THE VARIETIES OF OPTIMISM 



will acquit me of any intention to be irreverent; 

 and perhaps he will agree that so puerile a con 

 ception of the Eternal is as well and seriously met 

 by ridicule as by ostensibly serious argument. This 

 saying of Leibnitz excellently illustrates the result 

 of trying to trim truth to the taste of theologians. 

 Nowadays we are hardly likely to worship, in 

 place of the Unconditioned Condition of All things, 

 a supposititious person who is conceived as &quot;mak 

 ing the best of a bad job.&quot; 



From these and many other variants of so-called 

 optimism we pass by slow degrees, through such 

 opinions as that which belittles present and per 

 sonal evil by saying &quot;it will be all the same a 

 century hence,&quot; to attitudes which are optimistic 

 only in so far as they repudiate explicit pessimism. 

 Language is plainly in need of a word which shall 

 express the doctrine that good and evil are bal 

 anced, or that &quot; things might have been better and 

 might have been worse&quot; an opinion which is 

 usually, and most improperly, regarded as opti 

 mistic, as if any denial of pessimism were optimism ; 

 but at present we ask whether a man is an optimist 

 or a pessimist, as if there were no choice save be 

 tween two antithetic superlatives. 



After this attempt to classify the varieties of 

 opinion usually called optimistic, first according 

 to their genesis, and secondly according to their 

 measure, it remains to be considered what measure 

 of rational optimism or meliorism may be based 

 upon evolutionary considerations. We must ask 



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