Page:Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.djvu/234

210 “We say that man is an egotist, and nevertheless his sweetest pleasures come to him through others. He only tastes them on condition of sharing them.”

“If one could continually satisfy his desires, he would never have time to desire. Happiness then is necessarily composed of alternatives. It could not exist at a constant level.”

On the subject of nations and conquerors:

“To each conqueror can be said, when he has ceased tormenting our poor globe, ‘Would you not have been able to tilt equally well against a little globe of pasteboard?’”

“The laws of war, do they say? As if war were not the destruction of all laws.”

“War has been represented as necessary to prevent the too rapid increase of the population, but war mows down the flower of the young men, while it spares the men disgraced by nature. Hence it tends to the degeneration of the species.”

Then the writer turns his shafts against medicine:

“In some respects medicine is directly opposed to the will of nature, which tends to perpetuate the strongest and best of the species, and to abandon