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THE NATURE OF EVIL
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY:

Studies in Personality and Value
THE NATURE OF EVIL
BY
RADOSLAV A. TSANOFF, PH.D.
PBOFESgOB OF PHILOSOPHY, THE KICK IN8TITDTB
Nrtufork
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1931
COPYRIGHT, 1931,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
ALL, RIGHTS RESERVED NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED
IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER
Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1931
SET UP AND ELECTBOTYPED BY T. MOREY A SON

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
TO
MY FATHER AND MOTHER

PREFACE
If we conceive of philosophy as man's cosmic orientation,
contemporary thought reveals two strains rich in philosoph-
ical significance. On the one hand is the radical reinterpre-
tation of cosmological ideas necessitated by the experimental
and theoretical advance of physical science. By stimulating
metaphysical interest in scientists and scientific discipline
in metaphysicians, this advance has led to a healthy rap-
prochement between the two. On the other hand is the in-

sistentdemand for a philosophy of value that will be more
than a conciliatory epilogue to stark naturalism: for an ade-
quate account of value and of its role in nature. Both of
these strains in modern thought concern intimately the prob-
lem of man's cosmic status: what is man, and how is nature
mindful of him and of his values? Thus both natural science
and man's own self-criticism are making contemporary philo-
sophy increasingly significant and alive.
The critical constructive thought of today and of tomorrow
cannot neglect the record of the facts of nature supplied in
the amazing advance of the physical and biological sciences.
But nature is not limited to what telescope and microscope
and test-tube reveal: the career and the character of nature
are disclosed likewise in the lives and thoughts of men, in
man's devotions and ideals, illusions and tragic frustrations:
these are all facts relevant to what we may be allowed to call
the Higher Behaviorism. The resolve not to ignore them may
save us from a too precipitate and narrow 'naturalism' in
cosmology, and surely the study of them leads us into the
laboratory of the science and the philosophy of value,
vii
viii PREFACE
In an earlier volume entitled The Problem of Immortality:
Studies in Personality and Value the endeavor was made to
examine man's conception of himself as more than a mere
episode in the cosmic process, man's assured confidence in
the permanent reality of his values and of himself as the
bearer of them, and thus to understand the significance of
man's claims to a certain kind of destiny. In this work we
turn as it were to the other side of the picture. If the idea
of immortality is the peak of man's aspiration, the tragic
sense of evil the abyss that ever threatens to engulf him
is
and his ambitions, or at any rate to sober his self-esteem. It

imposes a reconsideration of the values to which man com-
mits his faith in himself and in nature. Pessimism and theo-
dicy both reveal man's character: his grievous sense of his
overwhelming problem, and his tireless effort to overcome it.
The characteristic worth of man is thus essentially bound
up with this tragic enterprise, and upon the adequate con-
ception of the nature of evil hangs the whole philosophy of
value.
The aim of this short preface has been to suggest the philo-
sophical why and wherefore of this book rather than to give
a preliminary tabulated statement of its contents. For the
latter the reader is referred to the detailed Table of Con-
tents which follows. As will be observed, a theme of such
wide human beyond the strict field of tech-
interest reaches
nical philosophy into the domains of religion and literature.
My obligations are as various as the contacts in which the
complexity of my theme has involved me. An effort has
been made to make due and accurate acknowledgment in
the Notes, at the end of the volume. Parts of this work have
been published separately, and I am grateful for permission
to include here material thatfirst appeared in the pages of
the Rice Institute Pamphlet and the Philosophical Review.

The final chapter is being used as a contribution to a co-
PREFACE ix
operative volume on Contemporary Tendencies in American

Idealism. I wish also to thank the Cambridge University
Press for allowing me to quote from Mr. Geoffrey L. Bicker-
steth's translation of the poems of Leopardi. Shorter quota-
tionsfrom other works have been acknowledged in the Notes.
Passages from foreign writers have been quoted in English,
with reference to the original in the Notes and also cross-
reference to the English translation cited. In the case of*
quoted poetry, the original text is given in the Notes. If no
English version is cited in a note, the translation of the re-
spective passage in the text, prose or poetry, is one for which
I must be held responsible.
My colleague Professor Charles W. Morris has very kindly
assisted me in the reading of the proofs. During the entire
course of this work I have had the constant help of my wife.
RADOSLAV A. TSANOFF.
HOUSTON, TEXAS,
November, 1930.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IN THE GREAT
RELIGIONS 1
What makes evil a problem? Temperamental complacency

and The optimist's problem of
tragic sense of frustration.
evil and the
pessimist's problem of good. The main varieties
of optimism and pessimism. The disdain of the finite in
Brahmanic India. Buddhist Karma and the gospel of Nir-
vana. The problem of evil in Greek tragedy, and the treat-
ment of it in Greek philosophy. The Zoroastrian explanation
of evil in terms of cosmic dualism: Ahura-Mazda and Ahri-
man. Theodicy in the Old Testament, and the perplexities of
Prophetic Monotheism. Job and Ecclesiastes.
CHAPTER II. THE CHRISTIAN-MEDIEVAL TRADI-

TION 37
Twofold heresy in early Christian theodicy: excess of world-
contempt (Gnosticism and Manicheanism) and excess of
moral self-reliance (Pelagianism). St. Augustine's orthodoxy
in opposition to these two. The Augustinian explanation of
evil in terms of perverse and misdirected human choice.
Divine grace and predestination. The dilemmas of Augus-
tinian theodicy. Medieval studied scorn of this world: the
On the Contempt of The World by Pope Innocent III.
treatise
The ethics and the theodicy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ. The Renaissance
estimate of human life. The Circe of Giovan Battista Gelli.
CHAPTER III. PASCAL'S DESPAIR OF REASON . 61

Pascal's precocity. Early scientific achievement followed by
doubt as to the real competence of the intellect. Conversion
to Jansenism; controversy with the Jesuits; the Provincial
Letters. Calvinist, Jesuit, Thomist, Jansenist- Augustinian
doctrines of divine grace and human destiny. Pascal's
Thoughts: the case for Christian faith and the case for scepti-
cism. Epictetus, Montaigne and Pascal. The dilemma of
doubt and Pascal's wager of faith. The disdain of reason and
xi
xii CONTENTS
FAGS
the will to believe; the hazards of Scotism in theology. Crit-
icism and positive estimate of Pascal.
CHAPTER IV. SCEPTICISM AND THEODICY . . 88

Theological discomfiture resulting from seventeenth century
science and philosophy Bayle's scepticism; his critique of
Augustinian theodicy; devastating influence of his Historical-
Critical Dictionary. The reply to Bayle in Leibniz's Theo-
dicy: suffering and sin referred ultimately to the imperfection
"
essentially characteristic of finite being in this best of all pos-
sible worlds." Criticism of Leibniz's treatment of the prob-
lem of evil. Archbishop King's Essay on the Origin of Evil.
CHAPTER V. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY OPTIMISM . Ill
Shaftesbury's cult of cosmic harmony, and eighteenth century
complacency. Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith: benig-
nant Providence and laissez faire. The theodicy in Bishop
Butler's Analogy. "Optimism run mad": David Hartley
and Abraham Tucker. Bolingbroke's sophistries and the
philosophical confusion of Pope's Essay on Man. The popu-
lar philosophy of the Enlightenment in Germany: Reimarus
and Mendelssohn; Maupertuis. Echoes of Pope in German
poetry: Brockes, Haller; Wieland. The sharp reaction
against complacent optimism: Mandeville's Fable of the Bees;
Jonathan Swift; Johnson's Rasselas. The disrupting in-
fluence of Hume's empiricism. Balancing and calculation:
Young's Night Thoughts.
CHAPTER VI. THE DESPAIR OF CIVILIZATION . 145
The modern cult of the intellect and of civilization, and the
romantic revolt of primitive feeling. The antithesis of Vol-
taire and Rousseau. -Voltaire's early optimism and his later
reaction against Leibniz and Pope: the Poem on the Lisbon
Earthquake; the irony of Candide. Rousseau's Confessions:
his longing for the ideal and his leaning towards the degener-
ate. His prize-essays: the doctrine of the corruption of hu-
man nature by civilization. Rousseau's conception of nature.
His doctrine of the emancipation of man from the shackles
of civilization. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Tolstoy. Tolstoy's
radical reinterpretation of Jesus' gospel: the five command-
ments of the Sermon on the Mount. Condemnation of mod-
ern civilization as resting on violence and exploitation of man
by man. Tolstoy's religion of love and the simple life.
Critique of social pessimism civilization involves the spread
:
of the whole field of human activity and of all available values,

CONTENTS xiii
PAGE
positive and negative, showing how high man can rise but
also how low he can sink.
CHAPTER VII. THE DEVIL IN MODERN POETRY . 176

Milton's Satan and the theodicy of Paradise Lost. Byron's
Cain as a romantic drama of revolt. Cain and Lucifer:
troubled doubt clarified and precipitated into resolute de-
fiance. The Qain of Leconte de Lisle. Lermontov's Demon.
Goethe's Mephistopheles and the central theme in Faust:
resistance to cloying enjoyment, and conception of real worth
and of man's salvation in terms of significant and ever-aspir-
ing activity. Other treatments of the Faust-saga: Marlowe;
Lessing; Grillparzer; Heine's Faust ballet. Faust, Don Juan
and the Devil: Nikolaus Lenau; Dietrich Grabbe.
CHAPTER VIII. LEOPARDI'S LYRICAL PESSIMISM 215

Giacomo Leopardi's tragic and heroic life: his frail health
ruined by excessive mental exertion during adolescence; his
uncomprehending father and unresponsive mother; caged in
his native Recarrati; disenchanted on his flight to Rome;
stirred to noble effort by Giordani's appreciation; anguished
by manifold illnesses and by financial hardships; embittered
by unrequited love; yet in spite of all, ceaselessly creating
great lyrical poetry, prose, literary criticism, philosophy until
his hour of death, in 1837. Leopardi's pessimism essentially
lyrical: unity of the philosopher and the poet. His intellec-
tual-poetic development as recorded in his Works, in his jour-
nal Zibaldone, and in his Letters. Early classical nostalgia,
followed by Rousseauistic longings for the primitive, and later
by pessimistic negation of the reality of all values. The sal-
vation of the philosopher by the poet; confronting the intellect
and sublimating its grim conclusions is the imagination: in the
noble perception of the emptiness which is life, life itself is
transfigured by the very condemnation of it: thus life- weari-
ness overcomes itself.
CHAPTER IX. ARISTOCRACY WITHOUT ILLUSIONS:

ALFRED DE VIGNY 246
Vigny's life a series of disillusions: unworthy leadership of his
cherished aristocracy; disappointment of his many hopes, mil-
itary, domestic, social, literary. His unflinching self-posses-
sion; proud retirement to his "ivory tower." The early
romantic dolor in his poetry; Biblical themes treated in an
xiv CONTENTS
PAGE
antitheistic spirit. Ascendant Stoicism, proceeding from
grim negation to a mellow heroic humanitarianism. The
virile religion of honor: conscience exalted, the poesy of duty
and half-hopeful resolution not to yield: the unshakable worth
of noble effort whatever the outcome.
CHAPTER X. THE WARP OF SCHOPENHAUER . 262

Schopenhauer's oligarchic ancestry; hereditary taint; his
father's suicide; his mother's gay life in Weimar; his own be-
lated education. Early gloom crystallized into settled pessi-
mism. Life in Dresden and Italian tour. Publication of The
World as Will and Idea, and bitter disappointment over its
negligent reception by the public. Financial and other dis-
agreements with his mother and sister. His fiasco as a lec-

turer at the University of Berlin. Lifelong hostility to Hegel.
Establishment at Frankfurt; repeated futile efforts to gain
public notice of his works. Publication of his popular essays;
belated fame, following the collapse of Hegelianism in the fif-
ties. Analysis and critical estimate of Schopenhauer's char-
acter.
CHAPTER XL GROUNDS AND LIMITS OF SCHOPEN-

HAUER'S PESSIMISM 282
The philosophical background of Schopenhauer's thought:
Kant, Plato, the Upanishads, Buddhism. His dependence on
Kant and his own metaphysical advance. Knowledge lim-
ited to experience; the ultimately real Thing-in-itself, neither
matter nor mind, but Will. Portrayal of the ever-present ac-
tivity of the Will-to-live and of the intellect as its tool at the
level of self-conscious existence. Pessimistic conclusions: hu-
man life one of will-driven desire: ever insatiate and never
satisfied,ever selfish and never happy: a life futile, wicked,
miserable. The primacy of pain over pleasure, and the van-
ity and suffering of existence. Schopenhauer's doctrine of
salvation: aesthetics and ethics. Art conceived as desireless
contemplation of the grades of objectifi cation of the will.
The hierarchy of the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting,
poetry, with music at the apex. The ethics of compassion.
Anti-moral incentives to action: egoism and malice; the re-
sistance to these, in sympathy, alone moral. The consum-
mation of sympathy in ascetic denial of the will-to-live, lead-
ing to Nirvana. Criticism of Schopenhauer's pessimism: the
dramatic-not-logical unity of Schopenhauer's thought, and its
grim expansion and self-revision.
CONTENTS xv
PAOB
CHAPTER XII. HARTMANN'S PHILOSOPHY OF THE
UNCONSCIOUS 308
The outstanding fact in the philosophy of Hartmann's day:
the antithesis of Hegel and Schopenhauer. Hartmann un-
dertakes a synthesis of these two: Schopenhauer's Will-to-live
and Hegel's Absolute Idea, incommensurate and complemen-
tary, two attributes of the Ultimate Reality, which is the Un-
conscious. Examination of the unconscious teleology mani-
fest in all existence. The origin of consciousness, the prelude
of the cosmic tragedy. Survey of all available values, lead-
ing to a pessimistic conclusion. The Three Stages of Illusion:
belief in individual happiness here and now, belief in a blessed
belief in social progress, all futile.
after-life, Hartmann's
platform: resolute participation in the enterprise of civiliza-
tion as a means of general pessimistic enlightenment. His
eschatology: Universal World Extinction Congress. The
gradual revision of Hartmann's early views, showing what
real devotion to value is available for one who has renounced
the quest of happiness. A philosophy of value gradually
modified to meet the demands of ethics, aesthetics and phi-
losophy of religion, thus revealing perhaps better than any
other system of thought the essential limitations of pessimism.
CHAPTER XIII. A GERMAN SLOUGH OF DESPOND 342

Schopenhauer's followers have tried to overcome the contra-
dictions and perplexities of his system in a variety of ways.
Julius Frauenstadt's sacrifice of the manifold vitality of his
master's thought in the interests of abstract logical unity.
Agnes Taubert's pessimism, a philosophy of consolation and
good-natured disillusion. Philipp Mainliinder's Philosophy
of Redemption: the world-process conceived as the working
out in detail of the pre-cosmic Will-to-die. Exaltation of
chastity; the Order of the Holy Grail. The ultimatum of
pessimism: the "real dialectic" of Julius Bahnsen: the world
portrayed as an irremediable chaos of self-rending activities,
irrational, without order or development or any goal, "full of
sound and fury, signifying nothing."
CHAPTER XIV. A GRADATIONAL VIEW OF THE

NATURE OF EVIL 364
Utter condemnation of the world and suave dismissal of evil
as unreal both ignore the essential bipolarity of value. If
either good or evil is admissible, both must be. The real
xvi CONTENTS
PAGE
problem: to understand the relation between them. The
absolutist explanation of evil as merely finitude misses the
characteristic problem of valuation and in consistency rules
out ethics. In the reduction of good and evil to pleasure and
pain, or to self-denial and self-assertion, or to primitive and
civilized conditions of life, value is mistakenly treated as re-
siding in specific things or aspects or conditions. Value is a
character that is postulated, involving a demand for its real-
ization or a demand for its negation, thus a fundamental
recognition of higher and lower and an incipient or determined
preference. The very outlook of the philosophy of value is
gradational. In this gradational view of things, evil is liter-
ally degradation, the surrender of the higher to the lower, and
our judgment as to what is higher and lower in a specific case
governs our respective judgment of good and evil. Normal
valuation in various fields of experience warrants this defini-
tion. So disease involves bodily disorganization and deg-
radation of structure and function. In error and fallacy the
mind fails to maintain itself on the intelligent level. Beauty
and ugliness are always relative to a certain development of
taste and culture. In the modern economic system evil is
flagrantly manifested in the brutalizing and mechanizing of
human life. In war civilized international life reverts to
barbarism. In the moral realm more narrowly conceived,
beastliness is not mere animality, but the degradation of the
human to the brutish level. The concourse of activities in
the hierarchy of nature is the matrix and medium for the
realization of value, and it does not admit of any final ter-
minus or conclusion: the vaster the field of attainment, the
greater the range of possible error or frustration. There is no
coming to terms with evil, and there is no completion or plen-
itude of good. The gradational theory of the nature of evil
expresses essential characteristics of our logical, aesthetic and
moral activity, does justice to the complexity and dynamic
hierarchy of nature, and points to an idea of perfection that
does not nullify the fundamental character of value of which
perfection is rightly conceived as the apogee.
NOTES 403
INDEX 441
THE NATURE OF EVIL
THE NATURE OF EVIL
CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IN THE GREAT

RELIGIONS
A precise definition of Pessimism cannot be offered at the

outset, and it might prejudice our inquiry were we to attempt
it; for the more carefully we survey our field, the greater will
appear the variety of views which are styled pessimistic.

The antonym superlative, Optimism, has been championed
by so many theologians and philosophers with theological
commitments and predilections that we should not be sur-
prised if a common stock of axioms and a largely predestined
type of reasoning has made likewise for more consistent
uniformity in definition and in conclusion. Even here, though
a dozen theodicies should declare that this is the best of all
possible worlds, the sentence, eulogistic in some systems, is

in others of a decidedly apologetic tone. Should we now, by
way of distinction,follow a contemporary and define a

pessimist as one who fears
that this is the best possible world,
we would only be brought to realize how astonishing is the
range of negation. Orthodoxy may not be quite one, but
heresy is surely legion. The A ye of docile acquiescenceis a
drilled choir chant, but like the thousand- voiced tumult of a

troubled multitude is the Nay of discontent, disdain, and
despair. Layer beneath layer of truth lies in the first words
1
2 THE NATURE OF EVIL
"
of Anna Karenina: All happy families are more or less like
each other; but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own
particular way."
The initial step in understanding the problem of evil is to
understand what makes it a problem.
Consider, in the first place, the point of view of consistent
materialism. Suppose we assume that physical science is the
only reliable source of metaphysical categories; suppose we
declare, not merely that, of every process in nature, a
mechanistic account is available, but that no other type of
account admissible. Such a point of view is essentially
is
impersonal and therefore cannot comprehend the meaning of

value; for it, both evil and good would be sounding brass and
tinkling cymbal, words without meaning or misapplied labels.
If nature, and human nature in it, is merely and nothing but
a causal nexus in space and time, then (even allowing for the
mystery, how this vast mechanism could come to know itself
as a mechanism or could in any way theorize about itself) all
we could undertake to do, or recognize as worth undertaking,
in serious science or philosophy, would be the description and
analysis and causal explanation of conditions and events,

not in any sense their evaluation.
A consistent materialistic-mechanistic philosopher may
undertake to give us the real, that to say causal, account of
is
'
what vulgarly known
is as evaluation/ approval or dis-
approval, but could he as a materialist evaluate or admit
value-judgments or value-categories? He may investigate
and record the manifold behavior of individuals who allege
that they feel or confer praise or blame, but can he con-
' '
sistently admit in his system the ideas praise worthy and
' ;
blameworthy? That the materialist himself, like the rest of
us, not only approves and disapproves, not only has prefer-
ences but undertakes to defend them, is only his own personal
concession to sanity.
THE PROBLEM IN THE GREAT RELIGIONS 3
The critique of materialistic philosophy is not a part of our

present undertaking.
1
Suffice it here to recognize that a
problem of evil, the judgment of anything as good or bad,

evaluation of any sort, cannot be an jntegral part of a
mechanistic system. Whatever the nature of value in detail,
or whatever our ultimate definition of it, it is clear that to
attach any serious meaning to value or evaluation requires a
philosophy that affords other than mechanistic categories, re-
quires metaphysical respect for intelligence and personality
and spiritual activity, requires the firm recognition' of that
truth to which Green has given perhaps the classical expres-
sion: "Our ultimate standard of worth is an ideal of personal
worth. All other values are relative to value for, of, or in a
2
person."
While consistent materialism, being impersonalistic, cannot
take either good or evil seriously, there is a temperament
afflicted With happiness and characterized sometimes by a
natural incapacity, more often by a passionate or an assumed
refusal to admit the reality of evil. "In some individuals/'
William James wrote, "optimism may become quasi-patholog-
ical. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momen-
tary humility seems cut off for them as by a kind of con-
3
genital anaesthesia." Calling such an attitude towards
life abnormal not dispose of it; we are bound to probe
will
further into the significance of such luxury in woe as, for
instance, is confessed by Marie Bashkirtseff: "Can you be-
lieve it? I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears,
my grief. I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair, I enjoy being
exasperated and sad."
4
But the question, "Can you believe
it?" seems a little revealing: it suggests defiance beneath the
enthusiasm, or at any rate discloses, running through the
docile acquiescence and indeed sustaining it, one worry, one
evil:the evil of worrying over evil. So we may well shake
our heads in doubt. If evil is really an unreality, an illusion,
why should one be so thrilled over one's unresponsiveness to
it? Perhaps the pure type of this docile optimism is very
rare or has seldom been recorded adequately, but it is of
interest nevertheless to consider the significance of all the
cherished and cultivated cheerfulness and cosmic expansive
emotionalism. There is unintended sinister significance in the
lines of Walt Whitman, the poetic seer of this cult of the
Everlasting Yea:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contained;
I stand and look atthem long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God
6
. . .
James does not quote the last line, which is scarcely of the
'Everlasting Yea/ But what indeed is the meaning of the

entire passage in its eulogy of animal, unthinking placidity?
This optimism would be spontaneous all-perception of good,
and it has become habitual and wholehearted, but still it is
willed because it demands and feeds on enthusiastic reassur-

ance. Thought disturbs man's rhapsody of bliss, and so
" 7
Whitman could turn and live with animals/ or would con-
template perfection "observing a spear of summer grass."
This is only one of the strains in Whitman's joyous chant,
but it expresses, perhaps unwittingly, the truth which we
shall find uttered in the earliest myths of mankind thought :
makes a man and pain, it rouses in

sensible of dissatisfaction
man desires, demands, dreams and ideals to which he cannot
attain. And in this sense of manifold frustration all the
countless woes of man
lie in germ. Evil and the problem of
evil seem to from an experienced clash and disaccord
arise
of the actuality with the ideal, whatever this may be. The
consciousness of this frustration may be so intense as to lead
to a settled conviction that the clash and disaccord are ir-
remediable, that frustration is the primal and the final fact
of life. This conviction,

reasoned, provides the texture of
if
pessimistic philosophy, which may go to such an extreme

painful sense of despised actuality that the cherished ideal
is pronounced illusory, the world is conceived in terms which
consistently preclude the reality of positive worth. Evil, in
such a philosophy of despair, becomes the fundamental
reality. But when this type of mind comes to itself, it finds
confronting it a problem of good If in theological optimism

!
it is difficult to show why there should be any need of salvation
in God's own world, the extreme pessimist's perplexity is no

less: in a world essentially and irremediably bad, irrational,
and meaningless, how could there be, not only salvation, but
even the demand for it how could such a world include the
:
disdain of it, to wit, pessimistic philosophy? This is the

pessimist's problem of good.
When the consciousness of frustration is dominated, not
only by a practical demand, but also by a theoretical con-
viction that actuality should and must accord with the ideal,
then we have the several varieties of reasoned optimism,
claiming that the alleged clash or disaccord is exaggerated,
and that in any case it
is not ultimate, that harmony is primal
and fundamental and will somehow be final in the universe.

The question, Why should there be such disaccord at all?
becomes pressing for the theologian whose definition of the
Creator precludes the belief that any such clash is part of the
divine experience. For such a mind the problem of evil de-
mands a theodicy: exculpation of God for the presence of
evil. Consistently it should likewise demand the metaphysical
depreciation, if not the excogitation, of evil. This excess of
logic is exhibited by lay minds in behalf of theology, but not
usually by theologians, for the theological view of life is
bound to include a perception of its evil and of man's need
of redemption.
This glance at the movement of thought shows a
initial
willy-nilly tendency from the two extremes towards the

middle. Optimism and pessimism represent views of life
which are not described with literalaccuracy by these super-
lative terms. We shall not, however, resort pedantically to a
manufactured terminology bonism, meliorism, malism, pei~
orism for even these labels will not cover all the significant
alternatives. Instead we shall use the words optimism and
pessimism to refer to estimates of the world and of human life

which are dominantly approving or condemnatory. Philo-
sophically a double problem of evil results. The pessimist
asks: What is the ultimate nature of this evil and miserable
world, and is there any way out of its woe? The optimist:
Why should this fundamentally good and perfect world in-
clude any evil, and how can we acquiesce in it loyally and
wholeheartedly?
II
The fundamental available alternatives are suggested by

the questions: Are good and evil coordinate and both ulti-
mate; or are they both somehow mixed in a world in which it
is futile to look for any ultimate rhyme or
reason; or is one
subordinate to the other, though forever related to it in
perennial antithesis, each one requiring the other; or is one
subordinate to the other in the sense of being episodic, transi-
tory, actual perhaps, but extinguishable and ultimately un-
real? With regard to evil in particular: is it somehow involved
as evil in the very stuff and substance of the one ultimate
a principle of being coordinate
reality; or, dualistically, is it
with the principle of perfection and opposed to it; or is evil a
permanent characteristic of finite existence; or are we re-
sponsible for the experience of evil, whether owing to our

immoderate zeal, which leads both intellect and desire to
overreach themselves, or else whether owing to our limited
knowledge which enslaves us to illusion, or to our hazardously

unlimited freewill which plunges us in sin? These questions,
and the answers to them, sometimes distinctly perceived and
reasoned out, but more often confused, or else intertwined
and embroidered in the figured speech of mythology, or
trimmed and fitted in theological doctrine, provide man's
alternative estimates of life.
That evil as rooted and dominant in the very heart

evil is
of ultimate reality can be the claim only of a pandiabolism,

blackest embittered despair. Philosophic pessimism scarcely
reaches this extreme: Schopenhauer's Will-to-live is blind and
irrational; Hartmann's Unconscious is metalogical; and
Mainliinde/s pre-cosrnic Will-to-die is pitiable and pitifully
inconsiderate; but not one of them is strictly hateful. The
pessimistic poet lets himself go more violently: pity for the
woeful creature rouses in him hatred for the Creator of woe.
Most wicked and miserable must be the Author of wicked
misery. Burning lines from Alfred de Vigny come to mind,
and the first and only written stanza of Leopardi's Hymn to
Ahriman, and this blasphemy of despair from James Thom-
son's City of Dreadful Night:
Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself; yet I would rather be

My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.
The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou

From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred,
Malignant and implacable! I vow
That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,

For all the temples to Thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world. '

Logically distinguishable from this, but practically tanta-
mount, though without the intense feeling of abhorrence
expressed in the above lines, is the view of life which like a
load of lead bore down the soul of Brahmanic India. Evil
isinherent in finite existence; woe is irremediably bound up
with life and with the attachment to life. Man is doomed to
rebirth; doomed to expiate the sin and folly of unrcmembered
past lives. To
be sure, his present life, if good, will have its
good results in some next life, but not at all assuredly in the
next life. We reap today the harvest of unknown past sowing,
to harvest in some unknown future the sowing of today. The
thought of this unending nightmare of reincarnation roused
in the heart but one longing: not to be. "In this sort of cycle
of existence (samsara) what is the good of enjoyment of
desires, when man
has fed on them there is seen
after a
repeatedly his return here to earth? ... In this cycle of

existence I am like a frog in a waterless well." 6 Thus the
one path of salvation for man was to cease existing: by ab-
sorption in the Infinite Brahman.
But if this whole world of finite existence is thus reckoned
as a woeful blunder, is Brahman, then, the blunderer in
having become manifest in this world of misery? There is
comprehensible reluctance to undertake the explanation of

this riddle, how or why Brahman should become so woefully
individualized, and the Hindu theologian does not hold fast

to the idea that the finite world is the self-outpouring and
externalization of Brahman. A bolder insight leads the Upani-
shadic seer to proclaim all finite existence as unreal, a veil of
illusion, Maya. Real, alas, is the soul which must expiate in
the woes of transmigration its attachment to illusion, until
it has been chastened and purified and
enlightened, and in the
end extinguished in absorption. So the immobile eye of the
ascetic saint, waiting for the hour of release, looks with dis-
dainful equanimity on this wretched riot of illusion.
Woe has thus its source in individual existence. Yet the

perception of the identity of the individual soul with the
Universal Soul was the quintessence of Upanishadic wisdom :
"That which is the finest essence this whole world has that
as its soul. That is Reality. That is Atman (Soul). That art
thou, Svetaketu."
7
To the Brahmanic list of illusions, the
Buddhist added the soul, individual and universal. All
alleged substantial reality is illusion, Maya, and the self-
identical substantial soul is also illusory. There is a condition

of individual existence; it is a process of combination, but it
is also a process of change, and inevitably a process of dis-
solution. The passing illusion is not an illusion by contrast

to something real and stable. All is passing, becoming, coming
together, dissolving; nothing is fixed and permanent. Really
no thing is: only a complex of activities obtains.
In this complex of activities, however, an impersonal law,
of retribution operates ruthlessly: in it, complexes of acts
that make for attachment to individual existence result in
successive rebirths; in it, complexes of acts that make for
releasefrom self-engrossment, result in the dissolving of self

and the extinction of all that is involved in self. There is no
stable reality, finite or infinite: there is stable cosmic order
with which we must reckon and on which we can rely it is the :
law of Karma.
Buddha saw error, lust, anger, pride, all evil and woe
in attachment to self, finite individual existence, but he
provided a cosmology and a gospel calculated to assure
direct deliverance from self-engrossment. Misery is univer-
sal, and it from self-engrossment, and can be ex-
arises
tinguished through emancipation from self-engrossment, by

following the Buddhist path of life. The resulting state
would be extinction of self, and of all the lusts of self, Arhat-
ship, Nirvana.
There is grave confusion in this gospel of deliverance from
evil through erasure of personality. I have tried to point it
"
out in my study of The Buddhist Doctrine of Karma/' in the
"
seventh chapter of The Problem of Immortality. Individual-
ity, selfhood is rejected by the Buddhist because in the life of
selfthe Buddhist saw error, evil, woe, lust, anger, and igno-
rance. Surely these are all in the life of self, and they are
surely got rid of if existence is depersonalized. But efface and
extinguish personality, and is it only evil and error that have
vanished? Can you then have good, enlightenment, truth,
sweetness and light? Evil and good, sorrow and joy, delusion
and enlightenment, these are correlative, and they involve
personal activity and self-consciousness. Already in Brah-
manism we may observe this tendency to reduce moral evil
to metaphysical limitation. But if we thus baldly
. . .
identify evil with individuality and finitude, then is not good

wiped out entirely? For is not evil already imputed to the
Infinite Being which becomes individualized and thus assumes
finitude? But what becomes then of the distinction good-evil?
... So Buddhism has undertaken a moral-religious judg-
ment of life, which its treatment of self renders nugatory.
The doctrine of Karma is essentially an impersonal, unmoral
conception of the world process; and yet it is forced to do
ethical service in the Buddhist religion. There is no self and
no self's activity, and yet there must be moral action and
moral destiny. " 8
That extinction of individuality should have been proposed
as the true goal of existence, indicates clearly the profound
pessimism of the Brahmanic-Buddhist philosophy of life.
Brahmanism hoped for deliverance from evil through even-
tual absorption in Brahman; its pessimism was positive, but
its path of salvation uncertain. More confirmed in his pessi-
mism, more assured in his gospel of redemption was the

Buddha. Buddhism brought cheer, for it brought promise of
the utter and unqualified extinction of self and all its woes.
Salvation is in non-existence. So Gautama is the progenitor of

"""
Schopenhauer and Hartmann.
III
The evident influence of Brahmanism and Buddhism on

Schopenhauer and Hartmann and their successors should not
confirm us in the misleading tendency to regard modern philo-
sophical pessimism as an exotic Oriental plant on European
soil. While it is true that the religious and philosophical
spirit of negation is not as characteristic of the West as of
ancient India, calling the West optimistic is too offhand and
does not dispose of our problem. Again, when in our survey of
the history of morals we contrast the Hellenic world-affirma-
tion with the Christian world-denial, we should not overlook
the fact that while the Greek, unlike the Christian theologian,
did not feel in duty bound to contemn this world, he did in
fact perceive abundantly its evil and undertook to meet and
to explain Consider the judgment of life in Graeco-Roman
it.
wisdom, from Theognis and Sophocles to Menander and

Seneca, Pliny and Plutarch: a veritable proverb of life-
disenchantment. Plutarch cites it on the authority of Aris-
totle as very ancient wisdom: Man's greatest boon is the
brevity of his life. Not to be born at all were of all things the
9
best; but, if born, then to die as soon as possible. So Horher
repeatedly bewails our vain and transitory life: "There is
nothing more piteous than a man among all things that
breathe and creep upon the earth, .This is the lot the
. .
Gods have spun for miserable men, that they should live in
10
pain; yet themselves are sorrowless."
Only the unthinking could fail to perceive the misery of
existence, and indeed to the early Greek, man's thought and
outreaching zeal seem to have been the roots of evil. But
why? Because man does ill to think and aspire, or because the
gods are envious of thinking and ambitious man? Very
significant are the myths of the Promethean cycle.
11
When
Zeus overcame the Titans, he denied man his due share of
good fortune; Prometheus thereupon took up the cause of
men and became their champion. He stole the celestial fire
of Zeus and gave it to man, thus making possible human
conquest of nature and civilized life. For this Prometheus

was affixed by Zeus on a, rock in Caucasus, "fast riveted in
bonds beneath the sky," as Aeschylus has it. 12 Daily his
liver,the organ of insatiate desire, was pecked by Zeus' eagle,
and daily it grew again. Thus did Divinity punish the divine
aspiration and achievement of the culture-hero. To the rest

of us Zeus sent as a gift Pandora, divinely beautiful and with
a mysterious box for her dowry. The pliable, sensuous,
unreasonably curious Epimetheus, disregarding all warnings
of his brother Prometheus, took Pandora and opened the
casket. Out flew all the woes and torments and pests: only
hope remained under the lid as a last refuge for unhappy man.
Here is profound legend, of which the story in Genesis is a
parallel. Eating of the tree of knowledge, curiosity, the desire
of manto rise above and depart from nature, the lure of the
unattained, these forces which lift man from the brute to
civilized existence, these are also the roots of all his woes and
misery. Later thought will come to regard man's desire as
sinful, his will as wilful, and his suffering as deserved.
In pre-Socratic thought the naturalistic preoccupation with
cosmology causes evaluation to recede in the background, and
the problem of evil receives scant attention. The Orphic bias
of Pythagoreanism, however, leads it to a conception of
human life as essentially a conflict between good and evil
(myth of Dionysos Zagreus), and to a disdainful view of
material, earthly existence. Heraclitus, "the Weeping Phi-
losopher/' who saw all things as in a flux, eternally chang-
ing, beginning, and passing away, compares the World-
Fashioner to a child building sand houses only to brush them
This shadow-like impermanence of human life Homer

aside. 13
had expressed in comparing men to wind-blown leaves, 14 and
Greek tragedy agrees with him so Aeschylus in the Agamem-
:
non:
Ah! What is mortal life? When prosperous,
A shadow can overturn it, and, when fallen,
A throw o' the wet sponge blurs the picture out.
This is more piteous than the ruin of pride. 16
And Sophocles, in Oedipus Rex:

mortal tribes of men,
How near to nothingness
1count you while your lives remain !
What man that lives has more of happiness

Than to seem blest, and, seeming, fade in night?
Oedipus, in this thine hour of gloom,
Musing on thee and thy relentless doom,
1 call none happy who beholds the light.
16
In this unstable world, persistent and limitless is misfortune:

thus Electra in the opening lines of Euripides' Orestes, recit-
ing the woeful doom of the house of Atreus:
Nothing there is so terrible to tell,
Nor fleshly pang, nor visitation of God,

But poor humanity may have to bear it. 17
And even more poignantly Aeschylus in the Libation Bearers:
Alas, that none of mortal men

Can pass his life untouched by pain!
Behold, one woe is here
Another loometh near. 18
The prevalence of evil and of evil fortune, divine punish-

ment of men for crimes committed unwittingly, undeserved
suffering, and sinister doom, all served to render theodicy
perplexing. Aeschylus is grimly aware of the problem:
though himself not a Prometheus, he can understand and
portray the Promethean temper. Sophocles, bound to see
the light shining through the darkness, yet saw life too stead-
ily to see it whole the ills were too many and glaring. When
:
Philoctetes hears that great Ajax is dead, while the mean,

nimble, poor dastard Thersites lives, he exclaims:
No evil yet was crushed,
The Heavens will ever shield it. ...
When I praise
Things god-like, I find evil in the Gods. 19
"That," Lewis Campbell observes, "is the nearest approach

in Sophocles to the occasional cynicism of Euripides." 20
Euripides was more sceptical and bolder in his reaction while :
as a dramatist he used the old legends to stir the feelings

of the multitude, his treatment of the sacred themes was
so moulded "as to make it manifest to the more intelli-
gent amongst his countrymen that these forms were morally

untenable and inconsistent with the highest notion of the
21
divine."
The Socratic shift in Greek thought turned Greek atten-
tion to the problem of evil and emphasized the Greek tend-
ency to seek an explanation of evil in the recalcitrancy of
matter, thus inclining towards dualism, but preserving se-
curely the infinite perfection of God. In Plato's philosophy
the problem is imperative. If the real world is a rational
system, if its essence and apex is infinite perfect Deity, then
how could there be any evil in the cosmos? For Plato Perfect
Rationality alone is perfectly real and the ultimate source
by comparison with it, material existence is but
of all reality;
shadow-shape appearance. But matter is also a resistant to

perfect rationality; it is the element of imperfection, error,
and evil in the cosmos. Plato insists that "God and . . .
the things of God are in every way perfect."

