difference.  In so far as he has become pure spirit he will have transcended the fear of death or defeat; for now his instinctive fear, which will subsist, will be neutralised by an equally sincere consent to die and to fail.  He will live henceforth in a truer and more serene sympathy with nature than is possible to rival natural beings.  Natural beings are perpetually struggling to live only, and not to die; so that their will is in hopeless rebellion against the divine decrees which they must obey notwithstanding.  The spiritual man, on the contrary, in so far as he has already passed intellectually into the eternal world, no longer endures unwillingly the continual death involved in living, or the final death involved in having been born.  He renounces everything religiously in the very act of attaining it, resigning existence itself as gladly as he accepts it, or even more gladly; because the emphasis which action and passion lend to the passing moment seems to him arbitrary and violent; and as each task or experience is dismissed in turn, he accounts the end of it more blessed than the beginning.

[11] The following quotations are drawn from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, by Sigmund Freud; authorised translation by C.J.M.  Hubback.  The International Psycho-Analytic Press, 1922, pp. 29-48.  The italics are in the original.

[12] Essai d’un Discours coherent sur les Rapports de Dieu et du Monde. Par Julien Benda.  Librairie Gallimard, Paris, 1931.