It is a view that healthy intellects have hitherto declined to entertain.

Its advocates have been met with neglect, contempt, or castigation, not with arguments.

They have been pitied as insane, avoided as cynical, or passed over as frivolous.

And yet, but for one reason, to that whole European world whose progress we are now inheriting, this view would have seemed not only not untenable, but even obvious.

The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages.