Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/86

 sitions of his companions, and a man is always the more anxious that others should drink as he becomes unwilling to desist himself.

There is but one instance in which appetite hangs about a man as a perpetual clog and dead-weight upon the reason, namely the sexual appetite, and here the selfish habit produced by this constant state of animal sensibility seems to have a direct counterpoise given to it by nature in the mutual sympathy of the sexes. Quere, also, whether this general susceptibility is not itself an effect of an irritable imagination exerted on that particular subject. (See Notes to the Essay on the Inequality of Mankind.) I hope this will be sufficient to break the force of the objection as above stated, and may perhaps furnish a clue to a satisfactory account of the subject itself.

I do not think I should illustrate the foregoing reasoning so well by any thing I could add on the subject, as by relating the manner in which it first struck me.

There are moments in the life of a solitary thinker which are to him what the evening of some great victory is to the conqueror and hero—though milder triumphs and long remembered with truer and deeper delight. And though the shouts of multitudes do not hail his success, though gay trophies, though the sounds of music, the glittering of armour, and the neighing of steeds do not mingle with his joy, yet shall he not want monuments and witnesses of his glory; the deep forest, the willowy brook, the gathering clouds of winter, or the silent gloom of his own chamber, "faithful remembrancers of his high endeavour, and his glad success," that, as time passes by him with unreturning wing, still awaken the consciousness of aspirit patient and indefatigable in the search of truth, and a hope of surviving in the thoughts and minds of other men.

I remember I had been reading a speech which Mirabeau