Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/719

 PESSIMISM 687 spoken of as God, and conceived anthropomorphically after the pattern of human personality. glish The optimism of Leibnitz found its well-sounding but best of possible worlds bitterly satirized in Voltaire s Candide, and painfully commented upon by the earthquake of Lisbon. But the real object of the Frenchman s wit was the baser optimism of the age which sheltered its vulgar features under the mask of the Leibnitian Theodicee. An easy-going generation had settled down in the pleas ing faith that their barns were rilled with good things for many years, and that they might eat, drink, and be merry. The creed found in England a prophet of solemn pomp in Pope, whose Essay on Man has fixed in pregnant lines the main half-truths of the Leibnitian theory, which the poet had probably learned from Bolingbroke. The same optimism appears in Shaftesbury ( &quot;Tis good which is predominant &quot;), and shows its presence in Paley. Some opposition to the current eudaemonisrn is found in the well-weighed and all but sceptical judgments pronounced by Butler, as well as in the cynical pessimism that tried to raise its voice in Mandeville. But the great instance against the comfortable view of life is the striking passage which Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion has put in the mouth of Demea, beginning &quot; The whole earth, believe me, Philo, is cursed and polluted. A per petual war is kindled amongst all living creatures,&quot; &c. erman In Germany, under the head of Natural Theology, the atural ordinary optimism flourished amain. The whole range of ueo ogy. crea tj on W as ransacked to show how well man had been provided for by God. The poetry of Brockes (the translator of Pope) is full of the theme, the laudation of the many gifts we owe to Providence, of the multifarious uses to which each animal and plant can be put. It is an anthro- pocentric optimism which thus makes man s welfare the main end of the creation, and which, above all, finds that welfare in what we eat and drink and wherewithal we are clothed. The good which Leibnitz had spoken of Avas understood as material prosperity, comfort, happiness. God s goodness was measured by the amount of worldly wellbeing which He bestows upon us. tttitude The great Kant, as late as 1759, when he printed a f Kant, short sketch On Optimism, was still inclined to keep terms with this base caricature of a great theory, and spoke with full agreement of that theory itself. But here as elsewhere Hume s influence was potent upon him, and in a paper published in 1791 (On the Failure of all Philosophical Attempts in Theodicy] he had altered his tone. Our intelli gence, he argues, is absolutely powerless to discover the proportion in which the world, at least as known to us in experience, stands to the supreme wisdom. And to the grounds adduced to prove that the pleasures of life far exceed its pains his reply is : take a man of sound mind, who has lived long enough and thought enough on the value of life to be able to form a judgment on the subject, and ask him whether he would like to play out the game of life once more (not on the same terms, but) on any terms he pleases, be it only in this terrestrial world of ours, and not in fairy land. In one direction indeed Kant may be called optimist (or at least meliorist), in his belief in the ample possibilities of moral and political improvement, and in his enthusiastic hopes for the cessation of some chief causes of human misery. But in one way Kant had laid the axe to the chief root of optimism. That root is the utilitarian or eudsemonistic theory of conduct, the theory which seeks to explain morality away into a sort of magnified selfishness, and regards the authority of moral rules as due to their origin in counsels of prudence. The moral law, said Kant, is the one clear utterance of the Absolute. And the lesson thus taught bore fruit. At first indeed idealism with its optimistic interpretations returned. The double-faced dictum of Hegel, that the real is the rational and the Hegel s rational the real, was often understood to justify the prin- ideal I ciple that, whatever is, is right. The net of Hegelian timism - thought seemed to grasp everything ; everything fell as it were naturally into its place, and seemed to be justified by the symmetry of its position in the logical evolution. For in idealism we find the true home of optimism. The world as experienced in sense and feeling is full of discords and defects, and the more we abstract each part of the whole into its &quot;beggarly elements,&quot; the greater seems the weakness and the triviality. But, when we rise in thought to the contemplation of the unity and order, these real discords pale before the spectacle of ideal harmony. The formal symmetry carries the day. The corpse may be hideous and yet the theory of the anatomist has its beauty. The sorrows of the hero do not make impossible the plea sure of the spectator in the drama. Just as the hardships long ago endured are sweet to remembrance, so the indi vidual sufferings are lost in the conception of the universal ends they subserved. The real pain is compatible with a formal pleasure ; reason can find commendable and good what is torment to flesh and blood. But, while the life-work of Hegel had been to show that at bottom the principle of being and the principle of thought were the same, that nature and history were the incarna tions of reason, the succeeding philosophy of Schopenhauer reverted to the distinction of Kant, which it emphasized, between thought and existence. Schopenhauer dethroned Schope: reason and claimed to have discovered the real root of that Bauer s being which we know as an idea. This root of existence. is what he called Will. The source of the reality which rea iity. we cognize the secret essence which is objectified in the forms of the universe as it presents itself to our concep tions is Will. By this Will he meant a blind but irre sistible effort to exist, a craving of inexpugnable strength towards life and objective being, an unconscious lusting after the pleasure of manifesting itself as something acting here and now. It is something less than Will, as we know will, and yet something more than force. Under every known kind of actions and phenomena in space-and-time phenomena, known by their reciprocal relations there is an unknown but felt something, an endless, aimless, limitless struggle to be upraised into the light of existence. This ultimate basis of will-force we must assume as the fact presupposed by all specific causal explanations. But in its generic basis the Will has no definite aim ; it is the will to be everything in general and nothing in particular, the will to be, to do, to act. End or purpose supervenes only with the rise of consciousness. Intelligence comes forward at first as a mere organ in the service of the Will ; it is only a means for the preservation of the individual and the species. It is observable first in the animal, where the purely instinctive stimuli fail to procure sufficient material for subsistence, where the food has to be selected, and the motions of the animal are accordingly dependent on motives, i.e., on conceptions of objects to be attained. It is this need which occasions the development of the brain ; with the brain intelligence rises upon the scene ; and thus the world now comes to see itself, not in its reality, but in its phenomenal objectification, as the realm of causes and effects in the element of space and time. This conscious knowledge, which at first consists merely in momentary and individual perceptions, attains higher powers, as abstract and general reason, by the aid of speech. Now intelligence, which originally came with the forma tion of brain-tissue as a mere tool of the Will in the more complex forms of its objectification, may rise at length, according to Schopenhauer, to be the liberator of the
 * ws. somewhat misleading phrase that all is for the best in this