22
"That God
being good is the author of evil to anyone is to be stren-
23
uously denied." But while the souls created by God di-
rectly are purely rational and free of corruption, God either

tolerates or else is confronted with the inferior creation of
mortal souls which are joined to the immortal in a manner
suggesting congenital depravity in the universe. The purely
rational soul assumes a bodily vesture "by necessity," as
we read in the Timaeus; 24 as a prisoner in his cell seeking
freedom, so the soul in pursuit of knowledge seeks to regain
its high estate. It feels itself divided; as in a chariot drawn
25
by two horses that pull opposite ways, it would attain to
rational perfection, yet is dragged into the mire by blind
passion and the lusts of the body. Ignorant man proceeds

to his ruin under the illusion that he is pursuing his advan-
tage; though no one desires evil directly, most of us are its
thralls. "The soul ... dragged by the body into the
is
region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the

world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard when she
touches change." 26
Were it not for this lure and tug of the material, our life
would be perfect. But how are we to explain the strength
and the effectiveness of this lure, or the very initial presence
of imperfection and the possibility of downfall in the divine
universe? Bodily contamination, disease and dissolution,
cannot destroy the soul; 27 the question arises, whether mat-
ter is the real evil, or only the medium and instrumentality
through which the real evil is made manifest: itself being the
soul's attachment to the body and all its cravings? But, if
this attachment is "necessary," is God to be exculpated by a
recourse to dualism? To be sure, from God the world receives
all that it has of good, and the Divine Helmsman portrayed
in the Statesman 28 acts directly in restoring the cosmos to

order. But Fate and Innate Desire which reverse the divine
cosmic motion, and the inferior deities who let go and aban-
don control, are these agents of chaos and evil within or
beyond the range of God's creative activity? The difficulties
confronting Plato here are as serious as those which at a
enmesh St. Augustine. Plato loyally main-
later age are to
tains the essential perfection and justice of the rational uni-
verse, but his implied dualism does not quite save him from
the lurking doubt whether the roots of evil do not after all
reach below the phenomenal crust of material existence.

The strong ethical note in the Platonic metaphysics is re-
placed in Aristotle by a scientific analysis of the nature of

existence. While prizing ideal rationality, he does not de-
preciate the reality of the material, and he would relate the

two so as to avoid the dualistic tendency of Plato. In this
universe matter is the necessary but inadequate vehicle
through which perfect rationality is progressively made

manifest. It is a condition for the attainment of perfection,
but also an obstacle to perfect attainment. Since in all finite
existence attainment is never complete but always involves
potential unattained perfection, Aristotle, while clearly rec-

ognizing evil in this world, is more interested in observing
it than in justifying it or in explaining it away.
The dominantly practical tone of Post-Aristotelian thought,

which concentrated on the question of value and made
philosophy more and more an ars vivendi, demanded of the
Stoic, confident of the essential perfection and justice and
cosmic supremacy of Divine Providence, a justification of
evil, and led the Epicurean, clearly aware of unjustifiable
evil in the world, to seek refuge in naturalism and atheism.
Thus, in teleological and anti-teleological monism, Post-

Aristotelian philosophy seeks to square itself with the problem
of evil. To the Stoic, the universe is essentially God's world,
and is thus perfect, and this truth could not be gainsaid by
the presence of evil in the world. The Stoic first depreciates
and discounts the gravity of evil, and then pronounces it
necessary and justified as a foil and a spur to good. The wise
man who perceives the essential rationality and Divine Provi-
dence dominant in all things sees that life is neither as evil

nor needlessly evil as appears to those who lack understand-
ing. Through the extirpation of passion man can attain self-
possession and peace of soul and victorious disdain of the
alleged evils to which sensual folly is heir. In the midst of
apparent ruin, the Stoic sage remains calmly acquiescent,
knowing that no real and final evil can touch the man de-
voted to reason and virtue, and that all other evils are either
illusory or are else instrumental to a greater good.
In this firm conviction the Stoic partook of what life had
to offer, content in advance and resolved not to grumble life :
is as it is and we should accept it and beware of unseemly
greed: "When we are invited to a banquet," Epictetus re-

minds us, "we take what is set before us; and were one to
callupon his host to set fish upon the table or sweet things,
he would be deemed absurd. Yet in a word, we ask the gods
for what they do not give; and that, although they have
given us so many things!" "True instruction is this: to

learn to wish that each thing should come to pass as it does.
And how does it come to pass? As the Disposer has dis-
posed it. Now He has disposed that there should be summer
and winter, and plenty and dearth, and vice and virtue,
and all such oppositos, for the harmony of the whole." 29
And even more enthusiastic is the acquiescence of Marcus
Aurelius: "Whatsoever is expedient unto thee, O World,
is expedient unto me, nothing can either be unseasonable
unto me, or out of date, which unto thee is seasonable. What-

soever thy seasons bear, shall ever by me be esteemed as
happy fruit and increase." 30
The difficulties inherent in
this noble vindication of the cosmos cannot be discussed here;
they were only accentuated in Christian theodicy with its
explicit theism, and are writ large in the pages of St. Augus-
tineand Pascal and Bayle and Leibniz.
This trust in Divine Providence was dismissed bluntly by
the Epicurean who stood his ground on undisguised and un-
wavering naturalism and rejected all teleology: "The nature
of the world by no means made by divine grace for us: so
is
31
by which it stands beset."
great are the flaws The cosmos is
really a stupendous dance of atoms in the void. No Divine
Providence nor any Reason friendly or malicious governs the
coupling and the dissipation of these material particles.
Man's soul and body are passing combinations of irreducible
bits ofmatter; lasting satisfaction is not to be had, nor can
itbe expected; immortality is a delusion; the evils in life
should surprise us no more than its alleged goods; they are
both but words in a world in which atoms whirling in empty
space are alone real. So materialistic philosophy exhibits
here its incapacity to recognize, much less to solve, the
problem of evil. Epicurean cosmology could not provide
for the values sought in Epicurean ethics.
Cyrenaic hedonism also, for all its concentration on hap-
piness, had proved unreliable in affording serene assurance of
the worth of existence. To Aristippus, at home and com-
fortable in whatever circumstances, the wise man was as a
bee, extracting honey from the bitterest flower. But later
Cyrenaics came to doubt the sweetness of the honey, and,
finding it in any case rarer and harder to obtain than their
master averred, saw no reason for attachment to life. Hege-
sias, in the third century B.C., gained in Alexandria the dis-
mal epithet of "the advocate of death." Life, to be worth
living, must be pleasurable; but the attainment of pleasure
is exceptional and unstable, and, when attained, defeats
itself by the weariness and satiety that follow in its train.
The one goal worth seeking eludes him most who most pur-
sues it, and thus ever-hoodwinked man has no good reason
for preferring life to death. Hegesias' gloomy eloquence
started an epidemic of suicides in Alexandria until his free-
dom of speech was curtailed by the king Ptolemy Soter.
Windelband points out the self-refutation of eudaemono-

logical pessimism in this its first exponent: "If happiness,
satisfaction of wishes, and enjoyment are to be the meaning
and end of human life, it misses this end, and is to be rejected
as worthless. Pessimism is the last but also the annihilating

consequence of eudaemonism its immanent criticism." 32
With regard to the problem of evil, Greek thought is thus
seen to exhibit an indecision of procedure due to a vacilla-
tion between monism and dualism, giving rise not only to
different traditions, but to opposed motives in the same tra-
dition. The fountain-head of perplexity appears to be Plato.
On the one hand is the joyous acquiescence in nature, the
belief that, through the dominance of reason, virtue and per-
fection are within the reach of man. On the other hand is a
certain nostalgic sense of alienation, depreciation and dis-
trust of nature, metaphysical as well as moral contempt of
matter, asceticism, and a mystical reach after the beyond-
rational which is decidedly sceptical in its implications. On
the one hand, the Idea of the Good is Supreme Reality, and
matter, imperfection, somehow is not; on the other, the con-
flict is somehow ingrained in the very stuff of Being, and
"evils can never pass away." 33 Aristotle resists Plato's

mystical depreciation of matter, but he is enabled to treat it
as an integral moment and aspect of reality because of his
objective scientific approach to his problem, because he lacks
the Platonic tragic sense of imperfection in nature, and be-
cause, unlike Plato, he is never a stranger here below. The
Stoic cosmology would overcome completely the antithesis
of rationalform and irrational_matter by adopting the idea
oraTTneârchy of material existence; but the Stoic ethics,
keenly sensible of the moral antithesis between reason and
the passions, demands its overcoming in heroic ascetic apa-
thy; while Stoic theodicy proclaims the course of material
existence to be a pageant of Divine Providence precluding
any evil, and at the same time attempts to justify evil as a
spur to greater good. The Epicurean dismisses the Platonic

difficulty by adopting a materialism which, unlike the Stoic,
was anti-teleological there is pain and pleasure in the world,
:
but there can be no problem of evil. Things simply are.

Unlike the Stoic insistent fortitude and loyalty to the
cosmos, and also against the Epicurean disdainful naturalism,
the mystic-religious tradition of later antiquity manifests a
more or less explicitly pessimistic attitude towards existence.
According to Philo of Alexandria, evil is bound up with exist-
ence itself. By its union with the body, the soul inclines
towards sin, and from this fatal leaning no one is ever free.
Matter, the condition of the ground

finite existence, is also
and the medium of evil. The path of salvation is a path of

asceticism and world-denial, the flight of the soul to perfec-
tion. The on redemption is not daunted by the
soul bent
evils that beset it: "The just endures death with courage
and even with joy; he trusts in Providence and conserves to
31
the But, for all Philo's insistent trust
full all his faculties.
in Providence, the idea of radical evil persists not the origi-:
nal sin of a morally neutral will, but evil inbred in the very
nature of this world of change. 35 It were better had
finite
there been no matter, no world, but only the eternal perfect
silence of the One.Gnostic, Neoplatonist, and Neopythago-
rean emphasized Plato's sense of nostalgic alienation, and
the result was a manifold wail over the cosmic pity of it:
that there should be a world at all was the essential tragedy,
for from the very first the cosmic self-manifestation of God

involves a downfall and a degradation. The original sin took
place, not at the close of creation, but in the first verse of the
first chapter. The first and essential blunder was not in ex-
istence, it was and is existence itself.
All these conflicting motives and demands reach their cul-

mination in Plotinian Neoplatonism. Plotinus would not
only explain, he would also vindicate the outpouring of the

Eternal One in the cosmos. As fire warms and snow chills
and light radiates and fragrance is diffused, so from the very
plenitude of its perfection the Eternal One overflows and
pours itself out. By the very fact of outpouring, though The
One does not know itself as One or as Many, an awareness
of Not-one arises. This is Thought, Spirit, Nous. And just
as the One, while eternally itself, yet emanates in Spirit, so
Spirit in turn, eternally itself, yet emanates in Soul, Psyche.
And so in turn doos Soul emanate in Body, Matter.
These are stages which we recognize in a process of pro-
gressively exhaustive outpouring which is continuous through-
out. If it is perfection overabundantly overflowing, it should
be perfect throughout, and no question of any imperfection

or evil could arise. Yet there is evil. What is it, and how can
it be? These questions lead us into the heart of the Plo-
tinian theodicy, and we find ourselves enmeshed in serious
perplexities.
Plotinus refuses to treat the process of emanation ex-
plicitly as progressive degradation of Reality. The Eternal
One is perfect, but so is Spirit :
perfect, to be sure, not as the
One is but characteristically perfect as Spirit. And
perfect,
so is the Soul perfect as Soul, nor could we demand any other
perfection of it. But does this mean that everything has
its own characteristic perfection: human, equine, aquiline,
plant-like, each in its way perfect as the Eternal One is per-
fect? And furthermore do you, do I, have our own individual
characteristic perfection, distinguishable from the generically
human as that in turn is from the equine? For, Plotinus says,
"man, man as partial thing, cannot be required to have at-

tained to the very summit of goodness: if he had, he would
have ceased to be of the partial order." 36 The philosophy
which condemns the finite individual for lacking the unquali-
fied perfection of the Absolute cannot limit its condemna-

"
tion to the material world. We will be obliged to admit evil
in the Supreme also, for there, too, Soul is less exalted than
"
the Intellectual-Principle and That too has its Superior. 87
In considering the difficulties confronting the Plotinian
theodicy, we should not confuse Plotinus' temperament with
that of the Gnostics or overlook his characteristic serenity
in dealing with the actual. There is no tendency to cosmic
lamentation in Plotinus. He is reluctant to blame the nature
of the world: this audacity which he finds in the Gnostics
seems to him due to lack of understanding. 38 Even Plato's
"
milder disparagement of the material world is not quite to
"
his taste. 39 A sufficiently clear and comprehensive view of
the world would serve to clear it of the evils which so impress
the one-sided observer. One who has seen or listened to God
can see reflections of Him even here and catch echoes of the
divine harmony even in this discordant world of matter.
What sort of world one perceives depends largely on the
character of the perceiver. "A feeble contemplation makes a
" 40
feeble object of contemplation.
But while Plotinus is not a pessimist by temperament, his
view of reality does impose grave burdens on his theodicy.
With the Plotinian hierarchy of perfections on our hands, we
travel an indistinct path between axiological abysses. Shall
we say that each thing is perfect in its own way? Then how
can we hold anything, even the Eternal One, more perfect
than any other? '.Why may not man then stand up to God as
the squirrel stood up to the mountain, in Emerson's Fabk:
If Icannot carry forests on my back,

Neither can you crack a nut.
But how can we, then, admit imperfection at all, or rather,

how can we avoid the Epicurean naturalism, according to
which things are what they are, each with its respective
nature, and there an end? In that case, for an apotheosis of
things at random or else seriatim, a cosmic, expansive mood

like Whitman's should suffice :
The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place;

The suns I see, and the suns I cannot see, are in their place;
The palpable is in its place, and the impalpable is in its place. . . .
I believe that a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg
of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven. . . .
4l
Or we say, on the other hand, that a perfect horse is

shall
perfect as a horse, but its perfection is not as perfect as

man's, nor man's in turn as perfect as God's perfection?
But while this view is nowise inherently unreasonable in a
cosmology such as that of Plotinus, it would scarcely deliver

us from the problem of evil. For in this case all the so-called
perfections of the finite world would, by comparison with
God's perfection, prove undeserving of the title: the alleged
hierarchy of perfections would be disclosed as a gradation of
imperfections. Would we not, then, in spite of Plotinus'
intention, be proceeding towards a Gnostic terminus, with the
cosmic emanation process one of increasing degradation?
"Plotinus denies and affirms metaphysical evil at the same
time, denying it by insisting on the possibility of different
kinds of perfection, affirming it by declaring these kinds to be
at the same time degrees." 42 His perplexity is grave: how is
'
he to 'accept the Universe in a Stoic sense without accepting
it in an Epicurean sense? And how is he, with his theory of
emanationism, to face with moral vigor the actuality of evil,

without proceeding to Gnostic condemnation of the world-
process? If the goal of existence is the return of the Perfect
One, how is the emanation from the One to be justified, with
43
all the imperfections and evils that it involves?
These difficulties are not quite resolved by referring the

evils of the world to Matter. Regarding Plotinus' estimate of
matter, the Enneads allow considerable latitude of inter-
pretation. From Zeller's point of view, Plotinus goes even
beyond Plato in holding matter as "evil, indeed the primal
from it comes all evil in the material world, from the
evil;
According to Dean Inge, those
7
44
body the evil in the soul.'
who, relying on a "few polemical passages," hold that Ploti-

nus makes Matter the evil principle in the manner of Philo
and the Neopythagoreans, misjudge "the whole tendency of
his philosophy." 45 Even though matter is the cause of evil,
it is not all evil. Were it by itself, chaotic and utterly without
form or order, it would be evil unqualified. But it does not

exist by Despite the unfortunate tendency of popular
itself.
Neoplatonism to acquiesce in the antithesis between God

and Matter as providing a ready explanation of evil, Plotinus
himself seems to have opposed the metaphysical dualism
which would set matter over against the perfect Absolute as
an independent reality. Matter is "the receptive principle
46
by which alone the present world could be at all." Its
whole being is in its being acted upon by the higher. But in
the philosophy of Plotinus matter is clearly not a merely
cosmological concept. As fimile Brehier puts it, in discussing
Plotinus' book on the nature and origin of evil: "Plotinus
identifies evil as a principle of religious pollution with the
matter of the philosophers ... a principle of rational ex-
planation is transformed into a reality concerning the religious
47
life of the soul."
The primeval and ultimate evil, according to Plotinus, is
not in man's will or in the soul's inclination: "We cannot be,
ourselves, the source of Evil, we are not evil in ourselves;
Evil was beforewe came to be; the Evil which holds men
down binds them against their will. . The Measureless
. .
is evil primarily; . . .
primarily, the darkness; secondarily,
the darkened. Now Vice, being ignorance and a lack of
measure in the Soul, is secondarily evil, not the Essential

Evil, just as Virtue is not the Primal Good but is Likeness to
The Good, or participation in it." 48 So we are evil in that
we are attached to matter, but evil is first and last essentially
in matter: "Thus the cause at once of the weakness of Soul
and of all its evil is Matter. The evil of Matter precedes
the weakness, the vice; it is Primal Evil. Even though the
Soul submits to Matter and engenders to it; if it becomes
evil within itself by its commerce with Matter, the cause
the presence of Matter: the Soul would never have
is still
approached Matter but that the presence of matter is the

49
occasion of its earth-life."
If, however, the higher emanations are evil or imperfect
only in so far as they incline or descend towards matter,

whereas matter is inherently evil, what accounts for this
radical collapse in the process of emanation? If emanation
is continuous throughout, how could a theodicy be required,
or else, how could it be achieved? In dealing with evil, there
* ;
is a tendency in Plotinus to define it as the necessarily last
of emanation: "Given that The Good is not the only existent
thing, it is inevitable that, by the outgoing from it or, if

the phrase be preferred, the continuous down-going or away-
going from it, there should be produced a Last, something
after which nothing more can be produced: this will be Evil.
As necessarily as there is Something after the First, so neces-
sarily there is a Last this Last is Matter, the thing that has
:
no residue of good in it: here is the necessity of Evil." 60

Thus, if we hold to the all-perfection of the One and to
the continuity of the emanation-process, and refuse to say
that at the third rim of emanation evil somehow unaccount-
ably appears, two alternatives seem open to us: either
emanation proceeds in a moral sense and gradually from a
plenitude of good and utter absence of evil towards complete
extinction of good (Gnosticism again?) or else what is called
;
'evil' in matter is metaphysically rather than morally 'the
'
last' or 'the ultimate least of Being, to wit Non-Being, and
in that case we cannot speak of any theodicy.
This dilemmanot altogether unlike that which appears
is
to confront some present-day advocates of the theory of

emergence, whom we may regard as the antipodes of Plotinus
and Plotinus begins with a con-
his doctrine of emanation.
which cannot allow him to regard
ception of the Divine First
'
the descent' in emanation from Being to Non-Being as a
degradation of the One in a moral sense. Thus, so long as
we regard the world-process as one of emanation from Ab-
solute Perfection, theodicy is either not in question or else
is quite out of the question: if it is demanded at all, it cannot
be executed. The advocate of emergence, on the other hand,

begins with a mechanistic conception of the cosmic terminus
a quo, and then notes fairly the successive factual rise of
'
reality to ever This progressive emergence

higher' levels.
he records, but can he explain without taking account of
it
the Whole and reinterpreting the alleged process of emer-

gence as one of progressive and ever more adequate self-
manifestation, or better self-realization, of the Whole? "The
spirit that moves over the deeps of seeming chaos, the divinity
that streams like light through all, courses like life-blood
through the whole, draws like an eternal magnet all to it-
self." 61 If the 'higher' is no more than the temporally 'later'
or the more complex, the advocate of emergence may per-
haps save his face as a 'scientist/ but can lay claim to dis-
course of God and good and other values at the close of his
book only by straining terms and spraining logic, for these
are either of nature, or else are unnatural.
Yet nature is made better by no mean

But nature makes that mean: so over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. 62
Thus with evil on our hands, the absolutist formula of initial,
unqualified perfection requires revision; and on the other

hand, if Mlinschhausen has indeed 'emerged/ it cannot
have been by merely tugging at his bootstraps. There is drag

in the universe, and there is likewise an urge; the drag and
the urge appear to be conflicting factors, but they are factors
of one cosmic process, and the true philosophy is one that
can take account of them both. Plotinus and the advocate
of emergence should both learn wisdom from the Gospel:
"By their fruits ye shall know them," grapes and figs, but
also thorns and thistles.
'
IV
The dualism God-Matter which Greek theodicy resisted
was primarily metaphysical and only secondarily moral, and
that perhaps the chief reason why it could not be sustained.
is
But metaphysical dualism seems inevitably bound for the

if
rocks, to a moral interpretation of the world dualism appears

imperative. In a mind intensely moral but relatively un-
touched by metaphysics, dualism could maintain itself with
greater assurance. So it is that the first principle in the
Zoroastrian philosophy of life, which is not speculation but an
act of heroism, is the principle of the essential duality of the
cosmos.
To the Greek philosopher, God, by whatever name he was
called, in the end signified ultimate and unqualified Reality.
The moral antithesis good-evil, tagging after themetaphys-
ical antithesis Being-Non-Being, had to do the best it could.
The chief difficulties in Greek as in some modern theodicies,
are traceable to this insistence on reducing a concretely moral
to an abstractly metaphysical distinction.
The Zoroastrian began with the antithesis good-evil and
deduced the rest from that. Good and evil could not issue
from the same source; there is accordingly a duality of cosmic
principles. More intent on preserving the moral than the
metaphysical reputation of Deity, the Zoroastrian held fast
to the goodness of Ahura-Mazda. The evil in this world is not
his work: he neither caused it nor permitted it; his only rela-
tion to it is what yours and mine should be: unremitting
The world is a battleground on which Ahura-
opposition.
Mazda and Ahriman, creating and counter-creating, strive
for mastery. As truth and falsehood, purity and pollution
are struggling for the mastery of man's soul, so health is
battling with disease, and life with death, and grain with
weeds, and life-giving rain with destructive storm, and light
with darkness. No one so refused to blink at evil, no one
perceived the universal conflict so thoroughly as the Zoro-
astrian. The moral struggle was nothing mysterious or
exceptional or illustory to him; it was the outstanding and
ever-present fact of all existence in which, from the God
Ahura-Mazda clear down to the least item of goodness
and life and light, the evil creation of Ahriman was being
opposed in mortal combat. Here was a stirring sense of co-
warriorship with God against the hosts of evil.
The struggle was not illusory, for Ahriman was real. Into
the metaphysical problem of Ahriman's coordinateness with
Ahura-Mazda, the Zoroastrian does not seem to have cared
particularly to inquire. "Is Ahriman coeternal with Ahura-
Mazda?" seems to have meant: "When did Ahriman start
his dirtywork?" a question which was answered: "As soon
as Ahura-Mazda began to create." Does this answer suggest
possible Brahmanic ideas; does it mean that evil appears
whenever finitude appears, that it is a function of finitude?
Or didn't the Zoroastrian rather mean to say that evil,
Ahriman and his work, could be nothing recent and excep-
tional, but that the struggle between good and evil was as old
as existence itself? So evil is and has been right here; it is not
to be prayed or excogitated out of existence; it is real enough
and calls for real opposition.
Evil is real, but it does not deserve to be real. The moral
intensity which begins with an insistence on the antithesis

good-evil demands the assurance of its ultimate overcoming.
The struggle is real but
futile. A day of days is
it is not
coming when, under the leadership of Saoshyant, the hosts
of Ahura-M azda will utterly put to rout the vile cohorts of
Ahriman. The world will then be consumed and refined in a
universal conflagration; all things will then be pure and
perfect, and evil will be no more.
The story of the Garden of Eden has probably Babylonian

origins or kinship, and partakes of a common stock of primi-
tive folklore in which it shares elements with Semitic and
non-Semitic races. Its significance, as we have noted, re-
sembles strikingly that of the Promethean myths. Man lost
Paradise because he was lured into eating of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil. As Pfleiderer has pointed out,
"the original meaning of the story is simply this: The origin
of the evils of human life is to be found in the transgression
by the first men of the divine prohibition which had denied

to them the higher knowledge, the most elementary
. . .
elevation ofman above mere nature, the first dawning of the

consciousness of supersensuous destiny which makes him
higher than the beasts, in fact, the first stirring of the
53
impulse towards civilization/'
It was later theology which, imposing later views on this
primitive legend, transformed its meaning. In the story

itself Adam and Eve seem to have been banished from Eden
because they had actually eaten of the tree of knowledge, and
lest they should proceed further to eat of the tree of life and
become immortal. Later thought laid stress on the dis-
obedience of man and ascribed to that sin his subsequent
woes.
The Greek, in one way or another, ascribed evil to a certain
fatal flaw or imperfection in the constitution of reality, yet
somehow not in its ultimate constitution; so he called it
Matter. The Zoroastrian saw in evil the evidence of the
operation of a cosmic principle opposed to God and every-

where at war with the good. Neither of these views was
entertained in Israel. Excelling in moral vigor rather than in
speculative genius, and bent more on perceiving evil and
avoiding it than on explaining its ultimate origin, the Hebrew
found a ready explanation of all things by attributing them
to God as their source. God brings good and also evil: but he
sends them to men wisely and justly. Israel from the start
regarded man as standing in a contractual relation with his
Maker. Fidelity to his laws God rewards with prosperity,
and if evils beset men, the reason is not far to seek: it is due
to men's remissness, disobedience, and sin towards God.
When Israel came to think of Yahveh as author and director
of the entire world-process, the elements of the standard
theodicy were at hand. The first Psalm is an epitome of it
and, should we compare the moral record of king and people
during various reigns with their record in outward prosperity
as chronicled in the Historical Books, we should see how
firmly fixed was the idea that God brought success to his
faithful people and punished them when they departed from
his law. Most striking because of its sinister irony in con-
junction with what follows is the statement of this view of

life in the first three verses of the Book of Job:
"
There
was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that
man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and
turned away from evil. And there were born unto him seven
sons and three daughters. His substance also was seven
thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred
she-asses, and a very great household; so that this man was
the greatest of all the children of the east."
Two points should here be kept clearly in mind: this

contractual relation was limited to the here and now, and it
was a relation of Yahveh to his people Israel. Now so long as
the latter idea prevailed, the former was not likely to cause
insuperable difficulties in theodicy. When however Israel
was led, particularly by the prophet Jeremiah, away from
the nationalistic towards a personal conception of religion,
the inadequacy of the contractual idea to explain the facts
became apparent. For, while in the
of this life's experiences
'
lives of peoples honesty is the best policy/ and one can with
some assurance ascribe a country's stable well-being and
prosperity to soundness of national character, in the lives of

people we cannot apply the formula with equal confidence
and, placidly attributing good fortune to goodness, rate every
poor devil a devil.
The days of the Babylonian exile, which chronicled Israel's
perception of the monotheistic idea and Israel's approach

to the notion of personal and therefore universal as dis-
tinguished from nationalistic religion, provided the Hebrew
mind with grave perplexities. In the sack of Jerusalem bad
men as good had managed to escape personal disaster,
well as
and by the rivers of Babylon good men as well as bad be-
wailed their lot. Ascribe God's amazing patience with the
wicked to his infinite loving-kindness; still, if he is one and
supreme in power and justice and wisdom, how is the ap-
parently undeserved suffering of the righteous to be ex-
plained? Before us is the masterpiece of Hebrew tragic
genius, the Book of Job. }
The obvious and complacent answer of orthodox tradition
was that the suffering in question was not undeserved. This
is the theme which Job's three friends play in a variety of
keys, first in a reluctant obligato, with distant and com-

passionate intimation; then, failing to evoke the expected
repentant antiphony in Job, crescendo, more and more
bluntly and insistently: Eliphaz the Temanite resting his
orthodox assurance on the rich harvest of a long life's ex-
perience, Bildad the Shuhite appealing to the verdict of
immemorial tradition, and Zophar the Naamathite reaffirm-
ing and exhorting and confidently challenging experience.
The kindliest of admonitions change into increasingly violent
upbraiding, but end on a promissory note of restoration to
prosperity, if only Job will repent and acknowledge his sin.
This triple challenge to Job rests on alleged manifold evidence
of experience, but ignores the very experience which has
brought the three to the side of the former prince of the
desert, now a mass of sores atop the ash-heap. "To lie for
God is the most pernicious atheism/' 64
Who ever perished, being innocent?
Or where were the upright cut off? 56
Who and where indeed? The poet is not content to <5b-
serve that prosperous vice and longsuffering godliness do

not invariably meet with appropriate reversal in accord-
ance with orthodox specifications at the end of the chapter.
Against the cruel complacence of orthodoxy, he masses with
tragic intensity the anguished conviction of an upright man
who, never arrogant or vain of his own perfection, and ever
vigilantly on his guard lest he fall by the way unwittingly,
is yet adamant in his assurance of lifelong unwavering devo-
tion to the divine will. To this witness of Job's own con-
science, the Prologue (whether or not we regard it as part
of the original poet's work) adds God's own twice repeated
testimony: "Hast thou considered my servant Job? for there

isnone like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man,
one that feareth God, and turneth away from evil."
The explanation of misery which the Prologue provides,
that it is a testing of righteousness, is patently inadequate
in a theistic system. Considering with Job that only too often
The tents of robbers prosper,

And they that provoke God are secure;
Into whoso hand God bringeth abundantly, 86 *
and, on the other hand, remembering the friends' recital of

the evil fortune of the wicked, while at the same time observ-
ing the trio of presumably righteous men without memory or
anticipation of trouble, we may well doubt whether experi-
menting of the sort suggested in the Prologue is a settled
policy of the Almighty. And furthermore, and more to the
point, in view of the omniscience of God, we may inquire:
For whose information are such tragic experiments conducted,
and at whose expense?
The question which Satan asks ironically in the Prologue:
"Doth Job fear God for nought?" is implied with tragic
significance throughout the poem. Job's tragedy is not in
the fact of his affliction, but rather in what his affliction means
to his religion which is the heart of his being. Unable in the
face of the plain facts of his own experience to regard his
suffering as appropriate punishment for sin, and yet regard-
ing his suffering as coming, together with all else, from God,
he sees the former ground of his confidence in God's justice
disappear, and no new ground in sight:
(
For the thing which I fear cometh upon me,
And that which I am afraid of cometh unto me. 67
Hence his repeated plea to have it out with God in his heart's
:
anguish, it is his mind's demand for a new theodicy that does

not outrage the facts of life. ,But the Voice out of the Whirl-
x
wind only overawes Job with the sense of his nothingness

in the face of his problem. Undeserved suffering was a fact
which Jewish theism could not comprehend: a yawning mys-
tery in which man, face to face with his Maker, is humbled
and abhors himself.
The Epilogue, reporting Job's restoration to prosperity,
so apparently in accord with his friends' orthodox promises
and so out of accord with God's explicit condemnation of the
trio, is probably a later addition to the poem, or else a conces-
sion in the nature of a happy ending, and in any case a flaw.
But God's approval of Job, in conformity with the spirit of
the poem, is conceivable only on the supposition that the
answer to Satan's question is in the case of Job an affirmative
answer. Job has really feared God for nought here through :
all suffering and agony, doubly hard because not understood,
he has remained loyal to God, but or rather because he

has refused to ignore the facts of experience, or to force them
"
into prefashioned moulds. There is a service of God which is
not work for reward: it is a heart-loyalty, a hunger after
God's presence, which survives loss and chastisement; which
in spite of contradictory seeming cleaves to what is Godlike
as the needle seeks the pole; and which reaches up out of the
darkness and hardness of this life to the light and the love
58
beyond."
Thus while the Book of Job offers no new formulated the-
odicy, it is a profoundly significant realization of the need
of one, and a dramatic expression of the sort of spiritual
attitude and temper of soul which alone could achieve it.
The poet of Job faced heroically the problem of evil. What
he sees and exhibits might make many another a pessimist,
but has not made him one. Compared with the buoyant
optimism of the typical Israelite, who saw abundance of sin,
but no occasion for being tragic about the cosmos, here is a
world-view grim indeed. But it is a view heroic and defiant
rather than hopeless. It is in a different strain of Jewish
thought that we catch distinctly the note of weariness and
cosmic disenchantment. This is the note of Ecclesiastes.
Job's dismay arises from intense and baffling suffering;
the despondency of Ecclesiastes is due to surfeiting but yet
unsatisfying pleasure. In Job is the tragic mystery of misery;
in Ecclesiastes, the tedious vanity of happiness. Here is a man

of rich and varied experience, yet he finds his life to be poor
monotony. The wisest in Jerusalem, he has found wisdom
to be but madness and folly. He is a connoisseur in delight;
he is rich and a man of property and power; he builds houses,
pools of water, gardens and parks and orchards; at his beck
are troops of manservants and maidservants, singers and
musicians, to do his will and pleasure, to serve and enter-
tain him. And seeing and having done all that is seen and
done under the sun, behold, for him "Vanity of vanities, . . .
all is vanity and a striving after wind. That which hath

. . .
been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done
is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under
B9
the sun."
To be sure, he sees evils about him: injustice, wickedness,
oppression. He concedes that some things are worse than
others, and much of his thought is a play with comparisons:
yet, be things better or worse, is there aught in life really
good? How can good be good, or evil evil; how is wisdom to
be preferred to folly, or anything to anything, or anything
if all things finally end in dust?
really cherished, "He finds
nothing that makes it worth while to struggle for uprightness
as the supreme end of life." 60 Ample variety of experiences
he has had, but no variety of conclusion. "For that which
befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing
befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea,
they have all one breath; and man has no preeminence above
the beasts: for all isvanity. All go unto one place; all are of
61
the dust, and all turn to dust again."
Despairing of lasting value in this pointless existence, and

seeing no likely prospect of work, or device, or knowledge, or
wisdom in Sheol, what is Ecclesiastes to do? He would eat
his bread, and drink his wine, wear his garments white, oil
his head, live iovfullv with his wife, and make the best of a
tedious bargain. But, adds the writer, or perhaps a later
editor, Ecclesiasteswould also keep in mind a certain grave
Perhaps after the grave. Confronted with the possible al-
ternative of a divine judgment in the hereafter, which he
can neither anticipate nor evade with assurance, he would
in any case fear God and keep his commandments. So the
mind that had started a dirge of sceptical-cynical weariness
ends, or is made to end, on a note of cautious piety. It is
a politic conclusion of a calculating philosophy of life.
CHAPTER II
THE CHRISTIAN-MEDIEVAL TRADITION

I
The weary sense of universal vanity and the tragic anguish

of unvindicated justice were transformed by the Christian
gospel into intense vigilance and confident hope. God is in

his heaven, a loving Father, and through Christ the
and in
stain of evil and the
sting of death are removed and turned
to God's greater glory in salvation. But the theological
problem still remains: what, whence, and whither evil? St.
Paul's treatment of these questions is meant to ascribe evil
to man's wilful disobedience, to regard it as a departure
from the way of the Lord into the selfish way of the flesh,
and to see its consummation in death and damnation, or its
extinction through the love of Christ in the life of the new
man. "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be
made alive."Here is the most intense abhorrence of the
l
body and a yearning to be freed from the bonds of the flesh:

"Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of this
body of death?"
2
But there is no despair of ultimate vic-
tory through Christ: "For I am persuaded that neither death,
nor nor angels, nor principalities, nor things to come, nor
life,
powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall
be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord.'* 3 In the very contempt of the flesh,
and very evils of the world is the joyous certainty of
in the
triumph which marks the saint's and the martyr's bliss:
final
"For which cause I suffer also these things: yet I am not
ashamed; for I know him whom I have believed, and I am
37
persuaded that he is able to guard that which I have com-
mitted unto him against that day." 4 The eschatological
sense of the speedily forthcoming end of all things was the
assurance of a blissful prospect: even the original downfall
gained sublime dignity as the medium in which the eternal
divine plan of redemption was wrought out.
Between the revulsion and the ecstasy, Christian theology
seeks a middle course that is yet in touch with both extremes.
The orthodoxy that is to be is the more opposed to the in-
cipient heresies just because it has so much in common with
them. Heresy is mainly and
twofold: excess of revulsion
contempt for the world (leading consistently to despair of
redemption), and excess of sanguine confidence in man's in-
herent capacity for good (depreciating the solemnity of re-
demption). The first type of heresy is Gnostic and Mani-
chean; the second is notably Pelagian. Combating them both
and steering between them is the orthodoxy of St. Augustine.

