothing could be more abhorrent than an alliance with any assailant of orthodoxy, draws no inference from his pessimism.  He is content to state the fact of human misery without perplexing himself with the resulting problem as to the final cause of human existence.  If the question had been explicitly brought before him, he would, doubtless, have replied that the mystery was insoluble.  To answer either in the sceptical or the optimistic sense was equally presumptuous.  Johnson’s religious beliefs in fact were not such as to suggest that kind of comfort which is to be obtained by explaining away the existence of evil.  If he, too, would have said that in some sense all must be for the best in a world ruled by a perfect Creator, the sense must be one which would allow of the eternal misery of indefinite multitudes of his creatures.