death, but you will only die once, while the doctors make you die daily through your diseased imagination; their lying art, instead of prolonging your days, robs you of all delight in them.  I am always asking what real good this art has done to mankind.  True, the doctors cure some who would have died, but they kill millions who would have lived.  If you are wise you will decline to take part in this lottery when the odds are so great against you.  Suffer, die, or get better; but whatever you do, live while you are alive.

Human institutions are one mass of folly and contradiction.  As our life loses its value we set a higher price upon it.  The old regret life more than the young; they do not want to lose all they have spent in preparing for its enjoyment.  At sixty it is cruel to die when one has not begun to live.  Man is credited with a strong desire for self-preservation, and this desire exists; but we fail to perceive that this desire, as felt by us, is largely the work of man.  In a natural state man is only eager to preserve his life while he has the means for its preservation; when self-preservation is no longer possible, he resigns himself to his fate and dies without vain torments.  Nature teaches us the first law of resignation.  Savages, like wild beasts, make very little struggle against death, and meet it almost without a murmur.  When this natural law is overthrown reason establishes another, but few discern it, and man’s resignation is never so complete as nature’s.

Prudence!  Prudence which is ever bidding us look forward into the future, a future which in many cases we shall never reach; here is the real source of all our troubles!  How mad it is for so short-lived a creature as man to look forward into a future to which he rarely attains, while he neglects the present which is his?  This madness is all the more fatal since it increases with years, and the old, always timid, prudent, and miserly, prefer to do without necessaries to-day that they may have luxuries at a hundred.  Thus we grasp everything, we cling to everything; we are anxious about time, place, people, things, all that is and will be; we ourselves are but the least part of ourselves.  We spread ourselves, so to speak, over the whole world, and all this vast expanse becomes sensitive.  No wonder our woes increase when we may be wounded on every side.  How many princes make themselves miserable for the loss of lands they never saw, and how many merchants lament in Paris over some misfortune in the Indies!

Is it nature that carries men so far from their real selves?  Is it her will that each should learn his fate from others and even be the last to learn it; so that a man dies happy or miserable before he knows what he is about.  There is a healthy, cheerful, strong, and vigorous man; it does me good to see him; his eyes tell of content and well-being; he is the picture of happiness.  A letter comes by post; the happy man glances at it, it is addressed to him,