The Gnostic view of the world as an inverted hierarchy of
divine self-degradation involved not only utter disgust for
material existence but also a condemnation of the self-
outpoured One, and, in good logic, nihilism to cap its pessi-
mism. The Manicheans, combining the Persian dualism of
good and evil with the Greek dualism of God and Matter,
cast serious reflections on the all-primacy and omnipotence
of God, and regarded man, not as the wilful, prodigal son of
God, but rather as the devil-fashioned battleground on which
God and the Devil are contending for dominion. Manichean-
ism took Satan too seriously, it appears, and man's sin and
guilt not seriously enough. Adam, we are told, was created
by Satan in his own image; and although, by depositing
portions of stolen light in the first man for safekeeping, Satan
prepared trouble for himself and made the redemption of man
possible, yet the fact of man's dual nature remained. Man's
wickedness is not wilfully acquired, but is rather inherent
THE CHRISTIAN-MEDIEVAL TRADITION 39
in his material nature as a son of darkness. The salvation of

man demands the releasing of the rays of light from the dark-
ness in which Satan ever seeks to imprison them.
The conflict between light and darkness was conceived by
the Manicheans in crudely materialistic terms and led to some
fantastic conclusions. The light rising from the dismal depths
of the earth towards the sunand moon (radiant reservoirs of
perfection) held
iscaptive by the roots of plants, but bursts
forth notwithstanding in flower and fruit. These the Man-
'
ichean elects' not pluck but, receiving them from the
may
hands of others, should eat them and thus release and speed
the divine light on its upward journey. 5 Meat, however, may
not be eaten at all; for animal life is of the devil. The sexual
propagation of life is likewise the devil's work. So the Mani-
chean ideal of perfection demanded a rigorously limited diet,
withdrawal from the kingdom of darkness, and chastity, or
at any rate avoidance of parenthood.
Both Gnostic and Manichean emphasized mortification of
the body; the ascetic bias which was gaining in the early
Church found in them both strong confirmation. This
ascetic abhorrence of the material was apt to develop into a
studied contempt of material beauty wherever found and
even into a cult of ugliness and filth. Loveliness, attractive-
ness, and all that is pleasant are of the devil. Do we say:
Cleanliness is next to godliness? The hermit thought other-
wise: godliness is marked rather by scorn for the body; the
more famished, the more neglected, the more repulsive and

macerated and vermin-infested the body, the more emphatic
is the expression of the saint's holy contempt for it. So we
are told that Justin Martyr and Tertullian could not tolerate
the idea that Jesus the Lord was handsome to look upon, and
represented him rather as the ugliest of men. St. Augustine
6
finds no special holiness in the ascetic neglect to wash, but he
also, as he urges himself to take food as physic and to resist

the manifold allurements of taste and touch, smell and color
"
and sound, would at times even desire that every air of the
pleasant songs to which David's Psalter was often used be
"
banished, for, "when it happens to me to be more moved by
the singing than by what is sung, I confess myself to have
sinned criminally." 7 To be sure Augustine's good sense
comes to his rescue here, and in general we may say that this
dismal view never quite prevailed; in the course of time
Christian art was to reveal the manifold meaning of the
beauty of holiness; yet the Gnostic and Manichean revulsion
regarding matter expressed something not wholly alien to the
early Christian; it was an extreme form of some real aspects
of the Christian view of life.
Too great emphasis on the inherent evil of our material
nature involved certain moral hazards. 'Human frailty'
was apt to be used as an excuse for dissipation. The doughty
virtue of the British monk Pelagius was outraged by the
cowardly surrender which he found all too common. He
refused to admit that man's will lacked the power to fulfil
what man's duty required. "If I ought, I can." In the name
of liberty hedenounced libertinism. God is just and will
punish us for our evil deeds; our wills could have refrained
from the evil, and we are thus responsible and blameworthy:
so much for the sterner side of the Pelagian doctrine. What
impressed the age of Augustine was the sanguine hope which

it entertained regarding man. Rejecting the teaching that
man is innately corrupt, the Pelagians held that each infant
is in the condition of Adam before the Fall, that man's will

can turn away from evil and choose the good. While Christ
proffers man a grace which was unavailable for Jew or Gentile
prior to his coming, yet the Christian has the power of will
freely to avail himself of this divine assistance. Adam's sin
set a bad example, which the rest of us unhappily have been
only too apt to follow. This example, however, holy men in

all ages have freely resisted, and the blessed counter-example
of Christ can stimulate us all freely to exert our wills and

attain unto salvation. In the life of the Church our capacity
for good is
perfected and the evil example of Adam loses its
influence. Here then was stalwart devotion to virtue, but
also a sanguine view of man 's lot and of his prospects.
St. Augustine attacks Manicheanism all the more vigor-
ously because the heresy had claimed him for about ten years
prior to his conversion; to root it out, therefore, was his first
duty as a laborer in the Lord's vineyard. Holding fast to
God's omnipotence, he rejects all dualism. There can be no
evil power in the universe coordinate with sovereign Deity.
And, since the world is the work of an almighty, all-wise, and
infinitely just and good Creator, no essential flaw in nature
imputable to God can be admitted. All that is positive and
substantial in the universe is and manifests divine perfection.
There is no duality of cosmic principles, nor a duality of souls
in us, nor is the world-process one of self-degradation and
8
self-dissipation of Deity. Evil is nowise substantial in this
world; there is nowhere and at no time an evil nature. Matter
"
is not evil, nor body, nor the flesh: Every nature, as far as
it is nature, is good. Take from waters their thickness
. . .
and muddiness, and pure clear water remains; take from

them the consistence of their parts, and no water will be
left."
9
So with everything else in nature. On a dozen fronts
Augustine maintains this position: that which is called evil
isreally nothing but corruption, perversion of nature. "When
the will abandons the higher, and turns to what is lower,
it becomes evil not because that is evil to which it turns,
but because the turning itself is perverse. Therefore it is
not an inferior thing which has made

the will evil, but it is
itself which has become so by wickedly and inordinately
desiring an inferior thing/'
lo
Not the beast, but wicked man
alone, is beastly; a beast's nature is in man a vice.
11
The will
is made evil by nothing else than a defection from God and
from good, by inordinate and unnatural self-degradation in

the literal sense of the term. Were it unwilling to become so,
the will could not become evil; our sins, being not necessary
but voluntary, are therefore justly punished. 12
There is an optimistic note in this eulogy of uncorrupted
nature and in this libertarian doctrine which Augustine was
compelled later to modify or disavow in order to render his
own maturer views more distinct. While he rejected evil as a
cosmic principle, pronounced all things good in their proper
order, and called evil a corruption and unnatural, his liber-
tarianism and even his optimism were solemn rather than
sanguine. He had defended the cosmos from the dualistic
calumny of the Manicheans; was he now to yield to the
Pelagian-Stoic complacency about sinful human nature? God
forbid! This was to him an equally fatal though opposite
"
abyss of error. Your doctrines are amazing, they are new,
13
they are false." Maintaining against the Manicheans that
all nature is appointed by God, Augustine now turns with
equal resolution to maintain against the Pelagians that in all

14
ages human nature must be sought after as ruined. For,
as it seemed to St. Augustine, Pelagianism not only ignored
light-mindedly the gravity of the evil in which we are em-

broiled, but was flagrantly unchristian. Is man an active
it
contributor to his own salvation, and is grace simply "a

' 7
help towards good living through the inspiring influence

. . .
of a burning and shining charity?" 15 Thus conceived, the

divine plan of redemption loses all solemnity, and indeed
losesmeaning. This cannot be Christianity.
How then is the actuality of evil in this world to be rec-
ognized, and man's ruined state and his utter need of divine
redemption emphasized, without on that account implicating
God as responsible for the evil in the world and disparaging
either his omnipotence or his infinite wisdom or goodness?
The City of God is, among other things, a resolute portrayal

of the wickedness and the countless miseries of our human
estate. "For what flood of eloquence can suffice to detail
the miseries of this life? ... Itsbrevity does not
. . .
clear it of misery; neither ought to be called happiness

it
because it isa brief misery." 16 Evil is here in abundance, in

God's own world, but God is not to blame for Who then
it.
isto blame? The initial defection of from God is

man's will
to blame, is Augustine's answer. If Adam's will had not been
free, his choice would have lacked moral quality. So God
could not deny to Adam the possibility of a good or an evil
choice. "The first man had not that grace by which he should
never will to be evil; but assuredly he had that in which if he
willed to abide he would never be evil, and without which,
moreover, he could not of free choice be good, but which,
17
nevertheless, by free choice he would forsake." In the
exercise of this his freedom man actually made an evil choice,
and in the fatal consequences of this evil choice the whole
human race is involved. God "foreknew what man would do
in unrighteousness; foreknew, however, but did not force
him to this; but at the same time He knew what He
Himself would do in righteousness concerning him." 18 So
God did not compel, but only did not prevent the evil
choice; foreseeing completely what he did not in any way
predetermine, God
justly foreordained the inevitable conse-
quences: consequences utterly and eternally disastrous to
man but for the infinite grace of God. Grace and salvation
God owes to none, yet vouchsafes it: whether to all or only
to some, is a point too long disputed to allow of being main-
tained unflinchingly.
Chapter and verse can be quoted for and against Gibbon's
contention that "the real difference between (Augustine)
and Calvin was invisible even to a theological microscope." 19
Similarly, with regard to Augustine's alleged final demolition
of free will, we may
well keep in mind his protests that it
was not but the Pelagians who demolished free-will by
he,
exaggerating it.
20
By ourselves, we children of Adam can
choose only evil, and we can choose the good only by the
grace of God; enslave ourselves to lust and sin, that we can,
but to liberate ourselves is beyond our power. "If the Son
shall make you ye shall be free indeed." This divine gift
free,
of grace is altogether free; we are not entitled to it, and it is
in no way given according to merit. 21 The holy endeavor of
the elect is itself due to the gift of perseverance. 22 That God
has vouchsafed this gift to some is due to his mercy; that He
has not vouchsafed it to others, is due to his justice; if we
should press the inquiry and ask: But why not to all? St. Au-
gustine would seek refuge in the mystery of God's un-
searchable judgments. 23 God is not a respecter of persons, he
tells
24
us/ and his words have sinister overtones. We should
not relax complacently, nor yet should we despair; for, while
the number kingdom of God is
of those predestined to the
certain and fixed, no one can presume on being certain that
he is on God's blessed list. 25 So, after all, we are to "work
out our own salvation with fear and trembling." 26
God could not deny Adam the possibility of a good or
evil choice. So, in Pfleiderer's summary, "evil is, according
to Augustine, not mere weakness or sensual inclination; it is
the fundamentally perverted direction of our will, which,

instead of finding its centre in the love of God, rather in its
self-love and love of the world deifies the creature, and with-
draws from the Creator the honour which is due to Him:
but a will thus poisoned to the very root by pride and self-
ishness, whose love is turned away from God to the transi-
tory, can bring forth nothing truly good in detail; it is free
to evil only, and destitute of all power for good; even its ap-
parent virtues are in reality only splendid sins; any good it
has can only come to it through God's redeeming grace, as
it isconveyed by the means of grace in the hands of the

Church." 27
This masterpiece of theological ingenuity which, in one
doctrine, emphasizes the actual evil in the world, yet excul-
pates the Creator of the world from any responsibility for
it, but ascribes it rather to man's evil choice, therein also
recognizing God's tragic respect for man's moral freedom:

this theodicy sets its mark on all subsequent Christian
thought, but is itself constituted of elements so incongruous

that Augustine's successors have had to interpret and rein-
terpret and trim and and adjust. St. Augustine looms large
fit
in the thought and Bayle, with whom we shall deal

of Pascal
in our next two chapters, and we shall be content here only
to point out the two Achilles' heels of this so sublime but
also so vulnerable theodicy.
First of all, if we observe the moral tone which Augustine
maintained in ascribing to man responsibility for the evil
which his choice has brought into the world, then that dis-
astrous choice could not be regarded as a matter of unac-
countable chance. It was a choice representative of the
chooser. But in that case, even granting Adam's immediate
responsibility for the particular choice, the more ultimate
question arises whether the Creator is nowise accountable
he had in his creature. The point
for the sort of chooser that
isseen even more sharply if we ask: Was it impossible for
God to create an Adam who could freely choose good as he
did create one who freely chose evil? The dilemma which
would follow the asking of this question is decidedly em-
barrassing to Augustinian orthodoxy. Furthermore, if Adam

deserved the evil consequences of his freely chosen course,
how is it with the rest of us? Can we also, as he hypothetically
could, choose of our own free will either good or evil? But
that alternative would surely betray us into the hands of the
Pelagians. Or are we, as Augustine indeed maintains, utterly
incapable of any good choice of our own, tainted as we are
with the taint of original sin? Then, on this latter supposi-
tion, is the individual damnation of those of us who are not
elected to grace, or at any rate do not attain unto it, a damna-
tion morally justifiable? Are we to suffer eternally as in-
dividuals for a sinful nature for which no free choice of our
own but rather a fatal racial inheritance was responsible?
Should we, in order to evade these difficulties, regard Adam
and his evil choice not as referring to an individual and a
particular event, but as truly representing humanity, then
the same dilemmas simply spread out and cover the larger
canvas: Either the moral freedom, involving the possible
choice of evil or good, is admitted, in which case Pelagianism
meets us at the turn of the road; or else man's allegedly free
will in actuality always chooses evil, in which case the gravity
of the former dilemma, hard enough with the one chooser
Adam, is multiplied a thousandfold. It is hard for original sin

and moral freedom to keep company in the same logical head.
Furthermore the idea that newborn infants were sin-tainted
and therefore bound for hell, so many immortal little vipers,
Jonathan Edwards was to call them, unless redeemed by the
grace of God, particularly if dying unbaptized, suggests some
of the moral enormities confronting this type of theology.
Augustine recognizes that no explicit individual wickedness

can be imputed to infants, yet he observes them as "they
cry and strugglewhen they are baptized, and feel the sacred
M "
elements, and in his Confessions he solemnly chronicles
his own sundry childish "sins." At any rate he is bound to
regard all children as tainted with original sin; they have

no merit that entitles them to grace; and the best prospect
he sees for such infants as quit the body without being bap-
29
tized is "condemnation, but of the mildest character."
Later theology was, still more moderately, to accept the
parental intention to baptize a child as a substitute for the
actual rite. St. Bonaventura, in advocating a more consoling
doctrine regarding the destiny of unbaptized infants than

that of Augustine, maintains that in opposing the Pelagians,
and "in order to lead them the more surely to the true middle
position,(Augustine) pressed himself to the opposite ex-
treme/' further than his own doctrine really required. 30
Regarding the redeeming virtues of baptism, the African
Christians in Augustine's own native country seem to have
entertained some strange views. Believing sins committed
after baptism to be doubly heinous, they were inclined to
postpone the cleansing rite for their young people until after
they had sown their wild oats; at the same time they worried
lest a youth should die suddenly without being baptized.
Monica, St. Augustine's mother, in planning her son's bap-
tism, seems to have been torn between these two motives.
The idea of an evil worldly state brought about by man's
wilful selfishness, and the consequent advocacy of the re-
jection of worldliness and the denial of self as essentials of

godliness, characterize the medieval conception of life. From
a multitude of available examples, I select three for brief
consideration: the tractate De Contempts Mundi, sive De
Miseria Conditionis Humanae by Pope Innocent III, some
illustrations from the philosophy of St. Thomas, and Thomas
& Kempis' Imitation of Christ: a prince of the Church, a
master-theologian, a saintly mystic.
II
In January, 1198, a conclave of twenty-eight cardinals in

the monastery of Septa Solis Clivisauri were electing a suc-
cessor to Pope Celestine III. During the conclave three
doves hovered above the forty-year-old Cardinal Lothario
de' Conti and, so the story goes, the whitest of them de-
scended sanctispiritually upon his head as he was elected
31
Supreme Pontiff. For the next eighteen years, as Pope
Innocent III, Lothario de' Conti was to prove himself a
matchless champion of Papal authority and, as a chronicler
has it, was to hold the lordship over the Roman Empire and
over the kings and princes of the whole world. Doubly
all
significant it is, therefore, that in his younger days this future

pontificalBismarck piously expected of himself and secured
and recorded the dismal reflections on life to which he gave
definite form during his temporary eclipse while Celestine
the Third was Pope.
This work, De Contemptu Mundi, sive De Miseria Condi"
tionis Humanae^ is a most laborious essay in pious disdain
and disgust of human Quoting Job and Ecclesiastes
life.
at every turn, and supplying them with copious footnotes,

the future maker and unmaker of emperors undertakes to
show compendiously and most minutely the pitiful vanity,
worthlessness, and loathsomeness of man's existence. Some
is piously filthy and is scarcely printable in an
of this writing
unanointed book like mine. My brief report of this treatise
can do very scant justice to this nausea of malediction which
medieval saintliness was so apt to approve in itself, but it
should serve to call it, which seems important.
attention to
I shall simply quote and paraphrase, without comment or
criticism and with at least partial apologies to modern taste.
Consider the origin, the course, the conclusion of a man's
life. "Man is made of dust, of mud, of ashes; worse yet, of
the foulest seed; conceived in the itch of the flesh, in the heat
of passion, in the stench of lust; and worse, in the depths of
sin; born to labor, to dolor, to horror; more miserable still,

to death. He
acts wickedly, offending God, offending his
neighbor, offending himself; he acts infamously, polluting
fame, polluting conscience, polluting character; he acts
vainly, neglecting the serious, neglecting the useful, neglect-
ing the necessary. He is food for fire ever blazing and burning
unquenched; food for worms, ever gnawing and eating with-
out end; a mass of putrescence, ever noisome and horribly

83
foul."
"Planets and stars He made of fire; breeze and wind He
made of air; fishes and worms He made of water; men and
beasts He made of earth." Adam, at any rate, "was made of
earth, but of pure earth; you, to be sure, were procreated by
seed, but impure." And from his very conception man's
nourishment is unspeakably vile. Besides, what a despicable
sight infants are: "weeping, weaklings, imbecilic, not so very
different from the brutes; indeed in many ways worse off than
the brutes." And the mother's pitiful life: "she conceives
with nastiness and stench, gives birth with gloominess and
dolor, nurses with scantiness and labor, keeps watch with
tirelessness and horror." (The worldly pleasure and pride
which the writing of this and similar passages brought the
rhetorician must have caused the pious Cardinal pangs of
34
conscience; but he kept the rhetoric just the same.)
"By their fruits you shall know them/' and what is the
fruit that man bears? "0 base unworthiness of man's estate,
unworthy estate of man's baseness! Examine plants and

trees. They bring forth flowers, foliage, and fruit; and you
alas, bring forth nits and lice and worms. They exude oil,
wine, balsam, and you, spittle, urine, and ordure; they diffuse
the sweetness of fragrance and you give out abominable
stench." Our life is brief; "few nowadays get to forty," and
an old man's lot is deplorable throughout: "His heart is
steadily afflicted, and his head impaired, the breathing
grows heavy and the breath is fetid, the face is wrinkled and
the stature curved, the eyes grow dim, and the members
unsteady, the nose runs, and the hair falls out, the hands
tremble and action slows down, the teeth decay and the
ears are dulled. The old man is easily provoked, but slow
to recover, quick to believe and slowly disillusioned, stub-
born and greedy, sad and querulous, quick to speak, slow to
listen,but not slow to anger, he praises the ancients, spurns
the moderns, vituperates against the present, commends the
past, sighs and worries, stupid and infirm." 35
In whatever work one may engage, it is all strain, pettiness,
and vexation. The vigils of learning are unavailing: " Indeed
whoso understands more, doubts more: .Thus the role
. .
of knowledge is to know that one does not know." Expatiat-
ing on Ecclesiastes, Cardinal Lothario surveys the thousand-

fold ambitions and enterprises of men, in pursuit of mastery
over nature, over each other, in quest of wealth, power,
honor, and finds it all vain anxiety and a striving after
wind profitless care, fear, and solicitude, abhorrent through-
:
out. Pair by pair he examines men in successive chapters:

poor and rich, servants and masters, married and single,
bad and good: the conclusion is ever dismal. Surveying the
enemies which surround and infest us, a catalogue of ferocious
beasts and noxious insects is cited. And man's own body is
"
his enemy and prison: Nowhere quiet and tranquillity, no-
where peace nor security, everywhere fear and tremor,
everywhere labor and dolor." Not even sleep brings us solace,
for then the terrors of dream-visions assail us. Brief and
exceptional is happiness, and brief our life, and death is ever
at the threshold. Tortured as we are by our own woes, we

have also to share the miseries of those we love. And to the
miseries of nature, man-made and punishments
miseries
must be added: "Men and slain with
are beaten with clubs
swords, burned in flames and buried under stones, they are
torn to pieces with claws and forced into fork-shaped yokes,
tortured by tigers, and scourged with scorpions, bound with
chains and strangled with nooses, thrust into prisons and
emaciated with hunger, thrown from cliffs and submerged in
36
water, flayed, cut up, and stabbed."
\The Cardinal then surveys, in the second book of his
tractate, the many vices and vanities of human character:
"greed and avarice, gluttony and lust, pride and ostenta-

" 87
tion. Men worship riches and sell their souls for it; men
cringe before wealth and power, and the poor are trampled
and despised; men and their cupidity is
traffic in injustice,
insatiate. Gluttony and drunkenness and lust are minutely

classified and described by Cardinal Lothario, and he abhors
them the more explicitly as a result of his close survey.
Arrogance, vanity, and ambition are shown to consume the
lives of men, but the expected wine of attainment proves
to be stale dust and ashes in the drinking, as the later Pope
Innocent III doubtless experienced more than once.
The third book opens with a prelude of disgust: "How foul
the father, how base the mother, how abominable the sister!
Man is conceived indeed of blood putrefied by the heat of
lust. . . . While alive he generated lice and worms, when
dead he will generate worms and flies; alive, he gave forth
ordure and vomit; dead, he will yield putridity and stench;
alive, he fattened a single man; dead, he will fatten many
worms. For what is more fetid than a human cadaver, what
more horrible than a dead man? " The third book is devoted
to the elaborate portrayal of the torments of the damned,
and so requires no further notice, for we have Dante. Here
again Cardinal Lothario, piously aghast though he is at the
sinners' prospects, yet obviously enjoys the jingling rhetoric
of his portrayal of hell: "Groaning and wailing, mourning
and torture, hissing and crying, fear and tremor, dolor and
labor, ardor and stench, obscurity and anxiety, acerbity and
asperity, calamity and indigence, distress and grief, oblivion
and confusion, griping and pricking pains, bitternesses and
terrors, hunger and thirst, chills and fever, brimstone and
flaming fire forever and ever." And then, his rhetorical essay
in contempt and disgust finished, the Cardinal ends on the
expected orthodox note: "From all of which may God de-

liver us, Who is blessed forever and ever. Amen." 38
III
Augustine's theology impressed a Platonic cast on

St.
early medieval thought; the thirteenth century registered

the ascendency of Dominican Aristotelianism; and the phi-
losophy of the Church has sought to combine the two strains.
These two traditions, the Augustinian and the Thomistic,
just as their Hellenic prototypes, share common ground but
differ in what they select for special cultivation and emphasis.
Each one " endeavors to satisfy the legitimate demands which
it is the proper function of the other to uphold/' 39 The
higher naturalism of Aristotle, as interpreted by St. Thomas,
is not wholly untouched by that saintly wistfulness in this
mortal world which so distinguished Augustinian Platonism.

St. Thomas in the end likewise takes his refug6 in God and in
God's grace. But, while he does not deny man's ultimate
main concern
insufficiency, his is to realize and to make good
the truth (which, as we have seen, is nowise foreign to St.
Augustine) that vice is a perversion of human nature, that
man's true being, capacity, and destiny are in the line of
rationality and virtue. Without God, man is lost and of no
avail whatever, but in reaching after God, man reaches after
and attains unto the fulness of his own true and character-
istic nature.
Thus while St. Thomas is no more sanguine than St.
Augustine regarding man's arduous rise to perfection, he is

more concerned to accentuate the naturalness of virtue to
man, as involving his completion and fulfilment. We may in
fair Aristotelian manner define good generally as the ade-
quate performance of a being's characteristic function. Man's
virtue then is nothing foreign grafted onto man, no append-
age, but rather his unfoldment: our good concerns "that
which we ought to be, because of what we are." 40 This
teleological conception of moral value is central in Thomistic
Aristotelianism. A man's good is in the attainment of his
end signalizing the fulfilment of his nature. The perfect

achievement of this end and nature is the Highest Good;
each step in the direction of this Highest Good is a step in
virtue; each halting or deviation or retrogression is vice.
With Aristotle, Aquinas regards reason as man's distinctive
faculty. Directed by reason, our will follows the high road to
perfection; lured by unregulated or unbalanced appetites and
passions, we goastray. And here the thirteenth century
theologian proceeds in a more distinctively Catholic manner.
Man's perfect goal and complete happiness is in the vision
of the Divine Essence. 41 Intelligent recognition and active
espousal of the divine order characterizes the rational will of
the saint; but when man turns away from this pious partici-
pation in God's order, turns from goods imperishable to goods
that perish, a corruption and a destruction of the soul sets
in, and a grievous betrayal and disloyalty. This is sin. The
essence of evil is always the turning away from the divine
imperishable good; the gravity of sin is measured in respect
of this turning away, and the gravity of malice in sins de-
pends upon the difference of objects that are thus pursued in

preference to the divine vision. "From the very fact that
man turns unduly to some mutable good, it follows that he
turns away from the immutable Good, which aversion com-
7 ' 42
pletes the nature of evil.
Alone among all creaturesman is not
a passive instrument
in the Creator's hands. He can turnaside from the path
that leads to God, can reject and frustrate the divine fruition
of his own nature; by refusing freely to identify himself with
the divine order of reason, he can pervert and destroy his
nature in sin. Hence his solemn responsibility, hence also
his blessed opportunity in this life, to prove himself worthy
of his high calling. This Aristotelian positive estimate of
man's nature and this consistent emphasis on reason, human
and divine, do not rely on mere authority and fiat, nor dis-
miss our finite scale of values as irrelevant to Deity. This
position does not involve anthropomorphic nai'vet6 in dealing
with God. A
universe necessarily involves a hierarchy of
created being, from the less to the more adequate approach
to divine perfection. This hierarchy is grounded in Reason,
Reason which we express inadequately in our nature, but to
which our own reason is not alien or indifferent. The evil
in this world is one result of this gradation of created things;
it makes alternative courses available for the will, to rise or
to fall in the cosmic scale: thus we get realization through
enhancement of being (good) or destruction through corrup-
tion, deformity, or privation (evil). The rise and the fall
both exhibit the consistent rationality of the system in which

we are active: a system of opportunity and a system of law
and justice. " Evil is evil but that there is evil, that is a good,
;
not always in respect to the subject in whom the evil is, but
in any case in respect of the whole: considering only the total
43
order and its ultimate effects/' Compared with God's
perfection, ours naught, but our perfection is real and
is
exalted compared with the depths of unattainment from

which we emerge and the abysses of corruption to which we
can sink. " The maximum and the minimum, the best and the
worst, are the two aspects of the real; optimism and pessi-
mism enfold each other:" created being ever falls infinitely
short of God's infinite perfection, but in its limited way it
ever does reflect and realize the divine. 44

would be interesting to speculate what the course of
It
modern spiritual culture would have been had this Higher
Naturalism and Humanism of St. Thomas' philosophy taken
full possession of the European soul, and had that Renais-
sance of which M. Gilson finds the true beginnings in the

46
thirteenth century come to full self-realization unopposed.
But normal development was disturbed by the Scotist
this
attack on Thomistic rationalism. St. Thomas had held this
world the best possible because Divine Reason originated,

sustained, and directed it, and he regarded our reason as
reliable even though insufficient and only propaedeutic to
faith. This pious rationalism Duns Scotus rejected and
championed in its place God's perfectly free and unfathom-
able will. Good, evil, the whole range of values, in so far as
they had ultimate status, had their source and ground in

divine fiat. This Scotist invasion, although undertaken in
the interests of unquestioning, pious faith, actually served to
stimulate scepticism and impiety. The attempted banish-
ment of reason from theology raised the number and the de-
termination of those who, thus compelled to part company with
theology, devoted themselves to the secular pursuit of truth.
Thus the elements for a new culture and a new type of
evaluation were at hand. Uncertain that his truth, his beauty,
his goodness, his justice availed ultimately or indeed meant
anything to God, the Renaissance man was tortured with

scepticism, or else, his spiritual vigor poisoned by sophistries,
he easily disdained all principle and gave way to unrestrained
impulse and passion; or yet again, though humiliated in his
logic, and his values distrusted and discounted On High, the
secular mind refused to surrender or submit, but undertook
to build from the ground up and in this his world and life to
attain and validate truth, recognize and vindicate supreme
values. The Renaissance which started and might have con-
tinued under the aegis of the Church was increasingly forced
to recognize itself as explicitly secular and to proceed on in-
dependent lines.
IV
Thomas & Kempis lived in an age of political, ecclesiastic,
and intellectual turmoil and seething But monastic
revolt.
withdrawal claimed him entire: he lived in the light of his
"
highest wisdom; by contempt of the. world to tend towards
the kingdom of heaven/' This wisdom is not to be attained
by much learning; he would " rather feel compunction than
"
understand the meaning thereof. It is gained only by in-
timate communion with God: "Let all doctors hold their
peace; let all creatures be silent in Thy sight; speak Thou
alone unto me." *
This world and this life he regards as of no worth; quite
unlike the pious rhetoric of Cardinal Lothario de' Conti is
the heart-gripping sincerity of the Imitation of Christ: "Here
a man is defiled with many sins, ensnared with many pas-
sions, held fast by many fears, racked with many cares, dis-
tracted with many curiosities, entangled with many vanities,
compassed about with many errors, worn away with many
labours, burdened with temptations, enervated by pleasures,
tormented with want. Woe be to them that know not
. . .
their own misery; and a greater woe to them that love this
miserable and corruptible life! Learn to despise out-
. . .
ward things, and to give thyself to things inward, and thou

shalt perceive the Kingdom of God to come in thee. . . ."
47
Sin and misery have the same source: in the inclination of the
heart to turn fromGod and attach itself to inferior things. 48
The miserable worldly life is a life of self and of the lusts
of self. He who would find peace in God must first "forsake
himself and go wholly from himself," sec himself for what

he is, a most vile worm, poor and contemptible, a wretched
creature, imprisoned and loaded with fetters, nothing and
less than nothing. 49 When the soul, thus scorning itself and
its world, casts itself in utter self-surrendering humility be-
fore God, then, in familiar converse with Jesus, all becomes
well, all wounds are healed, nothing is burdensome any more
or difficult, and man welcomes all with a smile.
Thomas & Kempis has his moments of depression he needs ;
the sustaining thought of the life hereafter to steel his world-

"
scorning and self-suppressing resolution: Write, read, chant,
mourn, keep silence, pray, endure crosses manfully; life ever-

lasting is worth all these conflicts, and greater than these."
But it is not likely that he constantly required this encour-

agement; the life of self-renunciation is for him one of in-
"
trinsic blessedness: If I be left to myself, behold! I become
nothing but mere weakness; but if Thou for an instant look

upon me, I am forthwith made strong, and am filled with
new joy."
50
Against this gospel of utter effacement and contempt of

self and complete self-sinking in God, is the view of life so
characteristic of the Renaissance: a lyric, self -exploring, in-
man and man's world, trust-
trospective attitude, exalting
ing man's thought and man's experience: a philosophy of
humanism, naturalism, eager, reliant, but also infested with
doubts and uncertainties. The early modern philosophy,
discarding alike the negations of world-scorning piety and
the naive sanguine conceit of unregenerate man, raises the
questions of the cosmic status of man and of man's values.
It be rhapsodically optimistic about the cosmos, as in
may
the pantheism of Giordano Bruno, and heroically tragic
about truth-loving man; or it may be placidly sceptical, as
in Montaigne's Essays; or again, as in the Thoughts of Pascal,
it may plumb tragic depths of despair born of devotion-in-
uncertainty. Meanwhile a little-known little book reflects
so vividly the Renaissance attitude towards life in its manifold
aspects and the Renaissance estimate of human nature and
its alleged perfections, that a brief mention of it may perhaps
serve well to close this introductory survey of the problem

of evil in ancient and medieval thought.
An ironical observer of man and his perfections is Giovan

Batista Gelli (1498-1563), Florentine academician under
Cosimo dei Medici and early master of Tuscan prose. His
Circe is cleverly conceived for his purpose. Restless in the
company of the enchantress, Ulysses is anxious to leave her
island and sail forIthaca, but he also desires to restore to
human shape the Greeks whom she had transformed into
diverse animals and take them with him. Circe complies
with his request on the condition that he ask this favor only
for those who desire it. Thereupon follow ten dialogues in
which Ulysses makes his offer to his former compatriots, now
various beasts on the island. One after another they refuse
him, without hesitation and not without reasons. Oyster and
mole and serpent, hare and goat, hind and lion, horse, dog,
and steer stoutly maintain that man is an arrogant wretch,
of all creatures the most neglected by nature, afflicted with
more wants and diseases, corrupted and evil beyond all
others, spurred by more vain desires and more discontented
"
than any of them. After supper," the oyster tells Ulysses,
"it is my method to shut up, and compose myself to rest,
without leaving room for so much as one uneasy reflection,
which is more than the wisest among you can often boast
of." 51 Such oyster-bliss Ulysses clearly cannot match.
Man's alleged superiorities the beasts disdain as useless to
themselves: the mole needs no eyes, nor the oyster ears or
feet, any more than man should want a pair of wings, so
we are informed! nor is reason required or desired by hind
or goat. Their equipment is amply adequate for their station
in life, which more

is than man can say for himself. So they
are contented and he is miserable: reason enough why they
all bless their present lot and flatly refuse to be restored to
human shape. The horse expresses his convictions on the

subject concisely:"As I am, I find fewer things to hinder
me from enjoying my ease, and from attaining that perfec-
tion and end which is agreeable to my kind and nature;
whereas when I was a man, I came very short of doing the
duties of a man." "The sole superiority Man could reason-
" M
ably boast of," Ulysses is told, is a preeminence in misery."
Precisely this animal contentment disgusts the ever-forward-
reaching Ulysses. Tennyson's lines come to mind:
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
"Would you believe it!" he complains to Circe after his

conference with the Hare, "he was naturally of so base a
spirit, and so averse to any little trouble, that he rather chose
most abject slavery, void of care, than to enjoy
to live in the
the most honourable post, merely because men seemed
. . .
53
to him to be subject to some trouble:"
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Ulysses is about to sail away in disgust, when an elephant

who had once been a philosopher, Aglaophemus, expresses
himself as open to conviction, and asks Ulysses to state his
arguments in favor of human superiority as clearly as he
can. The former Aglaophemus has retained his philosophical
openmindedness; the desired knowledge Ulysses readily un-
dertakes to supply. In good Platonic manner he convinces
the elephant that the intellect is a more certain and perfect
source of truth than the senses, more reliable than imagina-
tion, nobler than sagacity, that as man is thus by virtue of
his understanding alone capable of real universal knowledge,
so likewise by his will he can choose or reject what his under-
standing judges to be right or wrong, proceeding not as
appetite spurs but as reason directs him. Thus he alone in
nature can aspire to virtue and eschew vice. Unique and
noble is therefore man's destiny, quite unlike that of the
beasts. "Man, by having his choice free, can attain an end
more or less worthy as he thinks fit, by letting himself down
to creatures much below him, or by emulating those as much
above. He that elevates himself no higher than the earth
on which he grows, will become a mere vegetable; and he
that abandons himself to sensual pleasures will degenerate
into a brute. Whilst he that looks with an eye of reason on
the glories of the heavens, and contemplates the stupendous
regularity of Nature, will change the earthly into a celestial
creature; but he that dares soar above the gross impediments
of flesh, to converse with divine objects, will become little
less than a God. Who therefore can look without astonish-
ment on man, not only the most noble, and the sovereign
among animals, but who has this peculiar privilege indulged
him by Nature, that he may make himself what he will? " 64
The elephant, convinced, resumes joyously his former
human shape and role of Aglaophemus and sails with Ulysses.
The reasoning of Ulysses throughout is inspired by Florentine
Platonism, but Gelli's beasts are keenly observant in their
satiricalaccounts of man, and the book discloses both the
exalted and the sardonic moods of the Renaissance mind.
CHAPTER III
PASCAL'S DESPAIR OF REASON

I
In the knowledge of truth is man's hope of freedom, and

our whole dignity and worth are in our thought; yet thought
is also the first source of our misery; it yokes us to plough in
the marshes of doubt. He that increaseth knowledge in-

creaseth sorrow, sighed Ecclesiastes, and the primitive wis-
dom of Israel had already passed judgment on intelligence
in the old story of the Fall of Man. What banished Adam
and Eve from Paradise? Eating of the tree of knowledge
of good and evil.^ Profoundly significant is this Hebrew recog-
nition that man's first woes were due to his inability to check
his inquiring turn of mind. Dove, Iamb, and sheep remained
blissfully in Eden: they had not been moved to eat of the

tree of knowledge.
Whether it be owing to our intelligence, or to our insuffi-
ciency of it, many of us pass from pious innocence in child-
hood to unsettled, unbelieving youth, and to half-believing
or indifferent gray maturity, often wistfully recalling the
green days of whole-hearted trust. It was not by this road
that, in his brief span of thirty-nine years, Blaise Pascal
reached the evening twilight of defiant faith and finality. His
mind's history had proceeded on an entirely unconventional
schedule. How amazingly unconventional, let Chateaubriand
"
tell us in his Genie du Christianisme: There was a man
l
who at the age of twelve, with bars and rings, created mathe-
matics; who at sixteen wrote the most learned treatise on
conic sections produced since antiquity; who at nineteen
61
reduced to a machine a science existing wholly in the under-
standing; who at twenty-three demonstrated the phenomena
of air-pressure and destroyed one
of the great errors of an-
cient physics; at this age when other men are barely
who
born, having covered the round of human knowledge, per-
ceived its nothingness and turned his thoughts to religion;
who from that moment until his death, in his thirty-ninth
and suffering all the time, fixed the language spoken
year, sick
by Bossuet and Racine, gave the model of the most perfect
pleasantry and of the most vigorous reasoning; who finally,
in the brief intervals between his ills, solved abstractly one
of the highest problems of geometry and jotted on paper
thoughts which partake as much of the Divine as of the
human: this terrible genius was called Blaise Pascal"
The early training of this amazing mind was calculated
least of all to encourage sceptical tendencies, but rather to
develop the self-assurance of the intellect. Etienne Pascal,

himself a savant and mathematician of note, made the edu-
cation of his son Blaise his main concern and his
in life,
deliberate aim was consistently to keep the youth above and

ahead of his task. The boy should undertake no problem
likely to overtax or baffle his abilities. This was to be no
overfed infant prodigy: he was not to study Latin or Greek
until he was twelve, nor mathematics before fifteen. His
whole education was intended progressively to lead him, self-
assured and confident in the powers of his mind, to more and
more difficult problems. This complacent gait Blaise would
not follow; learning that geometry had to do with lines and
circles, bars and rings, he reinvented Euclid at the age of
twelve, wrecked his father's pedagogy, and joined the elder
Pascal's own scientific society.
In this very early and vigorous mental life, religion seems
to have played no part. The father was no freethinker, nor
the family as a whole in any way lax; but while altogether
PASCAL'S DESPAIR OF REASON 63
conformist and reverent, fitienne Pascal kept his faith and

his scienceon genial neighborly terms. To the young math-
ematical genius, religion came incidentally and, as it were,
in its place: it did not dominate his daily life as it did not
disturb overmuch that of his father. It was later, at an age
when vigilant minds begin to worry lest they lose their faith,
that Pascal first really found faith as a dominant force in his
own life. The Pascals were then living in Rouen, where the
father was a high official. In January, 1646, while on his way
to stop a duel, fitienne Pascal slipped on the ice and frac-
tured a leg. The two medicos who attended him must have
been versed in curing both soul and body, for by the time the
broken leg was healed, the entire Pascal family was con-
verted to the intense Augustinian Catholicism which Corne-
lius Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, had championed and of
which the Abbey of Port Royal, under the guidance of
St. Cyran, was the living heart.
If heretofore science and worldliness had marked the life
of the Pascals, henceforth devotion to God and his grace
were to claim them all: father, son, two daughters. From this
time forth the d6butante Jacqueline was bound for the
cloister; her married sister Gilberte was to live a life of the
most rigorous piety; the father's closing years were aglow
with Jansenist enthusiasm. The intensity of Blaise Pascal's
devotion fluctuated, but if he had lapses of worldliness, the
return was to a piety doubly profound. One does Pascal an
injustice in attributing his religiosity to his ill health. Ill
health and the compulsory relaxation ordered by his physician

sent him into the gay life of society, but he turned from it to
experience a second conversion, soul-consuming and irrevoca-
ble. From that Monday night in November, 1654, until his
death in 1662, Pascal was a warrior for the faith.
The citadel which he defended was a citadel besieged;
Jansenism was under the cloud of heresy. The invalid genius
whose youth had written new chapters in the history of
science was now destined to write masterpieces of religious
controversy, the Provincial Letters in which he champions
St. Augustine and Port Royal against the Pelagianism, the
casuistry, and the worldliness of the Jesuits.

