When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid—­in which case all comment is superfluous—­or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.  And this it is in this case.  Yes! poor Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland, yes! that he who is convinced without a vestige of doubt, without the faintest hope of any saving uncertainty, that his soul is not immortal, should prefer to be without a soul (amens), or irrational, or idiot, that he should prefer not to have been born, is a supposition that has nothing, absolutely nothing, absurd in it.  Was he happy, the poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and of happiness?  For that and no other is the problem.  “What does it profit thee to know the definition of compunction if thou dost not feel it?” says a Kempis.  And what profits it to discuss or to define happiness if you cannot thereby achieve happiness?  Not inapposite in this connection is that terrible story that Diderot tells of a eunuch who desired to take lessons in esthetics from a native of Marseilles in order that he might be better qualified to select the slaves destined for the harem of the Sultan, his master.  At the end of the first lesson, a physiological lesson, brutally and carnally physiological, the eunuch exclaimed bitterly, “It is evident that I shall never know esthetics!” Even so, and just as eunuchs will never know esthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned about or defined.

And you have another rationalist, one not sad or submissive, like Spinoza, but rebellious, and though concealing a despair not less bitter, making a hypocritical pretence of light-heartedness, you have Nietzsche, who discovered mathematically (!!!) that counterfeit of the immortality of the soul which is called “eternal recurrence,” and which is in fact the most stupendous tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy.  The number of atoms or irreducible primary elements being finite and the universe eternal, a combination identical with that which at present exists must at some future time be reproduced, and therefore that which now is must be repeated an infinite number of times.  This is evident, and just as I shall live again the life that I am now living, so I have already lived it before an infinite number of times, for there is an eternity that stretches into the past—­a parte ante—­just as there will be one stretching into the future—­a parte post.  But, unfortunately, it happens that I remember none of my previous existences, and perhaps it is impossible that I should remember them, for two things absolutely and completely identical are but one.  Instead of supposing that we live in a finite universe, composed of a finite number of irreducible primary elements,