One of the " Isms that haunt " many in these days is Pessimism. As a modern thinker remarks, the pessimists, like Macbeth, have murdered Sleep, and they have added a new trouble to our somewhat restless age. Not that Pessimism can be regarded as in any sense a modern theory of life ; it was taught by pre-Buddhist teachers long before the Christian era, and our modern pessimistic teachers only adapt the Oriental ism to Western modes of thought and forms of speech. The theory is associated chiefly with three names in modern days—Leopardi, the Italian poet; and Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, two German system-builders. Hartmann is the latest, and he may fairly claim to be the best, expounder of Pessimism, and therefore we need not go beyond his system in our effort to make this theory of life plain to our readers. Like all pessimists, he bases his pessimism on a certain metaphysical conception of existence, but he also descends from the high- ways of philosophy to the well-beaten tracks of ordinary life, and he makes his appeal to universal human experience and to that with which we are all supposed to be more or less familiar.
What is Pessimism ? Not, it must be premised, any merely emotional disgust awakened in us by the ills of life, but a certain reasoned theory of being or existence. There have always been men and women who have taken what are termed gloomy views of things, and who fix their attention chiefly on what is sad and disappointing. This has been called "Temperamental pessimism," and it has almost nothing in common with the pessimism with which we are now dealing. There is a dark side in life, it must be confessed, and the deeper our knowledge of, and sympathy with, humanity the more we may expect to feel within ourselves the pangs of a truly vicarious sorrow. In the writings of prophets, poets, and thinkers of all ages we may expect to hear this "cry of the human." Even the " sunny brow'd Homer," as Tully remarks, falls sometimes into this pessimistic mood, and the same tone may be traced in all the best literature, both ancient and modern, both sacred and secular. We find it in the Old and New Testaments ; we often come upon it in modern poetry, and Carlyle, who was certainly no pessimist, is full of this " pathetic minor."
A pessimist in the true sense is one who believes, or who thinks he believes, that if we weigh the sum total of good and evil, or, to speak more accurately, of pleasure and pain, in the Universe, we shall ever find the balance on the side of rain. According to Hartmann this view is justified alike by the experience of men and by a rigorous application of the "scientific method" to the study of the " world-process," An optimist is one who believes the world to be the work of a Being of Infinite Goodness and Wisdom ; and that it is, on the whole, conducive to the happiness of all its sentient life. A pessimist, on the other hand, believes that the world " is thoroughly wretched, and worse than no world at all." Suppose the case of a man living under the most favourable conditions ; assume that be has health, wealth, troops of friends, and a congenial sphere; in fact, all that we term happiness. To such a person let us put the alternative—the same life over again, with absolute oblivion of the past, so that it shall be essentially a new experience, or annihilation—which ? In all probability he will reply, Better no life at all than any life possible to man in a world like this! Homer makes one of his heroes speak thus of life in Hades :—
" Name me not, death, with praiseful words, noble Ulysses ; I
Would sooner be a bonded serf, the labourer's tool to ply.
To a cottar on the heath, with wealth exceeding small,
Than be lord of all the shades in Pluto's gloomy hall."
Our modern pessimists reverse all this, and instead of praising life they regard the highest and noblest possible life on earth as thoroughly miserable. And this is, in few words, their theory of existence.
We need not go very deeply into pessimistic metaphysics, but a few words may help the curious to understand the grounds on which pessimists base their hopeless conclusions as to the meaning of life. Schopenhauer regards Will as the only Substance, or Being; all Phenomena belong to what he calls the Representation. The will does not cause the Representation, for causality and all such categories belong only to phenomena. The substance, or essence, of the universe is a blind, purposeless striving, with neither intelligence, aim, nor end; hence the essential misery of existence, its necessary and eternal misery. Hartman regards the substance behind all phenomena as the unconscious, and this includes in it both will and representation. Underneath all forms of organic life, all animal instincts, all intellectual and moral life, will even be found, their only rational explanation, this Being, the Unconscious. In dealing with organic processes and adaptions, he seems also to assume the existence of endless wills, each of which acts as a sort of providence within its own sphere, ordering as foreseeing. The migrations of birds, for example, he regards as due to a genuine forecasting of events not possible even to the highest human intelligence; in fine, we must assume a sort of clairvoyance as one of the essential properties of Will. The grand evolution of life, then, is presided over by a Power—the unconscious—which forsees all, ordains all, controls and guides all, and yet this Power does not itself possess either Intelligence or Personality. What we term consciousness, or self-consciousness, is merely the result of the unconscious in nature; it arises ever from a kind of shock, in which the idea is detached from the volition. And from the eternal striving of this blind, purposeless, unconscious Somewhat, results the great world-process, the very essence of which ever is, ever must be, misery.