The main issue between Jansenist and Jesuit is all impor-
tant: it concerns the doctrine of grace and the salvation of
man. 2 Does man's free will contribute to his own salvation;
is salvation in any sense whatever earned by man or is it
altogether a free gift of God? This problem is not exclusively

Christian. The Hindu observes a little kitten in dire peril;
the mother cat seizes it by the nape of the neck and carries
it, limp and helpless, to safety. But see the baby monkey
similarly snatched from danger: the old monkey does her
best for but the little one also scrambles away for all it is
it,
worth. Which of these two is the better analogy of man's

salvation by God? Hindu theologians argued ardently over
the cat-hold and the monkey-hold theory.
The first essential of a religion of salvation is the recogni-
tion of the utter sinf ulness of man attenuate or explain away
;
the actuality of evil, says the orthodox theologian, and you

deny the religion of Christ, the Saviour of men. The whole
scheme of salvation implies man's dire need of it. If man can
save himself, what need of the Redeemer? So man cannot
save himself because he is born in sin. Salvation then is a free
gift of God to man, a gift which God does not owe to anyone.
Shall we add: a gift which God does not grant to all? Unless
we do, hell is likely to lose its salutary terrors; if we do add
it, we open the door to a pack of vicious problems. Here,
as we have observed already, the Church has traditionally
leaned on St. Augustine's doctrine of grace against the dual-
istic heresy of the Manichean, which treats evil as coeval
and coordinate with good, and likewise against the Pelagian

heresy which is ambiguous and negligent of the fatal reality
of eviland which regards man as actively contributing to

his own
salvation. St. Augustine's position is presumably
orthodox, but what is the true Augustinian doctrine? Surely,

we are told, it is not the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.
According to Calvin, as Catholics understood him, man,
tainted from birth with original sin, is bound for hell ever-
lasting. But some men God predestines to salvation. A soul
thus elected to grace is saved, justified, and sanctified by
the free gift of God. God, then, predestines some men to
heaven, others to hell, without any prevision of their sins
and irrespective of repentance or merit on their part.
Against Calvinism uprise the followers of Molina, a Span-
ish Jesuit who in 1588 espoused a doctrine of salvation de-
cidedly Pelagian. God has conditionally willed to save all,

but upon man's actually availing himself of this sufficing
grace freely bestowed by the Redeemer depends the effective-
ness of the grace to save. And even when the saving grace is
withdrawn, man still retains the power to reach after and
regain it. This Jesuit view was abhorrent to Pascal: it
rejected St. Augustine's truth along with Calvin's heresy.

Whereas Calvin makes God's will the absolute author alike
ofman's salvation and of his damnation, the Jesuit doctrine
makes both proceed essentially from the will of men.
A third position that of the Dominicans, followers of
is
St. Thomas. If all men are burdened with sin, all are ac-
corded the gift of grace through Christ's death. This grace
does not save and sanctify man, but it does open our eyes to
see good and evil, it makes us capable of choosing the one or
the other. rejection of this gift of God will
But while our
damn us, our acceptance of the gift is not sufficient for sal-
vation. For saintliness and eternal bliss, God gives to the
elect souls a second grace, free, irresistible, grdce efficace. So
long as God thus sustains the soul of the elect, it is saintly.
Should the hand of God be withdrawn, there remains to the
soul a power strong enough to fulfill God's commandments,
but not strong enough to save.
The fourth doctrine of grace is the doctrine of St. Augus-
tine as interpreted by the Jansenists. This is the doctrine
defended by Pascal. Adam's free choice of evil has tainted
allmankind with original sin, and God with perfect justice
could havedamned us everyone. But in his all pure and free
mercy God has elected some to grace. To some the grace of
God has not been accorded at all; others God has willed to
redeem and has given them grace which would have led them
to heaven had they also been given the singular grace of per-
severance, without which one cannot attain unto saintliness;
to still others, blessed souls, God has accorded grace certain
and infallible. Let each man believe, but believe with trem-
bling, that he is among the elect; let him not judge that any-
one, be he the most evil and impious, is among the damned
so long as one breath of life remains. Man's free will brought
evil into the world; God wills the damnation of the wicked
conditionally and by prevision; the salvation of the elect

souls God wills absolutely.
A dispute among theologians is apt to become arid and
abstruse. Back of this trio of Catholic doctrines, Molinist,
Neo-Thomist, Jansenist, we find two heresies in conflict:
on the one hand, the heresy of pagan self-reliance, Pelagi-
anism man in a measure saves himself and receives grace as
:
he deserves it; on the other, the heresy of fatalist predesti-

nation, which casts aside human will and responsibility as of
no avail whatever, and regards Jesus Christ as having died
not for all, but only for the elect. There is covert Pelagian-
ism in the doctrine of Molina; the Dominicans had attacked
it at Rome, and only a papal interdict of discussion prevented
a cleavage. It is against this Neo-Pelagianism of the Jes-

uits thatBishop Jansenius of Ypres wrote his learned folio,
Augustinus; and it was only natural that the Jesuits should
reply by charging the Jansenists of Port Royal with Calvinist

fatalism. The Provinciates exhibit with keen irony the dubi-
ous position of the Dominican followers of St. Thomas in this
conflict. In more substantial agreement with Jansenius than
with Molina, they were yet in verbal agreement with the
latter, owing perhaps to the Jesuit dexterous manipulation
of traditional formulas of orthodoxy. To open the eyes of
the Thomists to the real beneath the verbal issue and to win
them to the support of JansenistAugustiniamsm and so pre-
vent the threatened anathema, was Arnauld's hope; it was
also Pascal's immediate object in writing the Provinciates.
From this immediate issue over the doctrine of grace,
Pascal is led to attack the Jesuits on a larger front. The self-
reliance of the Molinist view of salvation is typical of the
laxity and worldliness of Jesuit morality. Resting on the
learning of Arnauld and Nicole, and seasoning the intensity
and severity of Port Royal with supreme controversial wit,
Pascal lays bare, in a series of immortal letters, the unchris-
tian compromise of the Jesuit with the powers of evil, Jesuit
complacence, Jesuit pride and arrogance, Jesuit diplomacy
and duplicity, Jesuit worldliness. Against Escobar's twenty-
four new-fashioned church fathers, Pascal pleads for the old
Augustinian faith, a faith from the world apart, a faith
humble, vigilant, fearful, relying never on self but ever lean-
ing on God and on Christ.
The
Provinciates did not accomplish their immediate aim:
the Dominicans did not turn from Molina to Jansenius, .and
Port Royal was condemned, for, as Pascal grimly observed,
it was easier to bring more monks to vote against Port Royal
than to bring arguments against it. But the brilliant attack
on Jesuit unchristian laxity dealt the society of Loyola a blow
from which it never recovered: as Sainte-Beuve observes, 3
Pascal destroyed forever Jesuit dominance in the govern-
ment of the world.
I have not taken this time to discuss the Jansenist contro-
versies of Pascal simply owing to the dialectic lure of the
Provinciates, though that itself were reason enough. The
Provinciates are in a sense propaedeutic to the Pens6es. Against
Molina's Pelagianism, Pascal was defending the Augustinian
Christianity of Jansenius; but what real assurance did he
have that any of these second- and third-hand alleged versions
of the truth were themselves true? Was he right about Jan-
senius, or Jansenius about Augustine, or Augustine about
Christianity, and what certainty availed of the truth of
Christianity itself? The Jesuit could well lean back in his

chair and quote his twenty-four doctors, himself being the
twenty-fifth as occasion demanded. The Jesuit was not
wedded to truth; he distinctly abdicated verity for proba-
bility. Would Pascal quote St. Augustine, St. Chrysostom,
St. Ambrose, St. Jerome? The Jesuit father had Escobar's
armory: Fernandez, Martinez, Suarez, Henriquez, Vasquez,

Lopez, Gomez, Sanchez, and twice as many more. They
didn't agree with each other, but what of it? If you would
murder, here is Lessius to suit you; if not, there stands Vas-
4
quez on your side. One needs many guides if one plans to
travel many roads. But Pascal would travel the one single
road of truth, truth absolute and incontrovertible. Proba-
bilism and casuistry he found intellectually intolerable and
morally detestable. It is not merely that Escobar's twenty-

four doctors contradict each other; if he maintains against
them all the cause of Augustine, Pascal is not simply pitting
authority against authority, one lion against twenty-four
asses. Pascal is not essentially a dogmatic theologian, and
mere authority counts with him nothing at all. His ortho-
doxy is the orthodoxy of truth, not the orthodoxy of papal
bulls. Nor is he overwhelmed by numbers nor by power. To
the Jesuit fathers he declares nobly in the closing words of
the Twelfth Provincial: "You believe you have force and
impunity on your but on my side I believe I have truth

side;
and innocence. . Truth lasts forever and triumphs over
. .
its enemies, for it is eternal and mighty like God himself."
On questions of fact he would not submit to Rome, and one

cannot be sure that on questions of faith also he might not be
ready to look beyond the Sorbonne and the Vatican. Pas-
cal's early life had not been devoted in vain to scientific
work fact is fact for him, and truth, truth. He does not need
:
Innocent the Tenth or the Seventh Alexander to tell him

whether a certain doctrine is or is not to be found in the folio
of Bishop Jansenius. He would repeat Galileo's words to the
Inquisition, which had extracted a recantation from him re-

garding the movement of the earth: "It moves just the
same!" Whether the earth moves or stands still is a question
of fact, not of papal pronouncement. He would not turn from
Arnauld to Escobar, or from Augustine to Molina simply
because a Pope in Rome decreed that he do so. "If my let-
condemned in Rome, that which I condemn in them is
ters are
condemned in heaven." Beyond the Sorbonne and the Vati-
can he looks to the eternal source and ground of all truth.
"Lord Jesus, I appeal to your tribunal!" 5
This then is the thorny problem which confronted the
author of the Pensees. Unlike the Jesuit Sophists, he be-
lieves that knowledge is more than opinion, and truth than
mere A grab-bag of authorities would not do
probability.
for him. Behind the authority he would go to test its sanction.
He believes there is truth to be had; he has the test of it and
would know if he had it but he despairs of ever attaining it
;
with his intellect. Here we perceive Pascal's scepticism, and

also its limits. Behold this sick, suffering genius, racked by
a thousand pains: what made him so discontented in his
science, what made him so unsettlingly intense in his faith?
We have now come to a book of fragments, notes, jotted
down or dictated by Pascal in the intervals between intense
suffering; the whole forming a manuscript almost illegible
and chaotic in its original state, a book nevertheless so soul-
searching and soul-revealing that great minds do not know
whether to be glad that it was never finished and polished off,
or to wonder what amazing masterpiece it would have been
had Pascal lived long enough to complete his work; a book
beside which one puts the Imitation of Christ and St. Augus-
tine's Confessions, and which French scholars would save
and cherish above all other French books. This master-
piece is the PenseeSj Thoughts, of Blaise Pascal. 6
II
not for others only that Pascal planned his great

It is
Apology, of which only the random fragments are to be found

in the book before us. He planned the Apology for himself
first of all. The book was to contain letters, dialogues,
eloquence, argument. Who can tell whether this sceptical
passage or that infidel fragment expresses Pascal's own views
or the views which, in a contemplated dialogue, he intended
to combat? So Strowski warns us: imagine the Provinciates
in theuncompleted state in which we find the Pensees. They
would have been equally contradictory: a chaos of Jesuit
7
tirades, Jansenist pleas, Pascalian dialectic. But there, as
here, the problems would have remained the same. In the
Pensees Pascal has argued the case for faith, but he has also
argued the case for doubt we have them both side by side,
:
and the contrast is eloquent.

For such knowledge as is vouchsafed to man Pascal relies
on the method of geometry. It consists, according to him,
in defining all our terms and proving all our propositions.
Now, if we go from involved and complex terms back to

plainer and simpler terms, we are led at last to primitive
words that do not admit of definition. Similarly, if we trace a
certain proposition to the propositions on which it rests for
its proof, and these in turn to further and further prior pro-
we finally reach first principles and axioms which are
positions,
undemonstrable. The geometrical method is thus perfectly
certain so far as goes, but inadequate and unconvincing
it
in the end since

does not go far enough. Man, naturally
it
helpless, sooner or later comes against a wall which he cannot

surmount. This subtly precise game of science, in which the
intellect manipulates its stock of concepts, affords Pascal no
final satisfaction: what it proves, it proves well, but it does
not prove what Pascal, what in fact all thinking men want
proved and assured the ultimates of life and of existence.
So Pascal writes to Fermat, whom he calls the greatest
geometer of Europe: "To speak frankly about geometry,
I regard it as the highest exercise of the mind, but at the same
time I know it to be so unavailing that I see little difference
between a man who is merely a geometer and a skillful

8
artisan/'
Let not the last phrase escape us. On the gates of his
Academy Plato had inscribed the words: "Let no ungeomet-
rical person enter here." Science demands the precise defini-
tion and demonstration of which geometry is the model.
But for true wisdom, for an adequate philosophy of life, one
has to be more than merely a geometer, content to begin
with a first page of axioms and definitions. One must chal-
lenge the meaning of number, motion, space, time, yes, and
also of Being, nature, world, life, thought, value, truth,
beauty, good, God. The man who could perceive and express
this truth as Pascal repeatedly perceived and expressed it may
not give us the final philosophy of life, but he would die trying
to attain it.
New troubles beset us now.

If geometry is precise but not
final, philosophyneither final nor precise. Here is human

is
thought overreaching itself in its effort to comprehend the

universe, God and man, and falling far short of its goal, con-
fused and inconclusive. How can you measure infinity with
a yardstick? Suppose you climb to the top of Mt. Cenis,
Montaigne wrote are you really any nearer the sky than you
:
would be at the bottom of the sea? Suppose, disdaining ge-

ometry, you attempt philosophy: are you any nearer final
truth? Only your footing is less secure. "For what, after
all, is man in nature? With regard to the infinite, he is
nothing; with regard to nothing, he is all: a mean between

nothing and all. Infinitely far from comprehending the
ultimate, the end of things and their first principles are hidden
from him in impenetrable mystery equally incapable of
seeing the nothing from which he issues and the infinite in
7
9
which he submerged/
is
What are we to do then? Shall we go with the men of the

world, such as Mere, whose wit exceeds their intellectual
supply or demand, and who, as Leibniz tells us, set little
value on what they do not understand? Or shall we more
eloquently shrug our shoulders with Montaigne and, ignoring
our duty to seek the truth, cheerily resign ourselves to our
inability to find it? Pascal knew his Montaigne, every line
and word, but he could not sink into the faint-hearted easy
indolence of the Essais. The motto of Montaigne, "Que
"
scais-je?" recalls Pilate's shrug: What is truth?" Such dis-
dain discloses the uriheroic soul. As keenly as Montaigne
Pascal recognized the pitiful limits of our knowledge, but to
him this was no occasion for idle acquiescence. It is, in fact,
the tragedy pf his spirit. He feels as if he is ever on the
brink of an abyss: the abyss of the all-important unknown.
Pascal considered another philosophical alternative: the
Stoic wisdom of Epictetus. Behold a sage who knows nothing
of man's knowing only man's duty. But
essential ignorance,
and fortitude, are they not in the
his severity, noble dignity
end merely pride, vain and futile?
There are Stoic moments in Pascal, and in him as in all of
10
us, so Sainte-Beuve reminds us, there is not a little of
Montaigne. But neither Montaigne's acquiescence nor the
pathetic dignity of Epictetus can satisfy him. More intently
and more unflinchingly he would face man's plight and seek
a way out. We move on a narrow strip of knowledge between
two oceans of ignorance. Not one law but has its counter-
law, not one truth but turns out to be also false. Man treads
no path that does not turn upon itself to bring him back to
the uncertainty with which he began. Real truth must be
eternal, the same in Toulouse and in Paris; but what of our
truths and our justice? If you lived on this side of the river,
it would be murder for me to kill you, my fellow. But you
live on the other side of the river: in killing you I am no
"
assassin but a brave son of my country. A meridian settles
the truth. .Truth this side of the Pyrenees, error on the
. .
ll
other side." Isour virtue an eternal value, or is it of this
life only? We shrug our shoulders regarding the hereafter,
yet how can we doubt that whether we be mortal or immortal
makes all the difference in morals? Tragically halting and
inconclusive is our thought on all ultimate questions. "In-
comprehensible that God exists, and incomprehensible that
he does not exist; that the soul is in the body, and that we
have no soul; that the world is or is not created, that there
isor isn't original sin." 12
Is the field abandoned, then, in possession of the sceptic?
Pascal cannot banish doubt, yet he cannot endure its wither-
ing effect. The notion of infinity overwhelms him. Kant
was by the sight of the celestial spaces;
stirred to noble ardor
Pascal found their eternal silence harrowing: "When I con-
sider the short span of my life, absorbed in the eternity before
and the small space that I fill and even that I see,
after,
engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not
and which know me not, I am dismayed and amazed to find
myself here rather than there; for there is no reason what-
ever why here rather than there, why now rather than some
other time. Who has put me here? By whose order and
direction has this place and time been allotted to me?" 13
We are moving, faster than appears, to the climax of this
drama of the spirit. Thought insists on scaling the infinite,
and cannot scale it. Here is man's misery and here also man's
grandeur, and here must we seek the way out. For consider:
"Man cannot be incurably helpless, as Montaigne says,
and at the same time have duties imposed upon him such as
are pointed out by Epictetus." 14 Yet as far as thought
goes they are both right. Reason cannot remove this con-
tradiction: we must rise to a higher point of view if the fuller
truth is to be revealed.
There is a hierarchy of orders, Pascal declares; from the
lower to the higher is always an amazing leap. There is a

material order, there is a mental order, there is an order of
values Pascal calls it charite. Just as the length in the
all
world will not give us breadth, nor all the length and breadth
together give us depth, so no amount of matter, bodies, firma-
ments, stars and earths, can yield or are worth one little
mind or thought. Mind, thought, is another, a higher order
of reality. And so in turn the whole universe of matter and

mind will not of itself yield one act of true charity, one
moment of worth. Charity, value, again, is another, a still
15
higher order of reality.
Here is thought enmeshed in contrarieties. What will
resolve the dilemmas of scepticism? A higher court than
the court of reason from the order of thought we must rise
:
to the order of charite, of value. How is this ascent achieved?

Shall we say that in Pascal's method the mind brings to-
gether approximations to truth, each by itself inconclusive,
and that certain truth is attained by the deliberate fusion
of a number of probabilities that cumulatively substantiate
and stabilize each other? Certainty would then be a synthesis
of a number of convergent probabilities, integrated by what

Cardinal Newman was to call "the illative sense." Or shall
we say that, confronted with radical antinomies, forced to
choose between alternatives which reason cannot logically
prove and alternatives which reason cannot sanely accept;
forced between alternatives that challenge the powers of
demonstration and alternatives that defy evident fact, we
should not rest in agnostic suspense: our logic should yield
to reality,we should bow before the incomprehensible cer-
tainty? The miracle of the Holy Thorn may be incompre-
hensible to the scientific intellect: only it is a fact to Pascal
which he cannot ignore in his view of the universe. Or again
shall we say that, while the intellect suffices for the establish-
ment of scientific truth in detail, it is by itself incapable of
attaining ultimate knowledge, that in order to know God

all of man's being is required, total perception, the complete
response of the soul?

16
The method' of the Pensees scarcely
'
admits of being encased in a formula. Pascal's dialectic

would escape agnosticism and also shamefaced contentment
with faith; his tactics suggest the Hegelian, but his road and
goal are more properly those of an aspiring saint, a mystic,
self-critical in the possession of the truth to which he never-
theless explicitly submits.
On the night of November twenty-third, 1654, the night
of his second conversion, Pascal did not reason, did not have
to reason; he saw face to face, saw with a higher vision a
higher light. Behold the truth of Montaigne and the truth
of Epictetus: these two contrary truths are one in the truth
of Christ. In Christ's Gospel the misery and the grandeur of
man are made truly one: the child of sin is the child of God.
To perceive this truth more than reason is required: this
lastwisdom, just as all ultimate truths and all first principles,
can be known only by the heart. This indeed is the wisdom
of all knowledge, to recognize its limits and to humble its
vanity. We
have been warned against the triple concupis-
cence: of sense, of science, of ambition, and Pascal also
writes: "I see my
abyss of pride, of curiosity, of concupis-
cence." 17
Before we can
to the higher perception, we
rise
must curb our pride, mortify the flesh, humble the barren
vanity of the intellect, confront it with overpowering realities

that transcend its comprehension, and compel it to acknowl-
edge what it cannot demonstrate or understand. Some
undertake to vaunt human nature; others decry it; still
others find it amusing; but Pascal writes: "I esteem only
"
those who
search in groaning. 18 Nothing is more reasonable
than this disavowal of reason, this submission to the heart.
"The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know
at all. ... It is the heart which perceives God, and not
reason. This is God made evident to
faith: the heart, not
to reason." 19
You may ask love to justify itself, to state
its grounds.This it does: a catalogue of halting reasons, so
many nothings, but the heart somehow transfuses these
nothings into one ardent reality.
Ill
In order to possess the great truths of religion, how do we

rise from the order of thought to the order of charity, from
reason to the heart, from knowledge to faith? Inspiration
is the perfect path; God in his grace must speak to man.
There are humbler approaches, however: reason and custom

may serve us here. 20 If they cannot establish our faith, they
may yet help to remove obstacles to it, may prepare the way.
How are we to prove God's existence? "If thereis a God,
he is infinitely
incomprehensible, since, having no parts nor
limits, out of touch with us. We are thus incapable of
he is
knowing what he is or whether he exists. Accordingly, who

would dare to undertake the solution of this question? Not
21
we, we are out of touch with him altogether." The Chris-
tian whobelieves without pretending to prove his faith is

after all right, forhow are any proofs possible here? "God
exists, or he does not exist. Now, to which side shall we in-
cline? Reason can settle nothing here: an infinite chaos is
in our way. A throw is being cast, at the end of this infinite
distance, which will come out heads or tails. What will you
wager? By reason you can make neither the one nor the
22
other; by reason you can support neither side."
We have now come to the famous wager of Pascal, which
has occasioned endless controversy. Is this a dialogue with
an unbeliever, or is Pascal disputing God's existence with
himself? Certain it seems that if knowledge about God is
beyond the reach of our reason, then the recognition of its
helplessness is the only reasonable course open to reason,

and agnosticism the true wisdom. Does God exist or not? I
do not know; I cannot say; how then can I wager? "The
right thing isnot to wager at all." 23
But this agnostic withdrawal from the wager of eternity,
is it not in effect itself a wager? To act so as to ignore the
issue whether God exists or not is virtually to deny God's

existence. This is indeed the most reckless of choices: to
move blandly in the face of possible eternal ruin. Theoreti-
cally Pascal's reason counselled sceptical inaction, but he

found the agnostic practice intolerable. If we were to wait
upon certainty before acting, could we act at all? We must
act today in preparation for tomorrow, although we may
never see the morrow. Every step we take is a step in the
dark. Whether we march or whether we stand still we are
invariably gambling on the uncertain. It behooves us to
use our poor reason in determining the nature of the hazards
we run in this world of uncertainties.
God exists, or God does not exist, and by God's existence
Pascal understands here the whole of the Christian religion,
God exists or God does not exist. This is of all issues the
most solemn and imposes itself on you; you cannot
fatal; it
shirk Pascal says, you must wager, ilfaut parier.
it; willy-nilly,
On which side will you stake your life, your soul? Since you
must choose, let us see on which side your interest lies.
Whether you choose the one or the other is, as far as reason
goes, indifferent, for there is no reason either way. But what
about your fortune, your beatitude or your irretrievable

ruin? Either there is a God, perfect goodness and wisdom
and power, and this world-course is a solemn drama of
Divine Providence governing all destiny; or else there is no
God, and this world is a vast machine of matter-in-motion,
or else immense and irremediable chaos. Either there is a
God, and your life and death are but the prelude to an eternal
career of bliss or damnation; or there is no God, and your
lot is as the lot of all other clods of moist earth. What have
you to gain and what to lose if you choose one way or the
other, heads or tails? Suppose you live your life as if God
existed: you may, of course, miss the so-called pleasures of
you may gain an eternity of heaven.

this brief life; but, again,
On the other hand, live your life as if there were no God you :
may then have your sinful way here and now, and then
death and nothing more; but, my soul, it is also possible
that you may face eternal damnation. Staked against pos-
sible heaven and hell, what are the pleasures of this life
worth? Nothing at all. The staked against the

infinite is
finite, today and tomorrow against eternity. How can you

then hesitate about your choice? Choose for God you thus :
insure yourself against the hazard of damnation, you stake

your brief life on the chance of eternal bliss. Even if there
were only one chance that God exists and ten thousand
chances that there is no God, still the infinite disparity be-
tween the hazards involved would warrant your staking your
life on God's existence.
Behold Pascal's immortal wager. But the soul of man re-

plies: Be it as you say; all the same, you are forcing me to

yieldmy life against my will. The fact is, I am so made that
I cannot believe in God. Will you damn me for my inability?
What am I to do? Even if my reason accedes, my heart re-
sists the call of faith.
True, Pascal answers: if reason cannot help you here,

habit and custom shall. Your heart is resistant because it is
wedded to passion, to the lusts of this world. Break down the
resistance to faith, curb your passions. You cannot believe?
Enter anyhow upon the path of the believer, do as he does,
act as you were a believer, go to mass, take holy water.
if
"This will make you believe and will stultify you, cela vou&
abetira." 24 The word is terrible "we "sKudder as it comes
;
from Pascal's lips and we dare not look at him lest we see on
his face the ironic grin of themocking unbeliever. Port
Royal could not bear, or did not dare, to print this word.
But there is no grin of mockery on Pascal's lips: terrible
exhorter though he be, he never loses sight of the other side.
To the unbeliever such artificial acquiescence seems debasing
stultification. Mechanically to go through the motions of a
ritual, to drug and stupefy myself into alien piety: "This is
just what I fear, the soul protests." "And why?" Pascal
26
replies: "What have you to lose?" Eternity is at stake for
you, and you are worrying over your sorry dignity and self-
respect. Your supreme interest counsels the wager: close
your eyes and plunge forward, blindly if need be; habit will
sweep aside the obstacles your way while you wait for
in
the grace of God to illumine you with the higher light, to
humble and transfigure and exalt you all at once.
IV
Pascal is one of the most defiant warriors for the Christian
faith;but his wager has proved a precarious bulwark to

orthodoxy. Orthodoxy demands a different sort of assurance.
Different is the assurance of St. Paul: "I know him whom I
have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to guard
that which I have committed unto him against that day." 26
Here is straightforward, unquestioning trust. Now a certain
type of believer demands for the voyage of his spirit, not only
the full-blown sails of faith, but also the rudder and compass of
understanding. Believe without understanding if you must,
Clement of Alexandria would say, but if you believe with
understanding, all the better. To the simple assent of faith
the gnosis of Christian intelligence is as the man full grown is
to the infant. This is the great confidence in the intellect
which distinguishes the best of Scholastic thought, particu-
larly the great succession of Dominican philosophers of the
thirteenth century: philosophy is the handmaiden of the-
ology, but it is a necessary introduction to it.
There has always been an opposite sort of believer who has
felt that his faith is somehow compromised if it leans on intel-
ligence. Defiantly he has scorned all proofs, as if to reas-

sert the solidity of his faith by rejecting all rational basis for
it. This the view of Tertullian: Separate Jerusalem from
is
Athens, the Church of Christ from the Academy of Plato.

What are proofs and arguments to me? Do you say that what
I believe isundemonstrable, that it is absurd? Well, I be-
lieve just because it is absurd, Credo quia absurdum est.
it
This type of mind is not exclusively Christian. You find it in

Islam, in India. Here is AI-Ghazzali of Bagdad, scornful of
allphilosophy in his reaffirmation of Mohammedan ortho-
doxy; here are immemorial mystics of India deeming the sur-
render of intelligence a prerequisite of wisdom. Not far from
here is also Duns Scotus of Oxford, Doctor Subtilis, uprising
against St. Thomas for his reliance on the intellect. Will is

superior to intelligence, according to him, and the only
ground of faith is divine revelation. The arguments of reason
are inconclusive in theology: you cannot prove God's omni-
potence nor the immortality of the soul. In all his thinking

Duns Scotus widens the breach between reason and religion,
disclaiming any reliance on demonstration, firm and self-
sufficient in his orthodox faith.
But there is danger in this defiant faith, danger of results
wholly unintended by its champions. Do you disdain in your
religion to rely on reason would you separate theology from
:
philosophy and science? Well enough: you remain then

wholly devoted to your faith by fiat; your religion cannot be
proved and does not have to be proved. But after you come
others who take you at your word, that religion does not
admit of proof, but who, unlike you, are mainly interested
in what has to be and can be proved. They leave you to your
undemonstrable faith and they go their own secular way.
So it is that Duns Scotus, arch-believer himself, became a
factor in the disintegration of belief which marked the col-
lapse of Scholasticism and the beginnings of the scientific
Renaissance.
Pascal likewise tells us that we know nothing and can prove
nothing about the fundamentals of religion. We cannot know
what God's nature is, nor even whether there is a God at all.
Faith lacks rational ground; to the intellect of man the gospel
of Christ is as St. Paul said it was to the Greek, folly. To all
this the modern unbeliever nods approval: he has made his

own anthology of passages from Pascal, and what Pascal
has said on this score no one can say better. But when Pascal
invites him to play heads or tails on God or Christ, the un-
believer declines. No gambler, he; he would stick to what
admits of proof. Pascal may convince us that it is a far
better bargain all around to wager on heads rather than on
tails; he has not convinced us that heads have any advantage
over tails, nor has he gained the man who is not impressed by
the stakes, or who simply will not gamble.
For consider: the whole force of Pascal's wager as an argu-
ment for Christian faith is to be found in the immense dis-
parity between the stakes for and against God. What de-
cides Pascal's wager is the prospect of heaven or hell. But
what warrants our judgment that, if there is a God, he has
eternal bliss or else hell everlasting in store for us? Do we
really know any more about this than we know whether God
exists at all? True enough, you may either wager or not
wager: there is here no third alternative, and Pascal insists
that wager you must. But why is he so sure of the number of
his alternatives and of the stakes involved? Do we have just
two alternatives, heads or tails? Pascal's geometrical bias
has betrayed him where it should have served to sustain.
The number of available alternatives may vary with each
wager. Heads or tails if you are flipping a coin but any one of
;
six chances ifyou throw a die, or one in thirty-six if you throw

a pair of dice. So a number may be either equal or not equal
to another number, but whether you prefer the one to the
other may depend on a different chance, whether it be equal
or greater or less. If in the cases mentioned the number of
alternatives is fixed, 2, 3, 6, 36, the situation becomes in-
creasingly more complex we approach more serious issues.
as
Logic should keep us vigilant here lest we stray through in-

complete disjunction. Perhaps we may say: Newton is either
correct or incorrect. But can we say: either Newton or
Einstein? No more now than before Einstein: tomorrow a
third alternative may be available for us. Who can say once
for all in how manyrespects Newton may be wrong, or Ein-
stein? Truth is one, but error is manifold. Can we say: either
Plato or Aristotle, either St. Thomas or Duns Scotus, either
Calvin or Molina? Still leas can we split issues in morals: is
every one of us either a saint or a sinner?
So here we must go back with Pascal to his wager and re-
examine the throws and the stakes. Assuredly the man who
denies God's existence is either right or wrong, and likewise
the man who affirms God's existence is either right or wrong.

