CHAPTER IV.

PANTHEISM.

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE DOGMA.—_Continued._

I. Optimistic pantheism—Transformation of transcendent Deism into immanent theism and pantheism—Disanthropomorphized God, according to Messrs. Fiske and Spencer—Diverse forms of pantheism—Optimistic and intellectualistic pantheism of Spinoza—Objections, Spinoza’s fatalism—The moral significance that might be lent to pantheism by the introduction of some notion of a final cause—Qualities and defects of pantheism—Conception of unity upon which it is founded—This conception criticised—Its possible subjectivity.

II. Pessimistic pantheism—Pessimistic interpretation of religions in Germany—1. Causes of the progress of pessimism in the present epoch—Progress of pantheistic metaphysics and of positive science—Penalties incident to thought and reflection—Mental depression and sense of powerlessness, etc.—2. Is pessimism curable?—Possible remedies—The labour problem and the future of society—Illusions involved in pessimism—Inexactitude of its estimate of pleasures and pains—Quotation from Leopardi—Criticism of the practical results of pessimism—Nirvâna—An experiment in Nirvâna—Will pessimistic pantheism be the religion of the future?

[Sidenote: Conception of God being disanthropomorphized.]

As theism becomes immanent, the personality of God comes to be more and more vaguely conceived. It is the very existence of God’s personality that pantheism either denies or confounds with that of the universe. According to Mr. Spencer and Mr. Fiske, the movement which led humanity to conceive its God anthropomorphically will be succeeded by a movement in the opposite direction; God will be deprived of all of His human attributes, will be disanthropomorphized. He will first be shorn of His lower impulses, and then of everything which is analogous to human sensibility; the highest human sentiments will be regarded as too gross to be attributed to Him. Similarly with the attributes of intelligence and will; every human faculty will in its turn be abstracted and divinity, as it becomes relieved of its limitations, will lose, one after the other, every item of its significance to the intelligence; it will be conceived ultimately as a vague unity simply, which eludes the forms of distinct thought. Pantheism lends itself to this notion of an indeterminate and indeterminable disanthropomorphized divinity. Nevertheless, the crudest and most naïve speculations, anthropomorphism and fetichism, in Mr. Spencer’s judgment, contained a part of the truth, namely, that the power that manifests itself in consciousness is simply a different form of the mysterious power that manifests itself beyond consciousness. The last result attained by human science, Mr. Spencer thinks, is that the unknown force which exists outside of consciousness is, if not similar to the known force that exists in consciousness, at least a simple mode of the same force, since the two are convertible into each other. So that the final result of the line of speculation begun by primitive man is that the power which manifests itself in the material universe is the same as that which manifests itself in us under the form of consciousness.

[Sidenote: Pantheism.]

If pantheism goes the length of denying the personality and individuality of God, it is by way of compensation inclined to attribute a sort of individuality to the world. In effect, if God is present in every atom of the universe, the universe is a veritable living being possessing an organic unity, and developing, like an embryo, according to a determinate law. What distinguishes pantheism from this point of view is, therefore, the substantial unity that it ascribes to the world.

[Sidenote: Different forms of pantheism.]

But, of course, pantheism is a very indefinite doctrine, susceptible of many interpretations according to the manner in which the universal energy, the omnipresent unity, and in especial, the fundamental ground of its activity, which some regard as determinism simply and others as the orderly achievement of a final cause, are conceived. Nay, more; both necessity and the orderly achievement of a final cause may be conceived optimistically or pessimistically.

_I. Optimistic pantheism._

[Sidenote: Spinozism.]

The first kind of pantheism, then, that which conceives a single substance as developing in an infinity of modes with no final cause in view, may be typified by the purely intellectualistic pantheism of Spinoza. This doctrine shows us, as existing in the totality of things, the immanent logic which presides over its development. The essence of human nature is reason, since reason is the essence of man. The proper function of reason is understanding, and to understand is to perceive the necessity of things, and the necessity of things is nature, or, if you will, God. Reason serves no other purpose than to enable us to understand; and the soul, in so far as it employs reason, regards that alone as useful which leads to understanding. To conceive the absolute necessity of eternal nature is to conceive that which, being subject only to the law of its own being, is free; it is, therefore, to conceive eternal freedom. And by that very fact it is to participate in eternal freedom, to identify itself with it. A consciousness of necessity is thus one with the fact of freedom. Human thought thus identifies itself with divine thought and becomes a consciousness of eternity. This consciousness, which is supreme joy, is love of God. The mystic Hebrew and Christian idea thus proves one with the moral theories of antiquity in Spinoza’s vast synthesis. Intellectual intuition is self-conscious nature; the intellectual liberty, as the Stoics taught it, is consciousness of necessity, and nature possessing itself; and mystic ecstasy, by which the individual is absorbed in universal being, is nature returning to itself and rediscovering its eternal existence beneath its passing modes.[137]

[137] See the chapter on Spinoza in the author’s _Morale d’Épicure_, p. 230.

[Sidenote: An optimistic fatalism.]

The objection that moral and religious philosophy urged, and always will urge, against Spinoza’s pantheism, considered as a possible substitute for religion, is that it is an optimistic fatalism, that regards everything as achieved by the mechanical and brutal operation of efficient causes, and excludes the possibility of any conception of final cause or of progress, properly so called. The evolution of the modes of substance, even when it results in pain, death, and vice, is divine; and the question arises, why this universe, which is alleged to be perfect and incapable of progress, should not be wholly motionless, and why this eternal, aimless agitation in the bosom of absolute substance should exist?

