EDITOR'S TABLE. 



415 



throiagti his own injudicious courses 

 into the same morbid condition of 

 mind ; each, consequently, on the 

 sti'ength of his own feelings asserts 

 that life is not worth living ; and 

 each says what is not true. Each in 

 his own way has disturbed, if not de- 

 stroyed, the natural balance of his 

 faculties and functions, so placing 

 himself in a wrong and painful rela- 

 tion to the woi'ld in which he lives ; 

 and the true remedy would therefore 

 seem to lie in undoing, if it be at all 

 possible, the mischief that has been 

 done. To trace pessimism, as Prof. 

 James does, to certain specific causes, 

 and then to propose to cure it by the 

 application of a religious theory, is 

 a little too much like trying to stay 

 a pestilence by prayer instead of by 

 sanitary measures. Supposing that 

 a pestilence due to natural causes 

 could be stayed by prayer, it would 

 require a perpetual miracle to keep 

 it from breaking out again so long 

 as those causes were not removed. 

 Therefore, before we can follow Prof. 

 James in seeking a religious remedy 

 for pessimism, we must unlearn the 

 lesson he has himself taught us, that 

 its origin may be found in such 

 avoidable errors as undue self-indul- 

 gence (repletion), sensualism, and 

 overstudy. A dyspeptic takes very 

 gloomy views of human affairs, but 

 what is the use of arguing with him ? 

 What he wants is new life in his 

 digestive organs. Pessimism, as a 

 creed, will only deserve to be argued 

 with when it can be shown that it 

 claims its victims, not less among 

 those who have wisely husbanded 

 their powers and in every way re- 

 spected the laws of life, than among 

 those who have wasted their sub- 

 stance and set the laws of life at de- 

 fiance. 



It is evident that Prof. James has 

 been so far affected by the pessimism 

 of studious souls as to have conceived 

 a very unfavorable opinion of the 



apparent order of the universe. He 

 does not, however, give us as clear- 

 ly to understand as we could wish 

 wherein this somewhat extensive in- 

 stitution fails to meet his private 

 views what he would like it to be 

 that it is not, or not to be that it is. 

 He quotes with evident sympathy 

 some appalling verses by the author 

 of The City of Dreadful Night- 

 verses which would have almost sent 

 a shudder through the rebellious soul 

 of Omar Khayam himself; and he 

 tells us that he fairly rejoices over 

 the downfall of that form of natural 

 religion fit only for backward and 

 barbaric peoples which consists in 

 " the worship of the God of Nature, 

 simply taken as such." "There were 

 times," he says, " when Leibnitzes, 

 with their heads buried in monstrous 

 wigs, could compose Theodicies, and 

 when stall-fed officials of an estab- 

 lished church could prove by the 

 valves of the heart and the round 

 ligament of the hip joint the exist- 

 ence of a 'Moral and Intelligent 

 Contriver of the World.' But those 

 times are past, and we of the nine- 

 teenth century, with our evolution- 

 ary theories and our mechanical phi- 

 losophies, already know Nature too 

 impartially and too well to worship 

 unreservedly any god of whose char- 

 acter she can be an adequate expres- 

 sion. ... To such a harlot " (as Na- 

 ture) " we owe no moral allegiance. 

 ... If there be a divine spirit of the 

 universe. Nature, such as we know 

 her, can not possibly be its ultimate 

 word to man." This, on the whole, 

 does not seem to us very convincing 

 writing for a Harvard professor. The 

 " monstrous wig " of Leibnitz did not 

 so stifle his brains as to prevent his 

 discovery of an admirable form of 

 the calculus; and, among the "stall- 

 fed officials of an established church," 

 the first that occurs to mind cer- 

 tainly the most illustrious was pre- 

 cisely he who pointed out (Samuel 



