IX PESSIMISM IN PHILOSOPHY 159 Again, it is possible to argue, more subtly, that the unhappiness is the effect rather than the cause of the worthlessness of life. It is not that life is valueless because it is unhappy, but that it is unhappy because it is valueless." 1 But what enables man thus to apply to life the standards by which it is itself condemned? Nothing surely but the fact that he is capable of framing an ideal of worth, an ideal of something worth striving for and of holding it up to reality as a mirror in which to behold its deficiencies. It is because we systematise our valuations and so form ideal standards which alone bestow true value upon life, that we can condemn it because it nowhere allows us to attain perfect happiness or full knowledge or complete goodness or æsthetic harmony, Now, it is evident that the deficiencies in life which the formation of those ideals enables us to detect will act as a potent stimulus to progress so long as the deficiencies seem comparatively small and the ideals appear attainable; if, however, we allow our ideals to outgrow our means of reaching them, the chasm between them and the actual will become too deep to be bridged by hope; we shall despair of attaining our heart's desire and bitterly condemn the inadequacy of the actual. Thus Pessimism will ever hover like a dark cloud over the path of progress, ready to oppress with gloom alike the cowardice that despairs and the temerity that outstrips, prematurely and recklessly, the limitations of the practicable. It is a natural and almost inevitable phase in spiritual development, which results. whenever any object of desire is found to be unattainable, and it has no exclusive affinity for the details of a petti- fogging calculation of probable pleasures and pains. The sole reason why the question of Pessimism has mostly becn debated on a hedonistic basis is because Happiness is the one ideal which is universally comprehended, which allures by its elusive glitter even the coarsest and most commonplace of men. Having thus freed Pessimism from its entanglement in 1 Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 99.