[Sidenote: Fiske’s theory of a dramatic movement in the universe.]

In Mr. Fiske’s judgment, Spinozism is the only pantheism, properly so called. The remark seems to us unduly to restrict the application of the term. Every system of theism that involves the notion of a final cause tends to become pantheistic when it denies the transcendence and admits the organic unity of the universe, which is the _Deus vivens_, the _natura naturans_, with a law of progress which is superior to the necessary laws of pure logic and mathematics and mechanics. The exclusion of any notion of the immanence of a final cause in things is not essential to pantheism. One might even conceive a sort of moral pantheism which should recognize a certain moral significance in the world, or at least what Mr. Fiske himself calls a dramatic tendency toward a moral dénouement. The instant men feel it to be a god that is labouring in the universe, they feel, rightly or wrongly, reassured as to the destiny of the moral ideal; they feel that they have an aim to march toward, and seem to hear, in the shadow of things, a multitude marching with them. They no longer have a sense of the vanity of life; all life, on the contrary, becomes divine, if not as it is, at least as it tends to be and ultimately will be.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

This system, according to its partisans, may be regarded as an induction which is justified by the modern doctrine of evolution. Mr. Fiske even goes the length of saying that Darwinism has done as much to confirm theology as to weaken it. Unhappily, nothing is more problematic than such an interpretation of modern science. Science reveals no element of divinity in the universe, and the process of evolution, which results in the incessant construction and destruction of similar worlds in an endless round, moves toward no conscious or unconscious natural end, so far as we can discover. Scientifically, therefore, the notion of a final cause of the universe may be no more than a human conception, than a bit of abstract anthropomorphism. No scientific induction can justify one in ascribing to the universe as such a conscious purpose. And it is equally rash to conceive the universe as a whole possessing a psychical and moral unity, since the universe, as science reveals it to us, is an infinity in no sense grouped about a centre. Materially speaking, the universe may perhaps be regarded as the expression of a single power, but not as possessing any moral or psychic unity. Whatever is organized, living, feeling, thinking, is, so far as we know, finite, and the equivalence of forces in the universe possesses nothing in common with the centralization of these forces. It is, perhaps, precisely because the forces of the universe are not moving in the same direction that the struggle and contest which are the life of the world exist. Who knows but that for the universe to become a unity and a total would involve its becoming finite, involve the acquisition of a centre, and by that very fact, perhaps, of a circumference which would arrest the eternal expansion of matter and life in infinite space.

[Sidenote: No unity in the so-called universe.]

What constitutes the charm of pantheism, for a number of its followers, is precisely this conception of unity in the world; but when one endeavours to make the conception precise, it proves so evanescent that it ultimately resolves itself into the absolute indetermination of Hegelian Non-Being. The more one examines it, the more one asks one’s self whether the unity that pantheism ascribes to the universe is not as purely a bit of anthropomorphism as is the design that pantheism attributes to the universe. The character of definiteness and of totality that the universe seems to possess may be simply a form that the human mind imposes upon the world of experience. Project on a wall—the wall of Plato’s cavern—shadows of numberless confused objects, of revolving atoms and formless clouds, and they will all fall into some certain figure; will look like the fantastic shadow of certain human constructions: will present the outline of towers and cities, animals and what not. The unity and figure of the world are perhaps simply of the same nature. Apart from our conception of it, the world is perhaps infinite, and infinity can never mean anything else to the human mind than formlessness, for we are, by the very nature of the case, unable to describe its contours. The unity of the world is perhaps realized only in our minds; it is, perhaps, only from our minds that the mass of things obtain such unity as they seem to possess. Neither the world nor humanity are totals except in so far as we think of them as such, and act upon them, and group them about our thought and action as a centre.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up, if the need of unity seems to justify pantheism, this need receives, at least, but an illusory satisfaction in the two principal forms of pantheism, and, in especial, in the deterministic form. Either the primordial and finite unity of the world is abstract and indeterminate and therefore purely subjective; or it becomes determinate in attributes which are as human as those of the god of atheism. The will which Schopenhauer makes the basis of his system is either the human will or simply force (which itself is human or animal), or the sense of effort, or, finally, pure abstraction. The same is true of the eternal force which Mr. Spencer regards as immanent in the universe. Such conceptions are more meagre in content but not necessarily more objective than those of the God of love, the World-Spirit, the World-Thought.

_II. Pessimistic pantheism._

[Sidenote: Pessimism.]

Pantheism has travelled from Spinoza’s optimism to Schopenhauer’s pessimism; its most recent form, and in some respects one of its most ancient forms. The pessimistic interpretation of religions with death or Nirvâna regarded as the redemption, is making incessant progress in Germany. Pascal long ago said: “Of all creatures that inhabit the earth, the Christian alone avoids pleasure and willingly embraces pain.” Germany, after having resuscitated Buddhism with Schopenhauer, Von Hartmann, Bahnsen, is in a fair way to supply us with a sort of pessimistic edition of Christianity which will far outdo Pascal. But for evil and sin, religion would not have existed, Von Hartmann thinks, and as evil is of the essence of existence annihilation is the sole salvation possible. Bahnsen, in his philosophy of despair reaches an analogous conclusion. The most interesting representative of the new doctrine is Philipp Mainlaender, the author of the “Philosophy of the Redemption” (Die Philosophie der Erclösing). He was the son of parents of an exalted piety, and grandson of a mystic who died of nervous fever in his thirty-third year, and brother of another mystic who, on his arrival in India, was converted to Buddhism and died soon after, exhausted by the intensity of his mental life. Mainlaender found his Damascus in Italy; the heavens opened upon him in a bookshop in Naples where he discovered the writings of Schopenhauer. After having composed his system of pessimistic philosophy, he supervised the printing of the first volume, and the day he received his first copy (March 31, 1876) he hanged himself.[138] The sincerity of this pessimist’s conviction cannot be denied, nor the power of abstract ideas implanted on a brain prepared for them by heredity, and by the intellectual tendencies of the times. Mainlaender regarded philosophy as some day destined to replace religion, but the philosophy is to be pessimistic; Mainlaender declared himself a Christian even while he was founding a scientific system of atheism. Freedom to commit suicide is the modern substitute for the beautiful illusion of immortality. Salvation by death will, Mainlaender thought, take the place of salvation by eternal life. The tree of science will thus become the legendary fig-tree of Timon the misanthrope, the branches of which were weighted every morning afresh by the bodies of the dead, who had come in search of oblivion from the evil of life, and had found it in self-destruction.

