ON PRACTICAL OPTIMISM. 215 
and nature of things around us, and of our own action as 
intelligent beings. 
6. That there is much to perplex, to disappoint, to sadden 
human life, and our views of human destiny, is beyond all 
question. But pessimism as philosophy is a very different 
thing from pessimistic utterances in poetry. ‘The latter 
express the idealised tension of individual sorrow, and are 
emotional claims for sympathy with individual suffering ; the 
former lays it down as a permanent and dominant principle 
that all hope of human progress and happiness is vain. ‘The 
plaintiveness of the poetry is a natural, though often over- 
strained, outcome of human experience; but the claims of 
the pessimist as a dogmatic philosopher are arrogant and 
untenable. His method is inadequate, and his arguments 
admit of an easy reductio ad absurdum. A “ philosophie qui 
maudit la vie” is a strange and startling phenomenon indeed, 
when it predicates objective, universal evil,and by a pretentious 
comparison of pains and pleasures in life ‘“‘makes nature 
bankrupt” of joy. The method of such a philosophy may be 
described as a compound of arrogance and moral blindness ; 
for it deliberately refuses to take account of the higher 
instincts and ideals of the reflective, as distinguished from 
the sensitive, portion of human nature. It exaggerates by 
descriptive accumulation all the pains and evils that may 
befall men in reference to the individual life, and pretends to 
estimate the value of life by a calculation of a quantitative 
character, where the real solution of the problem depends 
upon the correct adjustment of mutually qualitative facts. It 
views all things from the standpoint of “ what is pleasant ?”’ 
and practically ignores the question, ‘‘ what is right?” It 
refuses to entertain the idea of God, and substitutes for it the 
irrational concept of an Unconscious Will. Nor can we fail 
to detect the absurdity and grotesqueness of pessimistic 
philosophy, if we really test its reasoning as an offered 
explanation of the world, or of life. When we are told, in 
effect, that man’s life is only a struggle for existence, with the 
certainty of bemg conquered ; or, again, that the swmmum 
bonum to be aimed at is a state of “ perfect indifference,” 
“where subject and object disappear, and there is no 
more will, nor representation, nor world;” when it is 
laid down, as the true doctrine, that all conscious beings 
are the victims of a gigantic illusion, and are ‘‘pitiable 
puppets” of an irresistible impulse which makes life a suc- 
cession of sufferings, and compels men to act contrary to 
their true interest, which is to cease to be; may we not justly 
term such philosophising, irrational, and absurd? ‘The sum 
