ix PESSIMISM IN PHILOSOPHY 159 



Again, it is possible to argue, more subtly, that the 

 unhappiness is the effect rather than the cause of the 

 worthlessness of life. It is &quot; not that life is valueless 

 because it is unhappy, but that it is unhappy because it is 

 valueless.&quot; l 



But what enables man thus to apply to life the 

 standards by which it is itself condemned ? Nothing 

 surely but the fact that he is capable of framing an ideal 

 of worth, an ideal of something worth striving for and of 

 holding it up to reality as a mirror in which to behold its 

 deficiencies. It is because we systematise our valuations 

 and so form ideal standards which alone bestow true 

 value upon life, that we can condemn it because it 

 nowhere allows us to attain perfect happiness or full 

 knowledge or complete goodness or aesthetic harmony. 



Now, it is evident that the deficiencies in life which 

 the formation of those ideals enables us to detect will act 

 as a potent stimulus to progress so long as the deficiencies 

 seem comparatively small and the ideals appear attainable; 

 if, however, we allow our ideals to outgrow our means of 

 reaching them, the chasm between them and the actual 

 will become too deep to be bridged by hope ; we shall 

 despair of attaining our heart s desire and bitterly condemn 

 the inadequacy of the actual. Thus Pessimism will ever 

 hover like a dark cloud over the path of progress, ready to 

 oppress with gloom alike the cowardice that despairs and 

 the temerity that outstrips, prematurely and recklessly, the 

 limitations of the practicable. It is a natural and almost 

 inevitable phase in spiritual development, which results 

 whenever any object of desire is found to be unattainable, 

 and it has no exclusive affinity for the details of a petti 

 fogging calculation of probable pleasures and pains. The 

 sole reason why the question of Pessimism has mostly 

 been debated on a hedonistic basis is because Happiness 

 is the one ideal which is universally comprehended, which 

 allures by its elusive glitter even the coarsest and most 

 commonplace of men. 



Having thus freed Pessimism from its entanglement in 



1 Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 99. 



