The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level.  To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist.  Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out.  The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one’s body, grows and grows.  The savages and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life.  “Ah! my brother,” said a chieftain to his white guest, “thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing.  This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things.  Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death.  Thy people,... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight.  What is their life to ours,—­the life that is as naught to them?  Blind that they are, they lose it all!  But we live in the present."[N]

    [N] Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii.
    p. 240.

The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been beautifully described by a man who can write,—­Mr. W.H.  Hudson, in his volume, “Idle Days in Patagonia.”

“I spent the greater part of one winter,” says this admirable author, “at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea.”

...  “It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the valley and river.  So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of thorns....  Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun compelled me.  And yet I had no object in going,—­no motive which could be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot,—­the shooting was all left behind in the valley....  Sometimes I would pass a whole day without seeing