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must avow it in manly fashion, or I must reject it. And if I reject it, then I am bound to refute it. My answer to the question is not far to seek. As an actual fact I do accept, and avow with perfect freedom, what to many gentle minds seems, as I am aware, a pessimistic view of life; namely, precisely the view that at the last time we found Hegel maintaining and expanding into his marvelously ingenious and technical doctrine of what he called Negativität as the very essence of the passionate spiritual existence. The spiritual life isn’t a gentle or an easy thing. It is indeed through and through and forever paradoxical, earnest, enduring, toilsome; yes, if you like, painfully tragic. Whoever hopes to find it anything else, either now or in some far-off heaven, hopes unquestionably in vain. If that is pessimism, — and in one sense, namely, in the sense in which many tender but thoughtless souls have used the phrase, it is pessimism, being opposed to the gentle and optimistic hopes of such, — then I am now, and always shall be, in that very sense no optimist, but a maintainer of the sterner view that life is forever tragic. In so far as Schopenhauer has sought to make this plain, I follow him unhesitatingly, and honor him for his mercilessness. Why I do so I shall try to make plain before this lecture is done. In so far, however, as Schopenhauer held that the tragedy of life disheartens every spirit that has once come to know the truth, I as plainly and absolutely reject so much of his outcome. The world is, on the whole, very nearly as tragic as Schopenhauer represents it to be. Only spirituality consists in being heroic enough to accept the tragedy of existence, and to glory in the strength wherewith it is given to the true lords of life to conquer this tragedy, and to make their world after all divine. The way to meet Schopenhauer’s pessimism is, not to refute its assertions, but to grapple practically with its truths. And if you do so, you will find as the real heart and significance of Schopenhauer’s own gloomy