"Perfection does not exist; to comprehend it is the triumph of human
intelligence; to desire to possess it, the most dangerous of follies.
Open your window, Octave; do you not see the infinite? You try to form
some idea of a thing that has no limits, you who were born yesterday and
who will die to-morrow? This spectacle of immensity in every country in
the world, produces the wildest illusions. Religions are born of it; it
was to possess the infinite that Cato cut his throat, that the Christians
delivered themselves to lions, the Huguenots to the Catholics; all the
people of the earth have stretched out their hands to that immensity and
have longed to plunge into it. The fool wishes to possess heaven; the
sage admires it, kneels before it, but does not desire it.
"Perfection, my friend, is no more made for us than infinity. We must
seek for nothing in it, demand nothing of it, neither love nor beauty,
happiness nor virtue; but we must love it if we would be virtuous, if we
would attain the greatest happiness of which man is capable.
"Let us suppose you have in your study a picture by Raphael that you
consider perfect; let us suppose that upon a close examination you
discover in one of the figures a gross defect of design, a limb
distorted, or a muscle that belies nature, such as has been discovered,
they say, in one of the arms of an antique gladiator; you would
experience a feeling of displeasure, but you would not throw that picture
in the fire; you would merely say that it is not perfect but that it has
qualities that are worthy of admiration.
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