Though later as a philosophical creed in the European world, pessimism is far earlier than optimism as a mood of feeling in mankind at large. The ordinary human being, so long as he is engrossed with action and identified with his immediate present, is neither optimist nor pessimist. But in proportion as reflexion awakens—as the fulness of life and vigour of will give place to the exhaustion of age or to brooding thoughtfulness—there comes a sense of doubt as to the value of the aims on which energy is spent and as to the issue of the struggle with nature. It is failure that excites meditation: the obvious disproportion between desire and attainment impresses the poet and thinker, as they scan the page of human life, with the predominant darkness of the record. The complaint is heard from every land and in every language that the days of man are few and evil, that the best lot of all is not to be born at all, and next in order is the fate of those cut off by early death. Even the great king himself (says Socrates in the Apology, xxxii.), far less any private man, as he reviews the course of his past life, cannot point to any better or happier time than a night of dreamless sleep; and Byron bids us—

“Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o’er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been,

Tis something better not to be.”

In a religious form this pessimism appears as a belief that man is a creature at the mercy of more potent agents, to whom his wishes and fears are of slight importance. Called into existence by instrumentalities over which he has no control, he is involved in a lifelong conflict with forces, natural and supernatural, which work out their inevitable issues with utter indifference to his weal or woe. The wheels of the universe are deaf to the cry of human hearts. There is a hopeless sense of inequality in the struggle between the petty self-centred will of man and the capricious and irresistible forces of nature.

This natural and instinctive pessimism is contemporaneous with the non-theistic religions of the world,—with all the forms of nature-worship, from the grossest and most trivial polytheism to the abstruses! schemes of naturalistic pantheism. In such a state of belief man tries to obtain relief from the burden of troubles in various ways. There is first of all the vulgar method of adulation and sacrifice. The powers of the unknown which lie ready to thwart the plans of man, and which he conceives in the likeness of beings with vaster forces but with passions and susceptibilities like his own, may be bribed by gifts or placated by flattery. Hence the common practices of superstitious worship. A second means of escape from the burden of life is given by what may be called Epicureanism. While not denying the divine, it explains away the gods of popular religion, and at the same time rejects the attempt to transform the idea of necessary connexion from a principle for the explanation of phenomena into a controlling agency at the summit of the universe. Within the limits fixed by his natural conditions it represents man as free to work out his own welfare without interference from superior powers. But it is forced to admit that the happiness which man can obtain is after all only negative,—all pleasure is but the withdrawal of pain, and the utmost range of pleasure lies in varying the methods of such deliverance. Epicureanism is pessimistic; but it is an egoistic pessimism which is content to aim at the maximum of painlessness for the individual, and which ignores the metaphysics of universal pain and of universal relief from that pain.

The third method of relief from the troubles of existence has a closer analogy with the pessimism of modern times. It is the Buddhism of the East. Buddhism, whatever be the uncertainty attaching to its founder’s personal story, is to all intents a shoot which has been cut off from the main tree of Brahmanism. Its theory rests on the metaphysics of the Brahmanical schools; its scheme of life is one out of the many phases of Hindu asceticism. Buddhism left the parent stock of Hindu religion at a time when the metaphysicians had carried up the polytheism of their country into a unified pantheism, when the philosophy of the Upanishads had worked up the comparatively rude theology of the Vedic hymns into a compact doctrine. The fundamental dogma presented by this system is the contrast between the true self or permanent reality of the world and the changes and plurality of the phenomenal scene in which men live or seem to live. On the one hand is Brahma, or Atman: from one side, the universe, the All, and everything,—from another, the true self, the Ego, the absolute, whose name is the No, No, because no words can describe him, the very reality of reality. On the other hand is the world of growth and decay, of sorrow and death,—the world, as it was subsequently called, of illusion, Máyá, where the semblance of firm reality is deceitfully assumed, by the phantoms of creation. And as in the universe, so is the contrast in the human soul. There is the unredeemed soul, which desire and action (the will in posse and in esse) hold fast in the bonds of changeable existence, in the mutations of metempsychosis; there is also the redeemed soul, which by ascetic virtues, by renunciation of domestic ties, by the continued practice of selfdenial and mortification, has found its way from the world of illusory semblances to its true and abiding self.