We may grant to Pascal that whether either be right or wrong
cannot be determined by reason: that is not the point now,
but rather this what is affirmed or denied when God's exist-
:
ence or non-existence is affirmed or denied? Am I to believe

in God's grace with Augustine or with Molina? These are
different views of God's grace, and in a measure different
beliefs in God. Pascal has reduced his alternatives to two:
heads or tails, either Jansenist Catholicism or atheism. If
you could equate belief in God with Jansenist Catholicism,
then you have your stakes, eternal bliss in heaven or hell
everlasting, and then you may perhaps continue with Pascal's
wager.
But surely other alternatives are available. You may be-
lieve in God and yet just because of your supreme confidence
in his infinite love reject hell everlasting altogether; you may
be a pantheist and long for reabsorption into the Infinite;
you may be a Buddhist and look forward to the blessed self-
less peace of Nirvana. Personal immortality may to you be a
priceless boon and may decide you to stake your life on

the side that would assure your soul of a hereafter; but you
may have learned to look beyond the individual self and with
the Positivist seek survival in Humanity; or, again, you may
share the craving for personal extinction which characterizes
a certain type of Oriental. If immortality is for you a night-
mare and for me a cherished hope, your dread may lead you
to gamble on materialistic atheism and my hope may lead me
to gamble along with Pascal. With every shade of religious
opinion a new set of stakes emerges and we have really a new
wager.
To insist on the wager in Pascal's terms is to mix consider-
able bigotry with our scepticism. It is remarkable that a
mind like Pascal, believing itself so hopelessly ignorant about
God, should yet have felt so familiar with the operations of
Divine Providence in case any Divine Providence obtained.
If it has come to flipping coins over God, if our reason is really
incapable of knowing God's nature or even God's existence,

then how can we say that, if God exists, he will deal thus and
so with us? If you are dogmatic in your estimate of God's
nature and sceptical about God's very existence, then you will
have to flip a coin about it. But if you disclaim familiarity
with the workings of a possibly existent Divine Providence,
then you cannot list the stakes of your wager, then you do
not know your alternatives, then you have no wager at all.
Do you then resign yourself utterly to withering scepticism?
Let us see. The defiance of faith in Pascal's wager is dismal:
face to face with possible irremediable ruin, yet altogether in
the dark; forced to stake all blindly on a throw of destiny!
If there be any such Divine Providence, ready to damn us
forever for not believing in Him whom through no fault of

ours we cannot know, then this idea would indeed be food for
pessimists; here would be a real nursery of irreligion. More-
over, if we
condemned to incertitude, to wagers and pos-
are
not the casuistry of the Jesuit after all acceptable
sibilities, is
and sound? There is a disquieting similarity between the
doctrine which Pascal combats in the Provincialcs, and the
advice which he gives to the unbeliever, to stultify himself if
need be, by attending mass and taking holy water. Well does
Saisset declare: "To replace certitude by probability, to ap-
peal to interest instead of appealing to religion and to the
heart, to make a machine of yourself, to stultify yourself,
these are the detestable procedures which compromise the
name of the Company of Jesus." 27
There is a Pascal who, committed to eternal truth and
finding this truth in Jansenism, attacked with heroic dog-
matism the protean hosts of casuistry. There is another
Pascal, the prey of general scepticism, who, doubting all yet
unwilling to let go of his Jansenist faith, resorted to flipping

coins to retain his hold on his God. These two Pascals are
one, and reveal a most baffling genius. Pascal seems to coun-
Belus thus: Proceed confidently with geometry in the realm
of finite, relying on the certainty of science; recognize
the
however that all your finite certainties float in the ocean of
infinite doubt; nevertheless yield yourself humbly to the call
of faith, stake your life on the possible truth of Christianity.
Is this sensible? blighting to reason. JDeeper
'
Surely it is
wisdom lies in amazing treasury of thought. He is

Pascal's
communing with the Saviour: "Be comforted," the Saviour
says to him, "you would not seek me, had you not found me.
I was thinking of you in my agony; I have shed such drops
of blood for you. . . . Your conversion is my own concern;

fear notand pray with confidence as if for me." ^ Here, we
venture to think, is the most poignant as it is the most pro-
found note in Pascal, poignant in the white-heat of the phrase:
"I have shed such drops of blood for you!" profound and
luminous in the initial, immortal words: "You would not
seek me had you not found me." The soul groping in the
dark marshes of doubt pushes on and refuses to sink back.
In thus pushing on and refusing to sink back, in holding its
course ever solidly ahead, it is itself proof eternal that there
is solid ground ever ahead. Is God's truth done and finished
and stored away on divine pantry-shelves beyond our reach;
is it done and dead and laid out under divine seals which we
may never break? Or is it not rather ever in the making? Is

God himself the unreadable Preface of the book of creation,
or is he not rather the living, careering heart of the book,
ever to be sought and found, yet never encased in a formula:
the infinite, eternal, ever-present Beyond?
A
deal of religious perplexity is due to our trying to think
of God as if he were a reality external to us and to our hun-
ger and thirst after him. But, like the reality of all values,
may not the reality of the divine be in the divine quest it-
self? The logical judgment expresses logical value; scientific
thought, the search after knowledge and truth, is itself
knowledge, insight, truth. Poetic activity, the pursuit of
beauty, is itself the supreme manifestation of beauty. The
indubitable evidence of the reality of moral value is our own
endeavor after it. In science is Truth; in art is Beauty; in
goodness is Good; in godliness is God. The ancient Hindu
who conceived of the supreme Brahman as the divine worship-
ful urge which created all that there is, showed profound in-
sight into the nature of spiritual reality. "You would not
seek me, had you not found me. ... Your conversion is my
own and pray with confidence as if for me."
concern; fear not
How can man loveGod, how can he know God whom he
has not seen except he love and know his brother whom he
has seen? How can we reach the greater truth except through
the lesser? Each truth that turns out to be also false, every
good that we find to be also evil is, not a sign of our impotence
and ignorance, but of our strength and wisdom. In the striv-
ing after truth, beauty, good, God, in the reach after eternal
value, man attains unto the only real eternity there is, the
eternity of the ideal. Only in the higher light is the lower
light disclosed as dimness; only the larger good renders the
lesser good evil. "When I was a child/' St.Paul tells us,
"I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child/'
and quite rightly; but, he goes on, "now that I am a man,
"
I have put away childish things. Only he might have said:
"As I become a man, I am putting away childish things/'
for the full manhood of the spirit ever being attained.
is
Here Pascal's own career, tragic as it is in its misery and in
its grandeur, is a living symbol of this truth. What can be

more crushing than this "tragedy of a powerful and energetic
spirit in an imbecile body:" 29 prematurely burnt out and

disintegrating in constant anguish? And the spirit of Pascal:
what a tragic vortex of spiritual integrity and heroism,
halting distrust, anguished contrariety, sophistry, stultifying

bigotry, reckless hazard, and headlong surrender? But hear
the high note that is sounded in this life of Pascal, a note
the clearer and the more heroic because it rises from the
dark depths of despond from the abyss of benighted groping
:
to the heights of aspiring intelligence. Read a page that has

been called the noblest in French prose 30
:
"Man is but a reed, the weakest in Nature; but he is a

thinking rqpd. It is not necessary that the whole universe
should arm itself in order to crush him. A vapor, a drop of
water, would be sufficient to kill him. But even though the
universe should crush him, man would still be nobler than
that which is killing him, for he knows that he is dying, and
the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe
does not know.
"All our dignity therefore lies in our thought. It is upon
that that we must depend, not upon space and time which
we cannot fill. Let us therefore strive to think well such is
:
the foundation of moral life/'

CHAPTER IV
SCEPTICISM AND THEODICY
I
"
When a modern theologian reads Whoso increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow/' he must know that Ecclesias-
tes was recording sad professional experience: the richer his
store of life-wisdom, the more critical his conception of truth,
the more perplexing his problem as a theologian. In the
presence of the facts which Job's life provides, the office of
God's advocate becomes very precarious. Pascal's tragedy,
as we have seen, was the tragedy of a man who had sought
geometric truth in the realm of piety. This is a peculiarly
modern tragedy. The emancipation of secular thought from
dogmatic authority imposed on the modern mind rigorous
methods precluding the appeal to faith. The Cartesian
reliance on rational demonstration and the empiricist's trust
in sense-experience agreed in the abandonment of mystical
or dogmatic fiat in the pursuit of real truth.
The Protestant recognition of the individual conscience,
and the secularism that influenced the serious revision to
which the Reformers subjected the medieval Catholic con-
ception of Christian life and 'worldliness/ served only to
emphasize the antithesis between faith and reason, an antith-
esis perhaps essential to Protestant theology. 1 The violent
religious struggle roused in Catholic and Protestant alike
the demand for assurance regarding the eternal truths to
which they were committing their lives. But, if Calvinist
or Lutheran could argue and hold his ground against Rome,
doubts were sure to assail the inquiring mind: perhaps Arian,
88
SCEPTICISM AND THEODICY 89
Manichean, Paulician did not deserve their heretical Infamy?

Had their doctrines been better argued ?
But now, if we put the old problems once more on the

carpet, what is to be our touchstone of verity? In dealing
with an important theological issue, if several incompatible
doctrines confront us, what is to be our choice when each
doctrine may seem rationally indefensible or, worse yet,
when the religiously absurd and monstrous hypothesis may
turn out to be the least unreasonable or the most in accord
with the facts of experience? 2 Can we piously abhor a heretic
while freely acknowledging the superior logic of his position?
Can we admit that a religious teaching is irrational, and
still insist that it is God's very truth?
Despairing of winning an orthodox victory in the open

field of argument, Bayle sought the gray alliance of scepti-
cism and openly counselled the pious to take up the shield of

faithand seek safety within the citadel of God's own Holy
Word. Leibniz, convinced of the necessity of finding suffi-
cient reason for the least item, would not admit that God's
truth could be rationally untenable, and undertook its logical
vindication. Strange reversed rehearsal of the Seotist-
Thomist controversy! The shafts of Voltaire's satire sapped
the bridge which Leibniz had erected to span the precipice
of Bayle: and then from Konigsberg came a radically new
type of engineer.
Being a heretic was a perennial experience to Pierre Bayle.

His father and brother were devout Protestant clergymen;"
his own early training was non-conformist. Only once did
he lend a willing ear to Rome, at the age of twenty-two but:
all that he got from his seventeen months as a Catholic con-
vert was to find himself, after the resumption of his Protestant

confession, a fugitive and an exile from France and the object
of persecution abroad. The king of France suppressed the
Protestant university of Sedan, where Bayle was professor
of philosophy; but later in life Bayle was ousted from his
professorship at Rotterdam because he was not orthodox

enough to suit Jurieu's type of Protestant.
"
Everything is in Bayle," Voltaire wrote, "but one must
know how to find it." Only one design in this rich carpet of
erudition and dialectic can be traced here. As it happens, it
is the leading design in the texture. The problem of evil
harassed his mind, and he vainly protests his resistance to
dualism. We read the long articles in his Dictionary, on
Manicheans and Marcionites and Paulicians, and we cannot
imagine him in the fifth century on the side of Augustine.
It is of interest to note that it was in the land of the Albi-
genses, in Southern France, where Bogomile and Paulician

heretics sowed perhaps the first hardy seeds of revolt against
3
Rome, that Bayle's cradle was rocked.
If God is the omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely good
Creator of all that exists, and what other conception of
God is admissible? then how is the presence of evil in the
world to be accounted for? Lactantius before the days of

Augustine had reported Epicurus' list of the available al-
ternative answers, in a trenchant passage which Bayle
quotes: "Either God is willing to remove Evils, and not able;
or able and not willing, or neither able nor willing, or both
able and willing. If he be willing and not able, he is impotent,
which cannot be applied to the Deity. If he be able and not
willing, he is envious, which is generally inconsistent with
the nature of God. If he be neither willing nor able, he is
both envious and impotent, and consequently no God. If
he be both willing and able, which is the only thing that
answers to the Notion of a God, from whence come Evils?
Or why does he not remove them?" 4
Bayle observes that no account is taken here of moral evil,
which would have made the situation still more embarrassing.
The answer of Lactantius, according to Bayle, is weak and

"
perhaps even heretical: it supposes that God brings forth
evil, for otherwise he could not make us know the wisdom,
nor the virtue, nor the feeling of goodness." 5 What is this
divine omnipotence which labors under such, for us, distress-
ing limitations? Confronted with the problem of the corn-
possibility of God's attributes (in view of the existence of
evil), the Manicheans followed the Zoroastrian firm adherence
to God's infinite goodnessand made the best they could of
God's omnipotence. St. Augustine, as we have seen, under-
took to maintain God's attributes every one, and held man's
(Adam's) free choice responsible for evil.
Christian orthodoxy recoils from the doctrine of a duality
of world-principles and cannot tolerate a Creative Evil Power
coordinate with God. But, apart from orthodoxy, what is
offered to match the dualist explanation of evil? Man's

choice brought evil into this world, we are told. The choice
of evil by man God could not prevent without depriving
man of freedom and moral dignity. He did not predetermine
the evil choice but, being omniscient, he foresaw it; his per-
fect justice thus foreordained the inevitable consequences of
man's choice: ruin irretrievable save by God's loving grace.
What would a Manichean or a Paulician reply to this
doctrine? asks Bayle, and he is an ever-ready and patient
6
reporter of heretical rejoinders. In this doctrine of ortho-
doxy, the Manichean protests, all of God's attributes are
compromised. What can we mean by saying that God could

not prevent man's choice of evil without depriving him of
moral dignity? Ask a surgeon: "If you could perform this
operation without causing any pain whatever, would you
"
not do it? To be sure, but the surgeon does the best he can
under the conditions which confront him. In order that a
man may not be deprived of eyesight, he performs a painful
operation. Shall we say of omnipotent God that he does the
best he can? In order that man may not be deprived of moral
freedom, he allows him to choose evil? But what is this
freedom and moral dignity to safeguard which God allows
man to plunge into disaster? If this procedure exhibit God's
perfect goodness, then what meaning do we attach to 'good' ?
Would not a good son, seeing his father about to jump out
of the window, hold him back with chains if need be? If a
queen were on the brink of an abyss or drowning in the water,

would not the first lackey grab, embrace her, or even pull
her by the hair out of danger, with little regard for the dig-
Her Majesty? What mother would let her daughter
nities of
go to the ball knowing that she is to be lured away and se-

duced there? This is what Bayle's heretics understand by
goodness and faithful and loving care. Yet here the son may
well have insufficient certainty of his father's suicidal intent;
Her Majesty may resent the lackey's undue or premature
solicitude; the daughter may protest against her mother's
lack of confidence in her. For the disastrous outcome in all
these cases is in a measure uncertain. In God's case, how-
ever, omniscience precludes any possibility of doubt: it is
as the mother deliberately watched the seduction of her

if
daughter without lending her a hand at the brink of the

abyss. If insufficient prevision of the danger would alone
excuse a spectator's passivity in the presence of impending
disaster, then how is omniscient Deity to be justified in the
circumstances?
Or shall we say that all these examples are inapplicable,
that Adam's choice was a really free choice, without any
influence of past experience, or any cue to indicate the course
to be taken? But then did not even God know how Adam
was going Should we not, in that case
to use his freedom?
question God's omniscience, and should we not further ques-

tion his infinite goodness for giving man such a hazardous
present without warning or safeguarding him in the use of

No, surely we cannot doubt God's perfect omniscience

7
it?
and prevision of man's choice. So the Augustinian puzzle is

once more before us: how can a choice foreseen by God be a
free choice for which Adam alone is responsible? If it was
purely arbitrary, a free choice of indifference, how could we

speak of responsibility at all in the circumstances? And if
the choice was indeed representative, a characteristic ex-
pression of Adam's nature, then does Adam's responsibility
for what he did preclude his Creator's responsibility for what
he was? The more you speak of moral freedom and responsi-
bility, so the heretic argues, the more embarrassing is your
puzzle: how Infinite Goodness could create a chooser of evil?

Or do you seek refuge in a subtle distinction: God simply
permitted the introduction of evil into the world by man's
free choice? But did not this concern God's own infinite
perfection was it quite indifferent to him whether evil came
:
or did not come into the world, that thus, without causing,
he should merely permit its introduction? Why did he permit
evil, or even cause it? In order that his infinite justice and
likewise loving grace might be revealed? So Jurieu writes:
"God permitted sin in order to disclose his glory and his
wonderful providence. The creatures over against him
. . .
;
are a mere nothing; he loves his glory more than all his creatures,
for he has created all only for his glory." And Theodor Beza:
"Man had to be created that he might be a vehicle for God's
compassion." Had man not sinned, "God would have had
no opportunity to show his compassion or his justice." But
to say nothing specifically of God's infinite goodness, how
could Infinite Perfection require or allow any such senti-
ments? How could God be acting ad majorem Dei gloriamf 8
Still, we are told, had God foreordained man to choose only
the good, the choice and the goodness would have been God's
not man's. Such finite perfection would have been useless to
God. So St. Basil points out: God would have us love him
freely; constrained love is not acceptable to him. But now,
and this brings us back to the idea of freedom, does per-
fection, eitherhuman or divine, necessarily involve the capac-
ity to choose evil? Divine perfection presumably does not
include this capacity. And, as Bayle's supposed heretic (this
time a Marcionite) replies to St. Basil: Are the angels or the
blessed saints in Paradise deficient in perfection because their
choice is ever of the good, and is their love for God con-
9
strained on that account and unacceptable to him?
The Manichean heretic insists: You cannot tone down evil,
or regard it as the mere shadow in the lovely picture, or
excogitate it out of existence, else you abandon the Christian

doctrine of salvation. But the more seriously you take it, the
greater your perplexities if you reject dualism and, holding
God to be the omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely good Creator
of all things, yet seek to foist upon man's will the sole re-
sponsibility for evil in this world. This fatal bias to evil in
man's Will you make God
will itself requires explanation.
deliberately responsible for it? Then you have an Ahriman

in your God? Or will you hold God nowise responsible for the
evil bias in man? Then in strict logic you are virtually on our
side and should openly come over. Your doctrine of the devil
is a compromise which makes matters worse. Is the devil the
father of evil, is his city more populous than the City of God,
did he deceive Adam and Eve into making the fatal choice?
But is not your devil created by God? "This is a thousand-
foldmore damaging to God than to say that he is not the only
necessary and independent being." Just consider with what
monstrous burdens you load God in order to escape this al-
leged heresy of dualism: "The unique principle which you
admit has, according to you, willed from all eternity that
man should sin and that the first sin should prove a con-
tagious affair; that should produce ceaselessly and without
it
end all imaginable crimes on the face of the earth; and has
thereupon prepared for the human race all conceivable woes

in this life: pestilence, war, famine, pain, vexation, and after
this life a hell where almost all mankind will be eternally
tormented." 10 Thus we are involved in additional diffi-
culties regarding God's justice and goodness: whatever may
be said of Adam's supposed free choice, the countless mil-
lions born with the taint of original sin lack this freedom:
how do they deserve an eternity of hell-torments? ;
In this brief exposition it has been possible to give only

samples of Bayle's tireless dialectic. The last-quoted pas-
sages will give a fair foretaste of the soul-perplexing diet which
was served to the pious and the inquiring in the endless col-
umns of the Dictionnaire historique et critique. On page after
page the heretics advance their arguments, with three or four

lines of non-committal historical recital at the top, and be-
low, two columns of commentary,

long, closely-printed folio
audaciously and flanked
critical by dozens of references and
choice asides on the margins. And if a more systematic treat-
ment of the perplexities of theodicy isdemanded, it is abun-
dantly supplied, with controversial zest, in the Reponse aux
questions d'un provincial.

Voltaire's words return to one's mind: Everything is in
Bayle. What is really to be found here? Was this man
another dismayed Pascal, or a sneering Voltaire before his
time? How Bayle personally estimated the plight in which
he found himself is of great interest to others besides his
biographers, and may lead to serious difference of opinion.
But even more significant was the plight into which Bayle
involved his more intelligent readers: here we see him in more
than one sense a precursor of the Encyclopedic.
We have considered Bayle's diagnosis: what is his printed
prescription for counteracting the insidious heresy in dealing
with the problem of evil? By no means undertake to dis-
prove the heretics' doctrines, he tells us. Their position

is, in strict logic, more formidable today than it was in
St. Augustine's time. Do not try to prove the orthodox doc-
trine or you may find God's sublime attributes slipping out
one by one. Above all, do not seek refuge in the notion that
our ideas of goodness, justice, wisdom, power, perfection are
altogether inapplicable to God. This path leads to disaster,
for in that case what can we know or mean by goodness or
justice,and what reason can we have for preferring God to

the devil, or anything to anything else? n
So Bayle advises us, from sad experience, do not argue
at but stand your ground firmly on God's own Holy Word.
all,
Go to the Bible for your facts. The Bible records how man
brought evil and the disaster consequent upon evil. This
Bayle declares, is my fact, which I may not be able to explain
but which you dare not ignore. Ab actu ad potentiam valet
consequentia. I have thought this matter over and here, in a
second edition of my Dictionary, I give you my second
thought: "Why did God permit men to sin?" you ask me,
and I answer you: "I can't say at all, I only believe that he
had reasons for doing it, reasons worthy of his infinite wisdom,
12
but past my
understanding."
To this conclusion Bayle invites us time and again, both
in the Dictionary and in the Reponse aux questions d'un
provincial. Before you begin arguing with a Manichean

heretic or with any of his cousins ask them first this question:
"Do you accept the Scriptural account as a fact?" If they
do not explicitly accept it, refuse to argue with them. Do
not match reason with reason for you will come out of it the
loser. St. Basil disputes poorly; he should simply quote his
Bible. Fight heresy not with logic but with God's Word, and
with unquestioning submissive faith in it and with deter-
mined abasement Tertullian's "It is certain just
of reason.
because impossible; I believe it just because it is absurd/'
it is
is the surest refuge. The less reasonable your belief, the

greater the triumph of your faith. "No reason!" he quotes

St. Evremont. "Just this is the true religion: no reason !"
"Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have be-
13
lieved."
But then what of rational knowledge? Do we renounce it
and resign ourselves to scepticism? And why do you fear
scepticism, Bayle replies, if it alone best assures you the re-
tention of your choicest treasures of religion? Scepticism, he
read in La Mothe le Vayer, is of all philosophies the one
"least contrary to Christianity, and the one that can most
u But
submissively receive the mysteries of our religion."
if relianceon faith and the Bible alone justifies the Chris-
tian's acceptance of the orthodox doctrine of evil, what in
turn justifies this reliance in preference to the heathen's
reliance on his own Scriptures? How
one to justify his
is
preference for one religion over another? Shall we judge them

by their fruits? But if by fruits we mean superior virtues,
the manifest nobility of many pagans and atheists will em-
barrass us seriously. Indeed during the religious wars in
France the unusual manifestations of virtue and the strict
morality of a man roused suspicions regarding his .ortho-
doxy.
15
The truths of religion are not to be proved by appeal
to the virtue of the believer any more than by sound argu-
ments.
This tenacity of faith is nowise to be confused with aggres-
sive dogmatism. Such faith is not to be constrained, and
Bayle's championship of tolerance is one of the noblest fea-

tures of his work. (But what are we to think of this surrender
of reason on the field of battle and this retirement within
the citadel of unreasoning faith? \ Is it whole-hearted mysti-
cism, or reluctant scepticism, or irony tragic or malicious?

Was Bayle's faith only assumed, or self-imposed, a pious act
of self-resignation? We who inherit the spirit of criticism
which Bayle himself helped to vindicate in modern thought,
we who follow him marshalling his heretics' arguments
against orthodox doctrine, find it hard to conceive how he
"
could, on top of all his arguments, have sincerely taken up
the shield of faith." So accustomed we are to seeing Vol-
taire'stongue in his cheek that we seem to notice a sarcastic
tongue in Bayle's cheek also. And when we think of Bayle's
long controversies with unlovely advocates for God, we may
well understand his occasional deliberate satire. One ex-
' '
ample must suffice:

Bayle is
explaining at the end of his
Dictionary his frequent reference to the virtues of pagans and
atheists. He argues that many motives lead men to virtue,
of which belief in God is not the strongest or the most usual.
After thirteen paragraphs of stimulating discussion, Bayle
points out in the fourteenth that, on good theological ground,
one could say "that if there are people whom God does not
abandon to the point of letting them sink down to Epicurean-
ism or atheism, it is principally those fierce souls whose
cruelty, audacity, avarice, fury, or ambition might well ruin

a great country. Can we not say on the other hand that if
God abandons certain people so as to permit them to doubt
his existence or his providence, it is mainly persons whose
temperament, education, lively ideas of virtue, love of fine

glory, and keen sense of dishonor serve to curb them and
16
keep them in the path of duty."
But there is deeper irony in Bayle. Lacking as it is in
that Pascalian intensity which cuts right through the heart,
Bayle's thought is yet involved in irony, tragic and without
sneer, a self-humiliation of the inquiring mind and the last

arrow of debased reason. It is the irony of Pascal's "Cela
vous abetira." So Feuerbach writes: "The contradiction of
faith and reason in Bayle has a tragic significance. He . . .
really believed, but he believed in contradiction with him-

17
self, with his nature, and with his mind." Piously dis-
daining to accept what reason seemed to warrant, and ra-
tionally humiliated in cherishing what ran counter to good

logic, Bayle's spirit was racked by an antinomy which was
spread through all his Was his tragedy perhaps the
writings.
tragedy of Protestantism, which would go a way, but not the
whole way, with reason? The last word which Bayle's dying
hand wrote was "Verite Truth."
Bayle advocated scepticism as an inducement to unques-
tioning faith, but the effect of his writings was greatly to
increase scepticism about religion. The eighteenth century
was a century of reason and proof and evidence, and Bayle
proved a disintegrator of belief. How strong a factor for
infidelity this professed champion may be
of faith was,
judged from the reaction and rebound that he aroused quite

as much as by the undoubted influence of Bayle on the
avowed freethinkers of the next generation. It was an age
committed to proven truth and, if the determined unbe-
lievers flaunted Bayle's "Not proven," those within the
besieged citadel of faith discounted his counsel and insisted
on making a sortie on the battleground of reasoned argu-
ment. Chief of these champions of pious reason was Gott-
fried Leibniz.
II
Bayle's dilemmas shook orthodox assurance; even those

who did not perceive the blighting irony of his proffered
consolation in faith were disconcerted by his sceptical dialec-
tic. Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia, sore perplexed,
sought the wise counsel of Leibniz, and it was to the gentle

solicitations of this Princesse Divine and to Leibniz's daily
conversations with her, particularly during the summer of
1708, that we owe the Theodicce. Against Bayle, Leibniz
undertakes "to demonstrate the agreement of faith with
18
reason." Against Bayle he champions God's goodness and
man's freedom and would justify the presence of evil in
this best of all possible worlds.
Leibniz treats Bayle's refuge-in-faith as the refuge of des-
peration. He refuses to allow the instability of reason in
theology, his Theodicee, as Cassirer observes, is really a
and
19
Logodicee: no anti-rational faith is valid. But, if theology
is to be established on a rational basis, the logical consistency
of its fundamental ideas must be vindicated. How is human

freedom compatible with God's prevision of our acts and with
God's infinite wisdom? How is the idea of all-perfect creative
Omnipotence to be reconciled with a mechanistic cosmology
and with the idea of a created world which includes evil?
How are we to evade the perils of Manichean dualism? Can
good and evil have the same ultimate source and ground?
Leibniz's entire enterprise is one of reconciliation, and his
work is a controversial writing designed to overcome, explain
away, or tone down Bayle's supposedly insuperable difficul-
20
ties.
God's foreknowledge, the decrees of Divine Providence, the

causal determination of every event, "the very nature of
truth, which is determined in the statements that can be
made about future events:" 2l all seem to militate against
human freedom. To meet these objections, Leibniz insists
on the distinction between his two fundamental principles:
the law of contradiction and the law of sufficient reason.
The former involves geometrical, the latter hypothetical
necessity. The former precludes, the latter allows of con-
tingency, and it is the latter, not the former sort of necessity
which is implied in divine prevision of our acts.
We err if we confuse causal with geometrical necessity: the
connection of two events as cause and effect with the relation
of a theorem to the and axioms from which it
definitions
proceeds and to the which it involves. " There

corollaries
is, in the chain of facts in nature, something malleable, which
the chain of mathematical truths does not afford: the former

may always have been other than it is, which is wholly in-
" 22
admissible in the case of the latter. Not necessity but
contingency is the law of nature, and causality is grounded
and completed in finality. This serious teleological revision
to which Leibniz subjects the Cartesian mechanistic cos-
mology recalls the Platonic Socrates' experience with the

philosophy of Anaxagoras recorded in the Phaedo, which
Leibniz translated. Just as the continued presence of Socrates
in his prison-cellwas due not only to his bones and muscles
and to the rest of Jiis mechanical equipment, but above all
and fundamentally to his resolution not to defy the verdict
of the Athenian court by running away, so the whole world-
process isto be explained mainly by the operation of final
causes: the law of the best is supreme in nature; the nisus
towards perfection is the raison d'etre of things in the cosmos.
In this teleologically conceived contingent world, freedom

seems to be a function of individuality and intelligence.
"
Every soul is a world by itself, independent of everything
except God." This presumably means that the unique self-
expression of each monad is conditioned only by its own
characteristicrelation to the universe: "That is to say/'
Leibniz goes on, "each substance expresses the whole se-
quence of the universe according to the view or relation that
is appropriate to it." This spontaneity is intelligent in human
souls,thus constituting us free beings. The more clearly and

perfectly we understand ourselves and our actions, the freer
we are. Perfect freedom would characterize an act deter-
mined by infinite wisdom to the best possible end, and ac-
cordingly the freest of beings is God. 23

There can be no question here of our freedom of indiffer-
ence each soul-monad expresses its own unique character. I
:
am thus, to be sure, responsible for my acts, since I alone

' '
could be their unique author, but praise or blame could attach

to anyone for acting as he does only if we take Leibniz's mon-
adism more consistently than he takes it, and pushing its
pluralistic implications to their logical conclusion, land in
atheism. 24In that case what meaning could 'praise' and
'
blame have? If, however, we adhere with Leibniz to the uni-
7
versal harmony of the individual monads, which constitutes

them a cosmos, and think of God as the monad of monads, 25 or
as the supreme reality of which the monads are all unique
individual expressions or foci, then, if there is aught
blameworthy in the world, whose can the blame be but
God's?
This challenge Leibniz can meet with the obvious retort
that, since God is infinite perfection, all that is blameworthy
or evil must
necessarily be contrary to his nature. Grant
that evil not contrary but rather appropriate to your
is
nature or mine, are we to blame for thus differing from God?

Leibniz, like St. Augustine, seems to have designed his idea
of human freedom so as to transfer the guilt of evil from God
to man. But ultimately "only that can have guilt and re-
sponsibility which creatively brings forth something new;
that is to say, in this system only God." 26 So God, were he
evil,would be blamable for it, but being perfect good, is only
to be lauded; we, however, can only be characterized as thus
and so, good or evil, but, strictly speaking, deserve neither
praise nor blame. Perfect good is in God and our good is in
our small sharing in the divine perfection. Our 'evil' then is
in our falling short of being divine, but since not-being-God
is essential to our being what we are, or to our free self-
understanding expression of our unique individuality, what

room can there be for blame or indeed what positive meaning
could we attach to evil? We are thus confronted with the
whole problem of the nature of evil. Leibniz follows a difficult
course: he must not excogitate evil out of existence and he
must by all means hold omnipotent God blameless for it.
This is an enterprise which taxed St. Augustine's genius,
and it taxes the genius of Leibniz,

"If God exists, whence evil? If he does not exist, whence

good? The ancients attributed the cause of evil to matter,
which they believed to be uncreated and independent of
God; but we who derive all being from God, where shall
we find the source of evil? The answer is, that it should be
sought in the ideal Nature of the creature, in so far as this
Nature is comprehended in the eternal truths which are
27
in the understanding of God, independently of his will."
The last clause is the important one: as in the entire Theodicee,
so here Leibniz's main endeavor is to reconcile the various
attributes of divinity in conformity with those of nature and
human nature. Evil cannot be wholly independent of God,
but God's infinite goodness would remain untarnished pro-
vided the evil in creation did not proceed from God's will,
even though it was comprehended by his understanding.
Perfect Deity must will the creation of the best of all possible
worlds, but perfect understanding must comprehend that this
best of all possible worlds is bound to include evil.
The truth of the foregoing Leibniz would exhibit by ex-
amining the nature of evil. This, according to him is three-
fold: metaphysical_evil is the imperfection characteristic of
all finfte being; physical evil is suffering; moral evil is sin.
Leibniz is inclined to tone down suffering and to treat it as
the outward result of sin. Both suffering and sin are ulti-
mately referred by him to finite imperfection, and so evil

in the last paragraph turns out to be but finitude. This
settlement of the problem seeks escape from pessimism by
explaining away the moral aspect of evil. This is apparent
also in Leibniz's reluctance to recognize moral evil as ulti-
mately positive. Condemnation of God's will is thus pre-
cluded, but we could scarcely call this view optimistic, for
condemnation is here precluded by a viewpoint that pre-
cludes the recognition of all moral value. The wretch tor-
mented by the fear that his business has gone bankrupt is
here consoled by the reassurance that in fact he has had
no business whatever.
This summary statement of Leibniz's procedure we should
now make somewhat clearer. Keenly aware though he is
of the difficulty of the problem of evil, Leibniz yet warns
us against the tendency to exaggerate the evils in life. Vice
and suffering are in the world, yet assuredly the pleasures in
life exceed the pains, and with regard to virtue and vice the
"
rule is rather mediocrity than iniquity. There is incompa-
rably more good than evil in mankind, just as there are in-
"
comparably more homes than prisons. If, resisting the
melancholic tendency to distort the facts of life, we see them

in their proper perspective, then evil is disclosed as the
"
striking and deplorable exception. I am not astonished that
men are sometimes sick, but ... I am astonished that they

are sick so occasionally, and that they are not always ill." M
Such as it is, physical suffering is mainly a natural conse-
quence of moral evil or sin: "Sins must bear their penalty
with them through the order of nature." Indeed pain is
L>9
conceived by Leibniz as a feeling of a checked or unattained

perfection: "I believe," he writes in the Nouveaux Essais,
"that at bottom pleasure is a feeling of perfection and pain
a feeling of imperfection, provided it be marked enough to
make us capable of perceiving it." 30 Physical evil, imme-
diately resulting for the most part from moral evil, is ulti-
mately disclosed as a sense of imperfection or metaphysical
evil.
Leibniz's treatment of moral evil or sin

is very perplexing.
Considering the pronounced Christian motivation of his

writing, he seems bound not to reason sin out of existence;
on the other hand how can he, in a Christian theodicy, re-
duce moral evil to metaphysical evil, treat sin as merely
negative, as the imperfection of finitude? This is perhaps
Leibniz's hardest dilemma: either sin is merely negative,
imperfection, or it is positive, anti-perfection. If the former,

no condemnation can arise at all; if the latter, then how are
heaven and hell admissible, for who can be ultimately to
blame for sin but God, the author of the agents of sinful
acts?
Confronted with a similar perplexity, Bayle had been in-
clined to seek refuge in dualism, much as he professed his
horror of the monstrous doctrine. The Zoroastrian-Mani-
chean solution of the problem of evil repelled Leibniz as
much as it had repelled St. Augustine, but there is a duality
of principle in the divine nature even for Leibniz: God is all-
creative, "his power tends to Being. His will tends to

. . .
31
good," but "his wisdom tends to the true." Being perfect,
his will necessarily wills the good, the characteristic good
under all circumstances. The characteristic good under the
circumstances of finite existence is imperfect good. God's
cooperant with his understanding, which compre-
will is here
hends and is in accord with the eternal truths of all nature,
which are "more inviolable than the Styx." God can no more
have made finite existence without imperfection than he
could have made a four-angled triangle. Finitude and un-
mixed perfection are incompatible; a finite world without
evil is thus inconceivable: to God's perfect understanding it
is self-contradictory and thus inadmissible. "There are
truly two principles, but they are both in God, to wit his
Understanding and his Will. The Understanding furnishes

the principle of evil, without being sullied or evil thereby; it
represents natures as they are in the eternal verities; it
comprehends the reason for permitting evil; but the will only
tends to good. Let us add a third principle, that is God's
Power: it precedes even the Understanding and the Will;
but it acts as the former indicates and as the latter de-
mands." 32
Physical evil and moral evil are thus instances of meta-
physical evil, the essential imperfection of all finite existence.
11
The ultimate origin of evil must not be sought in the divine
will, but in the original imperfection of creatures, which is
contained ideally in the eternal truths constituting the in-
ternal object of the divine intellect, so that evil could not be
"
excluded from the best possible system of things. 33 God
does not will sin and suffering directly; they are involved as
inevitable features of any created world, and of all possible
worlds the one created by God, Leibniz informs us, is neces-
sarily the best. To reconcile here God's will with his under-
standing, Leibniz makes use of the distinction between God's
"
antecedent and his consequent will. God wills antecedently
the good, and consequently the best." 34
But there is grave danger here that, in his optimism, the
'
theologian is betraying the moralist. If all 'evil is in the end

explained as really imperfection, finitude, what distinct
7
meaning can then attach to the term 'good ? Does it not

also need quotation marks? Is not 'goodness' then simply
metaphysical perfection? To characterize Perfect Deity as

good would then be a tautology rather than a necessary or
axiomatic truth. If goodness means metaphysical perfec-
tion, infinitude of attributes, it is only a superfluous and
indeed a confusing term. But if we use it in a moral sense,
then metaphysical perfection, boundless maximum of reality,
need not be exclusively good. As Bertrand Russell points out,
"
perfection understood in this sense, though it does appear
to involve God's infinite goodness, involves equally, except
on a purely privative view of evil, his infinite badness." 35
This is perhaps the reason why Leibniz is apt to treat evil
as negative, the privatio boni of finitude. "God is infinite,
and the devil is limited." 36 But this is another way of
abandoning the moral meaning of evil by reducing it to
imperfection, the limitation of finitude. Thus God's vindica-
tion has been accomplished, but the resulting laudation has
lost the distinctively moral note, and the 'best' of all possible
worlds not really either good or evil it is simply finite. To
is :
be sure, even Leibniz did not resist the tendency which we

observe in some of his followers, to exploit his optimism as if
he had established it in a moral sense. In stricter logic,
however, Leibniz's teleology and theology in the end pre-
clude the real recognition of genuine moral values. The ad-
vantage of Leibniz's placid rationalism over the sceptical
mazes of Bayle or over the tragedy of Pascal's defiant faith is
a decidedly dubious advantage, for the placidity has been
purchased too dearly. Leibniz has paid for his theodicy with
his ethics.
Ill
Archbishop William King's Essay on the Origin of Evil

may move the author of the Theodicee to write Critical Re-
marks, but the main purpose of both is the same: Assuming
"the Government of an infinitely powerful and benevolent
Author of Nature," to answer the question, Whence come
37
Evils? in conformity with the assumption. Ever since the
days of Epicurus and Lucretius, men's observation of defects
in nature has been apt to lead them to atheism. The Dublin
archbishop undertakes to reestablish the bulwarks of ortho-

doxy, if possible without appealing to revelation. King is
archiepiscopally prevented from toning down the veils in

this world in the manner of Leibniz; ecclesiastic theodicy
must always lag behind the secular in its whitewashing of the
cosmos. Though the archbishop may observe that there is
38
"much more Good than Evil in Nature/' yet we know that
this cannot be so as far as human life is concerned; the Chris-
tian agent of salvation is bound in the end to emphasize
man's sinful state and to give us a subsection "Concerning
the Scarcity of Happy Persons, and the General Corruption
of Mankind." But he is comforted in the end by the con-
sideration that our earth is so small a part of the whole
system of the universe (How next to nothing!) that even if

it were all stained with corruption, clouded and benighted
with darkness and vice, yet it would be but as a very small

spot in a beautiful body, not lessening but increasing the
comeliness of the whole. We do not know that this is not the
case, and so the learned Archbishop counsels us not to be de-
pressed by the only evidence which we have. The whole Work
* '
of God may be bright and beautiful, tho' that Point which

"
constitutes our World seem by itself rude and unadorn'd. 39
It may be bright and beautiful; the Archbishop, unable to
show that it is, undertakes to demonstrate that it must be.
The demonstration proceeds along fairly familiar lines.
' '
King's Seventhly in his analysis of the First Cause es-

tablishes God's infinite power and goodness, and thus, since
no doubt is admissible of God's attaining his ends, "the World
is as well as it could be made." Is this best of all possible
worlds good without qualification? King notices that God's
goodness is limited by his wisdom and by his power, all three
being infinite, and would be nowise jeopardized if the world
contained only the least evil possible in a created world.
Does King prove this last, or does he only variously assert it?
The concluding paragraph of his second chapter exhibits the
predestined character of his reasoning. He certainly knows
what he wants: "If we can point out a method of reconciling
these Things with the Government of an absolutely perfect
Agent, and make them not only consistent with Infinite
Wisdom, Goodness, and Power, but necessarily resulting
from them then we may be supposed to have at last
. . .
discovered the true Origin of Evils, and answer'd all the

Difficulties and Objections that are brought on this Head,
against the Goodness, Wisdom, Power, and Unity of God.