THREE STAGES OF ILLUSION.
Let us, however, leave these lofty, and in this case, we fear, also barren heights of metaphysics, and come to ordinary work-a-day life, in which words are used in their simple and ordinary meanings. We reach the pessimistic conclusions after passing through three stages of thought and experience ; First, there is the stage of Childhood, long since left behind by all civilised nations, the stage in which happiness is believed to be possible in this life. Next, there is the stage of Youth, represented in history by the Middle Ages, in which happiness is believed to be fully attainable only in a future life. This is practically the solution of the problem offered by Christian Theism. Finally, there is the stage of Manhood, in which happiness is expected in the future of this world, as the result of a more highly developed civilisation. This is the solution of the problem offered by those who believe in the Religion of Humanity. Through these three stages of Endemonistic Illusion every thinker passes before he finally attains mental satisfaction, in so far as this is possible to any in a world of misery, in the Philosophy of Pessimism.
We need not contend, in answer to pessimists, for complete happiness in this world. Believers in a future life, indeed, are often guilty of joining with pessimists in exaggerating the evils of existence, in order that they may paint in brighter hues the glories of the life to come. This, also, is an evil to be avoided by all sober thinkers. The world is not exactly a " vale of tears" though millions of eyes are never dry; nor is it merely a "fleeting show for man's illusion given." We have no sympathy with a shallow optimism whichever ignores the darker phases of life, and which refuses to hear the truth about the woes of humanity. The man who has robust health, on whom fortune has ever smiled, who has either inherited, or by superabundant physical and mental energy, created for himself specially favourable conditions of existence, may easily come to the conclusion that this world is hard only upon the thriftless, the lazy, and the self-indulgent; it is not possible for all to adopt this view. Whether we accept or reject Henry George's remedy for the evils of life, we must confess that there is much aptness and force in his description of our boasted civilisation, as a wedge that presses down to ever-hopeless poverty far more than it raises into comfort. Looking with sympathetic eyes and hearts on the tremendous struggle for existence, and the survival chiefly of the strongest, we can quite understand the mournful refrain of the preacher, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
While we do not believe that perfect happiness is ever likely to be found in this life, we must nevertheless stoutly protest against Hartmann's description of what he calls the first Stage of the Illusion. He passes under swift and cynical review all the aims and ends of the children who at this stage amuse themselves with their gilded toys, all the choice delights of the sons of men by which they have tried to make the world a paradise rather than a prison ; but in his view, a blight is upon all human ambition, and a worm at the heart of all noble aspiration and endeavour.
Let us, Hartmann seems to say, take health, youth, and freedom as the zero-point of feeling; from these, let us ascend through love, friendship, family-life, honour, toil, and all kinds of ambition to science and art, the noblest and most hopeful of all man's ends in life. Yea, like the preacher, let us, in order that our analysis may be exhaustive, make trial even of "madness and folly." What is the result ? Simply vanity and vexation of spirit ; pain, not pleasure even predominates alike in the experience of the individual and the history of the race. The lower down the scale of sentient life we descend the more happiness we shall find. True, the poor have more privations, but then their minds are less cultivated, and therefore they feel them less keenly. Even the brutes are happier, that is, less miserable than men in this world. An ox or a pig lives as comfortably as if he had been taught by Aristotle to seek freedom from care, instead of hunting after happiness, as man ever hunts. Still happier is the fish, yes, most enviable of all is the life of the oyster ! Thus, the lower down the scale we go the more we find creatures happy ; in other words, true happiness is only found where there is no tormenting self-consciousness, and the supreme happiness, therefore, would be non-existence.
