SOURCE: “Critique of Pessimism as Taught by Von Hartmann,” in Atheism in Philosophy, Roberts Brothers, 1884, pp. 123-141.

[In the following essay, Hedge takes issue with the Pessimist conclusions made by Hartmann in Philosophy of the Unconscious.]

Does good, or evil, preponderate in the lot of man? Is the human world advancing to millennial peace, or tending to utter ruin? Or does it fluctuate between the two, alternately gaining and losing in certain fixed proportions, which no lapse of time, no social adjustments, and no cosmic revolutions can essentially change? Are Ormuzd and Ahriman so nearly matched that neither the one nor the other in endless ages shall acquire supreme and exclusive sway?

A question old as philosophy, and still awaiting its final solution,—a solution based on irrefragable proofs, and admitting of no appeal. My aim at present is not to establish a thesis on the subject, but to criticise the position of those who maintain the doctrine of an ever-growing ascendency of evil in human life.

Chief among these at present is Eduard von Hartmann, the last representative of the great transcendental movement which dates with Kant. Following in the track of Schopenhauer, with less originality, but finer perceptions and superior dialectic, Von Hartmann devotes a portion of his Philosophy of the Unconscious to the consideration of the question whether life is a blessing; whether existence or non-existence were most to be desired. After long debate and a wide review of the subject, he concludes that non-existence is preferable, since the misery of life in every form is greatly in excess of its happiness. And this, he thinks, would be the universal judgment, were it not for certain illusions which cast their glamour on the mind, and encourage the belief that life is a good to be desired. Three stages of illusion he conceives to be the source of this deplorable fallacy.

The first stage is that in which happiness is viewed as something which has been attained in this present world, and is therefore attainable still within the limits of the present life. The second stage is that in which happiness is believed to be reserved for some future transmundane state. The third is that in which happiness is expected to ensue from the consummation of the world's progressive development.

Under the first head our philosopher passes in review all the satisfactions and goods of life,—health, competence, honor, power, family joys, science, art, religion. Each of these is subjected to a rigorous scrutiny: its yield of pleasure is balanced against its inevitable sequence of pain; and in each case the result is a minus, depressing the value of life below the zero of indifference, and proving that, on the whole, it is a misfortune to be.

There is nothing original in this conclusion. Voices many and weighty, ancient and modern, affirm the same. “Wherefore I praised the dead,” says Ecclesiastes, “more than the living. Yea, better than both is he that hath not been.” Says Socrates,—or Plato speaking in his name,—“Let a man compare all the other days and nights of his life with some night in which he slept without a dream: how few will he find that were passed so pleasantly as that!” Sophocles makes the chorus in Œdipus at Colonus say: “Not to be is the supreme word; the next best is that, having been born, a man should depart as quickly as possible thither whence he come.” Byron repeats the sentiment in that verse of despair,—

“Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'T is something better not to be.”

D'Alembert speaks of the “malheur d'être.” Voltaire gives it as the result of eighty years' experience, that suffering is the end of life. Hamlet thinks that only the dread of something after death can restrain the suicidal hand.

To these and similar utterances the answer is plain. They are criticisms, reflections on life; and not the spontaneous verdict of life itself, the verdict which a healthy nature pronounces on life as it passes. I oppose to them the testimony of competent witnesses; I cite expressions of abounding joy in being. This from Emerson, yet unknown to fame, with scant means and a doubtful future: “Almost I fear to think how glad I am. Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”

This from Charles Lamb, who had had his full share of mortal woe:—

“I am in love with this green earth, the face of town and country, the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities and jests.”

English literature has no soberer poet than Wordsworth,—a man whose temperament inclined to melancholy; but what a witness to the value of life who knew

“that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 't is her privilege
Through all the years of this our life to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us or disturb
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.”

All this the pessimist pronounces a delusion. Be it so. All reality, so far as the individual is concerned, is subjective. The value of life for me is what I find in it. If it yields to my consciousness a preponderance of good, I am justified in my optimism. We may be deceived as to the ground of our joy in life, but the joy itself is no delusion. I concede to the pessimist that pleasure is superficial. Enjoyment plays on the surface of life. Disturb that surface, mar it at any point, and straightway the underlying pain obtrudes. And by what insignificant trifles the surface-joy is disturbed! In the midst of a happy day let the smallest, scarcely discernible mote lodge itself in the eye, let the nerve of a tooth be exposed, and immediately the day is “o'ercast,” enjoyment turns to pain. I concede to the pessimist that the substance of life is labor and hardness; joy is but the sheen which in normal states it assumes in our consciousness. But observe that life by a law of its own takes on that sheen. Call it delusion, it is nevertheless a stated condition, a habit of mind, our nature's dower. Observe, too, that suicide is by common consent charged to insanity. In this consent is implied the prevailing conviction that the good of life exceeds the evil thereof.