Let us try therefore what can be done in each kind of
<
Evil. . . ."
He tries well. Of evils, like Leibniz, he recognizes three

kinds: imperfection, natural evil, and moral evil, All three
kinds are explained, and their presence justified without dis-
credit to God, first by appealing to the observation that
absolute perfection can characterize only a self-existent Be-
ing and is thus peculiar to God, and that therefore all that
is created contains necessarily imperfection; secondly, by
insisting that this world contains the minimum possible of
imperfection or evil, since God's infinite goodness, wisdom,
and power could only create the best possible world or rather
the least imperfect. King meets his objectors with the re-
frain: "If that had been best God would undoubtedly have
done it." 41
The basis of King's optimistic assurance, aside from his
a priori reliance on God, as exhibited above, is in the appeal
to the Whole, to the Entire System. Natural evils are not
necessarily punishments for sin: rather should we say that
sins are evil because we disapprove of them as leading to
natural evils. Some natural evils are consequences of and
punishments for sins, but others are inherent in the very
character of created, that is, of imperfect existence; yet,
while in relation to particular human purposes or taken by
themselves, they may appear as evil, in relation to the whole
they must be admitted, since without them a greater evil
would arise. We should remember that everything in nature
has its place,nor is it meant merely for man's pleasure. A
viper isa viper and could not be a viper without its venom
any more than a knife could be a knife without its cutting
edge; yet nature is harmonious withal, and we should con-
"
sider that vi pel's gat her the poison out of the earth." Thus
King, while not relying on an anthropocentric teleology,
42
yet would not quite dismiss it.
With regard to moral evils, or sins, King seeks refuge in
free will, in a theory which is decidedly, but not consistently
Scotist. will is determined by nothing outside of him
God's
and the ultimate cause of good: things are not chosen
it is
because they are good, but good because chosen. God's

choice of anything constitutes it thereby good, and makes
goods agreeable to one another. This last, which is King's
real criterion of goodness, is made the consequence of the
divine election. In this principle, of constituting acts and
things good by willing them, we men share with God, as is
evidenced by our moral conscience. 43 But, if this be so, how
are sins, or undue elections, to be explained, and how are
they consistent with God's power and goodness?
infinite
King vindicates God by

informing us that had God omitted
to create free agents, or intervened to compel their choices,
or else translated man to a medium in which he would not be
tempted to choose amiss, in any of these three cases graver
imperfections would have resulted than now obtain. So in
every case God has chosen the lesser of evils.
Thus convinced that this world must be the best possible,
or the least imperfect, Archbishop King yet feels, in a lay
moment, the difficulties of his problem; at least there are
required in its investigation "some things which are too
subtle for all to comprehend." 44 Towards the close of his
book, we find the thought that evils necessarily arise "from a
competition or ... a Conflict of two Infinites, i.e., Omnip-
otence and Goodness. ..These Attributes amicably con-
.
spire together, and yet restrain and limit each other. There
is a kind of Struggle and Opposition between them, whereof
the Evils in Nature bear the Shadow and Resemblance.

Here, then, and no where else, may we find the Primary and
most certain Rise and origin of Evils." 45 This is scarcely a
surrender to Manicheanism, but it suggests an idea, better
thought of by Leibniz, of a duality of character in God to
which even ostensibly orthodox theology was inclined to
appeal in explaining and justifying the presence of evil
CHAPTER V
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY OPTIMISM
In 1709, one year before the publication of the Theodicee t
the main principles of Leibniz's optimism had been antici-

pated by Shaftesbury's work, The Moralists: A Philosophical
Rhapsody. To treat Leibniz as a plagiarist would mean to
ignore essential differences in treatment and execution of the
two plans and to overemphasize the general agreement in
teleology and in optimistic attitude as well as in the appeal
to the idea of harmony. Leibniz, to be sure, avows that, had
he seen Shaftesbury's work before writing his own, he would
have quoted at length from it, as it contained almost his
entire Theodicy, but more agreeably turned. 1
Thomas Hobbes, setting out from naturalistic premises and

pursuing a rigorous logic, had portrayed human life in terms
of the mechanics of insatiate desire. Man originally and in
the state of nature is an anarchic individual of unlimited
greed, and therefore of negligible security because of universal
conflict with his rivals. Good, evil, justice have no meaning
for him, since he has no standards or laws, nor can have them
until, led by selfish regard for security, he curbs himself by
entering into the social pact which makes Leviathan his
absolute lord and legislator. This doctrine shocked Britain,
made it the first business of every philosopher to square him-
self with Hobbes, and thus served to initiate systematic

British ethics. It is against Hobbes' portrayal of human na-
ture that Shaftesbury aims in his Inquiry concerning Virtue
or Merit.
Ill
Human conduct is not adequately described in terms of
selfishness and anarchic individualism. Gregariousness, emu-
lation, a lively regard for the good will of others, active be-
nevolence are as natural to man as insatiate greed. Bene-
volence as normal as egoism, and moral progress consists in
is
'
the advance from 'the private self-affections to 'the natural,
kindly, or generous affections/ It is precisely by the cultiva-
tion of benevolence that one gains increasingly the chief and
the most certain means of happiness in life; while undue self-
ishness breeds unhappiness, and unnatural affections, run-
ning counter both to public and to private interest, lead to
extreme misery. Happiness as well as virtue lies in the per-
fection of man's normal benevolence. Of the sanctions of
morality, Shaftesbury emphasizes first the moral sense and
next the loving and reverent regard for God's will.
This vindication of human nature from the calumnies of
Hobbes reflects a complacent and rhapsodic view of life, keen
to perceive light and color, but rather insensitive to the dull
and dark areas. Shaftesbury's theodicy is an appeal from the
particular evils besetting our life in detail to the system and
harmony of the whole. We cannot understand the individual
or the particular situations unless we see their relation to the
whole of which they are parts. If we follow the right path we
shall be led from system to system, in ever-expanding compre-
hension, until we come to sec everything in relation to the
All, the Universe,and thus perceived, it is perceived as good. 2
This enjoyable pursuit of the ever-larger harmony seems to
have just suited Shaftesbury's temperament, and his philos-
ophy is intended as the expression of that genteel good-breed-
ing and refined taste which is manifest in the active perception
of the Universal Harmony and the rhapsodic response to it.
The fuller our understanding of anything in its relation to
its appropriate system, the more adequate our perception
that it is as it should be. So strongly is Shaftesbury impressed

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY OPTIMISM 113
by the positive instances supporting this contention that

where the facts seem to point otherwise, he readily takes
refuge in finite ignorance. "In an infinity of things, mutually
relative, a mind which sees not infinitely can see nothing
fully, and must therefore frequently see that as imperfect
which in itself is really perfect." 3 "Seeing fully" means to
Shaftesbury seeing optimistically: to know the world per-
fectly is presumably to know it perfect; to his ears, discord is
but incompletely perceived harmony. It does not occur to

him that the harmonies we value may therefore, be, for all
we know, only conventional or deceptive incidents in a vaster
discord and ultimate perversity.
Shaftesbury does not deduce the perfection of the world
from the perfection of the Creator, but would establish his
optimism on a direct report of the facts of existence and on
inferences from the actually observable order and harmony
' '
of the cosmos. His theodicy is thus not necessarily theistic;
the idea of God is for Shaftesbury a focus of religious devo-
tion and aesthetic exaltation rather than a principle of cos-
mological explanation. Shaftesbury docs not argue that God,

being perfect, necessarily created a world with the least im-
perfection that finitude allows. In his view the world is not
the best possible, but is Things are as they
simply perfect.
ought to be conformably to the system of the whole of which
in the last analysis they are all parts. "When (nature) seems
most ignorant or perverse in her productions, I assert her
even then as wise and provident as in her goodliest works.
. . 'Tis good which is predominant; and every corruptible
.
and mortal nature by its mortality and corruption yields only

to some better, and all in common to that best and highest
nature, which is incorruptible and immortal." To doubt this
smooth-working teleology in the Whole, in view of the "con-
stant and unerring" order and harmony we observe in the
part, seems irrational to Shaftesbury. All is therefore ulti-
mately as it is for the good of all: "And what is for the good
of all in general, is just and good." 4 If our present life's
experience does not assure us completely of this truth, the
6
appeal to the life hereafter is bound to dispel the last doubt.
"
Therefore we ought to rest satisfied, and not only so,
. . .
but be pleased and rejoice at what happens, knowing whence

6
it comes, and to what perfection it contributes." Indeed
from the assumption that all things are as they are because
of their relation to the whole, and the admission that the
whole can conceivably exclude all evil whatever, Shaftes-
bury concludes that it actually does exclude it. Thus the
universe itself contains no real or ultimate evil. 7
The insistent optimism of this benevolent invalid was per-
haps not quite convincing, but as a reaction against Hobbism
and cynicism, his optimism proved widely influential. Leslie
"
Stephen notes Shaftesbury 's warm reception in Germany,
where sentimentalism is more congenial to the national tem-
8
perament"; but Montesquieu's praise of Shaftesbury is no
less extravagant than Herder's. In Britain his influence, direct
through Hutcheson to Adam Smith, spreads out in other

directions also, cultivating cosmic affability and assurance.
The placid optimism of Francis Hutcheson, while con-

fident that God is the author of a universe perfect and har-
monious throughout, rests more explicitly on the benignant
Providence directing the course of human life. Our Heavenly
Father orders all things for our greatest good, blessing and
rewarding or kindly admonishing or exhorting us as we may
need Notwithstanding all misfortune or suffering which
it.
may beset us, experience, in the view of this disciple of

Shaftesbury, warrants a firm persuasion that God permits "no
further evil than what the most perfect constitution requires
9
or necessarily brings along with it."
This general docility is characteristic also of Adam Smith,

who succeeded Hutcheson as Professor of Moral Philosophy

at Glasgow. God being perfect in power, goodness, and
wisdom, there is always bound to obtain in the world "the
"
greatest possible quantity of happiness.
10
And he counsels
moderation of practical demands keeping with his inex-
in
acting logic and easy-going observation of life's actualities.

"What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in
health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience?'
1 u
So Pope lisped:
Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense
Lie in three words: health, peace, and competence.
II
Tothe Christian mind of Bishop Butler, the actuality of

sin and suffering in the best of all possible worlds did not
admit of doubt. If however sin and suffering could be re-
lated as cause and effect, our confidence in the rule of Divine
Providence would remain unimpaired. The more ultimate
problem raised by the presence of the cause in this proposed
relation does not seem to have disturbed Butler unduly. The
sufferings in this world would not shake his confidence in the
divine government of the world provided only that they are
not undeserved. However lax in his metaphysical demands,
Butler is strict and clear enough on the ethical- juridical re-
quirements of the situation. "Moral government consists,
not barely in rewarding and punishing men for their actions,
. .but in rewarding the righteous and punishing the
.
wicked ... in an exact proportion to their personal merits

and demerits." 12 Butler has no illusions on this score: no
such complete concurrence of fortune and merit can be held
to obtain in the world of our experience. But he maintains
that there is sufficient indication of a tendency towards such
concurrence to justify a presumption in favor of Divine
Providence, and then proceeds to extract strength from weak-
ness: the indication is insufficient and therefore points neces-
sarily to a future life for its completion.
Regarding all this, absolute certainty neither obtains nor
isdemanded; in theology as in science we live on probabilities,
and Butler is content if his approximations to truth are no
more remote than those of the scientist. Indubitable knowl-
edge is out of the question, but in our groping we are not
J
entirely without guidance. Butler s teleology, conceiving of

human life as under divine government and of happiness and
misery as normally consequent on virtue and vice, is "a
moderately optimistic view of the distribution of happiness
and misery in human life: optimistic enough to justify the
venture of faith in the morality of the world-order, and yet
sufficiently moderate to recognize the incomplete attainment
of tendencies and consequences of which it observes the be-
ginnings in this life, and so to demand, for the full fruition
and perfection of the moral order, a future life for man." 13
III
David Hartley's reluctance to subscribe to all the Thirty-

Nine Articles necessitated a change in his choice of a career.
But, if the vicar's son turned to medicine as a life-calling,
his interests and his writings ever revealed a scientist doubled
with a moral philosopher. John Locke and Gay suggested to
him his association theory; from Newton he learned to think
of motion as the basis of sensation. Combining the tw o lines r
of thought, Hartley advanced a doctrine of bodily and men-

tal process which is clearly materialistic in implication not-
withstanding his own professed ardor for the immateriality of

the soul. 14 Sensations have their occasion in cerebro-neural
vibrations; simple ideas, in 'vibratiuncles' or
persisting
diminutive vibrations, the repeated association of two sensa-
tions resulting in the excitation of the simple idea of one in
the presence of the other. The mechanistic basis of this theory
is resisted in the interests of morals and piety, and it is in his

estimate of man and God that Hartley invites our attention.
His loyalty to the idea of God's infinite benevolence leads him,
in his account of human weal and woe, to an amazingly reck-
less optimism.
The
doctrine of vibrations, according to Hartley, seems to
require that we regard pain, not as the opposite of pleasure,
"
but as pleasure itself carried beyond a due limit." Contrari-
wise, "some painful sensations, as they decrease by time, or
the removal of the cause, pass into positive local pleasure."
Pleasure and pain, are thus closely allied. Is the mixture of
the two whichwe experience a pleasant or an unpleasant one?
Hartley defends the sanguine view. The very mixture of
pain in our normally pleasurable experience serves to en-
"
hance the pleasure. The nascent ideas of fear and horror"
which the view of a precipice or a cataract rouses in us
heighten our pleasure in the spectacle. Discords in music
give a relish and keep the sweet harmonies from cloying; a
certain degree of obscurity in poetry has a similar effect;
"
children's first laugh is a nascent cry from fear,
stopped of
a sudden"; our worries and perplexities redound to our
all
u
subsequent contentment.
Hartley regards man's happiness as assured by the very
constitution of nature. Of the seven primary colors, he ob-
serves, green the middle one and the most agreeable to the
is
eye, and (or should we say, and therefore] the general color
of plants, of external nature is green. Hartley's arguments for
the infinite benevolence of God do not suggest the impres-
sion of having teen required to convince their author. Be-
tween two alternatives he does not recognize a third: God is
either infinitely benevolent or infinitely malevolent. The

latter alternative could scarcely be entertained by a man who
regards the idea of a balance of misery over happiness in
human life as inconceivable. Never doubting that human
life is on the whole a happy one, Hartley is rather concerned
to banish pain altogether in the last paragraph, so zealous is

he for the defense of God's exalted benevolence. "In his 'thir-
teenthly' on this high topic, he reduces the optimist's alter-
natives to a list of five, making
1. Each individual infinitely happy always. Or

2. Each individual always finitely happy, without any mixture
of misery, and infinitely so in its progress through Or
infinite time.
3. Each individual infinitely happy, upon the balance, in its progress
through infinite time, but with a mixture of misery. Or
4. Each individual finitely happy in the course of its existence,
whatever that be, but with a mixture of misery as before; and the
universe infinitely happy upon the balance. Or
5. Some individuals happy and some miserable upon the balance,
finitely or infinitely, and yet so that there shall be an infinite over-

18
plus of happiness in the universe.
The fifth alternative, many of us fear, is the best we can

expect, with serious doubt regarding the last clause; and most
of us should thank our lucky stars if the fourth were assured
to us; but nothing less than the third would satisfy David
Hartley. Happiness in man's life, he observes, is mixed with
misery, but the mixture is not permanent; pain is reclaimed
by pleasure, and the ultimate state is joy unalloyed. For the
accomplishment of this happy transmutation, Hartley pro-
poses a law which he derives from his principle of association.
The tendency of this law, he thinks, "is to convert a com-
posite state of pleasure and pain, in which one of the ingredi-
ents is inferior to the other, into a pure state consisting of the
predominating element, and equal in intensity to the differ-
ence between the two original factors." Here is hedonistic
alchemy: the philosopher's stone being a bar of pleasure-
gold greater than the iron-woe which is to be transmuted.
While our pains in general seem to be more intense than our
pleasures, there are not, on Hartley's reckoning, as many of
them, so, "after the destruction of the pains by the opposite
and equal pleasures," the remainder will be pure pleasure.

Thus we are told " association has a tendency to re-
. . .
duce the state of those who have eaten of the tree of knowl-
edge of good and evil, back again to a paradisiacal one."
Because of this " infinite prepollence of happiness over mis-
ery/' we may advance from the third alternative variety of
optimism in Hartley's list to the second. Nor need we stop
short of the very first. In the eyes of God, seeing past, pres-
ent, and future one glance, the first three propositions are
in
equivalent. Thus, Hartley would conclude, though in our

imperfect range of vision happiness seems mixed with misery,
yet "all difficulties relating to the divine attributes will be
taken away; God will be infinitely powerful, knowing, and
good, in the most absolute sense, if we consider things as they
appear to him." The truth of the matter would then be that
17
"all individuals are actually and always infinitely happy."
Leslie Stephen calls this "optimism run mad." l8 However,
Hartley warns us, while our wish for the third supposition,
and its convertibility into the second and the first seem to be
some presumption in its favor, yet we cannot determine
absolutely for it as against the fourth and fifth. The chapter
on God's infinite benevolence is the work of a physician who
was also engaged in the composition of prayers.
In the edition of the Observations on Man (1791) prepared
by Hartley's son, the third volume contains notes and ad-
ditions by Hermann Pistorius, Rector of Poseritz in the Island
of Riigen. The good pastor regards pure happiness as in-
conceivable, for to find pleasure in enjoyment man requires
desire, and "in desiring and needing, he must find pain and
disquietude:" a circumstance which Schopenhauer was to
observe and exploit in an altogether different manner. Pleas-
ure, we are here told, demands comparison with pain. A
state of incessantly increasing pleasure (with correspondingly
decreasing pain) is thus more truly happy than "a pure,

unalterable, and on that account limited happiness." While,
therefore, Pistorius does not consider man's state to be one of
"
absolutely metaphysically infinite happiness," this being
the prerogative of God, he regards it as perpetually increasing,
and ever capable of further enhancement. It is comfort
19
enough.
IV
A country gentleman with abundant leisure and convinced
that an independent fortune is simply a God-given opportu-
nity freely to select one's own work, Abraham Tucker assumes
in his reader a patience as unlimited as his own leisure. The
Light of Nature Pursued through seven long volumes is a

work of unparalleled wordiness and distention, but for all
that exhibits critical power, a felicity for apt illustration, an
occasional directness of attack, and an indefatigable zeal.
It should not be forgotten that the last volumes of the work
were written after Tucker had lost his sight, with a writing
device contrived by himself.
This inquiring man of leisure perceives evils enough in the
world, but is assured none the less that the net balance is on
the side of good, although he finds "the art of bookkeeping
in the commerce of pleasure" very hard to attain. But that
evil should exist at all, his Christian mind regards as a diffi-
cult problem. The Divine Creator all, whatever else he is,

of
must be infinitely good. " Infinite power and wisdom avail
us nothing of themselves. The contemplation of omni-
. . .
potence, omnipresence, and omniscience, without goodness,

has most of anything else driven men into atheism. ." . .
Now if the evils in this world could not be prevented, " where
was the almighty power of God? if he knew how not to pre-
vent them, where was his wisdom? if he could, and might have
prevented them, but would not, where was his goodness?"
Tucker rejects several of the traditional solutions. To refer
the evil in the world to the material element in it indicates

perhaps the channel of evil but not its fountain-head. To
ascribe evil to free will only shifts the problem one step. To
reduce evil to the inevitable imperfection of the finite requires
that we consider whether it "cost omnipotence more trouble
angel than an oyster/ To take refuge in rhetoric
7
to make an
and ask: Can't God do as he pleases, and do we deserve a
better world than we do get, is to miss the point entirely,
which "not what the clay has a right to expect, but what
is
we conceive it likely that a beneficient potter would do."

Nor may we seek an escape in dualism, for even on a Zoro-
astrian basis "the good principle must have furnished his
antagonist with fitting subjects to wreak his malice upon,

and concurred in the production of evil, by giving his crea-
20
tures a capacity of suffering by it."
Tucker would solve his problem by saying that infinite
goodness, according to our comprehension (the prospect of

satisfaction in the welfare of others) is incompatible with the
infinite (inexhaustible)power of God who is completely happy
in himself. So our problem itself is due to our lack of compre-
hension. That God is good Tucker cannot doubt and assures
us that "were our vision a little enlarged we might perceive
every dark place surrounded with a splendor of light." As-
sume God's perfect goodness and equity (and God to Tucker
can be either infinitely good or infinitely malicious), then
"since . .none of us have anything besides what we re-
.
ceived from the divine bounty, and that bounty flows alike
upon all, it follows unavoidably that there must be an exact
equality of fortune among us, and the value of each person's
existence, computed throughout the whole extent of his
Being, precisely the same." Long catalogues and eloquent
accounts of the ills with which our lives are beset only serve
to show Abraham Tucker "how great a weight and variety
of evils are consistent with infinite goodness: and . how
. .
strong must be that necessity which could introduce them
into a plan contrived in mercy and loving kindness." 21
Perhaps all our troubles and tribulations serve to complete

the happiness of certain invisible beings! This is a fancy in
which Tucker seeks refuge and peace, a fancy in speculation
which he matches with one in calculation: though the evils
in this world seem dire and many, yet "our whole amount of
'
suffering may be equivalent to a minute of pain once in every

22
twenty-two years:'" whatever that may mean, a gem of
confirmed optimism, which may serve to temper our harsh
judgment of pessimistic statistics.
Bolingbroke brought to philosophical discussion the in-

temperate partisanship and the haranguing style of a politi-
cal pamphleteer. He declaims instead of reasoning and re-
places refutation by the most scurrilous railing in which he
consigns the world's greatest minds to Bedlam. His is not
the cold light of reason, but rather the politician's fire with
abundance of heat and volumes (five of them) of smoke.
Even after discounting his violent manner, the matter and
substance of his philosophical essays are disappointingly con-
fused and flimsy. One cannot help recalling Burke's question,
"
Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? "
If he is read at as a vigorous, though blustering,
all, it is
orthodoxy and a curiously sceptical

assailant of rationalistic
champion of deistic optimism, and is read largely for the
sake of others, as a preface to Pope and a footnote to Vol-
taire.
Bolingbroke professes to combat, in the name of 'theism/

both atheism and orthodoxy, but his chief object of attack
is the theologian. Against the atheist he maintains God's
existence on teleological grounds, but he denounces the ortho-
dox divine's account of God and of the world. If God is al-
mighty and infinitely perfect, how dare you decry God's

"
creation? If God perfect, so is his work:
is Everything,
which God has done, is for that very reason right/' 23 This
is to be the thesis of Pope's poetic theodicy. The perfection of
God, which is the conclusion of a teleological argument, is

for Bolingbroke the premise of an optimistic conclusion:
the heavens declare the glory of God, and God's heavens are
bound to be bright and clear. But actually they seem to be
cloudy. This need not disturb our theodicy if we are only
careful to avoid anthropomorphism. Bolingbroke carries on
tireless polemic against Clarke and other theologians who
maintain that God is perfectly good and just in our meaning
of these words. We can prove God's wisdom and power con-
formably to our ideas of wisdom and power, but not so his

justice and goodness. This does not warrant the theologian's
seeking refuge in the idea of appropriate readjustments after
death, nor the atheist's denying the operation of divine good-
ness and justice altogether. Not your happiness and mine,
but the design and harmony of the whole is the determining
aim of creation; and if we consistently see our own happiness
and misery in the light of the whole, anthropomorphic com-
plaint replaced by the most devout adoration of supreme
is
and incomprehensible Deity. The latter idea is Shaftesbury's

and dictates the optimism of Bolingbroke, but its conjunction
with the former virtually undermines the moral basis of
theodicy. Bolingbroke's sophistry and his implied ethical
scepticism should have led him consistently to pessimism:
"If once the concept of God's goodness was abandoned, then
the cold mechanistic view of the world offered no more a
24
protection from pessimism."
That Bolingbroke actually seems unaware of this duality
of motive in his thought isdue to his excess of polemical zeal
and deficiency in logic. 25 So he flays the orthodox divine for
blaspheming God by calling his creation corrupt and evil,

and also for regarding God in the image of man by calling him
just and good in our human sense of the term. The sceptical
and pessimistic implications of the latter form of harangue
become explicit in the thought of Voltaire, but neither these
implications nor the fundamental inconsistency of Boling-
broke seem to have been apparent to his English pupil. While,
as Lessing put it, Alexander Pope "merely borrowed the finest
and most sensuous expressions from each system, without
worrying about their truth/'
26
the Essay on Man is in the
main a rhymed version of that optimistic acceptance of God's
perfectly harmonious world which Bolingbroke shared with
Shaftesbury. God is the author of all: therefore, whatever
is, is right.
However we may judge of the merits of the Essay on Man
as a work of poetic art, we are bound to recognize its immense
and far-reaching influence on eighteenth century thought.
In Germany, as we shall see, it initiated a whole school of
versified theodicy. This great vogue of Pope's work was
"
partly due to his almost unique felicity of expression," 27
which fixed favorite articles of the eighteenth century creed
in striking epigram and proverb. That Pope's contempora-
ries so readily accepted proverbs in place of proofs, and, even
while suspecting Pope's orthodoxy, joined in his optimistic
refrains, is itself characteristic of the more popular thinking
of the Enlightenment.
One keynote of Pope's theodicy is the declaration of the
essentialharmony of the cosmos. There is a Universal Order,
divinely directed, in which all creatures have their proper
r61e and place. They are in and for the system, not the
system for them:
The Universal Cause
Acts not by partial but by general laws;
And makes what happiness we justly call,
Subsist, not in the good of one, but all.
Man errs in thinking that his pleasure and contentment are

God's chief concern:
Has God, thou fool I worked solely for thy good,
Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food?
If we see our own life in its cosmic setting, our discontent will
be swallowed up in adoration of the stupendous harmonious
Whole. In this Whole that stretches
From infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing
the least is as much in God's sight as the alleged crown of

creation:
To him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects and equals all.
There is a hierarchy of being, but it does not involve a grada-

tion of happiness:
Order is first law; and this confessed,
heav'n's
Some are, and must be, greater than the rest,
More rich, more wise; but who infers from hence
That such are happier, shocks all common sense. 28
Unprotestingly man should recognize his place in nature,

nor chide Providence if it crush him when its laws demand it:
Shall burning Aetna, if a sage requires,

Forget to thunder, and recall her fires? . . .
When the loose mountain trembles from on high,

Shall gravitation cease if you go by?
If it seems irrational and unworthy of Providence thus to

make brute nature triumph over human purposes, we should
trustfully keep in mind that the whole design is not known
to us:
So man who here seems principal alone,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown,
Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal;
'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.
Perhaps; but surely this is slight logical basis for the confi-
dent optimistic rhetoric that rests upon it: the more so as
according to Pope himself, God's plans are forever beyond
our complete grasp. The first Epistle was all about the Uni-
versal Whole; now Pope bluntly tells us to try to understand
what we can, our own nature:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Pope's estimate of human nature scarcely warrants compla-

cent optimism. Man is a creature of self-love and contending
passions, and reason, though a guard, is no sure guide; the
best that we can hope for is "the virtue nearest to our vice
allied." But reason, as it teaches the interrelation, reveals
our own social destiny: the whole universe is one system of
society, and the pursuit of our own highest good involves the
promotion of the good of others. So in the lives of men the
law of the general harmony is seen to operate, and
Thus God and nature linked the gen'rai frame,
And bade self-love and social be the same.
This resolute confidence does not waver even when confronted

with the iniquity of tyrants and traitors. Who knows, per-
haps even the anti-social lives of wicked men are part of some
divine purpose, which we may not fathom but should not
doubt. Indeed this would be no more mysterious than the
thousand calamities in nature, calamities to us, not to God:
If plagues or earthquakes break not heaven's design,
Why then a Borgia or a Catiline?
Who know but He, whose hand the lightning forms,
Who heaves old ocean, or who wings the storms,
Pours fierce ambition in a Caesar's mind,
Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind?
From pride, from pride our very reas'ning springs;
Account for moral as for nat'ral things:
Why charge we heav'n in those, in these acquit?
In both to reason right is to submit.
Who knows indeed? And since we do not know, Alexander

Pope harangues at us to believe:
All nature is but art unknown to thee,

All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
29
Now, as Pope's editor points out, "the logic of assertion,

and often of vituperative assertion, in which Pope abounded,
is available for every system, and his admission that God
is the instigator of evil, was a fit foundation for a pessimist
30
philosophy:" or, rather, for axiological anarchy. If what
to us is clearly cruelty, injustice, and discord may, indeed
must, be the reverse in the divine view and harmony, then
and injustice, harmony and discord may well be inter-
justice
changed our view as we grow in wisdom; and radically
in
more than they may well be interchangeable at any time
this,
if theodicy requires it. This ready surrender, not only of our
available standards of value, but of any standards of value

that involve ultimate antithesis of good and evil or any dis-
value, cavalier complacency which is sinister in its moral

is
implications. If justice and injustice are both in the end some-

how is no ultimate evil. But what
good, then of course there
then is good and
right? Whatever is. Thus in Pope's eulogy
of God's world, value-categories are in effect abandoned in
favor of existential, and then the eulogy itself loses meaning.
Here, as in the case of Leibniz, theodicy exacts too high a
price. Job's censure to his orthodox friends comes to mind :
Will ye speak unrighteously for God?

And talk deceitfully for him?
Will ye show partiality to him?
Will ye contend for God?
Is it good that he should search you out?
tl
Or as one deceiveth a man, will ye deceive him?
VI
Optimism dominates and dictates the tone of the popular
32
philosophy of the Enlightenment in Germany. Reimarus
finds in the inanimate world no intrinsic perfection but only
means to perfection which animate beings alone can possess.
The final goal and purpose of creation, in his view, is man's
greatest happiness. That in this world, created by God thus
explicitly for man's sake, pain abounds, is a problem which
Reimarus would meet with the old arguments. Less than
twenty years after the death of Reimarus, Kant is to indicate
the true uniqueness of man
in nature: his moral-spiritual
character; but this radical turn in the discussion is too early

for the Hamburg professor.
So Mendelssohn (1729-1786) firm in his assurance that the
world-course is directed by an infinitely wise and benevo-
lent Creator for the good of his rational creatures, regards
the evils in the world as necessary to set off the greater re-
sultant good and as becoming less and less as the goal of
perfection is attained: this life exhibiting in part what is to
be fully disclosed in the hereafter, God's justice and loving-
kindness and infinite wisdom.
An interesting record of German philosophical thinking
before Kant is Johann Georg Walch's Philosophisch.es Lexi-
con. Walch's treatment of the problem of evil manifests the
strong influence of Leibniz and Wolff, even in his criticism of
their ideas. Walch holds that good and evil are in general
relative, except moral evils or sins, which according to him

"are and remain evil." Evil he defines as "that which ne-
gates and opposes the capacities of man which God as his
maker has bestowed upon him, and from the nature of which
we can judge that God thereby designed us through the
exercise of them to attain blessedness." Just as the highest
good is in love of God, so the utmost evil (hochste Uebel) is
to be sought in our willing, in perverse inclination and emo-

33
tion in general, and especially in perverse self-love.
But how is this corruption and misdirection of the will to
be accounted for? Regarding the origin of evil, Walch's final
conclusion manifests the influence of Bayle's Dictionary.
While he reacts against any tendency towards dualism, and
leanson Augustinian and Leibnizian ideas, his conclusion
suggests pious scepticism: "If we turn to the origin of evil,
how it comes to be in the world and why God permits it,
this is something on which man with his reason should not

speculate." On one point, however, Walch is firm: God's
blamelessness in the circumstances. The crux of the problem
of evil concerns sin, and sin cannot be explained as due to
God-implanted bias to evil in man. Man is responsible, not
"
God. Man as man must be a rational being. Were it not for
his freedom, he would not have needed reason. As a man he
was a creature, and a finite substance, in that he could err
and sin. In these circumstances God found it conformable
to his reason to permit the fall of man." 34
But we ask: "If God chose to create such a world in which
evil and were to be chosen by man, is he wholly blameless
sin
for the consequences?" Walch, after seeking refuge in the
distinction between the possibility and the actuality of sin,
gives us an answer which shows that in his treatment of this
problem he has not been engaged in a real inquiry: "God,
considering the possible worlds and finding the best among
them, determined to create it, hence this best of all possible
worlds could not have been omitted. Had God passed it
over, it would not have been the best world; had it not been
the best world, God would not have created it." 35 Q. E. D.
In sharp distinction from the Leibniz- Wolffian rational-

istic optimism, the mathematician Maupertuis undertakes
to show by empirical calculation that life actually yields a

decided balance of pain. This president of Frederick the
Great's Academy is an eighteenth century Hegesias who
audits the hedonistic books of life, pronounces it mostly a
bankrupt concern, and, far from condemning suicide un-
reservedly, is kept from Hegesian advocacy of it only by his
Christian hope of restitution in the hereafter. His Essai de
philosophic morale^ he assures us, is not the result of personal
disappointment: on the contrary, he argues, if with all his
successes he still finds tedium in life, how can any man's lot
be regarded as better?
In good mathematical manner he begins with definitions.
Pleasure is "all perception which we would rather experience
than not experience/' 36 Pain is the reverse: any experience
which we should prefer to terminate or to replace by another
or by sleep and insensibility is an unpleasant experience. In
calculating and comparing pleasures and pains Maupertuis
takes into account the two factors of intensity and duration;
their product determines the pleasure or displeasure of a
certain experience; the sum of happy moments constitutes the
good of life, and the sum of unhappy moments its evil; and
if a comparison of these two sums shows a balance of pleasure,
our life is to be accounted happy; if the contrary, it is a life

of unhappiness.
Examining life from this angle, happiness on earth, ac-
cording to Maupertuis, is seen to be decidedly exceptional.

Were it possible to blot out all but the really cherished mo-
ments of our experience, "perhaps the entire duration of the
longest life would be reduced to a few hours." All efforts to
reason pain out of existence are futile: "The philosopher who
would say that gout is not an evil, would be talking non-
sense; or, if he merely meant to say that gout does not render
the soul vicious, then he would be uttering a triviality." 87
The organization of the human body is such as to disappoint
optimistic expectations. Pleasure is experienced only by
certain parts of our body, but we can feel pain anywhere.

Continued intense pleasure leads to satiety and disgust, but
the more intense and the longer a pain is, the more painful it
is. To be sure this is not true of the higher satisfactions and
dissatisfactions of themind; but the sages who can find last-
ing felicity in justice and in truth are so decidedly in the
minority that, despite Aristides and Newton, life on the whole
remains an unhappy affair.
If our career ended irrevocably at death, neither the Epi-
curean pursuit of pleasure nor the Stoic apathetic deliver-

ance from pain would avail us aught substantial, and we
might well lend an ear to the Stoic apologist for suicide, and,
we may add, hearken even to Hegesias. It is the unsatis-
factory character of all these solutions, however, which turns
Maupertuis for comfort to Christianity. The hope of life

after death, of which the Christian religion assures us, and
the light which it throws in the darkness of human life with
its teaching of whole-hearted love of God and man, these
transfigure our present life and can make it
blessedly happy.
Maupertuis does not pretend to certainty in the matter, but
his mind is pragmatically settled on the venture: "If I meet
the system which alone can fulfil the desire which I have to be
happy, should I not then recognize it as the true system? Am
I not bound to believe that he who leads me to happiness is
one that would not deceive me?" 38
The Leibniz- Wolffian theodicy did not remain caviare to
the general in Germany. Under its influence, and also under
the influence of English deism, a decided optimism invaded
German thought, and brought together the strict conformist
and the liberal in theology to join in praise of the essential
and ultimate 'bestness' of things as they are.
This movement of thought affected literature; a whole
school of philosophical poets sought to do Alexander Pope's
work in German; and they surely deserved the description
which has been applied to their British colleagues: "a genera-
tion of philosophical organ-grinders." The pioneer and the
champion praiser was the Hamburg senator Barthold Hein-
rich Brockes (1680-1747). In nine volumes of verse published
in the course of twenty-seven years, he compiled an elaborate
rhymed inventory of nature in all her departments, finding

"
her in every detail a precious gift of God to man. Brockes'
entire nature-poetry is a rhymed physico-theological argu-
ment." " In this pious undertaking Brockes reveals him-
selfas liberal in his theology, inexhaustibly benevolent, and
insufferably patient. In this patience the reader cannot
follow him, for his verse is dull beyond compare. Were it
not for his influence on the thought and literary taste of his
day, only the ludicrous absurdities into which his poetic
theodicy often led him would serve to keep his memory alive;
even so his dullness is atoned for, and in his praises of Provi-
dence he adds to the gaiety of nations. It were a penance to
read his five hundred sixty-eight lines on "The Sun," or
his long catalogues of natural wonders, Die Wundergaben
unsers Korpers, some of which are as it were pious parodies
anticipating Whitman at his very worst. But who can re-
sist Brockes when he gets primer-like and soft:
God calls to us in each forget-me-not:

"Forget me notl"
Or when he lists the good points of the wolf:
In how many ways the wolf is of decided use to us!
His skin keeps us well protected from the bitter winter chills;
From his organs are extracted remedies to cure our ills. 41
Or when he cites a real jewel of theodicy, as in his eulogy of
the goose:
Goose-grease doth relieve consumption; goose-gall lotion, too, is good;
Goose is good to eat; for dizzy spells we often use its blood;
Skin and feathers likewise useful: doth not this bird radiate
God's omnipotence, God's wisdom, and God's love for man's estate? 4l
Respectable alike as a thinker and as a poet is Albrecht

von Haller (1707-1777), some of whose philosophical verses,
particularly those Ueber den Ur sprung des Uebels, are readable
alongside Pope's. Optimism and theodicy are not with Haller,
as with Senator Brockes, the hobbies of dull comfortable
complacency. Here we have a mind of marvelous precocity
and as marvelous scope and command of intellectual treas-
ures, for whom writing poetry was a duty as well as a joy, who
undertakes deliberately to instruct his fellowmen in rhyme.
Important, he thinks, is first of all the right attitude to-
wards life:
A spirit well-disposed can sweeten even gall,

But a perverted sense turns everything to wormwood. 48
We cannot shut our eyes to existing evils, and Haller castigates

or bewails them in rhyme: superstition, humbug, oppression,
vanity, bereavement. But if we see particular things in rela-
tion to the whole, the picture changes. scale from God toA
nothing is the universe, and in this scale man is
Ambiguously kin to angel and to brute.

