Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/500

496 pessimism. The fundamental things in our psychic life are not thought, deliberation, judgment, nor yet pleasure and pain, but rather, will, impulse, restless striving, love, aspiration, progress. It is only when these fundamental things are checked and one is forced to think and feel and examine one's feelings, that pessimism arises. Pleasures unearned are no guaranty of inward peace. As President Jordan says:

But now let us examine more carefully some of the aspects of the new optimism and some of the grounds upon which it rests. In this new philosophy of life, man is the central and determining figure. He can make the world good. This is a new thought in the history of optimism. We are not blind to the evils and the miseries of life, but we are conscious of a new inner force which can relieve them and redeem them. The old optimism said, Cheer up, for the world is good and beautiful. The new optimism says, Cheer up, for you can make the world good and beautiful. This view is a part of the powerful reaction which has been taking place for many years against the mechanical philosophy of life which prevailed in the latter part of the nineteenth century under the influence of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. It came to be generally believed at that time that the world is merely a redistribution of matter and motion, that mechanical laws are sufficient to account for every phase of human life, including mental, moral and social phenomena, that at certain stages of organic evolution consciousness appears as a kind of by-product having no agency in the life drama itself, and that it is not necessary to take any account of it in explaining life, whether in its physiological, psychological or social aspects.

But now this disheartening philosophy is buffeted from every side, not more from the side of the psychologists and sociologists than from that of the biologists themselves. Grave doubts are cast upon the adequacy of natural selection to explain either the products or the direction of evolution, and it is now believed that there is some other determining factor which is spoken of now as consciousness, now as an initiatory psychic energy working towards definite ends, now as a vital impulse, a wellspring of progress or an original profound cosmic force. Whether consciousness itself be this original cosmic force, or whether, as some believe, it is a product of evolution, makes little difference in our problem, for human consciousness is here present in the world and it is a power which is changing not only the very face of the earth, but changing the direction of evolution itself. It would appear that consciousness has at this time reached a sort of adolescent or rapid growth stage in its development in which it has become conscious of its own powers, and this consciousness of itself increases tenfold its inherent force. We are, indeed, surrounded by mystery. Life is a puzzle and we may or