Your pessimists, who exhaust their ingenuity in showing that existence is a failure, creation a mistake, and not-to-be the supreme good, have been swift to secure their portion of the goods of life, and to all appearance have extracted as much satisfaction therefrom as life is capable of yielding. Schopenhauer, who maintained so stoutly that true wisdom consists in abnegation of the will to live, exhibited a quite inordinate disinclination to dying; he clung to the life he reviled like the limpet to the rock.

I return to Von Hartmann. His first alleged stage of illusion, the hope of happiness in this present world, concerns, as we have seen, the lot of the individual. So does the second, the hope of happiness hereafter in some transmundane state. This involves the whole question of a future life,—the discussion of which would far exceed the scope of this essay. I pass at once to the third illusion, which respects the future of the human race on this earth. It consists in supposing that a better lot awaits mankind in the consummation of the world's history, when the evils which now afflict society shall one by one be done away. Von Hartmann believes in no such result. He maintains that vice and misery, so far from abating, are on the increase, and will continue to increase. Theft and fraud and false dealing, in spite of the penalties attached to them, are becoming ever more frequent. The basest selfishness rends asunder the holiest bonds of family and friendship whenever it comes in collision with them; and only the severer punishments decreed by the state repress the more atrocious crimes of ruder ages. These too immediately break forth, revealing the innate brutality of human nature, wherever the bands of law and order are relaxed, as in the Polish revolution and in the closing year of the American civil war. He anticipates a time when theft and illegal fraud will be despised as vulgar and clumsy devices by the more adroit rogues, who will know how to bring their crimes against property into harmony with the letter of the law; and so on to the end.

On the other hand, he endeavors to show that the agencies at work for the melioration of the social condition,—science, art, discoveries and inventions, improved agriculture, increased facilities of communication, steam, railroad, telegraph,—inasmuch as they create as many wants as they satisfy, leave the net result of human weal unchanged. Medical art advances, but cannot keep pace with the swifter progress of chronic disease. Agricultural and mechanical improvements, as fast as they increase the means of support, promote the growth of population, which, on the Malthusian principle, is forever outstripping them. With the growth of population come all the inevitable ills which excess of population entails. Political science can yield but negative results. Suppose the perfect state were realized, the political problem solved, we should have only the frame, not the filling. Men do not live to govern themselves, but govern themselves to live. Looking in other directions for possible compensation, he foresees that the satisfactions of intellect and taste derived from science and art will diminish with the necessary, inevitable, and evergrowing degradation of science and art which must ensue from the dilettantism which is everywhere supplanting genius. And as for the consolations of religion,—what will become of them when belief in the truths of religion, as must inevitably happen with the progress of intellectual culture, has died out? In fine, as with the progress of human development, riches and luxury increase, there will be a corresponding increase in the sensibility of the nervous system, and thence of necessity an excess of sensible pain over sensible pleasure. With the dying-out of the old illusions there will come intense consciousness of the poverty of life, of the vanity of most of its joys and aspirations. Not only will there be increase of misery, but—what is more to the purpose—increase of the consciousness of misery. … The history of the individual will repeat itself in the history of the race. As the individual in childhood lives in the present; then, as youth, revels in transcendental ideals; then, as man, seeks fame, possession, practical knowledge; and, finally, in old age, having come to perceive the vanity of all things, longs only for peace, and lays his weary head to rest,—so with the human race. There are evident signs of senescence, he thinks, in the human race. Who can doubt that after a period of mighty, virile activity, there will come to mankind an old age, when, living on the fruits of the past, they will enter on a period of ripe contemplation, and, embracing in one view all the sorrows, so wildly stormed through, of their past career, will comprehend the utter vanity of the once-proposed aims of their striving. But observe, he says, the difference between the race and the individual. Senile humanity will have no heirs to whom it may bequeathe its accumulated wealth, no children, no grandchildren, the love of whom might solace its decline. Then, with the sublime melancholy commonly witnessed in men of genius and the intellectually elevated among the aged, humanity will hover as it were a transfigured spirit over its own body, and, like Œdipus, in anticipation of the peace of non-existence, will feel the sorrows of being as it were the sorrows of another, not its own,—will no longer know passion, but only compassion with itself. This is that heavenly serenity, that divine repose which breathes in Spinoza's ethic, where the passions are swallowed up in the abyss of reason, because they have been clearly and intelligibly grasped in ideas. But suppose this state of dispassionateness reached; suppose passion to be transfigured into compassion with one's self: it does not therefore cease to be sorrow. Even freedom from pain mankind grown old will not have attained; pure spirit they will not have become. In spite of weakness and decrepitude, they must still toil on in order to live, and yet will not know for what end to live. Outgrown their illusions, they will have nothing more to expect from life. Convinced at last of the folly of all their striving, they will come to despair of happiness, and only long for absolute painlessness, for annihilation, for Nirvana.