This scale of existence is the best possible; of all available
worlds the infinitely wise and good Creator has chosen the
least imperfect. To be the best, it had to be more than a
machine, it had to include free moral agents, and their
possibly evil choices, and the necessary consequences of

these: the poetic syllogisms are not unfamiliar. God's ways
are hidden from us : how can we blame our Maker for what
we in our blindness cannot perceive?
Perhaps is this our world, which like a grain of sand

Swims in celestial seas, the evil's fatherland!
Perhaps this petty speck of error and of dole

Swells the perfection of the universal whole.
Perhaps; at any rate Haller is ever confident that in the

end aU will be made blessedly clear:
When Thou reveal'st to us the secret of Thy ways,
Then all creation, Lord, shall bow to Thee in praise! 44
This sort of poetic theodicy comes to be a recognized duty.

Friedrich Hagedorn (1708-1754) and Johann Peter Uz
(1720-1796) lay aside their anacreontic lyre and their martial
patriotictrumpet to chant the praises of the Almighty.
As Uz informs us in his rhymed Theodicee:
Thus Leibniz has unlocked the shrine of destiny,

And clear illumined is his path. 45
But on this path neither he nor Hagedorn seem to have

tarried long.A far more richly gifted soul is moved in early
youth by tender love and by wooden preaching to praise God
and his creation more ecstatically, and in a poem of six
cantos, Die Natur der Dinge, oder die vollkommenste Welt,
C. M. Wieland (1733-1813) discusses in rhyme existing phi-
losophies and theologies. The last lines might well have been
anticipated from the start:
So evil step by step does vanish, and our life
No more embittered is by discord and by strife.
The future age at last God's love will truly praise,

And all shall be revealed. . . .
Those groping now in gloom will swim in seas of light,

Will join the harmony celestial, infinite. 46
Thus Wieland at the age of eighteen. When the poet was

almost eighty, he was to hear another youth singing another
song. "Life is a precarious matter," Arthur Schopenhauer
told Wieland; "I have resolved to spend my life meditating
upon it."
VII
Leibniz's theodicy became on the Continent the rallying-
ground of theological and moral optimism, and a bulwark
against the sceptical invasion of Bayle; and similarly Shaftes-
bury's philosophy of harmony stimulated resistance to Hob-
bist moral infidelity. But both Hobbes and Bayle found

a vigorous, if also a decidedly scandalous, protagonist in the
Dutch-born physician Bernard Mandeville, with his Fable
of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Mandeville
shares Bayle's distrust in reason, whether theoretical or
practical, and also Hobbes' account of human nature as natu-
rally selfish; but his professed moral demands are radically
different from those of Hobbes, while the conviction that
his demands are unrealizable rouses only ribald scorn in him,
and no tragic irony as in the case of Bayle.
Mandeville's avowed 'rigoristic' conception of virtue ad-
mits no moral value in any act unless it be wholly free from
47
selfishness and passion in its motivation. But while such
ascetic and purely rational conduct is alone virtuous, human
life does not provide instances of it. Life does not afford
what alone would render it morally worthy. All our acts do
in fact proceed from selfishness and passion; and not only
is this true, but were it not for selfishness and the passions,
society could not prosper. Precisely that which man, morally

speaking, ought not to do, contributes to the greatness and
the prosperity of the state. So honesty is made to appear
the worst policy:
Fools only strive
To make a Great an Honest Hive. 48
Luxury, wastefulness, pride, envy, lust, $nd a score of similar

passions which we rightly condemn as moralists yet serve to
yield the springs of redoubled effort, the occasion for wide
employment of labor, the source of conflict and through
achievement and greatness. Society thrives on vice:
conflict
on this foundation social pessimism may well rest while
theodicy collapses.
Confronted with such a moral-social paradox, a utilitarian
would seek refuge in a redefinition of virtue and vice, holding
only that to be virtue which leads to the increased happiness
of all; while a Kantian, unimpressed by Mandeville's social-
political exhibition, would stoutly reaffirm that rigorous

devotion to duty alone constitutes an act virtuous. Mande-
ville himself seems delighted to find all socially sensible con-
duct vicious; he is the Advocatus Diaboli of the eighteenth
century; in his laughing down of alleged human nobility and

in his obscenity, he is one with Goethe's Mephistopheles.
It is of Mandeville versus Kant that one is bound to think
when one reads the Prologue of Faust.
Mandeville's laughter of scorn is ribald; the sneer of Swift
is a sneer of tragic bitterness. In an age of intellectual self-
assurance and of all too general profession of complacent
universal harmony, of "shams and windy sentimentalities/'
as Carlyle put it, Swift's brutally keen eyes saw stupidity,
bigotry, hypocrisy, servility, arrogance, cruelty; the world
abounded in worms, serpents, jackals, and magpies. Con-
demned to wait in obscurity and inaction while dolts thrived
and prospered; growing up in circumstances in which even
kindly patronage was galling to his indomitable pride; con-
scious of his unrecognized genius and as bitterly sensible
of the dread cloud that was lowering over him, to envelope
his mind who maligned
in darkness; unwilling to silence those
"
his relations with by an admission
Stella" of his impending
fate, which would have earned him their insulting pity and
only confirmed them in ascribing to incipient lunacy his
judgments of life which he was convinced were only too sane,
Swift's cup of bitterness was ever running over. "He re-
sembles a victim tied to the stake and slowly tortured to
madness and death; while from his proudly compressed lips
there issue no weak lamentations, but the deep curses of which
one syllable is more effective than a volume of shrieks." 49
It is not particular individuals that rouse his hatred and
disgust, but rather the collective medley of nations, profes-

sions, and communities. Is he angry at mankind for being so
irremediably worthless? So he writes to Pope: "I tell you

after all, that I do not hate mankind: it is vous autres who
hate them, because you would have them reasonable animals,
and are angry for being disappointed." 50 Is this the explana-
tion of that grim kindliness which has made the most dev-
astating satire of human pettiness and futile vanity a chil-

dren's classic? And is it not also an irony justifying Swift's
estimate of human insight, that his masterpiece has been
removed from the library to the nursery?
"
Where heroes are scarce, Krali-Marko is a hero," so runs
a Balkan proverb. So man is a giant among Lilliputs; but
in the society of real giants, he earns the verdict of Brob-
dignag as being "the most pernicious race of vermin that

nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."
If Gulliver's Travels is a satire on mankind in general, The Tale
of a Tub selects the avowed ministers of the Lord for special

attention. Swift's coarseness in dealing with them, and with
other professed spiritual guides, is deliberate: in righteous
indignation he rolls his scavenger's cart right through the
alleged sanctuaries, to dump its contents on the sham altars,
the while Jove pronounces judgment on humanity:
Offending race of human kind,

By nature, learning, reason blind;
You who through frailty stept aside,
And you who never fell from pride;
You who in different sects were shammed,
And come to see each other damned
(So some folks told you, but they knew
No more of Jove's designs than you)
The world's mad business now is o'er,
And I resent these pranks no more

I to such blockheads set my wit;
I damn such fools! Go, go, you're bit. 61
In the same year (1759) which saw the publication of Vol-

taire'sCandide Samuel Johnson worked overtime for a week
on Rasselas, to earn the money needed to bury his mother
decently and to pay her debts. The story of the Abyssinian
prince reflects no illusions of individual or social stable wel-
fare,nor hopes of real progress; it depicts human life torn
between the heartaches of frustration and futile struggle,
and the tedium of " tasteless tranquillity/' Rasselas and his
" "
companions, having escaped from the happy valley of
cloying enjoyment, seek life-ennobling outlet for their ener-
gies, and finding it nowhere within the assured reach of man,
decide in the end to return to the cushioned ease of Abyssinia.
This is the last chapter, "The Conclusion in Which Nothing
"
is Concluded, In the face of rising discontent on the one
hand, and stubborn placidity on the other, Johnson re-
still
fuses to blink at the facts, but he also refuses to gamble on

possibilities and takes refuge in conservative reaction. Things
are bad enough; but don't make them worse by following idle
dreams of making them better. Leave bad enough alone!
Do your part, such as it is, in this world, without unseemly
whining or cowardly hope. Avoid speculation, keep your feet
on the ground. But know once for all that man has to have
religion and that it had best be the established one; resting
on it, curb hasty impiety in your curse of this wretched life
by remembering that the story is only half told here and now:
God's justice has the last word after all in the life after death.
So Alfred de Vigny was to say: Christianity is a religion of
despair, since, turning away from this life, it looks forward
to the hereafter.
VIII
Eighteenth century theodicy rested on the rationalist as-

sumption that knowledge of the ultimate nature of the
cosmos was within the mind's reach, to be derived from
fundamental axioms in the mind's possession. Regarding the
validity of proposed deductions reason may clash with reason
without losing self-confidence; but the humiliation of reason,

by the dismissal not only of its proffered eternal verities but
of its claim to reach eternal verity undermined the very basis
on which any theodicy could rest. In this attack on the cita-
del of reason David Hume was the most consistent and most
effective aggressor.
British empiricism, setting out more systematically with
John Locke, had repudiated the doctrine of innate ideas and
had undertaken to trace the origin of all alleged knowledge to
experience and ultimately to sensation. Locke's thought,
reluctantly metaphysical but in its intention resolutely pious,
retained ideas of a divinely directed cosmos which he had
scarcely derived from his empiricism. Unsatisfied with this
mere hospitality to Divine Providence, Berkeley's more def-
initely metaphysical mind undertakes to reinterpret Locke's
empiricism in an idealistic sense: he reduces the world
to minds and their ideas, finite minds participating in the
infinite experience of God's mind: the necessary connection
of ideas in the finite mind, and the agreement of mind with
mind, proving the cosmic system of ideas in the Infinite
Mind's experience. On this basis trust in Divine Providence
could rest, and materialism and infidelity were to be confuted.
David Hume's still more rigorous application of Locke's
t
method led him to challenge just this necessary connection

of ideas, the alleged objectivity of cosmic order and harmony.
Holding that Locke's proof of the subjective character of the
secondary qualities of objects (colors, sounds, tastes, smells,
etc.), applied with equal force to his so-called primary quali-
ties, and refusing to admit anything for which experience

did not supply a warrant, Berkeley had reduced all alleged
material existence to mental contents: existence is perceived
existence; a body is its qualities, and these are ideas. Hume
carried this procedure further. Experience does not disclose
to us minds over and apart from mental contents any more
than discloses to us bodies over and apart from their qual-
it
ities.Just as a 'body' is a sum of perceived qualities, so

'mind' is to be equated with ideas. This turn in empiricist
theory cut the ground from under Berkeley's pious idealism.
Berkeley's metaphysics could translate the mechanistic
formulas of physical science and treat natural laws as uni-
form ways in which God connects ideas in our minds; but if
now minds were to be reduced to clusters of impressions and
ideas, what assurance or what possible proof remained for
the Infinite Mind's synthesis, of divine harmony or Divine
Providence? From the order, coherence, necessary connection
of our ideas, Berkeley had inferred God's existence. This
alleged necessary connection Hume now undertook to test
in strict empiricist manner, and found it wanting in objectiv-
ity.
Hume's classical analysis of the idea of causal relation
brought this course of thought to a focus. Causal relation is

reducible to spatial contiguity and temporal succession, with
priority of the cause.' As to the alleged 'necessary connec-
'
tion' to cause and effect, it amounts to constant conjunction

of the two in past experience, habituating us to their being
experienced together and leading us in the presence of the

former to expect the latter. This excess of empiricism, ex-
hibiting "the insuperable difficulties, which attend first prin-
ciples in all systems; the contradictions, which adhere to the
very ideas of matter, cause and effect, extension, space, time,
62
motion; and in a word, quantity of all kinds," roused Kant
from his dogmatic slumber and stimulated him, in the vindi-
cation of science which he undertook, to revise and reconcile
the empiricist and rationalist theories of knowledge. But to
theodicy or to any speculation about ultimate cosmic origins
or direction, Hume's conclusions proved devastating and
unrelieved.
The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion are Hume's
contribution to the disintegration of rational theology and

theodicy. Incapable of proving the objectivity of necessary
connection between two simple events, and always dealing
with particular bits of experience, what could justify our
venture to pronounce upon the eternally necessary plan and
direction of the alleged cosmic whole or trace the origins of
the world from eternity to eternity? 53 Analogy, our refuge
in the absence of demonstration, could scarcely yield the idea
of an Infinite Being, or of unlimited perfection, or harmony,
or wisdom, or goodness, or power: experience discloses only
limitation and particularity. Limping as we do from one item
of experience to another, we to make the giant leap
how are
to All-Comprehending Deity? The venture is past our reach,
and unreasonable.
If Hume thus saps the foundations of rational theology, he
is no less destructive to theodicy or optimism. Even if our
own environment proved on the whole satisfactory
terrestrial
to us, it would not justify assured estimate regarding the
world as a whole, for how can we be sure of our competence
"
to pronounce what is ultimately good: Could a peasant, if
the Aeneid were read to him, pronounce that poem to be
absolutely faultless, or even assign it to its proper rank
among the productions of human wit; he, who had never
"
seen any other production? For all we know, "many worlds
might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eter-
nity ere this system was struck out." This world may be "very
faulty and imperfect, only
. . the
. first rude essay of some
infant deity, . . . the object of derision to his superiors,

... the production of old age and dotage in some super-
annuated deity. . ." 64 We have no conclusive evidence,
.
no real data, only analogies and conjectures. And moreover

within the range of our experience, human life scarcely war-
rants sanguine reassurance about the Whole. "Weakness,
impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life: and 'tis
at last finished in agony and horror. Observe . . . . . . the
curious artifices of Nature, in order to imbitter the life of
every living being. .

Besides, . .man is the greatest
. . .
enemy of man. Oppression, injustice, contempt, contumely,

violence, sedition, war, calumny, treachery, fraud; by these
they mutually torment each other: and they would soon dis-
solve that society which they had formed, were it not for the
dread of still greater ills, which must attend their separation.
. . Were a stranger to drop, on a sudden, into the world, I
.
would show him, as a specimen of its ills, an hospital full of

diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a
field of battle strewed with carcases, a fleet floundering in the
ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pesti-

55
lence. .". This is an eighteenth century foretaste of
.
Schopenhauer.
In the presence of these ills, who can argue reasonably
that we are in the care of a benevolent or indulgent Father?
Are we not rather in the hands of a rigid master, exacting
much for the little that he gives us; or, more reasonable still,
is not our origin and direction of existence a grievous per-
plexity? To recognize it and try to bear it is all that we can
intelligently do, without making ourselves dupes of miserable
illusions. Think straightforwardly, as far as you can, and
should it get past endurance, why, play a game of back-
gammon. It is the gray cheer of scepticism.
IX
Edward Young's entire life was an alternation of gratitude
and manifold lively sense of favors yet to come. Having
lavished seemly and unseemly praise in recognition and in
anticipation of presents, pensions, and preferments, his
copiously solemn muse, raising its glance ever higher, under-
takes the most sublime of themes, and perchance the most
rewarding, in pious prospect: to vindicate the cosmos or to
flatter Divine Providence. How Young's Night Thoughts

were received by the Dispenser of Eternity, it were indis-
creet to judge here; but they did earn him great fame in Eng-
land and all over the Continent: a fame as great as the obliv-
ion which followed it: the former still possessing historical
interest, and the latter quite deserved.
The Night Thoughts are intended to turn the soul from the
vanities, evils, and disappointments of this life to the stable
and assured blessedness of life hereafter. In his younger days
Young had courted the muse at high noon in his heavily
curtained rooms by the light of a candle set in a skull. "By
night an atheist half-believes a God." So through nine Nights
he pours forth pious declamation for the edification of his
imaginary Lorenzo, and is like the rest of us who "pay them-
selves the compliment to think they one day shall not drivel."
He is not afraid of argument in rhyme:
Where'er I turn, how new

proofs pour upon me!
How happily wondrous view supports
this
My former argument!
Nor does he he would "trace these briny rivu-

resist tears;
lets to their springs." is there anything new either in his
Nor
arguments or in his tears. Suffering, he informs us, is man's
desert; indeed it is his blessing: if not one, then the other;
both leave God blameless. Let us receive, be chastened, and
praise the Lord:
Amid my list of blessings infinite
Stand this the foremost: "That my heart has bled."
But all in due season and measure and not forever:

Since virtue's recompense is doubtful here,
If man dies wholly, well may we demand,
Why is man suffered to be good in vain? M \
There is and a happy turn of thought or

occasional wit,
epigram, and very occasionally even good verse in the Night

Thoughts. But neither is Young's light clear and steady
enough, nor his flame sufficiently pure and bright to justify
devoted or critical loyalty. His misty and many-worded
melancholy satisfied the pre-romantic world that did not
quite know what was troubling or stirring it, only to be for-
gotten as it did come to know and feel itself better. From
Edward Young one turns away as from the Cardinal Lo-
thario that was to be Pope Innocent the Third. In the life
beyond of which they were both so assured, may these two
rhetorical but unconvincing contemners of this world keep
each other company.
CHAPTER VI
THE DESPAIR OF CIVILIZATION
The eighteenth century registered a shift from reasoned

theodicy and complacent optimism towards manifold dis-
dain, revulsion, and rebellion: a shift gradual at first which
gained momentum. A movement which found its two leaders
in Voltaire and Rousseau is not to be defined in a simple
formula; the transition of the European mind from the placid

Enlightenment to the Romantic revolt involved a revision
in logic which not only elicited new conclusions from old
premises, but likewise imposed radically new propositions

fornew syllogisms.
The theodicies in prose and in verse had agreed that
"Whatever is, is right "; the new spirit could have found its
"
motto in the words of Marcellus in Hamlet:
Something is
rotten in the state of Denmark "; but was grave disa-
there
greement in diagnosis as to what was rotten. Voltaire, em-
bittered by the stupidity, intolerance, and cruelty of men,
dismayed by the brutal indifference of nature to human weal
or woe, defiantly scorned the idea of benevolent Divine Prov-
idence as a superstition, but, holding fast to his trust in the
intellect and in civilization, never lost faith in progress
through enlightenment and tolerance. Rousseau's diagnosis
was both simpler and more radical: God is good, and so is
man as God made him; evil is not in nature but unnatural,
due to the corruption of man by civilization, with its pride of
intellect, its depravityTlnjtistice, and oppression of man by
man.
145
This no mere pundit controversy: both as allies and as
is
opponents these two men loom large, not only in the history
of ideas, but in the pages of Europe's political and social life
during the last century and a half. The seething multitudes

which greeted Voltaire on his triumphal return to Paris in
1778, after an absence of thirty years, stormed the Bastille
eleven years later. Marat read Rousseau's Contrat social to
enthusiastic audiences in the public squares of Paris, and
Robespierre undertook to make revolutionary France wor-
ship at the shrine of the Savoyard Vicar. Empress Catherine
of Russia, aghast at perceiving the real drift of the new
ideas, ordered Voltaire's bust to be removed from her desk
to the lumber-room, but her caution was tardy and futile.
The earliest revolutionaries of Russia were avowed Vol-
taireans and endeavored to reenact in Petersburg and in
Moscow the Paris drama of emancipation. Young Tolstoy
carried around his neck a medallion with Rousseau's portrait,
and it was on the centenary of Rousseau's death that Tolstoy
began and religious apostolate. While

in earnest his social
a good deal besides Voltaire and Rousseau has entered into
the Russian Revolution, whose tenth anniversary was
celebrated but yesterday, is it quite beside the point to in-
dicate the clash of motives, both social-political and cultural-
religious, which divide Russian liberal and radical opinion
today: and is it altogether misleading to compare this clash
of motives with the clash in the French Revolution of the
Voltairean and the Rousseauistic strains?
II
Voltaire's earlier attitude towards the problem of evil was

similar to that of Bolingbroke and Pope. Convinced of God's
existence and of God's infinite perfection, he regarded criti-
cism of God's world as inadmissible. The strongest argu-
ment for God he found in the admirable order of nature:
THE DESPAIR OP CIVILIZATION 147
"The Heavens declare the glory of God." 1 In the hands

of Voltaire this teleological argument was a double-edged
sword: what the heavens declared to him regarding God or
what meaning he attached to his glory would depend on what
his inquiring eyes saw in heaven and especially on earth.
So long as his view of life was in the main contented, the
evils in life would present no insuperable difficulties to his
belief in God. Man of course has his defects and vices, im-
2
perfections of his finite nature.
Voltaire is not overwhelmed either by our vices or by our
woes; they are part of the universal order, and in that order
man is the happiest and the most perfect of beings. Indeed
in his critique of Pascal, Voltaire expressed grateful acquies-
cence in things as they are, grateful surprise that they are
no worse. "You are surprised that God has made man so
limited, so ignorant, and so little happy; why are you not
surprised thatGod has not made him more limited, more
ignorant,more unhappy? " 3 He was pleased to note Pope's
agreement with him in this sentiment; before them both
Leibniz had recorded the same complacent astonishment.
Toning down evil as he did, Voltaire in any case found it
no grave embarrassment in his theodicy. Sometimes he
agrees with Bolingbroke (or Bolingbroke with him) we may :
not and we need not think of the eternal, infinite Almighty

God as good and just in our human sense of these terms.
Goodness and justice are purely human in connotation
and inapplicable to Deity: "It is quite as absurd to speak
of God as just or unjust in this sense, as to speak of God as
blue or square." 4 The anthropocentric view of nature and
the anthropomorphic view of God are equally naive: in the
cosmic machinery each part has its place, but no part is
unique, hub and center. A mind like Voltaire's could not

permanently neglect a moral estimate of God, but his reason-
ing on the subject is halting: even we imperfect men pursue
goodness and justice, then surely perfect Deity is bound to
be good and just despite the apparent injustice and evils
in this world.
This view of God and nature was insecure a radical change
:
in Voltaire's estimate of man's lot in nature was certain to

change Voltaire's attitude towards God. Actually, in Vol-
taire's experience, man, God, and nature seemed to conspire
to wreck his optimism. The age of which Voltaire was the
outstanding spokesman was an age committed to the
Universal Harmony, an age of trust in human character and
human intelligence, yet Voltaire's own life was a long
struggle with injustice, stupidity, bigotry, and cruelty. He
did get the best of it in the clash of wits with the Lords
of the Earth, but when the Rohans sent their lackeys to
beat him up and had him locked in the Bastille, had him
banished from Paris, he had no recourse. The Great Frederick
might call him to Berlin and profess to treat him as a friend
and equal, but after all to the royal cynic, Voltaire was just
an orange to suck.
The cruelties of ecclesiastic bigotry embittered him against
all organized religion, and he undertook to crush the infamous
sanctity which in the name of God shackled the human
mind and turned man against man in bloody wars. " So many
frauds, so many errors, so many disgusting absurdities. . . .
Our religion ... is unquestionably divine, since seventeen

centuries of imposture and imbecility have not destroyed
5
it." Pouring contempt and ridicule on God's prelates did
not deepen Voltaire's piety. The manifold reaction against
his earlieroptimism came to a head in 1755, and in his poem
on the disastrous Lisbon earthquake he shocked Europe with
his violent disdain of theodicies and ideas of Divine Prov-
idence. The bitter irony of the novel Candide ou V optimisms
reveals a scepticism of a decidedly pessimistic cast, which
is familiar also to the readers of the Dictionnaire philoso-
THE DESPAIR OF CIVILIZATION 149
phique. The best of all possible worlds had been subjected

to a sneering scrutiny and docile optimism pierced all the way
through.
The whole discussion is now put on a humanistic plane.
The vast harmony of the universe, which in ways thinkable
or unthinkable transfigures our evils into elements of perfec-
tion, does not meet Voltaire's demands; nor the view that
goodness and justice as we understand them are not to be
ascribed to God and that God's perfection is untarnished by
any evil or injustice with which our life may be beset. It is
precisely the question of God's alleged goodness which con-
cerns Voltaire, and in insisting on it, he distinguishes him-
self sharply from the complacent rationalists of the Enlighten-
ment. Do the facts of life justify belief in a benevolent Divine

Providence, and if they do not, what standing ground is left
for despairing but unyielding humanity?

How is placid theodicy to dispose of a Lisbon disaster?
Is Lisbon engulfed because of its sins? But then why not
Paris and London as well? Or, if the earthquake is a mere
event in the order of nature, is it beyond the reach of Divine
Goodness to prevent, or has it been preferred by Eternal
Wisdom as the least evil of all possible alternatives? Would
the universe have been worse for sparing Lisbon this disaster?
Is God testing Lisbon's virtue in his fiery furnace? Or is He
the impassive spectator of his anguished creation? Or is
matter, crude and resistant to Divine Perfection, the source
and medium of our woes? These are all blind alleys and lead
us to shuddering confusion. Voltaire exclaims: "Alas, I am

like a doctor; I know nothing/'
6
Thus we are left groping in the twilight of despair; the

book of destiny is closed to us/ We
are atoms tormented but
thinking, measuring the heavens and piercing the infinite,
but ignorant of our own station and of our own lot. To
pretend to wisdom is tragic folly; we can neither affirm nor
deny the presence of the blessed Providence which we do nol
perceive. Voltaire abandons Plato and
rejects Epicurus;
Bayle is wiser in his doubt than they with their professed
knowledge; Bayle, "the advocate-general of the philos-

7
ophers/' is great enough and wise enough not to have a
system.
This dark scepticism is not of the tragically pious variety
as Pascal's; it is deliberately and sneeringly aggressive. In
this wretched world one of Voltaire's undoubted joys, during
the latter part of his life, was flaying optimists to disclose
their unsound substance. His irony is blighting. What do
you mean by your formula that "all is well in this world?"

Ordered it is in accordance with moving forces and necessary
laws; but can you mean that it is a happy world, that all is
"
well with you, with me, that no one suffers? Here is an odd
general good, composed of gallstones, gout, and all sorts of
and damnation." So Shaftesbury,
crimes, sufferings, death,
Bolingbroke, and Pope speak of the universal order, and
universal it is: "flies are born to be devoured by spiders,
who are in turn devoured by swallows, and swallows by
shrikes, and shrikes by eagles, and eagles are born to be
killed by men, who in turn live to kill each other and to be
consumed by worms or by devils, at least in thousand cases
to one." 8 The novel Candide is an elaborate satire on this
best of all possible worlds. Far be it from poor Candide to
doubt the 'metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology' of the
great Pangloss, but his own experiences leave him sorely
perplexed again and again. "If this is the best of possible
worlds, what must the others be like!" But he never gives
up hope; fleeing from Portugal and bound for Paraguay, he
remarks: "Now we are going to another world, ... it is
in that one, no doubt, that all is well." And all is well:
in Eldorado! But, outside of Eldorado, even Candide in
the course of time becomes weary of Pangloss' philosophic-
ing: "That is well said, but we should cultivate our

9
garden."
This in fact was Voltaire's solution, in so far as he had
any solution. Renouncing theodicy and entangled in the
gray webs of doubt, he never lost his faith in civilization:
this at least was at hand and reliable, cultivating our
garden. "Let us work without reasoning; this is the . . .
onlyway making of life endurable." 10

One can live through
Monday by this gospel alone; whether intelligent man can
thus live through the week of life is an open question, which
we cannot quite ignore. But it was not with this question
that Rousseau confronted Voltaire; rather with the bold
assertion that Voltaire had made a cosmic tragedy of evils
which for the most part man had brought on himself, and
that precisely by becoming civilized. So the issue was sharply
drawn.
Ill
To appreciate the violence and the immediate effectiveness
of Rousseau's attack on civilization, we should keep in mind
the fundamental contrast which this vagabond genius pre-
sented to the culture of his time. Here was a man hypersensi-
tive, violently lyrical, irresponsible, nomadic, with a longing
for the ideal and a leaning for the degenerate. Sentimental
like his father who gave him his early maudlin training, and
a coward before duty yet reckless in
like his father unstable;
adventure; chafing under the hardships of one trade after

another, and running away from his native Geneva in order
to escape a beating from his master; induced to change his
Calvinist faith by Father Pontverre's excellent Frangi wine,
Mme. De Warens' fine blue eyes, and the dazzling prospect
of a over the Alps; disgusted with the priests that made
trip
him Catholic; tasting the bitterness of the lackey's life in
Turin and at the same time glowing in his sense of inner
superiority to his outward status, yet with dastardly cruelty
mining a young servant girl's future by falsely accusing her
of theft merely to avoid a slight personal embarrassment;
sighing impatiently for his great chance but incapable of
steady pursuit of the real opportunity presented to him by
Count Gouvon; running away from his slow good fortune
in order to follow another young vagabond who had caught
his fancy; livingon the bounty of Mme. De Warens, trying
study, music, going off with his music master only to abandon
him in Lyons when the old man falls down on a street corner
in an epileptic fit; advancing slowly from a charlatan to
something of an expert in music; living on terms of irre-

sponsible intimacy with Mme. De Warens; dreaming of the
brilliant future that is to atone for his undistinguished present
and disreputable past; and then going off to Paris at the
age of twenty-nine to conquer the world with a new system
of musical notation. The Academy of Inscriptions damns
him with faint praise; he languishes hoping for the smiles of
great ladies, and gets some; goes off to Venice as able secre-
tary to an incompetent and unjust ambassador; in spite of
efficient personal record, is dismissed without pay, and finds
officialdom as slow to recognize a plebeian's just claims
against an aristocrat as academies of learning to welcome a
new And so, chafing and rebellious, he sees his years
idea.
pass and leave him behind, unrecognized and misunder-

stood, his life one of ardent longing, inarticulate, unrealized.
"
"Deep down within him," Gerhard Gran writes, there
constantly muttered a still inarticulate protest; the Genevan
inhim revolted against the worldly splendour he saw about
him; the vagabond was sometimes seized by an inexpressible
longing to get away from the golden cage of the artificial
world in which he felt imprisoned; the democrat was offended
in his innermost depths at the sight of the social chasms that
separated human beings; the mystic shivered in the cold

atmosphere of intellect in which he moved." u
Almost two thirds of his life are gone, when suddenly like
a flash of lightning he sees the wisdom that is to be his wisdom,
and like a peal of thunder he makes it reverberate all over
the world. Rousseau's own account of his conversion is justly
famous: it reveals him so vividly that after reading it we
need not be surprised at his gospel. Walking one hot after-
noon on the road from Paris to Vincennes bound on a visit
to Diderot, he read in a newspaper the announcement of a
prize-essay set by the Dijon Academy on the subject: "Has
the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to
purify or to corrupt manners?" (1749). "If ever anything
resembled a sudden inspiration," he writes, "it was the
movement which began in me as I read this. All at once I
felt myself dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights; crowds
of vivid ideas thronged into mind with a force and con-
my
fusion that threw me into unspeakable agitation; I felt my
head whirling in a giddiness like that of intoxication. A
violent palpitation oppressed me; unable to walk for diffi-
culty of breathing, I sank under one of the trees of the
avenue, and passed half an hour there in such a condition
of excitement that when I arose I saw that the front of my
waistcoat was all wet with my tears, though I was wholly
unconscious of shedding them. Ah, if I could ever have

written the quarter of what I saw or felt under that tree,
with what clearness should I have brought out all the con-
tradictions of our social system; with what simplicity I
should have demonstrated that man is good naturally, and
12
thatby institutions only is he made bad."
Some of this is probably maudlin romancing, but that all
of it was pure invention, that Rousseau's first plan was to

write the usual hackneyed essay in praise of culture and that
Diderot suggested to him the less conventional idea, does
not rest on sufficient evidence. What was revolutionary was
not Rousseau's thesis itself, that arts and sciences have served
to corrupt society; the Dijon Academy was of course pre-
pared for an essay on the negative side of the question pro-
posed, and the thing had been done before. What was
original in Rousseau's thesis was "the fervour, sincerity and
conviction of a most unacademic sort with which it was
7 13
presented and enforced/ Rousseau's whole life had been
a preparation for this essay: this harangue which shocked

and impressed all France was in fact an apology for his own
life. The intensity was lyrically motivated.
Rousseau's first complaint of civilization is the complaint
ofa Diogenes. In plain noonday he searches Paris over with
a lantern looking vainly for a real man, and finding only
varnished masks. He finds, in place of genuine ardor, stereo-
typed, elegant passion; artificial and deceptive politeness
instead of candor, the same conventional veneer on all sides
hiding the real individual, cowardice and hypocrisy, arro-
gance or servility according to the code that imposes itself
on each man, to keep him in his place. And in this soil of

cultured artificiality vices and depravity flourish like weeds:
no more sincere friendship, genuine respect, firm confidence;
instead of these, suspicion, slander, fear, arrogance, treachery,
all hiding beneath a uniform and perfidious veil of etiquette.
This corruption of human nature, Rousseau declares, not
only follows the spread of the arts and sciences, but it is in
proportion to that spread, and is indeed the effect of the
spread. Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Empires of the Orient,
one and all went down in decay and degradation due to their
becoming But the rude races of history, the earlier
civilized.
Romans, the Scythians, the Germans abide in history as

models of pure, simple human nature. Science and art
cannot help corrupting morals: they themselves originate in
"
corruption. Astronomy is born of superstition; oratory
springs from ambition, hatred, flattery, and deceit; geometry,
from avarice; physics, from vain curiosity. . . ." Were it
not for injustice, what need would there be of jurisprudence;

were it not for tyrants, wars and conspiracies, what history
would there be to write? Vain in their aims, dangerous in
and luxury, and nourish-
their results, bred in idleness, pride,
ing them, art and science are the more pernicious the more
they are respected and pursued; and there results a civiliza-
tion artificial and treacherous, worshipping fine words and
elegant manners rather than heroic deeds and a true heart.
From this view Rousseau turns with disdain, and would
appeal to the Almighty for redeeming ignorance and genuine
"
virtue: Almighty God, thou who holdest in thy hands all
souls, deliver us from the enlightenment and the baneful
arts of our fathers, and give us back our ignorance, innocence
and poverty, the only goods that can render us happy and
" 14
that are precious in thy sight.
Rousseau's chief protest against civilization, then, is that
ithas robbed man of his primitive genuineness and freedom,
and that it has corrupted a life of rude equality into one of
tyranny and enslavement. To the defenders of the arts and
sciences Rousseau sought to make his point clear; so he
writes to King Stanislas: "It is not from science, I am told,
but from riches that, in all ages, sprang nobility and luxury.
I never said that luxury was the child of science, but that
they were born together and that one could not go without the
other. This is how I arranged this genealogy. The first source
of all evil is inequality:from inequality sprang riches . . .
from riches, luxury and idleness. From luxury came the

fine arts, and from idleness, science." 15
And what is the origin of inequality, the fountain-source
of all evil? Rousseau gave his answer in his second essay, a
necessary corollary to the first. In this revolutionary work,

Rousseau painted the life of jbhe savage as a life of uncor-
rupted virtue and freedom, a life in which there obtained
physical Inequalities o? strength and but no artificial
skill,
enslavement of man by man: instead of this, simple coflpera-
tion in a rudimentary society, utilizing the abilities of each
for the good of all, and elementary comfort of life without
luxury, but also without squalor. In learning how to work

metals and to cultivate the soil, man saw opportunities to
grow above the heads of chance he took, and
his fellows; this
the institution of private property, raising the rich over the
poor, demanded a social and political order that would safely
and permanently keep the poor under the heel of the rich:
and this is indeed the clear though not always frankly avowed
purpose of governments, enslavers of mankind. Private
property and the inequality which it breeds and signalizes
is the root of the tree civilization, of which arts and sciences
are the blossoms, and moral corruption and misery the fruits.
"The first man
who, having enclosed a piece of ground, could
think of saying, This is mine, and found people simple enough
to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How

many crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and horrors would
not have been spared to the human race by one who, plucking
up the stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out
to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are
undone if you forget that the earth belongs to no one, and
16
that its fruits are for all."
These writings were not intentionally incendiary, but
their revolutionary implications are evident. When Rousseau
stated that, were he a chief in Nigritia he would hang the
first European who entered his lands or the first native who
left them, he was in effect telling the rude masses of Europe
how they might deal with their own elegant, civilized op-
pressors. Rousseau's passionate style was "like the fateful
writing on the wall during Belshazzar's orgy:"
17
"The
money that passes from the hands of the rich to those of those
artisans who furnish their superfluities, is lost for the sub-
sistence of the laborer, and he has no coat, because others
need ribbons. . .We must have sauces in our kitchens,

