84 



IM:I.MISM 



BKd MMUDW something 



actor. It also enters, 

 OOOMUNU element, 

 of the Stoic* an.) the . 

 regarded man's trtiq^' (sense) nature as opposed 

 and inferior to his intellectual. The mediieval 

 mystics ( Eckhart) combined the religious with the 

 pBkMBHHl tendencies of themood that 'despiteth 

 tlir earth, 1 hut not in a conscious, deUbamtelj) 

 philosophical fashion. Bat it is only in the most 

 recent time- that |N-imi-in 1 1 us been elaborated into 

 a philosophy or complete theory, in the system.- of 

 Scnn|>enhauer i>|.v.) and his successor, E. von_Hart- 

 IHI4MII ( i|.v. ). Scho|M-nliaucr is generally considered 

 to he the father of philosophical pessimism : he re- 

 gards the world principle as nn oinnipoleiil, hlindly 

 struggling and striving Will, which is incapable of 

 satisfying itaelf or of delivering itself from its eternal 

 cyclic misery, lliirtiniiiiii formulates ax world prin- 

 ciple the rricciii-cinu-, whose piimal error, for which 

 it eternally atones in the endless misery of the 

 world, was its kindling just ax Schopenhauer's 

 Will did :i light for itself in the brain, or the 

 conaoiousneiw of organised life. Itoth philosophers 

 build on the pain and misery and struggle 

 which they nee everywhere in the world, from 

 chemical decomposition and stellar movement 

 up through the endless struggle of organisms for 

 :ence to the acute suffering exhibited in the 

 many form* of human passion, and chiefly of all 

 in exalted passionate love or sexual desire (Romeo 

 and Juliet, or Kabale unit Liebc of Schiller); 

 and to both all this is only the outward expression 

 of the terrible, irrational, or non-logical cosmic 

 agency. It U extremely dillicult to state shortly 

 the inetaphv -ical grounds of pe inii-ni ; they are 

 far from lieing merely superficial, and may lie said to 

 be rooted in the old antitheses lietween nature and 

 man. Nature thwart* man at all point-, and 

 modern science ban shown us what a small twig 

 human life is on the great tree. Both Schopen- 

 hauer and llftrlmann lay a linn hold on the fact 

 (emphasised especially by Schopenhauer in opposi- 

 tion to Hegel ami to thei-m I that not only the Idea 

 or Logo* muitt be used in replanning the world, but 

 also Force, Impulse, Will, Strife. Thus in n sense 

 they represent the substitution of the scientific or 

 cosmic attitude toward* tin- world for the merely 

 introspective attitude of a Descartes or a ' coiumon- 

 nen*e moralist. It is not, of course, in the least 

 to be assumed that what we call 'naturalism,' aa 

 opposed to speculation or supcrnaturalism, leads 

 to pessimism, mental and spiritual facts being 

 just a* ultimate ax chemical protoplasm. The full 

 force of pemiiiiisin lies in the assertion that all 

 the ends and aim- of life are illusory, that life, in 

 fact, bring* only illu-ion: the illusion of illusions 

 being man's innate and inveterate lielief that he 

 is born to be happy and to have pleasure. There 

 are here two mam contentions: {)) All ends are 

 illunory, even cowiiic ends, for nothing is ever at- 

 tained in the world, seeing that the essence of the 

 world that which holds it together is strife and 

 change. Feimim, that is, really denies i 

 looy, M Darwinism does, in the old sense of the lei m. 

 (2) In the case of the individual life there is ex- 

 cess of unhappinew and pain over hap|>iness and 

 pleasure. Hut there i- no reawui for despising the 

 raaliofttion of certain end because there always 

 arises a limitlnw number of new endx to lie reali-cd : 

 of count* we do not i-li to limit the world process. 

