considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal.

But so very broad a use of the word "religion" would be
inconvenient, however defensible it might remain on logical
grounds. There are trifling, sneering attitudes even toward the
whole of life; and in some men these attitudes are final and
systematic. It would strain the ordinary use of language too
much to call such attitudes religious, even though, from the
point of view of an unbiased critical philosophy, they might
conceivably be perfectly reasonable ways of looking upon life.
Voltaire, for example, writes thus to a friend, at the age of
seventy-three: "As for myself," he says, "weak as I am, I carry
on the war to the last moment, I get a hundred pike-thrusts, I
return two hundred, and I laugh. I see near my door Geneva on
fire with quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again; and, thank
God, I can look upon the world as a farce even when it becomes as
tragic as it sometimes does. All comes out even at the end of the
day, and all comes out still more even when all the days are
over."

Much as we may admire such a robust old gamecock spirit in a
valetudinarian, to call it a religious spirit would be odd. Yet
it is for the moment Voltaire's reaction on the whole of life.
Je me'n fiche is the vulgar French equivalent for our English
ejaculation "Who cares?" And the happy term je me'n fichisme
recently has been invented to designate the systematic
determination not to take anything in <37> life too solemnly.
"All is vanity" is the relieving word in all difficult crises for
this mode of thought, which that exquisite literary genius Renan
took pleasure, in his later days of sweet decay, in putting into