[138] See in the _Revue philosophique_, June, 1885, an article by M. Arréat on Mainlaender.

[Sidenote: Must find the causes of pessimism.]

I. To estimate the value and probable duration of the pessimistic sentiment, which has in some cases at the present day been identified with the religious sentiment, one must first consider its causes.

[Sidenote: The growth of pantheistic metaphysics.]

Different reasons have brought about this transformation of pantheism, which after having divinized the world, now inspires the individual to dream fondly on his annihilation and reabsorption into the unity of things. The first cause is the progress of pantheistic metaphysics. After having adored nature as the product of immanent reason, pantheists have come to regard it as a work of immanent unreason, as the degeneration of an indeterminate and unconscious unity in the misery and conflict of phenomenal selves, of conscious beings condemned to suffering. At the very least, nature is indifferent to man. Eternal force, which is so much spoken of to-day, is no more comforting and reassuring to us than eternal substance. Right or wrong, the metaphysical instinct, which is identical at bottom with the moral instinct, demands not only the presence of life in all things, but of life in pursuit of an ideal of goodness and universal sociality.

[Sidenote: Persistence of anthropomorphism.]

I was lying one day in the mountains, stretched on the grass; a lizard came out of a hole and mistook my motionless body for a rock, and climbed up on my leg and stretched himself out to bask in the sun. The confiding little creature lay on me enjoying the light, untroubled by any suspicion of the relatively powerful stream of life which was flowing noiselessly and amicably beneath him. And I, for my part, began to look at the moss and the grass on which I was reposing, and the brown earth and the great rocks; was I not myself, after all, a lizard simply as compared with the great world, and was I not perhaps a victim of the same mistake? Was there not a secret life throbbing everywhere about me, palpitating beneath my feet, sweeping forward confusedly in the great totality of things? Yes, but what difference did it make if it was simply the blind egoistic life of a multitude of atoms, each striving for ends of its own. Little lizard, why have I not, like thee, a friendly eye in the universe to watch over me?

[Sidenote: The progress of science.]

The second cause of contemporary pessimism is the rapid progress of positive science, and the revelations it is making in regard to the natural world. The movement has been so precipitate, new ideas have been produced with such rapidity, that the intelligence has found it difficult to adapt itself to them; we are going too fast, we find it as difficult to get our breath as the rider of a runaway horse, or an aeronaut swept away at a dizzy speed by the wind. Knowledge causes thus, at the present epoch, a sense of discomfort which is due to a disturbance of the inner equilibrium; consciousness of the world, so joyous in its beginnings at the time of the Renaissance, making its first appearance in the midst of Rabelais’ uproarious fun, has come to be almost melancholy. We have not yet become domesticated in the infinities of the new world which has been revealed to us, and we feel a little lost; therein lies the secret of the melancholy of the present epoch, which was melodramatic and rapid in the pages of Chateaubriand and the youngest children of the century; and has come to be serious and reflective in the pages of Leopardi and of Schopenhauer and of the pessimists of the present day. In India the Brahmans are distinguished by a black point between their eyes; our men of science, our philosophers and artists, carry this black point on their foreheads.

[Sidenote: Exaggerated development of thought.]

The third cause of pessimism, which results from the two preceding, is the suffering caused by the exaggerated development of thought at the present day, and the disproportionate place that it occupies at present in human life. We are suffering from a sort of hypertrophy of the intelligence. Those who work with their brains, who meditate upon life and death, who philosophize, ultimately experience this suffering; and the same is true of artists, who pass their life in endeavouring to realize a more or less inaccessible ideal. One is drawn all ways at once by the sciences and arts; one wishes to devote one’s self simultaneously to all of them, and one is obliged to choose. One’s whole vitality sets in toward one’s brain; one has to check it, to beat it back, to resign one’s self to vegetating instead of to living! One does not resign one’s self—one prefers to abandon one’s self to the inner fire that consumes one. One’s thoughts gradually become feebler, the nervous system becomes irritable, becomes feminine; but the will remains virile, is always on the stretch, unsatisfied, and the result is an eternal struggle, an endless dissatisfaction with one’s self; one must choose, must have muscles or nerves; be a man or a woman; and the thinker and artist are neither the one nor the other. If by a simple immense effort we could but express the world of sentiment and thought we carry within us, with what joy, what pleasure we should do it; even if the brain should be torn asunder in the process! But we must give it out by small fragments, squeeze it out drop by drop, submit to all the interruptions of life, and little by little the organism becomes exhausted in the struggle between mind and body, and the intelligence flickers like a light in a rising wind, until the spirit is vanquished and the light goes out.