 Pessimism thus really corrreti to stake it* case 

 on the individual, which (let no say) to a certain 

 extent we do immediately know. ' The natural 

 man want* to fill infinity, to giatify all bis desire*, 

 to embrace in himself all tin- end* of the world, 

 be cairnot do this, but even fails to 

 gratified, hn vote* the world 



execrable. The pessimists in the end do not escape 

 the all-embracing human standpoint of anthropo- 

 morphism, anxious though Schopenhauer is to 

 avoid the errors of metaphysicians and ' trans- 

 cendental idealism. ' They examine man, and what 

 they lind to lie true of man they predicate of the 

 world : he 'measures' all things is the microcosm. 

 Still, we must concede that, if to man the world 

 brings only illusion, it is a failure for him. The 

 central position, then, of pessimism inevitably 

 comes to lie that living beings have as matter of 

 fact on excess of pain over pleasure. 



To this position the psychologist answers: (1) 

 That pleasure and pain are not things that can be 

 balanced one against the other. Both are degrees of 

 feeling, which, though itself a constant element of 

 experience, is only one element ; and what we do as 

 matter of fact measure and are conscious of is the 

 amount of change or transition in our feeling, there 

 being of course nn alisolute measure of amount of 

 pleasurable or painful feeling. (2) Even if by tin- 

 help of memory and calculation, and obsemu ion and 

 reflection (for there is really enormous ditliculty 

 in the matter), we allow ourselves to think of 

 sums of pleasures and sums of pains (there air 

 writers wno say the phrases are the purest non 

 sense), yet no one standard of pteUOnUeBMI or 

 pain f u I ness, no ' hedonistic calculus ' or universal 

 method of measuring pain against pleasure, can be 

 fixed upon. (3) Even inpponilgwbad an estimate 

 of pleasures and pa ins, it is not psychologically legi- 

 timate to regard feeling of any kind as the i-nil of 

 action ; it is only its relative and individual index 

 or measure (i.e. whether normal or abnormal), 

 while there are absolute measures of action in 

 the ends or things accomplished. (4) There me 

 actions which have a final value apart from their 

 pleasurable character, although also as matter 

 of fact the attainment of ends brings (a- / 

 paniment and not as end) a feeling of immediate 

 pleasure e.g. the adaptation of the eye to a 

 pleasing object or healthy muscular exercise in 

 general. Schopenhauer went so far as to say that 

 pleasure is only the absence of pain, pain alone 

 being the positive and preponderating element in a 

 sensitive consciousness. This is simply not true : 

 pleasure if we take the liberty of talking of 

 pleasure as a t liing i- as positive as pain is, and 

 the strife which exists in all life is not necessarily 

 painful. 



If we ask the jiessiniist if there is any freedom 

 or release from the ' bondage of ninn,' we are 

 answered: (1) The light which the I'ncniiseious 

 Will lias kindled for itself in the brain of man 

 ( pessimism has of course a pronouncedly naturalist ic 

 side) confers on us at least one advantage ; employ- 

 ing this light, we may for brief moments pause, and 

 survey with pitv the awful slavery ana strife of 

 life. In a word, artistic perception, the insight 

 into things of the man of genius, of the enianci 

 paled intellect, is freedom : art, asceticism, quiet 

 istic sympathy, is each the oasis and salvation in the 

 howling wilderness of life. (2) While individual 

 suicide is to be deprecated as the acme of thesellish 

 assertion of the Will to be happy, it is to lie hoped 

 that some day the human race will be educated 

 enough to see the contemptible character of life, 

 and, by a united act of enlightened will, will shake 

 off life and throw the world back into its primeval 

 state of innocence, ignorance, and mere potentiality, 

 and thus become the ' saviour ' of the world. There 

 is a basis of moral perception in all this, but it is 

 fantastical: it is the exaggerated statement of the 

 intellectual conditions of salvation often stated in 



ihilosophy 

 .he gods of 



, as in Aristotle's ' life of contemplation,' 



the god* of Epicnnis, and Spinoza's view of things 

 ' in the light of eternity.' If we demur that it is, 

 their, only the few who can be saved, we are told 



