ON MAN AND HIS DEVELOPMENT. 77 



sentiment of love for others or for their species, is one 

 upon which something will be said in the following 

 chapter. 



7. Meantime, before concluding the present chapter, 

 on man's development, let us come to a provisional under- 

 standing with the pessimist, who denies the worth of con- 

 scious life, however variously or widely developed. 



According to the true pessimist, life is so ingeniously 

 adapted to ensure misery and the greatest possible sum 

 of misery, that if it had been expressly and malignly 

 contrived by a designing mind to that very end, there 

 could have been no greater success. The maximum of 

 misery is what is really produced in "this best of all 

 possible worlds," so much admired by Leibnitz. For 

 with just a little more evil added on, the world could not 

 continue to exist at all. Men at least could no longer 

 endure existence, if any sudden and general increase 

 were made to the sum of sorrows, which they now so 

 stolidly bear much more from custom and a mere animal 

 clinging to life, blind and instinctive, than from any 

 rational or well-grounded conviction of its worth. 

 Development is itself an evil, and the more the greater. 

 The more conscious evolution there is, the more the con- 

 tents of consciousness are widened in range or deepened 

 in degree, the worse for the conscious individual. It is 

 rather the business of the wise man to despise progress, 

 and in his own person to resist an expanded development, 

 by narrowing the range of his desires, by " denial of the 

 will to live ; " or to assist the course of progress, only as 

 an evil in itself, which may, however, lead the sooner to . 

 the saving truth that all is hopeless, and should have 

 an end. 



Now, without going the extreme length of the pessi- 

 mists, some of whom, however, seem after all to find life 