ARE THESE THINGS SO ?
Shall we then despise all joy, because with the joy, because of the very capacity for joy, there is also pain ? This were to reject the rose because with it is the thorn ? Rather let us rejoice in the greater fulness of life, rather let us spurn the thought of the happiness of the "beast that takes his license in the fields of time," or in " whom a conscience never wakes." Besides Hartmann's testimony is altogether worthless and misleading. He looks at life through the coloured medium of his own theory, and, naturally, he sees only distorted images of the reality. Love may not, we admit, be all that the fond lover dreams as he gazes into the magic mirror, but it is at least far more than the pessimists allow. Family life has its sorrows, burdens, and restrictions upon liberty; it has also its pure joys, its ever helpful ministries, and its genuine moral discipline. Children do cause much grief to loving and generous parents, but they are also a well-spring of true comfort. They write asking for money when away from home, but they write at other times as well, and their letters cheer the hearts of their fathers and mothers. In like manner we may admit that husbands and wives have their differences, or even their quarrels, and they may occasionally be guilty of other atrocities, but if wedded life has its discords it also has its sweet music, and only the homes of the few are as Hartmann paints home life. There are in every Christian city thousands of homes where his pictures will be denounced as cruel libels and gross caricatures. Let us charitably hope that Tennyson's description is much nearer the mark:—
" These two they dwelt with eye on eye,
Their hearts of old have beat in tune,
Their meetings made December June,
Their every parting was to die."
Hence the poet is able to add words, evidently incomprehensible to some pessimists, " Their love has never passed away." It is certainly true that severe—and ill-remunerated—toil is crushing all joy out of the lives of millions of toilers, but it is not true that all toil is of this character; moreover, we must not forget that there are compensations of another kind, and that in all progressive nations these are being more and more multiplied to the humblest workers.
Many of the evils complained of by pessimists are due not to existence in itself, but rather to existence under present conditions. For example, Hartmann dwells much on the tormenting power of the passions, and he seems to think that these alone are enough to condemn life; but as Mr W. R. Greg and others have not failed to point out, these passions are at present abnormally strong, owing to the self indulgence of past generations. We may, therefore, fairly expect, as one of the beneficent results of intellectual and moral development, a gradual weakening of this force, with a corresponding diminution of the miseries to which, alike in the individual and in the community, it gives rise.
Be this as it may, we accept neither the method nor the results of the pessimists. The true end of life is neither enjoyment nor sorrow, and therefore the true meaning of life will never be discovered by those who insist upon weighing everything in merely Hedonistic balances. We may not, as Lecky says, balance the pleasures of eating "jam tarts" over against pains of an altogether different order, nor can we ever expect to arrive at life's true goal by this pathway. Hartmann and his school first rob life of all its simpler joys and sublimer meanings, refusing to men the admiration, hope, and love by which alone the moral nature grows ; then, pointing to the desert they themselves have made they say,—"Such life is not worth living." If we admit the premises, we can hardly deny the conclusion ; but even at this first stage of the so-called Illusion, we take our stand and say:—"The life you thus depict is not Human Life as we know it, but Human Life as it must become when all are pessimists?" To any one who in the freshness of youth accepts such advice of life, we may well address the poet's words:—
" But you, poor child forlorn !
Ah ! better were it you were never born ;
Better that you had thrown your life away
On some coarse lump of clay ;
Better defeat, disgrace, childlessness, all
That can a solitary life befall,
Than to have all things and yet be
Self bound to dark despondency,
And self-tormented, beyond all reach of doubt,
By some cold word that puts yearnings out."
