Now I ask you, what can one expect of man, as a creature endowed with such strange qualities? Shower him with all earthly blessings, plunge him so deep into happiness that nothing is visible but the bubbles rising to the surface of his happiness, as if it were water; give him such economic prosperity that he will have nothing left to do but sleep, eat gingerbread, and worry about the continuance of world history — and he, I mean man, even then, out of mere ingratitude, out of sheer devilment, will commit some abomination. He will jeopardize his very gingerbread and deliberately will the most pernicious rubbish, the most uneconomic nonsense, simply and solely in order to alloy all this positive rationality with the element of his own pernicious fancy.
It is precisely his most fantastic daydreams, his vulgarest foolishness, that he wants to cling to, just so that he can assert (as if it were absolutely essential) that people are still people and not piano-keys, as which they would be exposed to the threat of being so played on, even if it was by the laws of nature with their own hands, that the could not so much as want anything that was not tabulated in the almanacs. Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, p. 38.