to
inquire after happiness, which nature has kindly placed within our reach. The
way to be happy is to live according to nature, in obedience to that universal
and unalterable law with which every heart is originally impressed; which is not
written on it by precept, but engraven by destiny, not instilled by education,
but infused at our nativity. He that lives according to nature will suffer
nothing from the delusions of hope, or importunities of desire: he will receive
and reject with equability of temper; and act or suffer as the reason of things
shall alternately prescribe. Other men may amuse themselves with subtle
definitions, or intricate raciocination. Let them learn to be wise by easier
means: let them observe the hind of the forest, and the linnet of the grove: let
them consider the life of animals, whose motions are regulated by instinct; they
obey their guide and are happy. Let us therefore, at length, cease to dispute,
and learn to live; throw away the incumbrance of precepts, which they who utter
them with so much pride and pomp do not understand, and carry with us this
simple and intelligible maxim, That deviation from nature is deviation from
happiness.«
    When he had spoken, he looked round him with a placid air, and enjoyed the
consciousness of his own beneficence. »Sir, said the prince, with great modesty,
as I, like all the rest of mankind, am desirous of felicity, my closest
attention has been fixed upon your discourse: I doubt not the truth of a
position which a man so learned has so confidently advanced. Let me only know
what it is to live according to nature.«
    »When I find young men so humble and so docile, said the philosopher, I can
deny them no information which my studies have enabled me to afford. To live
according to nature, is to act always with due regard to the fitness arising
from the relations and qualities of causes and effects; to concur with the great
and unchangeable scheme of universal felicity; to co-operate with the general
disposition and tendency of the present system of things.«
    The prince soon found that this was one of the sages whom he should
understand less as he heard him longer. He therefore bowed and was silent, and
the philosopher, supposing him satisfied, and the rest vanquished, rose up and
departed with the air of a man that had co-operated with the present system.
 

                                 Chapter XXIII

     The prince and his sister divide between them the work of observation

Rasselas returned home full of reflexions, doubtful how to direct his future
steps.