which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined
together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling
upon God. And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would
hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to
which men go to weep in common. A _miserere_ sung in common by a
multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a philosophy. It is
not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it. Yes, we
must learn to weep! Perhaps that is the supreme wisdom. Why? Ask Solon.

There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the
tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life
itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated,
more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is
possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. And this
sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though
afterwards, as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it.
Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness--dyspepsia, for example;
but at other times it is constitutional. And it is useless to speak, as
we shall see, of men who are healthy and men who are not healthy. Apart
from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved
that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the
very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison
with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.

Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those
who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St.
Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, _René, Obermann_, Thomson,[9] Leopardi,
Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard--men burdened with
wisdom rather than with knowledge.