Let us examine this view somewhat more in detail. There are two ways of treating the subject. I may say that my life is not worth living, that I do not care for it, that to me it seems an evil rather than a good. Here I offer no proofs for my statements, but simply express my personal feelings toward life, my individual attitude toward it. This is subjective or unscientific pessimism. Or I may attempt to prove scientifically that life in general is not worth living, that it is unreasonable or illogical for any one to care for it. This is objective or scientific or philosophical pessimism. We shall have occasion to refer to both forms in the course of the following discussion.

2. Subjective Pessimism. - Lord Bacon gives us a characteristic estimate of the value of life in these pessimistic lines :

"The world's a bubble, and the life of man

Less than a span:

In his conception wretched, from the womb
So to the tomb;

Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.

Who then to frail mortality shall trust,

But limns on water, or but writes in dust."

Shakespeare's Hamlet expresses himself in a simi

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me the uses of this world;

Fie on't, oh, fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely."

And Keats in his Ode to the Nightingale draws an equally mournful picture of the world in which his unhappy lot has been cast:

"Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow."

These pessimistic utterances, however, prove nothing but the temporary mood of the poet who gives vent to them. They are common to every age and every clime, and are symptoms of the weariness and disappointment that lay hold upon the race in its struggle toward perfection. There is scarcely a person living who does not sometimes succumb to the black demon of melancholy, who does not at times long "to lie down like a tired child and weep away this life of care." And we may say that he is none the worse for it. Pessimistic broodings are

like the storm-clouds that gather on the horizon, and in a healthy life pass away as quickly as they came, leaving the mental atmosphere calm and pure. It is only when such moods become chronic and permanent that they prove dangerous to both the individual and the race, for unless we regard life as worth living we shall not live it as it ought to be lived.

There are persons, however, with whom pessimism is not merely a passing feeling, but a philosophic creed. A man may, like Hamlet or Faust, look upon life as burdensome to him, and express himself to that effect. When Hamlet says that the world seems weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable to him, we cannot refute him, because he is simply telling how the world affects him, what feelings it arouses in him. His feelings are facts, and as such incontrovertible. When you tell me that you do not value life, that you prefer death to life, and wish you had never been born, I cannot refute you any more than you can refute me when I say that I love life and am glad I am here. We are both simply giving expression to our feelings, and no one knows better how we feel than we ourselves. De gustibus non disputandum.

3. Scientific Pessimism. -But when you dogmatically declare that life is not worth living, that there is nothing in it for anybody, that it has absolutely no value, that instead of being a blessing it is a curse, you are making general assertions which call for proof. You are advancing a theory of life which shall be valid for all, and theories can be proved and refuted. You will have to show why life is not worth living; you will have to give reasons for your view, and reasons we can examine and criticise. Now, it can be shown, I believe, that pessimism as a philosophic creed is untenable, and that the optimistic conception of life is far more rational.1

1 Philosophical pessimists: Schopenhauer, World as Will and

U

Let us see. The pessimist may argue that life is not worth living because it does not realize the end or goal desired by man. Life is worthless because it fails to yield what human beings most prize, because it fails to realize the summum bonum or the highest good. Hence, to desire life is to desire something you really do not want, an exceedingly senseless procedure.

But what is the highest good? it may be asked; what is the goal at which we are all aiming? There are as many different forms of pessimism as there are answers to this question. Let us consider some of them.

(a) The highest good is knowledge, one pessimist may argue; life does not realize it for us, we do not and cannot know anything; hence, life is not worth living. Let us call this intellectual pessimism. It is preached by such characters as Faust:

"I've studied now Philosophy,
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,-
And even, alas, Theology, -

From end to end, with labor keen;

And here, poor fool, with all my lore

I stand no wiser than before." 1

(b) The highest good is pleasure or happiness, says another pessimist. Now life does not realize

Idea, English translation by Haldane and Kemp, Vol. I, Bk. IV; Vol. II, Appendix to Bk. IV; Parerga, chaps. xi, xii, xiv; Bahnsen, Zur Philosophie der Geschichte; Mainländer, Die Philosophie der Erlösung; Hartmann, Die Philosophie des Unbewussten, translated by Coupland. Consult Sully's bibliography referred to before, and read his preface to the second edition.

1 Bayard Taylor's translation of Goethe's Faust.

this end; indeed, it yields more pain than pleasure; hence, life is a failure. We find traces of this view, which we might call emotional pessimism, in the Old Testament, as, indeed, we are bound to find them in every book that holds the mirror up to the soul of man. "For what hath man of all his labor, and of all the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath labored under the sun. For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief; yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night." "The days of our age are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years: yet is their strength then but labor and sorrow; so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.

(c) No, says still another, the highest good is virtue; life does not realize virtue, men are wicked, the world is thoroughly bad; hence, life in a world like this is not worth living. "The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong; neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill." This way of looking at the world let us characterize as volitional pessimism. 4. Intellectual Pessimism. All these syllogisms contain unproved premises. Take the first. Knowledge is the highest good, knowledge is impossible, we do not know anything and we cannot know anything. In the first place, knowledge is not the highest good, but a part of the good, a means to an end. As we said before, the goal for which we are striving is a mixed life of knowledge, feeling, and