[Sidenote: Dissolving effect of subjective analysis on the emotions.]

Modern thought is not only more clear-sighted in matters of the external world, but also in matters of the internal world. John Stuart Mill maintained that introspection and the progress of psychological analysis possess a certain dissolving force that, along with disillusionment, induces sadness. We come to be too well aware of the source of our feelings and the details of our character; what an antagonism between being gifted enough in matters of philosophy or poetry to create a world to one’s own mind, to embellish and illuminate the real world, and, nevertheless, being too analytic and introspective to profit by the pleasing illusion! We build airy palaces of cards and are the first to blow them down. We are without pity for our own hearts, and sometimes wonder whether we should not have been better off without them; we are too transparent to our own eyes, we see the hidden springs of our own activity, we have no sincere faith in objective reality, nor faith enough in the rationality of our own joys to enable them to attain their maximum.

[Sidenote: Heightened sensibility.]

At the same time that the intelligence is becoming more penetrating and reflective with the progress of knowledge, sensibility of every kind is becoming more delicate; even sympathy, according to the pessimist, is coming to be an instrument of torture by annexing the suffering of others in addition to our own. The echo and reverberation in us of the sufferings of other people, growing with the growing sociality, seem to be greater than the echo and reverberation in us of human joys. Social needs themselves, which have been so magnified at the present day, are so far from being satisfied that pessimists are asking whether they ever can be satisfied and whether humanity is not destined to become simply more numerous in the struggle for existence, and more wretched and more conscious of its wretchedness.

[Sidenote: Depression of vitality.]

And, finally, a last cause of pessimism is the enfeeblement of the will, which accompanies an exaltation of the intelligence and the sensibility. Pessimism is in some sort a metaphysical suggestion engendered by physical and moral powerlessness. Consciousness of lack of power produces a disesteem, not only for one’s self, but for everything; a disesteem which, in certain speculative minds, must inevitably crystallize into _a priori_ formulæ. It has been said that suffering embitters one; and the same is true in an even greater degree of a sense of powerlessness. Recent psychological observations confirm this conclusion.[139] Among the insane, and among hypnotic subjects, periods of satisfaction and optimism, which are periods of benevolence and amenity, coincide with a heightened muscular power, whereas periods of discontent and malevolence coincide with a state of depression of the will which is accompanied by a lowering of the muscular powers, sometimes by one-half. One may say, with M. Féré, that people in good health, at the maximum of their muscular vitality, are incessantly disposed to estimate the world in terms of their own vigour, whereas the degenerate, the physically or mentally enfeebled, are incessantly disposed to estimate the world and its possibilities in terms of their own slackness and incompetency. Add that, being themselves unequal to the struggle with the universe, it seems to them, by a natural illusion, that the universe is unequal to their ideals and demands upon it; they fancy that it is they that tip the scale, whereas the fact is precisely the opposite.

[139] M. Ch. Féré, _Revue philosophique_, July, 1886.

[Sidenote: Relation between powerlessness and pessimism.]

In all the experiments in hypnotism a sense of powerlessness engenders dissatisfaction; the patient who finds himself unable to obtain possession of a desired object endeavours to explain his inability by seeking in the object itself some quality which renders it repulsive. We are inevitably inclined to objectify the limitations of our own power instead of recognizing them for what they are. Once started in this path, hypnotic patients would certainly, if they were competent, go the length of constructing a metaphysical system to justify their state of mind.[140]

[140] A woman somnambulist was induced to believe that she could not lift her worsted neckerchief off the back of a chair; her shoulders were cold and she wanted it; she put out her hand, and finding herself unable to overcome the subjective obstacle, she translated it into the outer world and declared that the neckerchief was unclean, or of an offensive colour, etc., and ultimately became violently terrified. Another subject, also a woman, was persuaded that she could not pull open a drawer; she touched the button and then let go of it shivering, and exclaiming that it was cold. “No wonder,” she added, as a rational justification of her repulsion, “it is of iron!” She was given an iron compass; she endeavoured to handle it, but soon dropped it. “You see,” she said, “it is as cold as the handle, I cannot hold it.” Thus the objective explanation of a subjective fact, once entertained, tends by force of logic to become general, to include a whole class of similar phenomena, to become a system, and, if need be, a cosmological and metaphysical system.

[Sidenote: Sense of powerlessness destined to increase.]

Pessimism thus probably originates, for the individual, in a sense of lack of power. Sometimes this sense possesses indisputably a certain element of universality; a consciousness of the limits of human power, as of human intelligence, must as inevitably increase by the very progress of our knowledge and capacity. Pessimism is not, therefore, pure madness, nor pure vanity; or, if it is madness, the madness is natural, and is induced sometimes by nature itself. At certain periods nature seems to go insane, to revel in folly, although the power of logic, which is identical in the last resort with the overruling principle of things, always has the last word in the universe, as it ought to have also in the human mind.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up: in this century of transition, of religious and moral and social transformation, of reflection and dissolving analysis, causes of suffering are abundant and ultimately assume the guise of motives of despair. Every new step in intelligence and sensibility brings new modes of suffering within our reach. The desire of knowledge, in especial, which is the most dangerous of all human desires, because the object of it is really infinite, becomes every day more insatiable and enslaves not only isolated individuals, but entire nations; it is the desire of knowledge that is the disease of the century, a disease which is growing, and becoming for the philosopher the disease of humanity. The seat of the disease is in the head; it is the brain of mankind that is attacked. We are far from the naïveté of primitive people, who, when they are asked for the seat of thought, point to the stomach or the bosom! We are well aware that we think with our heads, for it is in our heads that we suffer from a preoccupation with the unknown, with the ideal, with an incessant endeavour to overtake the progress of a winged and devouring thought. On the mountains of Tartary one sometimes sees a strange animal pass through the morning mist at a breathless speed; its eyes are those of a frightened antelope, and while it gallops with a foot that trembles as it strikes the soil, two great wings stretch out from the sides of its head and seem on the point of lifting it from the ground each time that they pulsate. It sweeps down the valleys, and its path is marked by traces of blood, and suddenly it falls, and the two great wings rise from the body, and an eagle, which was feeding leisurely upon its brain, takes its way off into the sky.

