The Greeks, who were a fortunate mixture of Conservatives and
Anarchists, averred that the desire for the impossible (I do not
quote, for, alas! I should not understand the quotation) is a disease
of the soul.
It is not, I think, the desire for the impossible (since few can tell
what seems impossible, and fewer care for what indubitably is so) so
much as the desire for the topsy-turvy. Baudelaire, who admired
persons thus afflicted, has a fine line:
"De la réalité grands esprits contempteurs";
but what they despised was not the real, but the usual. Now the usual,
of the sort thus despised, happens to represent the necessities of our
organisms and of that wider organism which we call circumstances. We
may modify it, always in the direction in which it tends spontaneously
to evolve; but we cannot subvert it. You might as well try to subvert
gravitation: "Je m'en suis aperçu étant par terre," is the only
result, as in Molière's lesson of physics.