PES ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. ESSIMISM, in the more general acceptance of the term, is a tendency to take a despondent view of things, to see more evil than good in the present life, and to apprehend worse things in the future. In its more special meaning it signifies a particular doctrine, which we shall shortly consider, concerning the preponderance of evil over good in the world. In the course of this paper the word will be made to bear, without, it is hoped, any risk of confusion, either of these meanings indifferently. At all times there have been optimists and pessimists who, for various reasons, have answered "Yes" or "No" to the great question, "Is Life Worth Living?" and whose way of regarding life has been influenced largely by their natural temperament or the circumstances in which their lot has been cast. Men of high moral character, whose minds are intent upon the hereafter, will never take a wholly despairing view of life, for they feel that their destiny is in their own hands, and that the immortal part of them will outlive this present period of suffering. Those, on the other hand, who are given to comparing life as it is with what it might have been, and do not take the future life into account, will almost necessarily be led to desponding conclusions about man's destiny. Witness the following lines by a French poet :1 PEU DE CHOSE. La vie est vaine, Un peu d'amour, Un peu de haine, La vie est brève : Un peu de rêve Among the ancient Greeks and Romans there was a pretty general agreement as to the gloominess of man's prospects after death, and it was only a small number of the more enlightened and never very popular thinkers, such as Plato and Socrates, who held that death was only the beginning of a completer life. Plato, in the third book of his "Republic," censures Homer for saying of the dying Hector: 1 Leon Montenaeken. “ ψυχὴ δ' ἐκ ῥεθέων πταμένη ̓Αϊδόσδε βεβήκει, όν πότμον γοόωσα, λιποῦσ ̓ ἁδροτῆτα καὶ ἔβην.”1 The odes of Horace, though they sing of the joys of life and proclaim the praises of love and wine, are marked with a pervading note of sadness. Their author lived in degenerate days, when the old Roman ideals had long ceased to influence the mass of the people, and, like many of the more educated among his countrymen, he formed his life according to the principles of epicurean pessimism, gathering what pleasure he could in a world where pain predominates. Not so Horace's contemporary and friend, Virgil. The times were bad in which he lived, but there was hope of better things to come "Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo." Selfishness, luxury and shameless immorality were universal, but much might be done by wise legislation, seconded by that new patriotism which his own national epic, the "Eneid," was intended to promote. This poem breathes the spirit of optimism, of pride in the past and hope for the future. Rome, in spite of nearly two centuries of headlong decadence, was still secure in her dominion of the world, and it was hoped that a rest from civil strife might give opportunity for the revival among her sons of the civic virtues of their forefathers. But the decadence of Rome, although retarded, never ceased after it had once set in. The revival that actually came about was far different from the one anticipated by Virgil. In the Christendom of the Middle Ages, men's deep religious faith and the absorbing activity of their lives secured them from any wide-spread tendency to doubt about the importance of life or the beneficence of the power which rules the universe. It was not until Protestantism had stirred up the spirit of free inquiry 1 " And the spirit fled from his limbs and went down to Hades, bewailing its evil lot as it left the flower of its manhood."-(Iliad, xxii., II. 362-3.) "Hither bid them bring wine and unguents and the all too short-lived blossoms of the lovely rose, whilst thine age and fortunes and the black threads of the triple sisterhood allow."—(Carm., ii., 3.) 3 "Even while we speak envious time will have sped: make the most of every day, trusting as little as may be to the morrow."-(Ibid., Carm., i., 11.) that men began to ask how the predominance of evil in the world is consistent with the doctrine of an all-wise Creator. It was in answer to this question, as it was proposed in his own day, that Leibnitz wrote his "Théodicée" "to vindicate the ways of God to man." Leibnitz was the first philosopher of modern times who tried to reduce optimism to a regular doctrinal system. He endeavors to show that, out of all possible worlds, infinite wisdom must necessarily form the most perfect, and that the one in which we live could have been no better than it is. Before proving this theory, which really involves a denial of God's omnipotence, he has to overcome the difficulty of the manifest existence of evil in the world. For the purposes of his argument, he divides evil into three kinds: (1) metaphysical evil or imperfection, which is unconditionally willed by God as essential to created being; (2) physical evil, such as pain, which God wills conditionally as a punishment for sin or as a means to greater good; and (3) moral evil, which he fails to account for satisfactorily, but without which he declares that the world would have been, on the whole, worse than it actually is. Pope, in his " Essay on Man," a work largely inspired by the "Theodicée," says: us. "All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good; And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT." Leibnitz failed in trying to prove too much, but his writings gave rise to a large class of would-be apologists for the divine order of the universe, who went still further than their master, and endeavored to prove the beneficent character of Providence merely from the amount of material well-being which He bestows upon Such a method of demonstration, however effective when judiciously applied, could, under the circumstances, only harm the cause it was intended to further, and it ended by leading men to the