noon
Compared with these emasculated children of the equator , the Orientals are Nature 's noblemen . I can very well imagine some over-righteous person saying , `` Alas , poor deluded soul , how little importance can we attach to your specious apologies of a people 's lawlessness , when your own personal narrative shows that the moral atmosphere you have been breathing has quite corrupted you ! Go back over your own record , and you will find that you have , according to _ our _ notions , offended in various ways and on divers occasions , and that you are even without the grace to repent of all the evil things you have thought , said , and done . '' I have not read many books of philosophy , because when I tried to be a philosopher `` happiness was always breaking in , '' as someone says ; also because I have loved to study men rather than books ; but in the little I have read there occurs a passage I remember well , and this I shall quote as my answer to anyone who may call me an immoral person because my passions have not always remained in a quiescent state , like hounds -- to quote the simile of a South American poet -- slumbering at the feet of the huntsman resting against a rock at noon . `` We should regard the perturbations of the mind , '' says Spinoza , `` not in the light of vices of human nature , but as properties just as pertinent to it as are heat , storms , thunder , and the like , to the nature of the atmosphere , which phenomena , though inconvenient , are yet necessary , and have fixed causes by means of which we endeavour to understand their nature , and the mind has just as much pleasure in seeing them aright as in knowing such things as flatter the senses . '' Let me have the phenomena which are inconvenient as well as the things which flatter the senses , and the chances are that my life will be a healthier and happier one than that of the person who spends his time on a cloud blushing at Nature 's naughtiness . It is often said that an ideal state -- a Utopia where there is no folly , crime , or sorrow -- has a singular fascination for the mind .