or late.  It is part of the heritage of men, this pain and distress; and he who determines that nothing shall make him suffer, does but cloak himself in a profound and chilly selfishness.  This cloak may protect him from pain, it will also separate him from pleasure.  If peace is to be found on earth, or any joy in life, it cannot be by closing up the gates of feeling, which admit us to the loftiest and most vivid part of our existence.  Sensation, as we obtain it through the physical body, affords us all that induces us to live in that shape.  It is inconceivable that any man would care to take the trouble of breathing, unless the act brought with it a sense of satisfaction.  So it is with every deed of every instant of our life.  We live because it is pleasant even to have the sensation of pain.  It is sensation we desire, else we would with one accord taste of the deep waters of oblivion, and the human race would become extinct.  If this is the case in the physical life, it is evidently the case with the life of the emotions,—­the imagination, the sensibilities, all those fine and delicate formations which, with the marvellous recording mechanism of the brain, make up the inner or subtile man.  Sensation is that which makes their pleasure; an infinite series of sensations is life to them.  Destroy the sensation which makes them wish to persevere in the experiment of living, and there is nothing left.  Therefore the man who attempts to obliterate the sense of pain, and who proposes to maintain an equal state whether he is pleased or hurt, strikes at the very root of life, and destroys the object of his own existence.  And that must apply, so far as our present reasoning or intuitive powers can show us, to every state, even to that of the Oriental’s longed-for Nirvana.  This condition can only be one of infinitely subtiler and more exquisite sensation, if it is a state at all, and not annihilation; and according to the experience of life from which we are at present able to judge, increased subtility of sensation means increased vividness,—­as, for instance, a man of sensibility and imagination feels more in consequence of the unfaithfulness or faithfulness of a friend than can a man of even the grossest physical nature feel through the medium of the senses.  Thus it is clear that the philosopher who refuses to feel, leaves himself no place to retreat to, not even the distant and unattainable Nirvanic goal.  He can only deny himself his heritage of life, which is in other words the right of sensation.  If he chooses to sacrifice that which makes him man, he must be content with mere idleness of consciousness,—­a condition compared to which the oyster’s is a life of excitement.