The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Perez - La maladie du pessimisme
Are there, in reality, for every malady or morbid diathesis certain pronounced psychical manifestations? Psychological physicians must guard themselves from hasty generalizations; they are too ready to show to psychologists that their science cannot be an independent one without being chimerical. P. makes this reproach to the authors of two theses which he examines here: O Pessimismo no ponto de vista da psychologia morbida. J. de Magalhāes. Typ. Universell. Lisbonne, 1890. (2) Des Rapports de l’arthritisme avec les manifestationes nerveuses. Dr. G. Huyghe. Jouve, Paris, 1890. Is pessimism really a malady or the result of a morbid diathesis? M. Magalhaes has found in the personalities of several men who are considered as in a sense pessimistic as, e.g. Schopenhauer, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Amiel, Byron, and in others such as Tolstoi, Swift, Shelley, A. de Vigny, Schiller, Berlioz, etc., etc., the mental state of which pessimism is the literary or philosophical form; such morbid indications as nervous instability, irritability, hyperæsthesia, hyperalgy, irresistible impulsions, etc. Pessimism according to him is a neurasthenia, of which the fundamental character is nervous instability with alternation or constant combination of irritability and feebleness; from this fundamental hyperæsthesia result discords between the sentiments and the intelligence, between the sentiments, between the ideas and volitions. All these characters reveal excess of subjectivity. P. finds that we must get more proofs before we can grant that the alterations of character attributed to the pessimist are pathological phenomena; at least, if we regard pessimism as a malady we cannot characterize it simply as neurasthenia. In the book of M. Huyghe the inverse of pessimistic states of mind is arthritism, a morbid diathesis characterized by a tendency to local congestions of various kinds. In regard to this P. finds that the connections of arthritism with pessimism are defined with just about the same evidence, and imperfect evidence, as are the connections which M. Magalhāes finds to exist between pessimism and neurasthenia. It is evident that the whole of pessimism is not arthritism, and that all arthritism is not pessimism.