104 PESSIMISM. 



to compromise the claims of the future with the 

 desires of the present, impossible also to cast off 

 the fetters of the past. 



The life which is warped and narrowed down to 

 limited possibilities by the past, must sacrifice either 

 its present or its future, and most often sacrifices 

 both, in vain. For how can we, starting from the 

 perverse and incongruous materials we did not 

 make, so mould our lives that we can be happy 

 both in youth and in old age, enjoy our lives and 

 yet be glad at death ? How shall we not regret in 

 age the pleasures and the freshness of youth, or in 

 youth struggle vainly to attain the wisdom and the 

 calm of age ? And this incongruence of the inner 

 constitution of man's soul is invincible and universal : 

 his nature is a disordered jumble of misinherited 

 tendencies. The image of a multitude of warring 

 and destructive beasts which Plato regarded as the 

 inner state of a tyrant's soul, fails to describe the 

 full horror of the facts: for each man's soul contains 

 the representatives of ancestral savages and beasts, 

 and has out of such discordant elements to form a 

 government to guide his course. Thus, in addition 

 to the external difficulties of life, there is constant 

 danger of rebellion and anarchy within. The reason 

 has to provide not only against attacks from with- 

 out, but to curb the conflict of the elements within ; 

 for if it reach a certain point, the mind is shattered 

 and a raging maniac leaps forth into the light. 



And so the lusts of the flesh, the incubus of an- 

 cestral sins, are ever at war with the aspirations of 

 the spirit ; our feelings, the deep-rooted reaction of 

 our emotional nature upon ancient and obsolete 

 conditions of life, persist into a present where they 

 are out of harmony with the more flexible conclu- 



