PESSIMISM AND POSITIVE SCIENCE. 203 



coveries of science, with the march of invention, with 

 the wonders of steam and electricity, in an age of boasted 

 general advance and improvement, this philosophy of 

 despair has appeared. A strange portent surely. What 

 may it mean that in these days of telegraph and rail- 

 ways, of universal suffrage and cheap press, of constant 

 discoveries in science and inventions in the useful arts, 

 in an age of diffused knowledge, diffused material com- 

 fort, extended political power to the people, in an age 

 of general enlightenment and progress in all directions, 

 there should suddenly appear and find acceptance, 

 amongst the cultured and fortunate classes first of all, a 

 philosophy affirming the nullity of all these things, and 

 the worthlessness of existence, however supplemented 

 by progress ? Does the phenomenon portend that modern 

 civilization, hollow and despairing at its heart, of which 

 such philosophy is a symptom, is about to perish as former 

 civilizations have perished, to sink as religion has 

 already sunk ? Is it the symptom of a state of things 

 gravely amiss, and deep-seated, not in our spiritual state, 

 but in our social constitution, with its terrible contrasts 

 of want and luxury, which points to social revolution as 

 its only cure ? Or, finally, is it merely an exceptional 

 product in philosophy, phantasmal and ephemeral, an 

 offspring of the abysmal individual melancholy of a man 

 of genius, who has made it attractive to a large circle of 

 readers, just as the despairing poetry of our century has 

 been found attractive ; a philosophy which, on the whole, 

 had better have been cast in the poetic than the philo- 

 sophic form, and which will dissipate itself anon without 

 producing other than a poetic result, a momentary and 

 not unpleasant agitation in the emotion of the reader, 

 which has no effect on conduct ? All these three ques- 

 tions may be seriously asked concerning the pessimist 