The Second Stage of the Illusion, that in which happiness is believed to be attainable only in a future state, need not occupy us long. At the same time, as a critic of pessimism well says, " if the pessimists are to be fought successfully, the battle must take place " here. A word or two may be necessary to indicate Hartmann's attitude towards Christ and Christianity. The founder of Christianity completely adopts, he thinks, the pessimistic view regarding the miseries of life. He brings His gospel only to the miserable. He rejects everything natural, and declares it to be impossible simultaneously to attain earthly and heavenly bliss ; he also demands voluntary poverty, assuming that pain increases with the number of man's wants and desires. In fine, the quintessence of Christ's teaching is that we must patiently bear life's ills as our cross here, and look forward to blessedness only in the future. Christianity, is however, in the view of Hartmann, " no longer a vital factor in our developing civilisation, as it has already traversed all its phases." Soon it will be only a shadow of its medieval greatness, " will be, what it exclusively was at its origin, the last consolation of the poor and the wretched." As to the hope of immortality, has not this already been proved to be illusion ? Soul and body alike belong to the phenomenal, and to the phenomenal then can never be permanence. Besides, what is this craving for a future life but the old egoism under a new form? All life is unblessed, and therefore even if we had this immortality, for which Christians long, we should only be more miserable than before.
Such, in brief, is Hartmann's view of Christianity, which he associates with the Second Stage of the Illusion. It is hardly necessary to offer any reply to misconceptions and misrepresentations so gross as these! Hartmann does not understand Christ's teaching, nor does he seem capable of entering into the ethics of Christianity. The idea of Christianity so long being a factor in our civilisation, or of a thinker not being able simultaneously to accept the methods of science and the teaching's of Jesus, must startle considerably many of the foremost scientists of our time. As to his denial of the very possibility of personal immortality, Christians may reply in the words of Mr. John Fiske, one of Herbert Spencer's most devoted American disciples : "The materialistic assumption that there is no such state of things as a future life, and that the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known in the history of philosophy. The more thoroughly we comprehend that process of evolution by which all things have come to be what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence of the Spiritual element in man, is to rob the whole process of its meaning. It goes far towards putting us to permanent intellectual confusion, and I do not see that anyone has as yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason for our accepting so dire an alternative."
The Third Stage of the Illusion, that, viz., in which men expect a happy future for the race in this world, is the one now reached by those who, in various forms, accept the guidance of Comte, or who, while rejecting the Christian faith, still believe in the progress and immortality of the race. Here Hartmann and his followers become mercilessly iconoclastic. Who can hope for happiness, say they, in a world like ours ? All the foremost nations are seeking after scientific culture, but this can only lead them to pessimism, for, as Kobeleth says, " he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." Everywhere we behold growing anarchy and distrust instead of peace and contentment. Revolution is in the air, and the working classes, though never before so prosperous, were never before so discontented with their lot. Nor can it be said that nations are becoming more moral. Wherever civil war breaks out we are able to see clearly the elements that are beneath the smooth surface of modern society. In short, only Utopian dreamers can really look for a happy future as the result of higher culture and the development of what we call civilisation.
Complaints are sometimes made in these days of the gloomy Eschatology taught by the Churches, but the pessimists teach still more awful doctrines. Take, for instance, the views of the future of the race given by our English Maudsley, one of the most pessimistic of modern scientists. The survival of the fittest means, as he remarks, not the survival of the morally highest, but simply that which is most adapted to its environment. Hence his ideal of the future is a "race bereft of its evolutional energy, disillusioned, without enthusiasms, without Hope, without aspiration, without an ideal . . . There will remain no aspiration, no holy sense of duty, no belief, only dreary apathy or torpid resignation." In order to stimulate its flagging energies mankind may resort to alcohol, chloral, and other drugs, but only to find the end worse than the beginning. " 'Tis a way of making Hell by a mad attempt to find Heaven." What can remain for men so miserable ? Only suicide, which " is a sort of convulsive climax of pessimism," first mental suicide, an absolute determination to live no longer upon illusions, or to indulge in dreams and visions that only end in vanity. But this is not enough, and, therefore, we may expect that the race, when thoroughly disillusioned, will consider it wiser and better to cease altogether from an existence which, at the worst, is positive torment, and at the best only vanity and vexation of spirit. This can hardly be regarded as a particularly hopeful outlook, and yet to many in these days it seems to have a charm that is no longer found in connection with the brighter visions of Christianity.
THE ETHICS OF PESSIMISM.
