THE EVOLUTIONIST ANSWER INCONCLUSIVE. 12 1 



king of gods and men will stop the railing mouth 

 of Thersites by the cold clod of earth, by the un- 

 answerable summons of his dread herald Death. 

 Thus Pessimism is hopeless, and doomed to pass 

 away, and can cherish no hope, even if true, of per- 

 suading men of its truth. 



§ 19. Pessimists will doubtless use this argu- 

 ment to explain the undeniably optimistic bias ot 

 the generality of men, but will deny several of its 

 assumptions. For instance. It assumed that, other 

 things being equal, the optimist would survive. 



But how if Pessimism be causally connected with 

 other qualifications for survival, e.g. with growth of 

 knowledge ? How, if increase of wisdom be truly 

 increase of sorrow ? Might not the wiser pessimist 

 survive better than the ignorant optimist ? History, 

 indeed, seems to teach that this has frequently hap- 

 pened, and that gay savages and the lightly-living 

 races of the South have not been more successful 

 than those who have soberly and sadly borne the 

 burden of civilization and of science. 



Thus, there Is nothing absurd in the supposition 

 that with the attainment of a certain degree of 

 mental development, the conviction of the futility of 

 life should be irresistibly borne In upon all men, 

 and that the forces of evolution should for ever 

 urge mankind towards Pessimism, even though It 

 meant death. Pessimism may invert the evolut- 

 ionist argument, and urge not that the susceptib- 

 ility to pessimistic modes of thinking will be des- 

 troyed by the progress of the world, but that the 

 progress of the world will be artificially suppressed, 

 because of the destruction which pessimistic modes 

 of thinking involve as soon as a certain point is 

 reached. Civilization, then, would be an ocean 