[Sidenote: Is pessimism the last word of philosophy?]

II. Is pessimism curable? A sense of evil constitutes a legitimate element in the metaphysical or religious sentiment; but is that a sufficient reason for recognizing it not simply as a part, but as the whole of metaphysics and of religion? Such is the problem.

[Sidenote: Pessimism only part of the truth.]

Von Hartmann has endeavoured to discover in all religion a basis of pessimism. To do so is to judge all humanity too narrowly, according to one’s observation of it at the present day. To maintain that religion is founded on a radical pessimism is like affirming that medicine is based not on a theory of the curability, but of the incurability of disease. Schopenhauer’s pessimism, like Spinoza’s optimism, contains, no doubt, a certain indestructible element of truth, but immensely overstated and magnified. If science cannot regard the world as divine, neither can it regard the world as diabolical. There is no more ground for cursing the objective universe than for adoring it. And the subjective causes of unhappiness, which we have analyzed, are provisional simply. Human knowledge, which at present is so considerable in its dimensions that it actually embarrasses the brain, may well come to be so organized (as, indeed, in some cases, it is even now) that it will produce a sense of well-being and of largeness of life only. There is need, however, for a wholly new science, that of intellectual hygiene, of intellectual therapeutics, a science which, once created, might prevent or cure the mental depression which seems to result from exaggerated nervous excitation, such as pessimism seems to be incidental to, and such as Greece was unacquainted with.

[Sidenote: Resignation.]

For the rest, the desire of knowledge, which is, as we have seen, among the most profound of the desires of the century, may become the source of, perhaps, the most trustworthy and most infallible cure for a great number of human ills. Some of us, certainly, who are of the physically and mentally disinherited, may cry: “I have suffered in all my joys.” _Nescio quid amari_ was present for us in the first draught of pleasure, in the first smile, in the first kiss, and yet the present life is not without its sweetness when we do not rebel against it, when it is rationally accepted. What makes up for the bitterness of knowledge is the definiteness and clearness that it lends to the world. As science becomes more perfect it may some day inspire the soul with something of the serenity that is everywhere incidental to unfaltering clear light. Therein lies the secret of Spinoza’s intellectual calm. If his objective optimism is indefensible, his subjective optimism is not without an aspect of truth in the consciousness of inner peace that belongs to breadth of intelligence and harmony of thought.

[Sidenote: Analysis destroys irrational joys only.]

So far as introspection is concerned, and the dissolving force it exercises upon our joys, introspection is destructive, really, of none but irrational joys, and by way of compensation, it is destructive also of irrational griefs. Truth resists analysis; it is our business to seek in truth not only for the beautiful, but for the good. Take it all in all, there is as much solid and enduring truth in enlightened love of family, of country, of humanity, as in the most unquestionable scientific fact, or in certain physical laws, like that of gravitation. The great remedy for excessive analysis, such as Amiel, for example, suffered from, is a little to forget one’s self, to widen one’s horizon, and, above all, to do something. Action, by its very nature, is a realized synthesis, a decision which necessitates the solution of a certain number of problems, or the recognition that their solution is not indispensable. Action is something too trenchant and provisional, no doubt, but men must remember that they live in the provisional and not the eternal, and that of their life, after all, what is least provisional is action, motion, the vibration of an atom, the undulation which traverses the great whole. Whoever lives immersed in the conduct of life has no time for self-pity or self-dissection. Other forms of oblivion are involuntary and sometimes lie beyond one’s power, but one may always forget one’s self. The cure for all the sufferings of the modern brain lies in an enlargement of the heart.

[Sidenote: The problem of distribution of wealth.]

It has been urged, it is true, that we suffer increasingly from a growing sympathy and pity for each other. The problem of individual happiness, owing to the increasing sense of the solidarity of mankind, is more than ever dependent to-day upon the happiness of society at large. Not only our immediate and personal griefs, but the griefs of other people, of society, of humanity, present and to come, influence us. So be it. To discuss the future would be endless. We have not Macbeth’s privilege of being brought face to face with the file of future generations, and cannot read in advance the destiny of our descendants in their faces. The mirror of human life shows us nothing but an image of ourselves, and in this image we are inclined, like the poets, to emphasize the lines of pain. The labour problem, which at present distresses us, is infinitely complex; but we believe that the optimists have even more right to regard it with tranquillity than the pessimists have to declare it insoluble; in especial when one considers that it has assumed a threatening aspect only during something like the last half century.

[Sidenote: How the economic half of the problem will be dealt with.]

