MR. MALLOCK ON OPTIMISM. 531 



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MR. MALLOCK ON OPTIMISM. 



By W. D. LE SUEUR. 



AS, in olden time, a certain Lars Porsena, of Clnsium, swore 

 by the great gods that his friends the Tarquins, who had 

 been expelled from Rome for gross misconduct, " should suffer 

 wrong no more," so, in our own day, Mr. Mallock, of " Is Life 

 worth Living V* seems to have sworn a great oath that the beliefs 

 which the republic of modern thought has for good cause expelled 

 from its borders shall by his powerful arm be restored to their 

 old tyranny over human life. He therefore brings up his forces, 

 draws lines of circumvallation, and prepares to conquer and capt- 

 ure the whole host of liberal thinkers, and either put them logic- 

 ally to the edge of the sword or force them back into the ancient 

 slavery. The enterprise is not lacking in audacity, and, to do Mr. 

 Mallock justice, he seems to be a writer of no little courage and 

 of infinite jest. His sword-practice is always brilliant ; and, if he 

 could only induce his opponents to stand exactly where he makes 

 his passes and slashes, there is no question that he would do for 

 them completely enough. As it is, we see the gleam of the 

 weapon ; but, somehow or other, the foe does not fall, and we be- 

 gin to perceive that he was never quite in the line of the strokes. 



In furtherance of the purpose above indicated, Mr. Mallock 

 has contributed two apparently powerful articles to the " Fort- 

 nightly Review" — one on "The Scientific Bases of Optimism," 

 and the other on " Cowardly Agnosticism." We shall briefly ex- 

 amine the first of these to-day, and, perhaps, with the editor's kind 

 permission, may take up the second at a later date. " Optimism," 

 in Mr. Mallock's view, is the essential creed of all the modern 

 schools of thought, whether Unitarians or Deists, followers of 

 Spencer, followers of Matthew Arnold, or followers of Auguste 

 Comte. All of these, whatever some of them may say to the con- 

 trary, really unite in worshiping Humanity; and Mr. Mallock 

 undertakes to show them how foolish their worship is, and how 

 mutually contradictory are the ideas on which it is founded. Let 

 us take a brief but careful survey of Mr. Mallock's argument. 



" The religious doctrine of Humanity," says this agile writer, 

 asserts that the facts of history have a meaning, that they fol- 

 low a certain rational order, and that, "taken as a whole, they have 

 been, are, and will be always, working. together — though it may 

 be very slowly — to improve the kind of happiness possible for 

 the human being, and to increase the numbers by whom such 

 happiness will be enjoyed. To affirm this, however, is, by impli- 

 cation, to affirm that a natural element in human character is 



