Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/426

 P. MAINLANDER, DIE PHILOSOPHIE DER ERLOSUNG. 425 A rather obvious cause of pessimism is suggested by the passages in which Mainlander, while contending for the necessity of the burdens and restrictions imposed by the State, places them among the serious evils of life. It suggests itself that the pessimism of the Hindus was not really a discovery they made because they had leisure to see the vanity of things, but was due to their want of political freedom. This suggestion would find support in an appeal from India to Greece. Such a merely external cause as political circumstances, however, is not satis- factory as a final explanation. Pessimism must also have its internal cause. What kind of temperament is it, then, to which reflection seems to reveal nothing but " the intrinsic worthlessness of existence " ? It is remarkable that all systematic as distinguished from episodical pessimism, all pessimistic philosophy, is associated with a more or less strong Mediae valism. Some one may object that there is no mediaeval reaction in Leopardi. To this the reply is that Leopardi was not a genuine pessimistic phil- osopher. The underlying philosophy of Leopardi is a certain combination of elements derived from ancient philosophy and culminating in the antique ideals of the individual and the State. His " pessimism " is really a sceptical despair of the realisation of these ideals ; and at intervals (at least in the poems) it almost disappears. A genuine pessimist, besides, does not protest against Nature and Fate, but like the Buddhist and Christian saints (as Mainlander shows) holds himself to be in harmony with the tendencies of the sum of things when by " the slow suicide of asceticism " he seeks the only end that appears to him desirable. Mainlander's " esoteric Christianity " is really what he represents it to be Christian asceticism made its own reward. He has simply given a well-compacted foundation, of the most modern materials, to what is essentially the mediaeval view of life. To point out its causes is not, of course, to refute Mainlander's pessimism. It may be that the Hindu philosophers and those modern Europeans who are most in sympathy with the Middle Age are those who have most successfully taken into themselves the results of the experience of large and complex societies continued through a long succession of years. What has been said is only intended as an aid to the statement of the question. The conflicting views of life, we now see, are, on the one hand, that for which the dictate of the highest wisdom is to suppress the personality, on the other hand, that for which to maintain the personality is the foundation of all virtue. And what their opponents should seek to establish against the pessimists is not necessarily that the sum of pleasures in life is greater than the sum of pains ; but that life, by moments, has a positive value, and that these are not the moments in which the personality is approaching extinction, but those in which it has the fullest consciousness of maintaining its own being. T. W T HITTAKEB.