The labour problem involves two distinct questions, one of them relating to a conflict of interests, the other to a conflict of intentions. We believe that the strictly economic problem will one day be solved by a simultaneous increase in the difficulty of the industrial situation and in the knowledge of how to deal with it, which will lead the well-to-do classes to perceive that by endeavouring to save everything they are running the risk of losing everything, and will lead the lower classes to perceive that by endeavouring to obtain too much they are running the risk of gaining nothing and of seeing society’s coveted wealth melt away before their eyes, and that dividing capital is like dividing a germ, and results in sterilization. The remedy for socialism lies in science—even though the first effect of a wider dissemination of knowledge would be to increase the strength of socialism. Out of the very intensity of the crisis the solution will come. The moment different interests are completely conscious of their real points of antagonism, they are close upon a compromise. War is never the result of anything but an incomplete knowledge of the comparative powers and respective interests of the opposing parties; people fight when they can no longer calculate, and the march of armies and pitched battles may themselves be regarded as a sort of higher arithmetic.

[Sidenote: The human half will settle itself.]

When it has once come to be understood that there is no fundamental conflict of interest between the classes, the sense of antagonism between them will gradually diminish. The most reassuring promise of a complete solution of the industrial problem lies in human sociality. All asperity of temper in the matter will be smoothed away by the incontestable growth of sympathy and altruism.

[Sidenote: Love and admiration the panacea for pessimism.]

If sympathy, love, labour in common, recreation in common, sometimes seem to augment the pains of life, they more than proportionately augment the joys. Moreover, as is well known, to share trouble is to lessen it; sympathy is itself a pleasure; poets know it, dramatic poets in especial; even when pity is accompanied by a lively realization of another’s pain it nevertheless induces love, and to that extent still preserves a certain charm. That creature suffers, therefore I love it; and there are infinite joys in love; it, multiplies the value of life in one’s own eyes, by giving it a value in the eyes of other people, a social value, which is in the best sense a religious value. Man, Wordsworth says, lives in admiration, hope, and love, but he who possesses admiration and love will always possess an abundance of hope. He who loves and admires will possess the lightness of heart that carries one through the day without fatigue. Love and admiration are the great remedies of despair. Love, and you will wish to live. Whatever may be the value of life from the point of view of sensibility—knowledge and action, and principally action in behalf of another, will always constitute reasons for living. And it is mainly one’s reasons for living that justify one’s tenacity of life.

[Sidenote: Pessimism an optical illusion.]

Pessimism sees only the sensitive side of life; but life presents also an active and an intellectual side; over and above the agreeable there exist the great, the beautiful, and the generous. Even from the mere point of view of pleasure and pain, pessimism is based on calculations which are as open to discussion as Bentham’s hedonistic arithmetic. We have seen elsewhere[141] that happiness and unhappiness are _ex post facto_ mental constructions that are based upon a multitude of optical illusions. Even the disillusionment of pessimism is itself a sort of an illusion.

[141] _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction_, p. 89.

Leopardi hit upon an ingenious empirical argument in favour of pessimism in his dialogue between an almanac seller and a passer-by:

_Almanac Seller._ Almanacs! New almanacs! New calendars! Who wants new almanacs?

_Passer-by._ Almanacs for the new year?

_Almanac Seller._ Yes, sir.

_Passer-by._ Do you think this year will be a happy one?

_Almanac Seller._ Yes, to be sure, sir.

_Passer-by._ As happy as last year?

_Almanac Seller._ Much more so.

_Passer-by._ As the year before?

_Almanac Seller._ Still more so, sir.

_Passer-by._ Why, should you not like the new year to resemble one of the past two years?

_Almanac Seller._ No, sir, I should not.

_Passer-by._ How many years have gone by since you began to sell almanacs?

_Almanac Seller._ About twenty years, sir.

_Passer-by._ Which of the twenty should you wish the new year to be like?

_Almanac Seller._ I do not know.

_Passer-by._ Do you not remember any particular year which you thought a happy one?

_Almanac Seller._ Indeed, I do not, sir.

_Passer-by._ And yet life is a fine thing, is it not?

_Almanac Seller._ So they say.

_Passer-by._ Should you not like to live those twenty years, and even all your past life from your birth, over again?

_Almanac Seller._ Ah, dear sir, would to God that I could!

_Passer-by._ But if you had to live over again the life you have already lived, with all its pleasures and sufferings?

_Almanac Seller._ I should not like that.

_Passer-by._ Then what other life would you like to live? Mine, or that of the prince, or whose? Do you not think that I, or the prince, or anyone else would reply exactly as you have done, and that no one would wish to repeat the same life over again?

_Almanac Seller._ Yes, I believe that....

_Passer-by._ And it is clear that each person is of opinion that the evil he has experienced exceeds the good; ... but with the new year fate will commence treating you, and me, and everyone well, and the happy life will begin....

_Almanac Seller._ Almanacs! New almanacs! New calendars![142]

[142] Dialogue cited by M. Caro in _Pessimisme_.

[Sidenote: Persistent novelty in the universe.]

Many of us no doubt would reply to the poet as the almanac seller did—we should not wish to begin our life over again—but it is not to be concluded from that that our past life, taken as a whole, has been unhappy rather than happy. It is to be concluded simply that it has lost its novelty, and with its novelty a great part of its charm. Man, in effect, is not a purely sensitive being. His pleasures are, so to speak, not blind. He not only enjoys, he knows that he enjoys, and knows what he enjoys, and each of his sensations constitutes an addition to his treasures of knowledge. Having once begun to amass this treasure, he desires incessantly to augment it, though he cares little enough futilely to handle and to contemplate the wealth already acquired. Our past life, therefore, is to some extent tarnished and deflowered. The number of hours that were so rich, so full that we could not exhaust them at the time and desire to repeat them, is not great; and, barring such hours, the principal charm of the rest of our past existence lay in estimating its details, in comparing them with each other, in exercising upon them our intelligence and our activity, and in lightly passing them by; they were not worth lingering over; they resembled the tracts of country that the traveller does not feel tempted to turn and look back upon. If novelty possesses for mankind a certain charm, if a repetition of identically similar circumstances rarely affords as great pleasure the second time as the first, the fact is owing in part to the very laws of desire, but in part to the superiority of the human mind; the desired object should always offer something new to the intelligence. Every desire contains an element of philosophic and æsthetic curiosity that the past cannot satisfy; the flower of novelty cannot be gathered twice from the same branch.