conclusion that, however great the sum of worldly blessings may be, it is small when compared with the number and the greatness of the evils which afflict mankind. And indeed, when viewed apart from the ulterior designs of God, the face of Nature is scored with the marks of physical and moral failure. She seems to have written in the hearts of men a moral code which she herself is flagrantly and constantly transgressing. The animal kingdom is a scene of disorder, violence and unnecessary cruelty, while the history of mankind is largely a monument of misery and crime. There is hardly a nation on earth whose foundation has not been due, in great measure, to successful robbery. Everywhere there are patent instances where the unjust prosper and the virtuous are unfortunate. No wonder is it that Ecclesiastes, speaking of the days of his vanity, before his eyes had yet been opened to the true meaning of life, says: "And therefore I was weary of my life, when I saw that all things under the sun are evil, and all vanity and vexation of spirit."" With this compare the lines of Byron : "Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er the days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou has been, 'Tis something better not to be." Of all the great thinkers who have pondered over the nature and destiny of man, there is no one who has given to the world so clear and so true a picture of life as Shakespeare. Shakespeare was no pessimist. Had he been so, indeed, had he been committed to any philosophic system or to any one-sided view of things, he would not have been Shakespeare. But though not a pessimist, inasmuch as he was far from denying the value of life when regarded as the prelude to another life to come, still, throughout his writings, he represents man's sojourn upon earth as an apparently aimless career through a world of delusive joys, disappointed hopes and cruel uncertainties, where heroes of lofty, ambition and stainless honor expend their lives, like Henry V., upon ill-advised enterprises whose intrinsic wrongfulness they fail to see; or where great and exalted souls like Lear and Othello become the victims of designing minions or even of their own minor weaknesses. But it is in Hamlet that we find the best example of a deep and sensitive mind, unsteadied by the principles of faith, brought face to face with the dark problem of existence. Gervinus says that in this play Shakespeare has transcended his own times by a leap of two centuries. And indeed in that England of Queen Elizabeth, when men's minds were filled with the new wine of the renaissance, when life, for them, had begun to have a new meaning and its sphere to be indefinitely enlarged, there was little place for desponding reveries such as we meet with in Hamlet. It was a time of action and of hopes, of new fields for action, and as long as men are active, they will, theoretically at least, be neither optimist nor pessimist; they will not pause to question whether life is vain, nor search for reasons to persuade themselves of its profitableness. They will simply follow the stream of life as it eddies about them, rejoicing in the vigor of its current and the freshness of its flow. 1 Eccles., ii., 17. When Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet," the England which had sacrificed her faith just at the advent of her ripening vigor, too proudly conscious of her position of independence among the nations of the earth, was dazzled by the glamour of her new freedom and by the hopes that were born of her "splendid isolation." The revival of classical learning, the invention of printing and the discovery of new lands beyond the sea had filled Europe with a new energy and a new enthusiasm. In the new order of things Italy had led the way; the other continental nations had followed in her wake, and now England had caught the spirit of the times. Her middle classes, no longer the victims of feudal aggression, were steadily amassing wealth by their commercial enterprise. Her fleet, which had lately destroyed one of the largest armaments that ever put to sea, was powerful enough to protect her trade all over the world and to compete with Spain and Portugal in founding colonies in newly discovered lands. Englishmen naturally took a pride in their country's greatness, and the national enthusiasm found utterance in the works of a galaxy of writers who made the Elizabethan period the golden age of English literature. And this was the time in which Shakespeare conceived the idea of Hamlet, a character in most respects so unlike the age in which it was produced. The age was active, enthusiastic and optimist, while Hamlet is reflective, self-conscious and inclined to pessimism. To call him absolutely a pessimist would be far from the truth, for underlying all his doubting and despondent moods there is in his intellect a foundation of high moral principle which gives a distinct purpose to his life. It is the irony of circumstances and the imposition upon him of a burden beyond his strength, combined with his reflectiveness and the weakness of his will, which lead him to doubt about the profitableness of life. And it is precisely in this reflectiveness, this self analysis, and skepticism as to the goodness of his cause, that he is, in some sort, a precursor of the modern spirit. In the eighteenth century the tone of European literature was largely optimistic. Besides Pope and Leibnitz, numerous other writers, Christians and deists, took upon themselves, with varying show of discretion, the task of fighting the battles of divine Providence. One of these champions of optimism, Abraham Tucker, in arguing the inherent blessedness of this life, calculates that the whole amount of the sufferings of a lifetime may be equivalent to a minute of pain once in every twenty-two years. It was in perverse optimists of this sort that David Hume found an easy prey, when he argued from the facts of human life against the supposition of a wise, benevolent God. It was at the close of the last century that a more pessimistic tone |