84 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 



Aphrodite with those of Ares. Her terrible aspect is not 

 to be ignored or covered up with shams ; but it is not the 

 only one. If the optimism of Leibnitz 4 is a foolish though 

 pleasant dream, the pessimism of Schopenhauer 5 is a 

 nightmare, the more foolish because of its hideousness. 

 Error which is not pleasant is surely the worst form of 

 wrong. 



This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but 

 to say that it is the worst is mere petulant nonsense. 

 A worn-out voluptuary may find nothing good under the 

 sun, or a vain and inexperienced youth, who cannot get 

 the moon he cries for, may vent his irritation in pessimis- 

 tic moanings; but there can be no doubt in the mind of 

 any reasonable person that mankind could, would, and 

 in fact do, get on fairly well with vastly less happiness 

 and far more misery than find their way into the lives of 

 nine people out of ten. If each and all of us had been 

 visited by an attack of neuralgia, or of extreme mental 

 depression, for one hour in every twenty- four a sup- 

 position which many tolerably vigorous people know, to 

 their cost, is not extravagant the burden of life would 

 have been immensely increased without much practical 

 hindrance to its general course. Men with any manhood 

 in them find life quite worth living under worse condi- 

 tions than these. 



There is another sufficiently obvious fact, which ren- 

 ders the hypothesis that the course of sentient nature is 



4 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716) was a German 

 philosopher and mathematician who developed a complicated 

 system of idealism. He believed that this is the best of all pos- 

 sible worlds, that perfection is its ethical end, and that God is its 

 efficient cause and final harmony. 



5 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher 

 who held that since blind force rules the world, there is no hope 

 of the world growing better, and that happiness is secured only 

 by the suppression of all desires and the attainment of a purely 

 passive state. 



