Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/455

Rh through his own injudicious courses into the same morbid condition of mind; each, consequently, on the strength of his own feelings asserts that life is not worth living; and each says what is not true. Each in his own way has disturbed, if not destroyed, the natural balance of his faculties and functions, so placing himself in a wrong and painful relation to the world in which he lives; and the true remedy would therefore seem to lie in undoing, if it be at all possible, the mischief that has been done. To trace pessimism, as Prof. James does, to certain specific causes, and then to propose to cure it by the application of a religious theory, is a little too much like trying to stay a pestilence by prayer instead of by sanitary measures. Supposing that a pestilence due to natural causes could be stayed by prayer, it would require a perpetual miracle to keep it from breaking out again so long as those causes were not removed. Therefore, before we can follow Prof. James in seeking a religious remedy for pessimism, we must unlearn the lesson he has himself taught us, that its origin may be found in such avoidable errors as undue self-indulgence (repletion), sensualism, and overstudy. A dyspeptic takes very gloomy views of human affairs, but what is the use of arguing with him? What he wants is new life in his digestive organs. Pessimism, as a creed, will only deserve to be argued with when it can be shown that it claims its victims, not less among those who have wisely husbanded their powers and in every way respected the laws of life, than among those who have wasted their substance and set the laws of life at defiance.

It is evident that Prof. James has been so far affected by the pessimism of studious souls as to have conceived a very unfavorable opinion of the apparent order of the universe. He does not, however, give us as clearly to understand as we could wish wherein this somewhat extensive institution fails to meet his private views—what he would like it to be that it is not, or not to be that it is. He quotes with evident sympathy some appalling verses by the author of The City of Dreadful Night—verses which would have almost sent a shudder through the rebellious soul of Omar Khayam himself; and he tells us that he fairly rejoices over the downfall of that form of natural religion—fit only for backward and barbaric peoples—which consists in "the worship of the God of Nature, simply taken as such." "There were times," he says, "when Leibnitzes, with their heads buried in monstrous wigs, could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an established church could prove by the valves of the heart and the round ligament of the hip joint the existence of a 'Moral and Intelligent Contriver of the World.' But those times are past, and we of the nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know Nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any god of whose character she can be an adequate expression. . . . To such a harlot" (as Nature) "we owe no moral allegiance. . . . If there be a divine spirit of the universe. Nature, such as we know her, can not possibly be its ultimate word to man." This, on the whole, does not seem to us very convincing writing for a Harvard professor. The "monstrous wig" of Leibnitz did not so stifle his brains as to prevent his discovery of an admirable form of the calculus; and, among the "stall-fed officials of an established church," the first that occurs to mind—certainly the most illustrious—was precisely he who pointed out (Samuel