When, following Von Hartmann, I reached this conclusion, there came to my thought the curse which Faust thunders against the world, with all its illusive joys and hopes, and I seemed to hear the wail of the spirits in response to that curse,—

“Woe! woe!
Destroyed it thou hast,
The beautiful world;
With the blow of thy fist
Into ruin hast hurled.
Sadly we the lost surrender.
Fairer now,
Earth's son, in splendor
Rarer now,
Oh, recreate it!
In thine own bosom build it again!”

This, then, is the view of human destiny propounded by the latest soothsayer of the transcendental line; this is the philosophy taught in a work which passed through seven editions in as many years,—a philosophy which evidently rests on a pathological foundation. To the question, “Is life worth living?” it was wittily answered: “That depends on the liver.” One can hardly help suspecting an unsound condition of body affecting mental vision in a writer who solemnly predicts the moral ruin of mankind on the ground of certain existing imperfections and wrongs. Were I dealing with a theist, I should say that our idea of God implies the preponderance and growth of good in all the worlds. But Von Hartmann is not a theist, although the “All-Eine,” the central intelligence of his system, supposed to act with infallible wisdom, is a great advance on the blind Will of Schopenhauer's philosophy,¹ a nearer approach to the God of theism. Putting out of view, then, the idea of infinite wisdom, power, and love presiding over and guiding the world's history, I oppose to the pessimist view this weighty consideration, overlooked by Von Hartmann, that moral power is in its very nature cumulative, an ever-increasing quantity. Material force, as Des Cartes, I think, was the first to point out, is a constant quantity. So much and no more of it there has been since the first impulsion given to the matter of which the world is composed. All the forces now at work in the world—correlated one with another, as science teaches—are propagations in all directions of that primal impact. In one form or another it survives, and can never cease and never increase. Given an access of it in one, and there is a proportionate diminution of it in another. If you increase the speed of your engine, you diminish your supply of heat; if you overtax your brain, you reduce the vitality of other organs.

But moral force is cumulative; its exercise in one form by one individual not only does not lessen, but increases, its supply in another. If A puts forth his moral power in an act of self-sacrifice, his supply of that force is not exhausted, but rather increased thereby; and B, who witnesses and profits by that sacrifice, experiences in himself an accession of moral life. We may trace, I think, the growth of that life through all the ages of human history. In primitive man it is found at its minimum. The savage state has feeble perceptions of the moral law: it is a state of comparative innocence; since where there is no law there is no sin, but a very immoral state. The moral sense is restricted to good faith with friends and allies, and avoidance of flagrant trespass on others' rights. As civilization advances, society, imperilled by individual licence, protects itself with laws, and promotes social ends with exactions and requirements which make life more complex, but also more moral. Acts which before were performed without scruple become crimes. By these prohibitions and requirements the moral sense is educated. Gradually the stringency of obligation is transferred from the civil statute to the private conscience. With increase of population and increase of luxury, it is true, demoralizing influences set in; and when these become excessive they disorganize society and subvert the state, as has happened in one and another country in the course of the world's history. But humanity rallies, it recovers itself, it takes warning from the past; the moral sentiment reacts on these corruptions; it strives and succeeds to keep the corrupting tendencies in check. Gradually moral capital is accumulated; is vested in public opinion, in memories, books, and institutions, and furnishes a guaranty against future dissolutions of the civil bond. For want of this capital ancient states, Assyria, Greece, and Rome, went down; by means of it modern states subsist, and have, so far as internal agencies are concerned, an indefinite lease of life. Evil is self-limited and self-destructive; the good in human nature is self-conserving and self-increasing. If modern society is more compact, and rests, as it evidently does, on a firmer basis than did society in ancient time, it is to be inferred that society is more moral now than then, and that increase of moral power affords a presumption of further increase from age to age. Von Hartmann insists that egoism, however it may change its face and methods, has lost nothing of its virus with the lapse of time. I maintain, on the contrary, and think it can be shown, that “altruism,” or care for others, care for the common weal, is gradually making head against egoism. And herein I find a refutation of the pessimist view of human destiny. For society, I repeat, subsists by moral force; and increase of that force in the shape of care for the commonweal guarantees, in the absence of any physical derangement of the globe, the growth of social well-being in all coming time.

