PESSIMISM 685
enormous surplus of pain over pleasure, and that man in particular, recognizing this fact, can find real good only by abnegation and self-sacrifice. As a speculative theory optimism is chiefly associated with the Théodicée of Leibnitz (1710), while pessimism is the work of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1st ed. 1819) and Von Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1st ed. 1869). In either case, however, the modern doctrines have their predecessors. The Stoics and the Neoplatonists were earlier labourers in the cause of optimism, in their attempt to exhibit the adaptations in nature for the welfare of its supreme product man. And in the metaphysical dogmas of Brahmanism, as well as in the practical philosophy of the Buddhists, the creed of the modern pessimist, that the world is vanity and life only sorrow, is found preluded with startling sameness of tone.
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.
Methods of relief.
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 abstrusest 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.
Buddhistic pessimism.
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 Átman: 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 self-denial 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-
