Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/721

 PESSIMISM 689 ent existence of morality, and reduced it to conventional stereotyping of natural symbols, with forgetfulness and misinterpretation of their meaning and applications. To an age so minded the consolations of pessimism sounded faint and unreal. They had lost the old TTOV crrw, the optimistic creed that man was the undisputed head of creation. They saAV themselves no longer a select race, favourites of God, but as engaged in the struggle for life with thousands of other species. The role of saviour of the world was not for them. And so, turning a deaf ear to the high words of Schopenhauer, they sought easier con solations in the common and casual pursuits and pleasures in the world ; they determined to make the best of this vale of tears, even in Pandemonium there might be shady spots and cool retreats. A few spirits who had drunk more deeply at the wells of suffering, and who were alike without the mental energy of Schopenhauer and the comfortable inconstancy of the mass of men, could not rise beyond the ever-present sense of the emptiness and in felicity of life. There are many such types in literature ; but perhaps no more perfect expression has been given to the strange abysmal melancholy of a withered life than by the Italian poet-scholar Leopardi. At one time dallying lovingly with the idea of death, at another finding only deception and illusion in love, liberty, progress, and all human ideals, and almost always with irony, bitterness, and hopelessness living in the sense of an inexorable destiny, a malign nature, which calmly motions man to destruction, Leopardi presents pessimism in its naked terrors. For him there are no consolations, either base or noble. Man is at the mercy of a pitiless nature ; he must endure a thousand deaths daily. This mood of Leopardi s, however he himself protested against the suggestion, was unquestionably to a main extent due to the tremendous disproportion in which his mental and aesthetic nature stood to the circumstances of his life, and not a little to the general political condition of his country. When the first edition of Schopenhauer s great work appeared in 1819 it did not attract much immediate attention. Pessimism was in the air : the Romantic school in Germany, and especially Heine and Lenau, Byron in England, and Chateaubriand in France, not to mention many other names, all in their several ways gave expression to the &quot; Weltschmerz.&quot; Yet it was not till 1844 that a second and much enlarged edition of the work appeared, followed by a third in 1859. By this time the doctrines of Schopenhauer had found many enthusiastic followers, and a flood of literary works poured from the press in criticism or support of them. With the year 1866 the title &quot; Pessimism &quot; began to show itself in books which discuss his views. And in 1869 appeared the Philosophy of the Unconscious, by E. von Hartmann. The popularity of this work was enormous. In the ten years which elapsed between its publication and that of Hartmann s next systematic work (The Phenomenology of the Moral Con sciousness) it had -run through eight editions. The lesser works of Hartmann, his articles in reviews, the pamphlets by friends and opponents during the last fifteen years, are truly named legion. The question &quot; Is life worth living? &quot; has become a question of the day, to which the problems of socialism, liberalism, and religion contribute their quota. The novels of Turgenieff and Sacher-Masoch are full of the ideas of Schopenhauer s pessimism. Hartmann s first work was written when its author was twenty-five. It bears traces of the paradox and exaggera tion which sometimes go with youthful talent, and occa sionally pays the tribute of imitation to the naturalistic pruriency and sensationalism of the contemporary novel. The style is cumbersome and pretentious. And yet its popularity proves that its author has the faculty of directing with no unskilful or incompetent hand the vague and in coherent tendencies of the cultivated masses. The world which has lost hold of, and perhaps broken with, the faith of its fathers is on the look-out for a &quot;Weltanschauung&quot;; it wants to know the metaphysical inferences to be gathered from the recent advances of scientific theory. Not merely had Darwinism, as may be seen from the character of HackePs Natural History of Creation, caught the public ear more widely in Germany than in England, but the deductions from its principles had been carried to far greater lengths. Amid the decay of distinctively Chris tian beliefs, and even of theism, the doctrine of pessimism attracted a sort of religious fervour. The prevalent sense of dissatisfaction and baffled endeavour was met by a theory that the principle of the universe was radically per verse, and could not be amended. And, if it be urged that it is difficult to believe in the genuineness of a pes simism when its professors take their ease and mirthfully jeer the stranger who expected to find people not clad in soft raiment nor dwelling in kings houses, it may be replied that pessimism is not the only temporizing creed. The moral indignation (Entriistungs-Pessimismus) of a Carlyle or a Juvenal, which pours its vials of scorn on the selfish meanness of mankind, and the churchly exhibition of the sores and frailties of human flesh and blood in Avhich books like the De Contemptii Jfundi of Innocent III. revel, alike overshoot their mark and leave the Avorld un convinced of its nothingness. It is out of place here to enter into any lengthened ex- Von position of Hartmann s metaphysics. This world, accord- Hart- ing to him, is the work of an Unconscious, a being which m is at once will and intelligence, a will urging to be and physics, to do somewhat and an intelligence which adapts means to ends. But the will is only instinct, and the intelligence is the unconscious reason which guides the somnambulist or the clairvoyant. Thus there is wisdom in the frame of the world, but the original resolution to exist was the work of a blind will. Reason did not prompt the initial act, yet at every movement towards existence an unconscious reason effectively correlates the elements into united action. The various individuals seem indeed to be acting of them selves : they pursue aims of their own but they are only puppets in the hand of nature, the unconscious intelligence and will. Apparently, there are many agents, each in some degree independent ; really, there is only one source of action, the union of will and idea in instinctive adapta tion and unwitting design. With man at length consciousness awakes, and the pos sibility is laid for a new relation between the two elements in the universal principle. Knowledge, however, is not an end in itself ; it is not enough to know the process of the world. The consciousness which is generated at length by the unconscious reason out of the workings of will has its function marked out for it beforehand by its uncon scious author. Its final purpose is to revoke the effects of that irrational step by which the unconscious will in its eagerness to exist dragged the idea with it in its service. The hour of vengeance may come some day. The intelli gence which has become conscious in man may at length induce his will to take the backward step, to retire into non-existence even as it erewhile rose into existence. In that day when the force of will has been mainly accumu lated in the province where intelligence prevails, it is prob able that a successful act of suppression of the will to life on the part of human reason would entail the utter prostration and annihilation of the will to life throughout the universe. By the act of its intelligent portion, in which the major part both of the cosmical will and intelli gence has been gradually accumulated, the world, as a whole, will commit suicide, XVIII. 87