[Sidenote: And genuine novelty.]

But Leopardi might reply, What is the charm of novelty but an illusion? For everything on earth is really old: the future is but a repetition of the past and ought logically to be as repugnant as the past. Abstract formulæ, and precipitate inductions like that, offer no resistance either to reason or to experience. Whatever pessimistic poets may say to the contrary, nothing is a repetition of anything else, either in human life or in the universe. There is always something new under the sun, if it be no more than the budding leaves on a tree or the changing colour on a cloud. No two sunsets are the same. Fairy-stories tell of a marvellous picture book, the pages of which one may turn forever without weariness, for the instant the picture has been looked upon and the page turned, its place is taken by a new picture. The universe is such a book; when one wishes to turn back to a familiar page it is no longer the same nor are we ourselves the same, and if we consider the matter narrowly, the world should always possess for us its first freshness.

[Sidenote: Perception of difference the mark of high intelligence.]

The distinctive sign of a really superior, really human intellect is to be interested in everything in the universe, and in the difference between things. When we look straight before us without, properly speaking, seeing anything, we perceive resemblances only; when we look with attention, with affectionate love of detail, we perceive an infinity of differences; an intellectual activity, always awake, finds everywhere objects of interest. To love anything is to find in it, incessantly, elements of novelty.

[Sidenote: The world inexhaustibly interesting.]

When pessimists maintain that the charm of the future is an illusion, it may be retorted that the illusion is theirs, that they do not look at the world closely enough to see it as it is, and do not love it because they do not know it. If one could view the Alps from the surface of a passing aërolite, the Rigi, the Faulhorn, Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa would all look alike, would all appear to be indifferent points on the earth’s rind; but what shall be said of the naïve traveller who confounds them, and professes to have seen the whole of the Alps when he has climbed the Rigi? Life, also, is a perpetual ascent, of which it is difficult to say one has seen the whole because one has climbed the first peak. From childhood to old age, the horizon grows larger and changes and is always new. Nature seems to repeat itself only to a superficial gaze. Each of its works is original, like those of genius. Æsthetically or intellectually considered, discouragement is voluntary or involuntary blindness. If poets have wished to forget past experiences which were too painful, even in memory, no true scholar or man of science has ever expressed the desire to forget what he knew, to make a blank space in his intelligence, to reject the knowledge so slowly acquired—unless, indeed, it were for the refined pleasure of learning it all over again and of owing nothing to the labour of previous generations. Beneath every human desire, we repeat, there exists this thirst for truth, which is one of the essential elements of the religious sentiment, and all other desires may be satiated or fatigued, but this one still subsists; one may be weary of life without being weary of knowledge; even those who have been most bitterly wounded by the conditions of life may still accept them for the light that the intelligence brings them at the price of pain, as a soldier, whose eyes have been injured by some chance splinter, nevertheless strains them beneath his eyelids to follow the course of the fight about him.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

In effect, the analysis that pessimism is based upon is, in many respects, superficial. Even the word pessimism is inexact, for the doctrine ascribes no progress from bad to worse, from pejus to pessimum; it maintains simply that the world is bad and must be recognized as such, and that this recognition is the consequence and the condition of progress, of intellectual power and of knowledge.

[Sidenote: Suicide as a resource.]

The practical rules for the conduct of life that pessimism prescribes from its principles are still more open to discussion. Granted the wretchedness of life, the remedy that pessimists propose is the new religious salvation that modern Buddhists are to make fashionable. This novelty, which is older than Sâkya-Muni itself, is one of the most ancient of Oriental ideas; it to-day proves attractive to a number of Occidental peoples, as it has several times proved attractive to them in former days, for traces of it may be found among the Neo-Platonists and the Christian mystics. The conception is that of Nirvâna. To sever all the ties which attach you to the external world; to prune away all the young offshoots of desire, and recognize that to be rid of them is a deliverance; to practice a sort of complete psychical circumcision; to recoil upon yourself and to believe that by so doing you enter into the society of the great totality of things (the mystics would say of God); to create an inner vacuum, and feel dizzy in the void and, nevertheless, to believe that the void is plentitude supreme—Πλὴρωμα—these have always constituted temptations to mankind; mankind has been tempted to meddle with them, as it has been tempted to creep up to the verge of dizzy precipices and look over. The pantheistic or monistic notion of Nirvâna eludes criticism precisely because it is void of all precise content. Physiologically speaking, Nirvâna corresponds to the period of repose and quietude which always follows a period of tension and of effort. One cannot stop and take breath in the eternal forward march that constitutes the phenomenal life of humanity; it is good sometimes to feel lassitude, it is good a little to understand the comparative cheapness and vanity of everything one has hitherto attained, but good only on condition that such an understanding of our past constitutes a spur to fresh effort in the future. To rest content with lassitude—to believe that the deepest existence is the meanest, the coldest, the most inert—is equivalent to a confession of defeat in the struggle for existence. Nirvâna leads, in fact, to the annihilation of the individual and of the race, and to the logical absurdity that the vanquished in the struggle for existence are the victors over the trials and miseries of life.

