with us.  Too many concords are annoying in music; too many benefits irritate us; we wish to have the wherewithal to over-pay our debts. Beneficia eo usque laeta sunt dum videntur exsolvi posse; ubi multum antevenere, pro gratia odium redditur.[34] We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold.  Excessive qualities are prejudicial to us and not perceptible by the senses; we do not feel but suffer them.  Extreme youth and extreme age hinder the mind, as also too much and too little education.  In short, extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice.  They escape us, or we them.

This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance.  We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.  When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever.  Nothing stays for us.  This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite.  But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.

Let us therefore not look for certainty and stability.  Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows; nothing can fix the finite between the two Infinites, which both enclose and fly from it.

If this be well understood, I think that we shall remain at rest, each in the state wherein nature has placed him.  As this sphere which has fallen to us as our lot is always distant from either extreme, what matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe?  If he has it, he but gets a little higher.  Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?

In comparison with these Infinites all finites are equal, and I see no reason for fixing our imagination on one more than on another.  The only comparison which we make of ourselves to the finite is painful to us.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further.  How can a part know the whole?  But he may perhaps aspire to know at least the parts to which he bears some proportion.  But the parts of the world are all so related and linked to one another, that I believe it impossible to know one without the other and without the whole.

Man, for instance, is related to all he knows.  He needs a place wherein to abide, time through which to live, motion in order to live, elements to compose him, warmth and food to nourish him, air to breathe.  He sees light; he feels bodies; in short, he is in a dependent alliance with everything.  To know man, then, it is necessary to know how it happens that he needs air to live, and, to know the air, we must know how it is thus related to the life of man, etc.  Flame cannot exist without air; therefore to understand the one, we must understand the other.