1 20 PESSIMISM. 



growing both more unhappy and more immoral ? 

 For the strength of the instinct being constant, and 

 its field of action being continuously circumscribed, 

 must not the internal pressure of necessity become 

 more painful ? must not the outbursts of passion 

 more and more frequently and violently burst 

 through the limits of the law ? 



§ 18. We have seen so far how impossible is 

 adaptation, how ineradicable is misery, and how 

 inevitable is the growth of unhappiness ; but it is 

 perhaps necessary also to display the fallaciousness 

 of the appeal which optimism makes to the law of 

 adaptation, which may be called the evolutionist 

 argument against Pessimism. 



It may be stated as follows : — 



Other things being equal, those men will survive 

 whose speculative doctrines tend to make them 

 more successful in life. This will generate in time 

 a strong bias in favour of those doctrines, which 

 may go the length of making their opposites not 

 only practically impossible, but even theoretically 

 unintelligible. Hence, quite apart from questions 

 of their truth or falsehood, we may rest assured that 

 doctrines tending to handicap those that hold them 

 in the struggle for existence, must in the long run 

 vanish away. Now Pessimism is certainly such a 

 doctrine. It diminishes the amount of pleasure of 

 its votaries, and thus deprives them of its vitalizing 

 effects ; it depresses their energies, efforts and en- 

 terprise, by its constant suggestion of the general 

 futility of all things, even when it does not settle 

 the question of survival by the short remedy of 

 suicide. Hence, the optimist will survive better 

 than the pessimist, and pessimism will receive its 

 final answer from the brutal logic of facts. The 



