Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/288

264 pessimism he gives us an universal expression for the whole negative side of life. If you will let me speak of private experience, I myself have often found it deeply comforting, in the most bitter moments, to have discounted, so to speak, all the petty tragedies of experience, all my own weakness and caprice and foolishness and ill fortune, by one such absolute formula for evil as Schopenhauer’s doctrine gives me. It is the fate of life to be restless, capricious, and therefore tragic. Happiness comes, indeed, but by all sorts of accidents; and it flies as it comes. One thing only that is greater than this fate endures in us if we are wise of heart; and this one thing endures forever in the heart of the great World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection. This one thing, as I hold, is the eternal resolution that if the world will be tragic, it shall still, in Satan’s despite, be spiritual. And this resolution is, I think, the very essence of the Spirit’s own eternal joy.