Another consideration which suggests itself in opposition to the pessimist theory, is the fact of the timely appearance, at certain points in the world's history, of exceptional individuals, whose word and life have been a healing and reviving power in the world. I waive the idea of what is called divine interposition in such phenomena. Regarding them simply as historic facts, I see in them proofs of a self-renewing power in human nature, and the promise, as human need may require and social exigencies prompt, of similar revivals in time to come. Whatever opinion we may have formed of Christianity, its origin, its present status, its future prospects, no faithful student of history will deny that the Christian movement did impart to human society a moral leaven which served to regenerate the world by reinforcing those saving agencies of faith and love whose loss is disintegration and moral death. The same may be said of each successive reformation which has reproduced the Christian idea in subsequent time. The experience of the past seems to warrant the presumption that social and moral necessities will always elicit a remedial power from the unexplored depths and incalculable forces of the human soul, and that when things are at the worst redemption is near.

Add to this that some of the worst evils which afflict society are accidental, not inherent in the nature of man or the nature of things, but superinduced by vicious custom, and are likely to find their remedy at last in a truer perception of their nature and law, and the application of social science to the sources whence they spring. For example, one of the greatest enemies to social well-being in this country at present is the abuse of alcoholic stimulants, drunkenness, which brutalizes its victim, poisons the springs of family life, and constitutes a source so prolific of pauperism and crime. Philanthropy has labored in vain to abolish this evil by legislative action forbidding the supply, instead of seeking, by discovery of its cause, to obviate the demand. So long as the demand continues, in spite of legislation, the supply will be found. I cannot believe that the mischief of intemperance, wide-spread and deep-seated as it is, is past correction, if once its nature be rightly understood, and scientific treatment invoked for its cure. And what a load of misery will be lifted from the world, what a melioration of the social climate, prophetic of better years and finer growths, will be achieved with the extirpation of this vice!

In fine, the pessimist view, though a natural accompaniment of atheism, is not a necessary fruit of even that dreary stock. Human nature itself, without the supposition of a God; human nature as manifest in history and interpreted by reason,—pleads against it, and furnishes, I think, its sufficient refutation.

But whilst I am forced by these considerations to cast the horoscope of human life more auspiciously than our German pessimist draws it, I admit an element of truth in his philosophy which may temper the extravagance of superficial optimism, and tinge with soberer hues the vulgar vision of the “good time coming.” Von Hartmann himself, in an essay subsequent to his main work, from which I have quoted, vindicates the doctrine of pessimism against the charge of presenting an altogether comfortless and discouraging view of life. He argues that self, as expressed in the will, is the source of all our woes; that since moral perfection, or the supreme good, consists in or requires the entire surrender of self, the pessimistic view, which promotes that surrender, by exposing the futility of all our wishes and the grief that is born of the private will, is stimulating, bracing, encouraging.

It is true that self is the source of the greater part of human misery; but equally true it is that the highest satisfaction has its origin there. Extinguish self, and we escape the pangs of disappointment, the unsatisfied longing, the frustrate effort, the misery of wounded pride, of ingratitude and neglect; but we also miss the stimulus of a noble and sanctified ambition. Moral elevation does not guarantee happiness in the vulgar sense of that word; but neither does material prosperity assure it. Suppose that prosperity consummated the world over for all men; make earth a paradise; drive want from the face of it, and ignorance and vice; let competence be secured to all; build palaces for hovels; let climate be attempered by art to perpetual blandness; let there be no forced tasks, no chiding of the laggard will, no painful bracing up of the dissolute mind, but only duties which invite, and work which is play,—fashion a world after your own heart; and know that a day in that world will have the same proportion of joy and pain that a day has in this. Our joys and our sorrows spring from the same root; in cultivating the one we cultivate the other also. There is a root of bitterness in human life which no change of circumstance and no improvement in the outward condition can eradicate. And perhaps if we rightly understood the constitution and the wants of man we should not wish it eradicated. It is the bitter oil in the kernel that gives the peculiar flavor to the fruit. That remnant of bitterness in the lot of man, so far from depreciating the value of human life, enhances its significance by supplying the needful tonic without which the spirit would rest and rust in sluggish contentment with the present, and, ceasing to aspire, would forfeit the prize of its higher calling. The end of man is not enjoyment, but discipline, education, growth, effective service. Given a lot of unbroken ease, and life would not be worth living.

Note

1. Von Hartmann was too acute not to see that will without a concept of the thing willed is an absurdity. Strange that his own substitute of a seeing and understanding, though unconscious, Will should be represented as infallibly wise only in adaptation of means to ends while wholly irrational in its end,—a world of preponderant evil.