It is on some such conception of the world, in which over against Brahma in his eternal quiet there stands man suffering and yearning for relief, that Buddhism ultimately reposes. But, while the speculative theories of the Brahmans put in the foreground the august mystery of the All-one, Buddha starts from the other side of the picture, from the actual experience of life. The four truths of Buddhism, which are the foundation of its religious creed and the recurring burden of its teachings, leave the metaphysical basis out of sight. All life is sorrow, says the first: birth, age, disease, death, is sorrow; and the cause of this sorrow, adds the second truth, is the thirst which leads from birth to birth,—the thirst for pleasures, for existence, for power. The third is, that sorrow can only be removed by the complete annihilation of desire; and the fourth prescribes the means of word and act forming the eight parts of the way which frees from sorrow. The practical need is everything; the theoretical basis, the Brahma, which the orthodox schools presented as the sole reality, is so completely lost sight of that the modern critics are at variance with each other as to how far the goal of Buddhist endeavour can be described as anything positive. That all life is pain is the one perpetual refrain of Buddhism. The search for pleasure is vain and ends in increased misery. But the true Buddhist does not allow the per ception of this fact to cause, still less to perpetuate, a feeling of melancholy. It only urges him to have compassion on his suffering brothers, and to look forward joyously to the goal of release which he has set before himself.

For further details reference may be made to the article on Buddhism. It is enough to say here that the chief point of Buddhist theory is to see in all apparent being only a process of becoming: events happen, nothing is; the only permanence can be but the law of their occurrence. The cosmic philosophy of Buddha is like that of Heraclitus. “All things flow · nothing abides”; only this flux of everything serves to emphasize the fact that the happiness of man is thereby rendered vain. The end which Buddha seeks is the redemption of man from this toilsome world of birth and death. It is not absorption in the unity of Brahma, not felicity in a higher and better world. It is, to cast off the conditions which trammel existence, the consciousness which leads to desire and action, the body and all its appurtenances; it is, to attain death in life, to have so mortified flesh and spirit that the individual can no longer be in the ordinary sense said to exist. He has obtained, when so perfected, what is called Nirvána, “the land of peace where transitoriness finds rest.”

Before discussing the development of this pessimistic ethics in modern days, it remains to notice a fourth issue from the evil that is in the world. This view of life and of the universe is specially connected with Hebrew monotheism and its later developments in Mohammedan as well as Christian doctrine under the potent stimulus of Greek philosophy. It is in the belief of a moral God—a good and wise creator and governor of the universe—that the optimistic problem and theory finds its chief origin. When the idea of God has been purged of its naturalism and identified with the ideal of wisdom, goodness, and justice, there soon arises for thinking minds the necessity of a “théodicée,”—a justification of providence. Can the evil and misery found upon earth, the disproportion between merit and recompense, be explained on the hypothesis of a wise and beneficent ruler in heaven Ί One of the most familiar and typical instances of such a feeling is given by the book of Job. In the later times of Israel, when the vigour of creative faith was undermined by a criticål spirit, born of bitter fates and foreign influences, voices were heard, like those of the writer of Ecclesiastes, giving utterance to pessimistic doubt. The story of Job is another and more edifying presentation of the same theme. How, it is asked, can the misfortunes of the just man be harmonized with the idea of a righteous God? Is suffering the penalty of sin, and must virtue be always paid its wages in pleasure?

The difficulty, it is evident, arises with the perception of the antagonism between the natural and the moral, and implies a desire to bridge over the gulf between them. With the gradually deepening conviction that the central principle of the universe is a moral principle, the need is felt for explaining the immorality (so to speak) of the natural laws, for reconciling the unconditional imperative of the word of duty with the indifference to right and wrong displayed in the facts of life. Sometimes we are referred for answer to another world, which shall compensate for the mistakes of the present. At other times it is suggested that physical evil has the function of a moral discipline, that suffering teaches nobility, that misfortunes are blessings in disguise.

The optimism of Leibnitz is of a different cast, and goes more boldly to face the real difficulty of the situation. It argues against the common estimate of moral and physical evil, and seeks to reduce them both to little more than privations of good,—to mere absence of good, to a defect rather than a blemish, to what is called metaphysical evil. The world, it is admitted, is far from perfect, but it is as good as it could be made if all the good which it contains was to be realized. Like everything else, it is not free from the defects of its qualities. It is, we may be sure, the best of possible worlds. But this is far from saying that it is a good world. Ignorant as we are of the limits of what is possible, it is not for us to say that the quality of the best, under the given circumstances, is at all distinguishable from what is really very bad. The defence of theism which Leibnitz thus undertook against the sceptical suggestions of Bayle is only the common argument that the work must be judged as a whole, that it is unfair to pronounce judgment on an isolated event or thing apart from the question how it is affected by its interdependence. But, unfortunately, in the case before us, in the problem of the universe, we do not know the whole, and can only grope our way tentatively from point to point, feebly endeavouring to forecast the plan of the total structure.

