"It is in accordance with experience that the individuals of the lower and poorer classes and of ruder nations are happier than those of the elevated and wealthier classes and of civilised nations, not indeed because they are poorer and have to endure more want and privations, but because they are coarser and duller. One need only remember “the shirt of the happy man,” in which story there lies a deep truth. And accordingly I also maintain that the brutes are happier (i.e., less miserable) than man, because the excess of pain which an animal has to bear is less than that which a man has to bear. Only think how comfortably an ox or a pig lives, almost as if it had learned from Aristotle to seek freedom from care and sorrow, instead (like man) of hunting after happiness. How much more painful is the life of the more finely-feeling horse compared with that of the obtuse pig, or with that of the proverbially happy fish in the water, its nervous system being of a grade so far inferior! As the life of a fish is more enviable than that of a horse, so is the life of an oyster than that of a fish, and the life of a plant than that of an oyster, until finally, on descending beneath the threshold of consciousness, we see individual pain entirely disappear. On the other hand, the higher sensibility sufficiently explains why men of genius are so much more unhappy in their lives than ordinary men, to which must be added (at least among reflective geniuses) the penetration of most illusions. This is in accordance with the result of the foregoing examination, which taught us that the individual is so much the better off the more he is entangled in the illusion created by the instinctive impulse (“He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”—Ecclesiastes); for, in the first place, it has corrupted his judgment on the true proportion of past pleasure and pain, and in consequence he feels his misery less, and is not so oppressed by this feeling of misery; and, secondly, there remains to him in every direction the happiness of hope, whose partial frustration is quickly followed by new hopes, whether in the same or in another direction. He lives, therefore, always in dreamland, and in all present misery consoles himself with the illusion which promises him a golden future. (Käthchen von Heilbronn or Mr. Micawber in “David Copperfield” will readily occur to the reader.)"