CHAPTER I. 



PESSIMISM AND POSITIVE SCIENCE. 



1. THE new system of pessimism is a very remarkable 

 phenomenon of these latter days. Appearing in an age 

 of vaunted progress and great material prosperity, pessi- 

 mism, as the shadowy handwriting on the wall at the 

 banquet of the Babylonian monarch, pronounces our 

 modern civilization as weighed in the balance and found 

 wanting. Nay, our philosophical pessimism strikes 

 deeper; it denounces conscious existence itself, however 

 highly and variously developed as necessarily evil, as a 

 fundamentally vicious thing, an all but irreparable error 

 into which the ultimate principle of existence, unguided 

 by reason, necessarily strayed. 



Unlike the other current systems, pessimism takes its 

 stand within, upon the fact of consciousness, which, far 

 from having an accidental appearance in the course of 

 the evolution of the universe as the Evolutionist and 

 Darwinian asserts, or a chance but unique product of the 

 physical energies in the present bodily machine as the 

 extreme materialist affirms, was and still is an essentially 

 necessary outcome of the ever striving and dissatisfied 

 Will of the universe to live, and to attain to conscious 

 being, if only to find (through the assistance of philo- 

 sophers) the vanity of it. Consciousness was a necessary 



