purpose: tranquillity, and excitement. With much tranquillity, many find
that they can be content with very little pleasure: with much
excitement, many can reconcile themselves to a considerable quantity of
pain. There is assuredly no inherent impossibility in enabling even the
mass of mankind to unite both; since the two are so far from being
incompatible that they are in natural alliance, the prolongation of
either being a preparation for, and exciting a wish for, the other. It
is only those in whom indolence amounts to a vice, that do not desire
excitement after an interval of repose; it is only those in whom the
need of excitement is a disease, that feel the tranquillity which
follows excitement dull and insipid, instead of pleasurable in direct
proportion to the excitement which preceded it. When people who are
tolerably fortunate in their outward lot do not find in life sufficient
enjoyment to make it valuable to them, the cause generally is, caring
for nobody but themselves. To those who have neither public nor private
affections, the excitements of life are much curtailed, and in any case
dwindle in value as the time approaches when all selfish interests must
be terminated by death: while those who leave after them objects of
personal affection, and especially those who have also cultivated a
fellow-feeling with the collective interests of mankind, retain as
lively an interest in life on the eve of death as in the vigour of youth
and health. Next to selfishness, the principal cause which makes life
unsatisfactory, is want of mental cultivation. A cultivated mind--I do
not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of
knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable
degree, to exercise its faculties--finds sources of inexhaustible
interest in all that surrounds it; in the objects of nature, the
achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of
history, the ways of mankind past and present, and their prospects in
the future. It is possible, indeed, to become indifferent to all this,