In each of these pleasures that seems to us so simple, floats a swarm of hopes and memories, like the gnats in a summer twilight.

There is not a sight, a sound, a smell, not a breath from sea or garden, that is not full of them, and on which, busy and numberless, they are not wafted into us.
And each of these volatile presences brings the notions of right and wrong with it; and it is these that make sensuous life tingle with so strange and so elaborate an excitement.

Indirectly then, though not directly, the mere joy in the act of living will suffer from the loss of religion, in the same manner, though perhaps not in the same degree, as the other joys will.

It will not lose its existence, but it will lose zest.

The fabric of its pleasures will of course remain what it ever was; but its brightest inhabitants will have left it.