Every feeling of hardship is inseparable from the desire to escape from it; every idea of pleasure from the desire to enjoy it.  All desire implies a want, and all wants are painful; hence our wretchedness consists in the disproportion between our desires and our powers.  A conscious being whose powers were equal to his desires would be perfectly happy.

What then is human wisdom?  Where is the path of true happiness?  The mere limitation of our desires is not enough, for if they were less than our powers, part of our faculties would be idle, and we should not enjoy our whole being; neither is the mere extension of our powers enough, for if our desires were also increased we should only be the more miserable.  True happiness consists in decreasing the difference between our desires and our powers, in establishing a perfect equilibrium between the power and the will.  Then only, when all its forces are employed, will the soul be at rest and man will find himself in his true position.

In this condition, nature, who does everything for the best, has placed him from the first.  To begin with, she gives him only such desires as are necessary for self-preservation and such powers as are sufficient for their satisfaction.  All the rest she has stored in his mind as a sort of reserve, to be drawn upon at need.  It is only in this primitive condition that we find the equilibrium between desire and power, and then alone man is not unhappy.  As soon as his potential powers of mind begin to function, imagination, more powerful than all the rest, awakes, and precedes all the rest.  It is imagination which enlarges the bounds of possibility for us, whether for good or ill, and therefore stimulates and feeds desires by the hope of satisfying them.  But the object which seemed within our grasp flies quicker than we can follow; when we think we have grasped it, it transforms itself and is again far ahead of us.  We no longer perceive the country we have traversed, and we think nothing of it; that which lies before us becomes vaster and stretches still before us.  Thus we exhaust our strength, yet never reach our goal, and the nearer we are to pleasure, the further we are from happiness.

On the other hand, the more nearly a man’s condition approximates to this state of nature the less difference is there between his desires and his powers, and happiness is therefore less remote.  Lacking everything, he is never less miserable; for misery consists, not in the lack of things, but in the needs which they inspire.

The world of reality has its bounds, the world of imagination is boundless; as we cannot enlarge the one, let us restrict the other; for all the sufferings which really make us miserable arise from the difference between the real and the imaginary.  Health, strength, and a good conscience excepted, all the good things of life are a matter of opinion; except bodily suffering and remorse, all our woes are imaginary.  You will tell me this is a commonplace; I admit it, but its practical application is no commonplace, and it is with practice only that we are now concerned.