PESSIMISM AND POSITIVE SCIENCE. 201 



philosophy, or the state of the human mind which gives 

 birth to philosophy, apparently does. 



The last-named great spirit it was who first systemati- 

 cally taught that man, from his inmost mental make and 

 constitution, from his insatiable wants and lusts and 

 omnivorous desires, no less than from the external 

 troubles and fatalities of life, must be miserable, until, 

 having entered once for all upon the only path to peace, 

 he has attacked the disease of life at the root ; until he 

 has seen through its illusions, and cured himself of its 

 desires ; until he has extinguished within himself the 

 consuming fires of lust and hate and the all-too-eager 

 desire for life. Nor can the wise man, the sage, attain 

 to a consummated peace, the only earthly happiness, till 

 he has detached his desires completely from every earthly 

 object round which their tendrils are thrown; until, 

 finally, by supreme effort of concentrated meditation and 

 virtue, to which only the perfected saint and sage is 

 adequate, he has destroyed finally, all desire for material 

 or immaterial existence, all desire for life on earth, all 

 desire for further life hereafter. Then only it is, having 

 reached this last and most glorious summit of earthly 

 piety and virtue, that the heavy burden of life's miseries 

 and sorrows falls off, that the perpetual pain of existence 

 ceases to fret, and the ever-vexed and perturbed con- 

 sciousness becomes calm and peaceful as the surface of 

 the sleeping lake in summer evening. For then at length 

 has been already reached on earth the peaceful and holy 

 state of Nirvana, the blissful prelude and foretaste of 

 that grander Nirvana, that state of supreme unconscious 

 peace, of soft, sweet, infinite, and eternal rest, to be 

 enjoyed by the perfect hereafter. As for the bad and 

 imperfect, they must plunge again into the storms and 

 vortices of existence, as the punishment for their. demerits 