[Sidenote: Trial of Nirvâna.]

It would be interesting to perform a practical experiment in Nirvâna. One of my acquaintances pushed the experiment as far as a European of scientific tendencies could. He practised asceticism to the point of rejecting all variety in his diet, he gave up meat (as Mr. Spencer also did for some time), wine, every kind of ragout, every form of condiment, and reduced to its lowest possible terms the desire that is most fundamental in every living being—the desire of food, the excitation of the famished animal in the presence of appetizing dishes, the moment of heightened expectation before dinner which constitutes for so many people the event of the day. For the protracted meals that are customary, he substituted a certain number of cups of pure milk. Having thus blunted his sense of taste and the grosser of his appetites, having abandoned all physical activity, he sought to find a recompense in the pleasures of abstract meditation, and of æsthetic contemplation. He entered into a state which was not that of dreamland, but neither was it that of real life, with its definite details. What gives relief and outline to the life of each day, what makes each day an epoch for us in our existence, is the succession of our desires and our pleasures. One has no idea what a blank would be produced in one’s existence by the simple omission of some hundreds of meals. By a similar process of elimination, employed in regard to pleasures and desires generally, he secured for his life a certain savourless, colourless, ethereal charm. The whole universe recoiled by degrees into the distance, for the universe was composed of things that he no longer came into forcible contact with, that he no longer handled vigorously, and that, therefore, came less violently into contact with him, and left him, therefore, more indifferent to them. He entered the cloud in which the gods sometimes envelop themselves, and no longer felt the firm earth beneath his feet, but he soon found that, if he no longer stood upon firm earth, he was not on that account the nearer heaven; what struck him most was the enfeeblement of his thoughts precisely at the time when, owing to his complete detachment from all material cares, he was inclined to believe himself most intellectually competent. The instant that thought ceased to rest upon a foundation of solid reality it became incapable of abstraction; the life of thought as of our whole being is contrast, and it gathers power by dealing from time to time with objects which seem least readily to lend themselves to its purposes. An endeavour to purify and to sublimate thought robs it of its precision; meditation gives place to dream, and dream gives place to the ecstasy in which mystics lose all sense of the distinction between ἕν καὶ πᾶν, but in which a mind accustomed to self-possession cannot long remain without a sense of vapidity. Then a feeling of revolt supervenes, and one begins to understand that abstract thought needs, if it is to achieve its highest point of lucidity and concentration, to be spurred on by desire. Such at least was the experience of the friend mentioned above, and I suggest his experiment for imitation to those who speak of Nirvâna from hearsay only, and have never practised absolute renunciation. The only danger to fear is lest renunciation produce a certain brutalization, lest one lose one’s self-control and be overcome by a sort of vertigo before having measured the depth of the abyss, and having perceived that it is bottomless. The safest paths in the mountains are those that have been trodden out by asses and mules. “Follow the asses,” is the advice of the guides. The advice is often good in real life; the good sense of the multitude opens the way which must be followed, whether one will or not, and philosophers may well at times “follow the asses.”

[Sidenote: Sanctity and egoism.]

Absorption in infinite substance, renunciation of the desire to live, and inert sanctity will always constitute the ultimate form and expression of human illusion. If all is vanity, nothing, after all, is more vain than to be completely conscious that all is vanity; if action is vain, repose is still more vain; life is vain, death is vainer. Even sanctity is not the equal of charity, the equal, that is to say, of what binds the individual to other individuals, and by that fact renders him once more the slave of desire and of pleasure—if not of his own desires and pleasures, at least of those of other people. One must always serve someone, must always be in bonds to something, even if only to the flesh. One must drag a chain, if one is to draw others after one. Nobody forms a sufficient end and aim for his own activity; nobody can emancipate himself by living ‘in and in,’ by forming an ideal circle like the coiled serpent, by reflecting eternally, according to the Hindu precept, on his navel; nothing is more like servitude than liberty that is confined within the bounds of self. The perfect sanctity of the mystics, Buddhists, and pessimists is a subtler egoism simply; and the sole genuine virtue in the world is generosity, which does not fear to set its foot in the dust, in the service of another.

[Sidenote: Pessimism not destined to prevail.]

We do not therefore believe, with Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, that pessimism will be the religion of the future. Life will not be persuaded to seek death, nor movement to prefer immobility. We have said elsewhere that what renders existence possible renders it also desirable; if the sum of the pains of human life were greater than the sum of the pleasures, the species would become extinct by a gradual decrease in the vitality of each succeeding generation. Occidental nations, or rather the active people in the world, to whom the future belongs, will never become converts to pessimism. Whoever acts, feels, has power, and to be strong is to be happy. Even in the Orient, when their pessimism, the great religions, is addressed to the multitude, it is very superficial; commonplace maxims on the ills of existence, and on the necessity for resignation, result as a matter of fact in a _far niente_ which is appropriate to the manners of the Orient. And, when it is addressed to thinkers, pessimism is only provisional—it points to its own remedy in Nirvâna; but Nirvâna as a panacea and salvation by negation, or by violent self-destruction, will not long captivate modern common sense. It is ridiculous to attribute to man the power to destroy the sacred germ from which life, with all its illusions, has sprung, and will always spring, in spite of ascetics and partisans of individual suicide, and even, if Von Hartmann will, of “cosmic suicide.” It is perhaps less difficult to create than to annihilate, to make God than to destroy Him.