What then is the highest ethical ideal of the pessimists ? What is their conception of duty ? According to a high authority, the ethics of pessimism and the ethics of Christianity are one and the same. If by this it is meant that both teach self-renunciation we agree, but beyond this there seems to us to be no agreement at all between the two systems. The pessimist believes in the essential misery of existence, and therefore he practises self denial; in order, in short, that he may be as little miserable as possible, by having very few wants or desires. The Christian practises self denial because he believes in the finding of the higher self through the abnegation of the lower self. According to the English translator of Hartmann's " Philosophy of the Unconscious," the " endeavour after the utmost possible happiness through a continual process of self-renunciation, is found to be the right content of moral action.
Perfect duty and true religion are one; to work to the utmost for the enlightenment of the absolute Will, and to do that work reverentially and lovingly, feeling that we are labouring to abridge the pains of a God whose sufferings are at the discretion of his creatures. The difference," he very properly adds, " between this theology and that of the Christian Church, for instance, is that we each and all are the very God who is awaiting deliverance." In other words, the self-renunciation of the pessimist is, after all, only a new form of that egoism which has before been so severely condemned. This may well be called the " poultice- blister theory" of life, the sufferings of the creature are a kind of external application intended to relieve the sufferings of the Creator, the Being whom pessimists regard as the Unconscious.
We cannot but agree with Barlow :—" If the pessimist arguments are really sound and valid, if it be the fact that conscious life and misery are in- separable, and by the nature of things must ever so remain, the man is a fool if he continues in it a moment longer than he need, and a scoundrel if he becomes the means of bringing any more wretches into existence."
In this connection, it is often alleged that pessimism is taught in the Old Testament Writings. Scratch the Semitic skin of Job, says a Hebrew scholar, and we shall find beneath a modern pessimist. This can only be true of what is termed temperamental pessimism. Neither in the Book of Job, nor in the words of " the preacher " do we discover the pessimism of Hartmann and his followers. Old Testament Writers not only believed in the existence of God, they also believed, and this with an enthusiasm of faith that is most refreshing, in the ultimate triumph of righteousness. Even in their doubts there lived more real faith than in half the affirmations of some modem believers. In the later days of Jewish history prophets and singers believed in personal immortality, and in all ages they found in their conscious fellowship with God, and in the yearnings of their moral nature, the promise and potency of immortality.
THE MISSION OF PESSIMISM.
Has this pessimism a meaning or a mission? How comes it that a faith once so potent in the East should reappear in Western lands in this nineteenth century? Those who believe in a providential order of life, who find a Divine meaning in the evolution of all thought or belief, must see some meaning in this system.
The pessimists seem to us God's scourges sent to make us reconsider some of life's problems. Many are trying to live without God in the world, to rest satisfied with evolution, with eternal process only, and they are not seeking to rise through the manifested order to the living Orderer and the ethical end. We also identify the good with the pleasurable, the evil with what causes us pain, and we attempt by purely Hedonistic and merely quantitative tests to determine right and wrong. Imagine a world in which there is no Creator, Father, or moral Ruler of Men, and in which right and wrong as merely enjoyment or so much pain! In such a world, earnest and thoughtful men must perforce be pessimists, for it would be essentially a hopeless world. And just because the pessimists are murdering sleep, and making us face afresh the questions as to the existence of the Supreme Being and the ethical meaning of life, they may rouse men from their indifferentism and their dogmatic slumbers.
We need not fear the triumph of this " ism." Apart from all questions about defective psychology and bad ethics, we may trust outraged human nature to vindicate itself and to take ample revenge on the pessimists. Leopardi and Schopenhauer might preach, but they certainly did not practise, self-renunciation ; Hartmann and his followers may prate about moral duty, but their system tends only to immoral license. But while this philosophy will not triumph, it may meanwhile do much mischief to many. Its cynical contempt for woman, its hints that men and women are not governed by the same ethical laws, its specious and quasi-philosophical defence of licentiousness in men, and its attempted glorification of some of the lower appetites, of which the best men have ever been ashamed, all these things make pessimism dangerous to the morals of the community. . . .
ELPIS.
No comments:
Post a Comment