But Leibnitz goes farther than this assertion of interconnexion or adaptation. It is the ultimate assumption of his argument that the forces of the universe are in the hands of a perfectly wise intelligence, that, as in man there is a rational power of initiation and guidance, so in the world as a macrocosm there is a primal reason which governs its movements and co-ordinates them to a desirable end. The actual phases of existence only carry out in palpable shape and successive or simultaneous manifestations an ideal or rational plan, which is their original and sufficient reason. The world at large is somewhat of a machine, or a congeries of machines, which run down according to their own internal and innate conditions of existence; but these machines are wound up by one supreme machinist, who has predetermined the aim and object of their combined movements. Thus the doctrine of the pre-established harmony, while on the one hand it is an apotheosis of logic by the emphasis it lays on the necessary causal interdependence of the several partial movements, is on the other hand, by its principle of sufficient reason—the principe du meilleur or de convenance — a doctrine of teleology, whereby an ideal principle of design interpolates the contingent and subordinates necessity to freedom. The world is not a mere group of causes and effects governed by the logic of contradiction and identity; over and above the necessitarian logic is a mind which looks behind and before, and combines all events, not recklessly or necessarily, but in the bands of reciprocal subservience to the greatest good of which they admit.

In this argument Leibnitz is open to the criticism of Kant, that he has passed from a legitimate conception presiding over the synthesis of phenomena to the illegitimate idea of a self-subsistent and personal principle, which, far from being a mere ideal of complete synthesis, itself creates and predetermines that synthesis. To the logical scientist the phenomena are merely connected by a formal unity; to the theist like Leibnitz this unity is identified with a cosmical mind, an intelligent power which regulates the evolution of things and subordinates them all to the fulfilment of its original plan. Leibnitz thus manipulates two ideas, the logical and the religious, as if they were interchangeable, though in reality they lie in different planes. The reason which at one time is treated as an abstract principle of self-consistency is at another time clothed in the concrete mental life associated with it under its human aspects. Mere reason, says Aristotle, can initiate no change; it neither chooses nor commands, but simply asserts. But human reason is always in the long-run wrapped up with some aim, is always (in the technical sense) practical, and only for moments of abstraction ever merely theoretical. Thus the reason in the universe was spoken of as God, and conceived anthropomorphically after the pattern of human personality.

The optimism of Leibnitz found its well-sounding but somewhat misleading phrase that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds bitterly satirized in Voltaire’s Candide, and painfully commented upon by the earthquake of Lisbon. But the real object of the Frenchman’s wit was the baser optimism of the age which sheltered its vulgar features under the mask of the Leibnitian Theodicee. An easy-going generation had settled down in the pleasing faith that their barns were filled with good things for many years, and that they might eat, drink, and be merry. The creed found in England a prophet of solemn pomp in Pope, whose Essay on Man has fixed in pregnant lines the main half-truths of the Leibnitian theory, which the poet had probably learned from Bolingbroke. The same optimism appears in Shaftesbury (“’Tis good which is predominant ”), and shows its presence in Paley. Some opposition to the current eudaemonism is found in the well-weighed and all but sceptical judgments pronounced by Butler, as well as in the cynical pessimism that tried to raise its voice in Mandeville. But the great instance against the comfortable view of life is the striking passage which Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion has put in the mouth of Demea, beginning “The whole earth, believe me, Philo, is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures,” &c.

In Germany, under the head of Natural Theology, the ordinary optimism flourished amain. The whole range of creation was ransacked to show how well man had been provided for by God. The poetry of Brockes (the translator of Pope) is full of the theme,—the laudation of the many gifts we owe to Providence, of the multifarious uses to which each animal and plant can be put. It is an anthropocentric optimism which thus makes man’s welfare the main end of the creation, and which, above all, finds that welfare in what we eat and drink and wherewithal we are clothed. The good which Leibnitz had spoken of was understood as material prosperity, comfort, happiness. God’s goodness was measured by the amount of worldly wellbeing which He bestows upon us.

The great Kant, as late as 1759, when he printed a short sketch On Optimism, was still inclined to keep terms with this base caricature of a great theory, and spoke with full agreement of that theory itself. But here as elsewhere Hume’s influence was potent upon him, and in a paper published in 1791 (On the Failure of all Philosophical Attempts in Theodicy) he had altered his tone. Our intelligence, he argues, is absolutely powerless to discover the proportion in which the world, at least as known to us in experience, stands to the supreme wisdom. And to the grounds adduced to prove that the pleasures of life far exceed its pains his reply is: take a man of sound mind, who has lived long enough and thought enough on the value of life to be able to form a judgment on the subject, and ask him whether he would like to play out the game of life once more (not on the same terms, but) on any terms he pleases, be it only in this terrestrial world of ours, and not in fairy land. In one direction indeed Kant may be called optimist (or at least meliorist),-in his belief in the ample possibilities of moral and political improvement, and in his enthusiastic hopes for the cessation of some chief causes of human misery.

But in one way Kant had laid the axe to the chief root of optimism. That root is the utilitarian or eudaemonistic theory of conduct,—the theory which seeks to explain morality away into a sort of magnified selfishness, and regards the authority...