PESSIMISM AND POSITIVE SCIENCE. 205 



they have permitted the priests to obtain a spiritual 

 despotism. In such a social and spiritual state, the 

 prophet of Nirvana came and was hailed as saviour. 

 But that a like creed should appear in the advanced and 

 wealthy nations of Western Europe, and should find 

 disciples, not as yet amongst the poor, but the superior 

 and cultured classes, seems at first sight a somewhat 

 strange and unaccountable thing. 



Nevertheless, its appearance is not so inexplicable 

 as at first one might suppose. Some of the conditions 

 which favoured the reception of Buddha's teaching, the 

 pressure of population and great inequality of social con- 

 dition, exist in modern Europe. But added to these 

 there are special causes peculiar to our age and civili- 

 zation. The prevailing disbelief in the old theological 

 dogmas, the deepening doubt, extending to ever wider 

 circles until now it has reached the masses, of any 

 compensating happiness hereafter for all the miseries 

 and injustices suffered here; these things, joined to an 

 increased intensity in the struggle for existence, to which 

 our more flaccid fibres and more sensitive nerves are less 

 equal, suffice to account for a certain failure of heart and 

 hope, a diminished joy and zest in existence, and a 

 desponding feeling as if the Power that rules the world 

 had in our day dishonoured His acceptances, and become 

 bankrupt as regards His promises to pay in a future life, 

 all which things are of the essence' of the pessimist 

 mood of mind, and offer a fitly prepared soil for a 

 pessimist philosophy professing to be deeply and scien- 

 tifically grounded. 



It is not, then, wholly strange that a degree of 

 despair should have set in in the midst of our vaunted 

 age of progress. But it would, we think, be strange if 

 the mood became very general, if it were anything more 