.
and that is why so many sick people lack broth. We must

have liquors on our tables, and that is why peasants drink
water. We must have powder for our wigs, and that is why
so many poor have no bread." 18
To participate actively in a civilization of oppression and
exploitation which he was denouncing proved more than
even Rousseau's inconsistency could bear. He would simplify
his own life, would go as far back to nature as he could. He
had been the avid pursuer of aristocratic favors, ambitious
for economic competence and social preferment, theatrical
and musical fame, yet, dalliant and sensitive vagabond that
he was, he had always chafed under the daily routine of gain-
ful, civilized occupation, and under the constant risk of
humiliating slights confronting him in the aristocratic society

in which he furtively moved, and his romantic soul in the
garish elegance of the salon dreamt of the green foliage of

untamed nature. So he gave up the chance of a career of some
profit to support himself by copying music at so much a page.
He discarded his sword and gold buttons and courtly apparel,
sold his watch, and when a thief stole the forty-two fine linen
shirts of his Venetian days, contented himself with plainer
apparel. He had set out on his return to the primitive.
To some of his contemporaries this seemed an elaborate
pretence, obstinate pose, maniacal oddity. Of course all the
fine ladies of Paris wanted their music copied by Jean Jacques'
hands, and Grimm sarcastically remarked: "Why don't

you rather start a lemonade stand: all Paris will come to you
19
and you'll get rich."
>
To
Voltaire, Rousseau's thought and practice seemed alike
misguided. "I have received, sir," he wrote him, "your
new book against mankind. Never before has so much
. . .
wit been devoted to render us all stupid brutes; on reading

20
your work, one is moved to walk on all fours." Rousseau
did not miss the opportunity of returning the compliment
when the poem on the Lisbon earthquake appeared. Except-
ing death, which is scarcely in itself an evil, he wrote Vol-
taire, most of our physical ills are due to our own perverted
form of life. Who is to blame if twenty thousand houses, six
and seven stories high, were huddled together in an earth-
quake area? Had the inhabitants of Lisbon lived as nature
intended man to live, as primitive men live in the plains or
forests, the few who first felt the tremor would have speedily
fled across the fields, and in any case would have been in no
imminent danger. Besides, who knows, perhaps those who
died in Lisbon escaped thereby worse and more prolonged
sufferings. Rousseau repeats familiar arguments from Pope
and Leibniz: if God exists, He is perfect, He is wise, puis-
sant, and just; then all is well, and our souls are immortal,
and it makes little difference whether we do or do not live
thirty years longer; and perhaps these thirty years which
I miss are necessary to the order of the universe. These
two the immortality of the soul and in a beneficent
beliefs, in
Providence, he feels, desires, hopes, and will defend to his
dying breath. And he wonders at the contrast between Vol-
"
taire and himself: Sated with glory and disillusioned about
vain greatness, you live free in the lap of plenty. .Yet. .
you find only evil on earth. And I, unknown, poor, and tor-
tured by an incurable malady, I meditate joyously in my re-
treat and find that all is good." 21
Rousseau concludes that it must be his hope, which Vol-
taire lacks, which saves him from pessimism. But is it to be
admitted that one who is personally comfortable should
praise the Lord regardless of the evils he sees in the world
about him, simply because they do not hurt him? As John
Morley writes: "It is hard to imagine a more execrable emo-
"
tion than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous. 22
Voltaire's indignation and despair in the circumstances are
nowise to his personal discredit, nor does he lose here by com-

parison with Rousseau. In the years when he championed
indefatigably the cause of the poor widow and orphans of
"
Galas, Voltaire wrote: During that time not a smile escaped
me without my reproaching myself for it, as for a crime." 23
We should look in vain for anything like this in the Confes-
sions of Rousseau.
The important difference between Voltaire and Rousseau
is not in their views of Divine Providence: here the two are
only rehearsing Bayle, Leibniz, and Pope. What is significant

is their estimate of civilization in relation to their estimate of
nature and God. Voltaire, as we have seen, while despairing

of finding evidence of a providential plan or meaning in this
sorry world, yet never loses his confidence in the upward

climb of man or his faith in enlightenment. But Voltaire
despised the stupid masses: oxen that need yoke, whip, and
24
hay. Life is a sorry jest, which intelligence may enable
us to understand and endure. Now Rousseau took just the
opposite view: praising the Lord, clinging to the faith which
Voltaire unsettled, glorifying nature and the free ignorant
savage, and tracing all our evils to the very civilization
in which Voltaire found man's one glimmer of comfort. So
in the significant contrastwhich we are here observing, it is
Rousseau who appears as the pessimist: disdainer of civiliza-
tion and of the cultural values, as perversions of the primi-
tive soundheart nature.
What is this nature which Rousseau worships as perfect
and the corruption of which by society and civilization he
constantly bewails? The concept of nature has not been de-
fined clearly by Rousseau, nor has he used it consistently
in a manner to allow of precise definition by others. Hoff-
25
ding has distinguished three views of nature which may be
found in Rousseau's works. "Nature," in a theological sense
is for Rousseau the simplicity and harmony of God's original
creation, contrasted with its artificial perversion by civilized
man. Man has distorted God's work: salvation thus involves
the restoration of the majestic simplicity of God's work.
"
In a naturalistic sense, nature" is purely instinctive exist-
ence, without reflection or imagination, a life of action in
response to purely physical needs and stimuli. The trans-
formation of this life into that of civilization is unwholesome
and unnatural: "If nature destined us to a healthy life I dare
almost affirm that the state of reflection is a state contrary
to nature, and that thinking man is a depraved animal/' *
So the primitive man's senses and bodily powers are keener
than those of civilized man: he can see with the eagle, he
can follow a scent, he can track his victim, he is fleet-footed
like the deer, he pursues, he is agile, vigorous, resilient. But
he devises tools, he loses his own bodily strength and skill,
and the more reflective he becomes, the more helpless is his
naked self face to face with nature. If in his theological con-
ception of nature Rousseau depreciates man's work to glorify
God's, here he strangely exalts our animal inheritance over
our human achievement.
"
Rousseau's third use of the term Nature" is in a psycho-
logical sense.In affirming the essential and natural goodness
of man, Rousseau means that man's fundamental, primitive
impulses are good: men are evil, but man is good. This is the
appeal to the heart, to those inner feelings and longings in
which man, despite untoward circumstances and unfortunate
or even disreputable careers in society, may yet claim for
himself the virtue and the precious worth for which his heart
thirsts. Here is perhaps the most significant strain in Rous-
seau's thinking: this flood of feeling in which all literature was
soon to be submerged, this protesting and craving and like-
wise complacent individualism of the misunderstood, of the
insulted and injured, the eulogy of the vagabond and his
inner alleged purity, the cult of the criminal and of the
prostitute, victims of social inequity and iniquity. Rousseau

in Venice weeps at the feet of Zulietta, and with better right
in cold Petersburg, Raskolnikov is to weep at the feet of
Sonia. This third view of nature is manifest in the nostalgic,
wistful, and only half-expressible emotionalism, sentiment
that could degenerate into sentimentality, a heart-breaking
sense of alienation in the actual and the hunger of the heart
after vanished or unrealized perfection : an orgy of meditation
and melancholy and advertised solitude; the individualism
of sensitive suffering souls for whom this world was too much,
27
yet who, like Rousseau, felt "stifled in the universe." It
is the quintessence of romanticism.
So we find these central ideas of Rousseau in his three

major works which in a sense form a trilogy: "Man is born
free, and everywhere he is in chains." Taking man as he is,
what should be done to save or recover for him as much of
the freedom of his primitive state of nature as possible in
civil society? This is the theme of the Contrat social. In La
nouvelle Helo'ise Rousseau exalts unconstrained, straight-
forward love, in contrast to the elegant conventionalized
passions of the salon. This is the emotional, romantic return
to nature, to genuine and unashamed and consuming devo-
tion. And in the Smile he would safeguard through education
man's natural gifts, and thus allow them free range to develop
and come to fruition so that the human nature of the child,
created perfect by God, may not be corrupted by wrong
social training. And the same redemption of human nature
from the corruptions of civilization he proposes in man's
religious life, in the Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard:
not a Christianity of theological rigid orthodoxy, elaborate
ritual, ecclesiastic pomp and circumstance, but rather an
intimate mystical-emotional faith, individual spontaneous
outpouring of the human soul, a religion of tenderness, char-
ity, trust, and soul-soothing quietism. Thus we see Rousseau
chafing in the strait-jacket of civilization, wriggling un-
comfortably, and trying to win for himself and for others as

large a measure as might be of that blessed lost freedom and
spontaneity which he imagined that uncorrupted primitive
man had. x
"His eventide moods he scorns in the morning," Boileau

had written in his Eighth Satire, and Rousseau found his own
portraiture in the words. There is little logic or consistency
in his works, and less of it in his life. The man who ad-
vocated education of children according to nature sent
his own children one after the other to the Foundlings' Asy-
lum. The man who glorified the simple life of freedom in the
bosom of nature lived that life as the protege of one aristo-
crat after another. The man who exalted intimate and utter
personal devotion was morbidly suspicious of his own friends
and forgot or lost them in a manner that is apt to invite
mingled contempt and pity. And yet the ideas which so
passionately possessed him, and the new passions to which
he gave so thrilling an utterance, became mighty forces in
the thought and in the life of mankind.
Shall we dispose of the matter easily by styling Rousseau-
ism the vagabond tradition in our modern life, the impetuous
outpouring of the uncontrolled, the defiant protest of the
submerged, the sentimental pathos of the morbid, the neg-
lected intimate, and the misunderstood? Is distrust of Rous-
seauism and resistance to its romantic nonsense an acid test
of sanity in a modern man? So large and so real elements of
truth are implied in the very asking of these questions that
one is only too apt to lapse into error by mistaking the partial
for the more complete truth. The verdict which Rousseau
passed on civilization and on our cultural values can be esti-
mated in more adequate and more contemporary terms if
we consider in this connection the gospel preached in our
own day by the man whom we may regard as Rousseau's
greatest pupil, for he was more than a mere pupil: a volcano

of passions but also a granite-wall of resolute will, an icono-
clast less sentimentaland more candid and heroic than Rous-
seau. A century after the death of Voltaireand Rousseau,
in 1878, Count Lyof Tolstoy, fifty years old, was definitely
turning from a life of cultured ease, elegance, literary fame,

and complacent religious unbelief and indifference to an
agonized soul-searching contest with the problem of the
eternal values of human life. At the middle of life and at the
turn of the road, the Voltairean smooth scepticism on which
his youth had been nourished proved unavailing. Did he then
once more turn to Rousseau whomhe had earlier in life
cherished and partly forgotten? were
It quite inadequate
to interpret Tolstoy's modern apostolate as a simple con-
version from Voltaire to Rousseau; but the career of the
evangelist of Yasnaya Polyana does illustrate in contempo-
rary terms the clash which in the eighteenth century ranged
Voltaire and Rousseau in opposite camps. And the Russian's
way of meeting and solving his problem serves to accentuate
the main issues, and thus enables us to reach a truer estimate
of this modern disdain of civilization and cultural values.
IV
There is a mistaken notion that at the age of fifty, after he
had written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy sud-
denly turned right about face and changed his entire course
and view of life. On more careful scrutiny, however, we find
in the later Tolstoy only the explicit recognition of a truth
which must have been lurking in his inner being all his life.
His favorite game as a child was to search for the green stick
on which was carved the secret of universal happiness. This
green stick was supposedly buried somewhere on the family
estate, but the children never found it, for an essential con-
dition of success while looking for it was not to think of a
white bear. Tolstoy's whole life may be called the hunt fc
the green stick of blessedness. 28 He sought it in the trans
ports of passion and in the thrill of the gambling table, in th
vast calm and untamed grandeur of elemental nature, in th
dare-devil intoxication of ever-present death and in th
hardening of the soul through war, in the serene joys of
happy family life, in the glowing sense of ever-growing li<
erary fame, social prestige, power of wealth: ever insatiat
and never satisfied. When he had seemingly scaled th
heights of human ambition, he recoiled from life: the heigh
on which he stood was the brink of an abyss.
It is quite clear to any intelligent reader of the novel Ann
Karenina, I am
referring here particularly to the account c
Levin's tragic character, that we have there, not merel;
the~p5?trayal of struggle and anguish, but the portrayal c
them by a man who is himself anguished and struggling
When the book My Confessions appeared, the world per
ceived the conflict in Tolstoy's inner life, a conflict betweei
the artist and the man, the struggle of a man whose work th
world admired and approved, but who could not admir
his own work because he was not sure that God approved it
indeed doubted whether there was any God to approve it
and found his life poisoned by the doubt. 29
The more he saw of life, the more he thought, the les
satisfied he became. "What is the meaning of it all?*' h
kept asking himself. He had six thousand desyatines of lan<
in the government of Samara, and three hundred horses
Suppose he had sixty thousand desyatines, and as man;

horses:what then? He was a famous writer. But suppose h
became still more famous, more famous than Gogol, tha]
Pushkin, Shakespeare, Moli^re, than any writer in the world
what then? What was it all about? Why should he, Coun
Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, wit!
his thousands of acres, horses, healthy, rich, respected, ad
mired, loved, possessing all that men desire: why should
he be living at "Is there any meaning in my life," he

all?
asked, "which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death

awaiting me? ... I felt that the ground on which I stood
was crumbling, that there was nothing for me to stand on,
that what I had been living for was nothing, that I had no
reason for living/'
The problemis radical enough, and Tolstoy's solution of
it was as bold and radical. The enlightened men of his own

class seemed to be in the dark as far as the question of ulti-
mate values and lasting satisfaction was concerned, so he
turned to the peasants, amazed for the first time in his life
by the idea that, despite their poverty and ignorance, they
lived contentedly on their bread and onions. Life must have
a real meaning, he thought, and in their humble way they
must know this meaning. The peasants told him to live
according to Christ's law, and in all sincerity Tolstoy tried
to find this law in the Gospels. His discoveries were revolu-
tionary. He found in the Sermon on the Mount five com-
mandments, like five signposts pointing him to solid ground
out of his spiritual quagmires.
Jesus condemned murderous anger and contumely, and
preached considerate and generous respect of man for man.
Jesus branded sensuality, veiled or unveiled, the flagrant or
the contemplated degradation of woman to serve as a mere
instrument of lust. Jesus denounced the willing surrender
ofa man's free conscience to his official superiors implied in
the taking of military or bureaucratic oaths of unquestioning
obedience. Jesus tore down the barriers separating one nation
from another, and applied the moral law to international
merely love your neighbor, but love your
relations: not
enemy, the mankind. And fifthly, in a com-

alien; love all
mandment which Tolstoy regarded as the keystone of his
moral edifice, Jesus condemned unreservedly the use of force
and the law of retribution, and preached the law of love,
non-resistance.
Tolstoy observed that these commandments of Jesus ran,
not only counter to the general practice of society, but in
some cases also counter to the avowed principles on which
the social order rested. The search for spiritual peace had
sent him to the Gospel, and what he learned there involved
him in a radical critique of the life and the fundamental
ideas of modern civilization.
The root of evil, Tolstoy declared, is selfish exploitation
of man by man. This lust for self-assertion and self-grati-
fication, sexual, economic, political, social, intellectual, taints
the entire system of so-called civilized life. We imprison or
exile or kill those whom we haven't reformed or who haven't
reformed us. We employ the best years of a nation's young
manhood in the training of men to kill other men similarly
trained. We hold sacrosanct an economic system in which
one man luxuriates while and often just because a hundred
starve. We
condone lust, glorify it in literature and provide
for it whether in the form of regulated or unregu-
in practice,
lated prostitution or in the less candid form of unstable, pre-
tended marriages. At the basis of our systems of law and
public security is hatred masked as righteous indignation
and the spirit of revenge parading as retributive justice.
And we declare that philanthropy is well enough in its place,
but that we must have force and violent compulsion, if
civilization and the social order are to be maintained. 30
What are we to do then? Shall we withdraw from this
wicked world to romantic hermit life & la Rousseau
live the
in the bosom of uncorrupted nature? Or shall we resign
ourselves to the inevitable, considering that the whole system
of society involves exploitation, that we cannot change the
system, that our drop in the bucket doesn't make any dif-
ference one way or the other, and we should not make our-
selves miserable over it? Tolstoy took a different stand,

and here his integrity puts Rousseau to shame. Rousseau's
attack on civilization is largely an apology for his own life:
society is to blame, not he; even in his Confessions Rousseau
challenges mankind to show a better man than himself. He saw
himself as a victim, never as a villain; even his remorse over
his vices only illustrates the wretchedness of the environment
that had perverted him or hampered his true self-expres-
sion.
Tolstoy is of a different temper; the intensity of his con-

victions is Pascalian, and the consequent radical reform of
his everyday life calls to mind pages from Pascal's biog-
raphy.
31
He begins with himself. What is to be done? means
to him: what am I, Lyof Tolstoy, to do? Here I have been
writing world-famous novels, and have been portraying the
tree of human life, its decayed and leafless branches; but
what am I really? One of the caterpillars on the tree of
human life. I criticize exploitation, and myself exploit people
and live comfortably on their daily toil. I, Lyof Tolstoy, am
like a horseman who observes that the horse he rides is ex-
hausted. What is to be done? Write fine books about tired
horses, remain seated on the horse's back and philanthrop-
rcally hold up the beast's head? No, but first of all get off
the horse's back. Before I can honestly engage in philan-
thropy and undertake to relieve the sufferings of the poor,
I must stop living a form of life that necessarily causes pov-
erty in the social order. This problem, Tolstoy says, is quite

simple, and is made complicated only by those who do not
wish to solve it in their own lives. The Chinese say: If there
is one man idle, there is another dying of hunger. If I con-
sume what have not myself produced, I am simply eating

I
the dinner which someone else has earned and doesn't get,
and no amount of argument can change the ugly fact. ,
Here, then, I must start. I must make other men work

for me as possible, and must myself work as much as
as little
possible. can take care of my own room, I can look after

I
my own garden, I can clean my boots, indeed, I can make

my boots, I can go into the fields and by honest labor produce
the equivalent of the food which I eat. And only when I
have done this, my own share of the daily labor upon which
the sustaining of human life depends, only then can I pre-
sume to talk of philanthropy or teaching my fellowmen or
32
the higher cannot write novels, or philosophize, or
life. I
make a catalogue of a million beetles, or calculate the dis-

tances of the stars, or paint sunsets and compose symphonies,
and count myself superior to the ignorant and ill-smelling
peasant who in the meantime has been feeding me, or worse
yet, who has been producing the bread that I eat today while
I, captain of trade or finance, manipulate the market so that
his bread and that of thousands of others may be gathered
into my storerooms.
This supposed division of labor, Tolstoy
says, a subtle fallacy with which we seek to cover a plain
is
and ugly fact. It is a fact that in one day or even in one

hour a skillful commercial transaction may make me the
legal possessor of what thousands have labored for days or
months to produce. It is a fact, but it is none the less in-
iquitous, and the civilization that sanctions it has not been

touched with the true spirit of Christ.
Thealleged superiority and dignity of mental work is
subject to a similar criticism. am I the choice beneficiary
Why
of the social order? Because of my supposed high order of
intelligence, because of my genius? But in that case I should
be able to see more clearly than others this real truth of
human life, and seeing it should mend my life accordingly.
The maximum time that I can spend in really profitable
mental work, that is, work vigorous and not detrimental to
mind or body, is five hours daily. I sleep eight hours. What
do I do with the eleven hours that remain? Let me spend
part of that time in relieving the peasant in his manual labor,

so that he may have chance to think at least half an hour.
But you say that modern civilized life is too complicated
to allow of such transformation? So much the worse for
civilized life then: this gaudy edifice of culture does not
atone for the misery of millions on which it rests, nor is it
worth the human price which its elegant beneficiaries pay
for it. "The greater part of my life and yours is taken up
with satisfying, not our natural wants, but wants invented
by us, or artificially inoculated by our education, and that
have become habitual to us; and nine tenths of the work
which we devote to satisfying these demands is idle work." 3S
So Tolstoy condemned the powers of darkness within us:
violence, arrogance, lust, desire to oppress, exploitation. He
saw these as it were inextricably bound up with modern
civilization. To rid human life of them he was prepared to
sacrifice civilization. ;
And he conceived of another social
order in which men labored in the spirit of brotherhood, each
doing his share, each freely bringing to mankind his peculiar
gift of intelligence or intense exquisite feeling or spiritual
genius. In this social order of Tolstoy's vision, agriculture,
industry and trade involved no exploitation, science and
philosophy truly enlightened human life, art was not aristo-
cratic and exclusive, but rather perfected the universal com-
munion of men in the direct language of feeling, and religion,
instead of chaining men to stony creeds and wooden ritual,
knit men together in living brotherhood, entered the human
soul and openedits windows to admit the sunlight of God.
We need not waste time criticizing the details of Tolstoy's

own practice as a reformer, if we remember his words written
to Engelhardt in August, 1882, words which he could have
written with even stronger conviction twenty-five years
later: "People say to me, 'Well, Lyof Nikolaevitch, as far
as preaching goes, you preach; but how about your practice? 1
The question is a perfectly natural one; it is always put to
me, and it always shuts my mouth. Condemn me, if . . .
you choose, but condemn me, and not the path which I
am following. ... If I know the road home, and if I go
along it drunk, and staggering from side to side, does that
prove that the road is not the right one? ... Do not your-
selves confuse and mislead me, and then rejoice over it and
cry, 'Look at him! He says he isgoing home, and he is
floundering in the swamp !
'
. . .
My heart is breaking with
despair because we have all lost the road; and while I struggle
with all my strength to find it, and keep in it, you, instead
of pitying me when I go astray, cry triumphantly, 'See!

He is in the swamp with us!'" 34
If we are candid, we are bound to admit the evils in our
modern civilized society which Tolstoy so vividly exposes to
view. But before we can pass judgment on his remedies, the
conclusions of his diagnosis must be estimated. Because the
evils which Tolstoy combats are so largely evils of civilized
life, does it follow that civilization as such is an evil, and

that moral progress and cultural progress conflict essentially
and all along the line?
Our age burns incense on the altars of progress, but is
getting decidedly dubious regarding its idolatry. The rapidity

with which so much of our boasted humane culture collapsed
at the first impact of savage, elemental forces during the
Great War: the surrender of organized labor, the ready ac-

quiescence of academic and literary leadership, the prostitu-
tion of organized religion in the service of international
slaughter, the diabolical application of the latest science and
the most expert technology to the perfecting of engines of
war, particularly in the use of poison gases, the extension
of hostilities to the submarine and air-regions, increasingly
dangerous to numberless non-combatants, and the cynical

humiliation to which the noblest purposes of man were sub-
jected by the turn of international politics after the conclu-
sion of the proclaimed War to End War: all these have made
many men draw back with dismay, distrusting the goddess
Civilization, and doubting the stability and the essential
soundness of the whole structure of Western Culture.
This confirmed or incipient social pessimism is not without
ground; these last years have served only to exhibit more
obviously the seamy underside of the outwardly resplendent
cloak of modern civilization. In our modern age we have
perfected technical beyond the wildest dreams of the
skill
past, have harnessed nature to do our bidding, have almost

abolished time and space; but have we become spiritually
cosmopolitan, citizens of the cosmos? Have we, in transcend-
ing the provincial boundaries of our material environment,
transcended and overcome likewise spiritual provincialism?
In the amazing perfection of our means of communication,
have we perfected correspondingly our sense of ultimate
direction? We move much faster: do we know any more
clearly whither we are going, the nature of our journey or
our destination? We can share our ideas so much more read-
ily and universally: that is, share them with eye and ear;
but what is the final meaning of what we have to say to each
other? Is it not one of the deplorable aspects of our modern
civilization that spiritual culture has lagged behind material
progress, that we see all about us veriest apes of the spirit

manipulating the latest devices of applied science, as if the
jungle itself were equipped with wireless and radio for the
broadcasting of simian wisdom?
Let us ask then: Does the disdain of civilization rest on a
sound diagnosis, and are Rousseau's or Tolstoy's proposed
remedies really appropriate? Civilization does involve
perversion and corruption of human life, but is it only or

essentially corruption and perversion that it involves? Is civ-
ilization adequately defined as perversion and corruption?
Rousseau, Tolstoy, and other social
ês^roigts
condemn the
cultural process because of the evils' in which it is entangled.
This condemnatory verdict is a wholesome shock to rouse
man from the slumber of cultural complacency, but it is
nonetheless one-sided. A more careful look into the relation
of civilization to morality and perfection generally discloses
the deeper truth as lying between the two shallower extremes
of complacency and despair.
This deeper truth we may formulate as follows: The ad-
vance of civilization does not involve the perfection nor yet
the perversion of human nature, that is to say, neither one
of these two to the exclusion of the other. What we call the
advance of civilization is rather the spread of the field on
which human aims are pursued, realized, or frustrated: a
spread and an intensification of all available values, positive
and negative. Civilization is a great opportunity, but it is
also a grave hazard: in its advance man learns how high he
can rise, but also how low he can fall.
This essential truth may be examined and exhibited in
detail in every field of human endeavor. The more complex
our civilization, the more varied, the subtler, the more mo-
mentous become both attainment and frustration, whether
moral, intellectual, aesthetic, or religious. Read and inter-
pret the decalogue in terms of modern civilized experience.

"Thou shalt not kill shalt not steal shalt not covet :"
observe the almost measureless expanse of range alike in vice
and in opposite virtue here. These commandments have mel-
lowed; enriched in meaning, they are much more difficult to

than in primitive life, but the virtues they inculcate are
fulfil
also loftier and richer. Consider justice, or brotherhood, and

see the sweep in range of meaning in them as a result of civi-
lization. In the realm of science the same results obtain. A
little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and still more dangerous

is much knowledge: dangerous in its disturbing of traditional
stolidity, dangerous in its being misapprehended and mis-

applied, a sword double-edged in possibly foolish hands. Shall
we say then: Blessed are the ignorant, or repeat the words of
Dostoyevsky, "In Germany everyone can read and write,
but everyone is stupid/' implying presumably the rare wis-
dom of the illiterate Russian peasant? Intellectual progress
is an opportunity and a hazard, even in purely intellectual
terms every solution only serves to give rise to still vaster

:
problems, in which the chance of greater truth is confronted

with the chance of more serious error, truth and error alike
increasingly fundamental. So in art, success and failure
alike are in the beginner elementary, but in the work of the
master both are complex and grave a child's house of blocks
:
compared with a Gothic cathedral, a primitive woman's

crooning against a Beethoven symphony. So even more truly
is it also in religion. Man's idea of God gains in significance,
but also in complexity. Piety in civilized life may be more
profound, but it is likewise immeasurably more difficult than
in primitive religion.
This view of human life cannot be described either as
optimistic or as pessimistic. Dispiriting to the laggard, it is
a challenge inspiring to the heroic in human nature. The

parable of the servant who hid the single talent entrusted to
him may here be adapted to our purpose. Spiritual life is a
venture in values. To him that hath shall be given : this is the
promise to the aspiring; but from him that hath not even that
which he hath shall be taken away: this is the censure of the
slothfuland stagnating. And the old stories of Prometheus
and Garden of Eden may now be seen in a somewhat
of the
new light. The uprising of man from the so-called state of
nature to the level of civilization is both tragic and sublime.
The tree of knowledge is the tree of the knowledge of good
and of evil: eating of it cost man his primitive, paradisiacal
innocence, and it was guilt and made man's

his first sin and
a tragic enterprise. But it also made him a traveler on the
life
road of real moral attainment and moral dignity: deliberate,

aspiring, heroic. Not in the unruffled innocence of Paradise,
but in the storm and stress of spiritual endeavor is man's real,
living perfection to be sought. "The best world for a moral
agent/' Royce told us, "is one that needs him to make it
35
better."
Man's true path upward is not in negating civilization, not
in Utopian simplification of modern life, though Tolstoy is to
be honored for having pointed out how much larger share of
homely self-reliance is possible for man even in the present
highly specialized social order. Tolstoy himself recognized
that evil is not to be remedied simply by a change of environ-
ment or reorganization of the social structure, but through a
personal reformation of one's own life in the social system in

which one lives, a system, however, which must never be
allowed to overawe the individual's conscience. 36 The prob-
lem which modern society presents to the alert individual
conscience is this: How
may I participate in this complex
life of civilization, yet in and through it contribute to the
attainment of ever more adequate fair play, economic and
social and international and inter-racial justice? Tolstoy even
in his ploughing and cobbling was still Tolstoy, but how are
those millions for whom ploughing or cobbling, those for
whom factory, shop, or store is the day's work, how are they
to find in the vast complex social enterprise of modern civi-
lization inwhich they must participate, meaning and satis-
faction and stimulus, sweetness and light? This is a funda-
mental problem of modern civilization, but this problem is
not solved by the Utopian proposal to reject culture and seek
perfection in peasant or in primitive conditions of life. In say-
ing this I do not for one moment seek to dismiss the truth,
so forcibly uttered by Tolstoy, that the callous exploitation

of man by man is essentially vicious,and that morality de-
mands respect for the spiritual dignity of one's fellowmen and
wholehearted participation in the work and in the larger life
of mankind. But the attainment of this goal demands, not
the cultural impoverishment of humanity, but rather the
spiritual and moral enrichment of our cultural inheritance.
CHAPTER VII
THE DEVIL IN MODERN POETRY

"Nothing is less poetical than optimism," Leslie Stephen
wrote; "for the essence of a poet's function is to harmonize
the sadness of the universe." l More rhapsodically the
Scandinavian sage Soren Kierkegaard has expressed the same
idea: a poet is "an unhappy creature tormented by deep
anguish, with lips so formed that his sighs sound like beautiful
music." 2 We may share the ancient Orphic view that Zeus
made the gods from his smiles, and men from his tears, and
thus regard grief as the essential theme of the poetic utter-
ance of human life; or less gloomily we may observe that
grief is an experience more intense and less common than
joy, and thus on both counts more stimulating poetically.
But in either case the dominance of the tragic note in great
poetry will not escape us, the note of dolor, dismay, and
divine discontent, and Shelley's lines in the poem To a Sky-
lark will come to mind:
We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
The next three chapters are devoted to the pessimistic

strains inmodern poetry. This field is large, and compression
is imposed by the natural bounds of our present undertaking.
A study of the despondent, wistful, Utopian strains in modern

romantic poetry, and the romantic disdain of the actual,
would throw light on our general inquiry, but is apt to lead
176
THE DEVIL IN MODERN POETRY 177
us far afield. On the other hand,

the major poets of pessimism
demand a more intimate individual study of life, character,
and work than can be accorded to them in a general discus-
sion of a movement/ An effort has been made here to com-
'
bine the merits of the two methods, by dealing more inti-

mately and in greater and more various detail in the next
two chapters with Giacomo Leopardi and Alfred de Vigny,
while in this chapter, instead of a general comparison of
pessimistic strains and tendencies, the conception of supreme
evil has been selected as a window through which we may
look into the inner life and into the view of life of several
modern poets. a man's idea of God is sure index of his

If
spiritual temper and outlook, then doubtless a poet's idea

of the devil should reflect his sense of the source and ground
of evil and his poetic reaction towards it. Naturally enough,
and also fortunately for our purpose, this theme brings to-
gether a number of poets of disdain and despair who would
have interested us in any case, but it also brings, for com-
parison and contrast, poets whom we can scarcely call pes-
simistic, and who should serve to make the final impression
more balanced. We shall turn first to the Devil of the Genesis
story, as portrayed in Milton's Paradise Lost and in Byron's
Cain, and in the latter part of this chapter shall consider the
conception of Mephistopheles in several of the more signifi-
cant versions of the Faust-saga.
Milton found the setting of his epic in the Book of Genesis,

and Biblical tradition imposed on him certain elements in
his theme which he perhaps would not have freely chosen,
and some which he deliberately revised or rejected. While
Paradise Lost has supplied thousands of men with what they
have believed to be Biblical impressions, so that Milton's
poem has actually played the r61e of Scripture, particularly
in Protestant experience, Milton's readers have as a rule come
to the poem with the demonology of tradition, have carried
away rich memories of Satanic stratagem, strife, and seduc-
tion, but have often missed the deeper ideas of his ethics
and theodicy. Even Dante, for whom the medieval world-
view was surely no poetic fiction, appealed to the keener
perception that distinguishes poetic from prosaic truth:
ye who have sound intellects, observe

The doctrine that is here, hiding itself
3
Beneath the veil of the unwonted verses!
Milton, heir to the wisdom of antiquity, was also a live

participant in the thought of the seventeenth century, critical
and non-conformist in theology, cosmology, morals, and
politics alike. It is clear to the more careful reader that in
Paradise Lost Milton undertakes to portray a world in which
rampant, and ruinous to man, but casting no discredit
evil is
on God, nor yet prevailing in the end over good. If we keep
in mind the years during which the blind poet created his
masterpiece, we can well perceive how much of himself he
was bound to utter and how completely he was to enter
into the world of his epic, himself a protagonist. Thus we
shall not be surprised to find Satan no mere vehicle of an
abstraction, but vitalized by ardent imagination and intense

feeling into a living figure, the most living in the whole poem.
We shall not forget that Milton would
delineate so,
By likening spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best;
4
but we shall also remember that Paradise Lost is not a mere

allegory. We may surmise that even for Milton's cold reason
Satan possessed a reality which, by way of comparison,
Mephistopheles could scarcely have had for Goethe's intel-
lect.But in dealing with Goethe and Milton alike, the more
THE DEVIL IN MODERN POETRY 17Q
important question concerns, not the seriousness of their

demonology, but the moral scale of values and the sort of
theodicy disclosed in their delineation of Evil Powers and
Principalities, whatever assortment of them they may have
selected for the purposes of their poems.
The dominant trait of Milton's Satan is proud, rebellious,
resentful self-will. His uprising against the Almighty is con-
ceived as having been provoked by God's exaltation of his
newly begotten Son as cosmic king anointed, to whom all
knees in heaven should bow. That Milton was willing thus
to revise theology, to regard the angelic host as more ancient
than the Son of God, and the latter as a more lately chosen
sole favorite of the Almighty, was clearly dictated by poetic
considerations as greatly enhancing the dramatic qualities
of the revolt in heaven. But the headlong violence of Satan's
resistance and the readiness with which his cohorts joined
in the rebellion manifest only too clearly the indomitable
haughtiness of these "thrones, dominations, princedoms,
virtues, powers," that must have been chafing and smoul-
6
dering under the sway of the Eternal all along and needed
only a spur and a spark to flame up in open defiance. One
single counter-note of loyalty to God is sounded by the seraph
Abdiel, but his pious zeal is seconded by none, and the Satanic
apostasy overwhelmingly prevails in the dread council; one
full third of the angelic host join the revolt.
Here is confirmed, hardened sin: deliberate and passionate
rejection of that loyalty to the higher and the better wherein
all good consists. Satan and his followers have not merely
stumbled; unlike Adam and Eve whose lapse, due to decep-
tion, while demanding expiation, yet does not shut out the
prospect of redemption, the Satanic hosts and Satan most
of all are the very embodiments of irreconcilable disdain
and malice, demanding final overthrow but altogether pre-
6
cluding salvation.
This essential wickedness is not unreservedly repulsive.
In his devotion to his chosen aims, Satan exhibits ardor
and heroism; he abundantly deserves the brave loyalty of his
lieutenants. Milton had too keen moral perception and too
fine poetic taste to paint Satan all muddy black, after the
fashion of the ugly devils of popular fancy. His Satan is no
ignoble leader and his calls to arms do not remain unan-
swered. There is no scene in hell like the one in heaven when
God asks his angels:
Which of you will be mortal to redeem
Man's mortal crime; and just the unjust to save?
7
Dwells in all heaven charity so dear?
and the heavenly choir stands mute, and no patron or inter-

cessor appears on man's behalf until finally the Son of God
offers himself as the redeemer of man. There is compelling
majesty in Satan's character and career: sublime pride,

courage, flaming independence, untrammeled spirit of criti-
cism. Milton not only gave the devil his due, but in many
ways put himself in Satan's place: the Prince of Dark-
ness is drawn with so much understanding because Milton
himself was a free spirit, indomitable, proud. But all the
more impressive is the clarity of Milton's perception that
ardent devotion does not by itself avail if its object is un-

worthy. It is the cosmic pity of it that such high virtues here
are so perverted; courage in such a godless cause is doubly
ruinous because so heroic. Satan's fanatical egotism is
rendered the more deplorable by the majestic proportions
which it assumes. The end does not always justify the
means, but often damns them.
The determination to pervert and undo God's work, while
dominating Satan's mind, does not exhaust it to the exclusion
of other ideas. He is no mere text or formula or moving ab-
straction, but a living and complex individuality. He has a
noble solicitude for his warriors, and on occasion shows fine
disinterestedness in his devotion to the common cause. He

isnot unresponsive to beauty nor even to the call of pity,
nor is he lacking in chivalry. But the master passion of his
being, while admitting coexistent emotions, does not tolerate
any rivalry; it prevails and subjugates the rest.
This domination of Satan by his great passion, the rebel-
liousness of his self-will against the sway of the Higher, is
what constitutes him the personification of evil. His whole
career represents the defiance of passion to reason. The
dramatic version of the first conclave of incipient revolt in
heaven anticipates Spinoza's ethical analysis: upstart outlaw
passion demagogically inciting and drawing to itself all the
other feelings, disdainfully rejecting the loyal counsel of
sanity, and plunging headlong, nor drawing back, but stub-
born and resolute unto perdition. Reason is not extinguished
here, but it is humiliated. While organizing his plans of
battle, Satan is not really unaware of his ultimate defeat.
lie from heaven's height

All these our motions vain sees, and derides.
Nor ishe insensible to the glorious state from which he has

fallen. But defeat is not defeat to him so long as he remains
resistant, nor is a state really glorious to him if it demands
submission:
What though the field be lost?

All is not lost; the unconquerable will
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome. . . .
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be?
So again, when about to tempt Eve :

Revenge, at first though sweet,
Bitter ere long, back on itself recoils:
'
Let it: I reck not. . . .
So again in Paradise Regained:
Iwould be at the worst: worst is my port,

My harbour, and my ultimate repose:
The end I would attain, my final good.
Thus triumphant in Satan's being, rebellious resentful self-

willpours out all the treasures of an archangelic nature into
the determined and ardent pursuit of perverted aims:
To do aught good never will be our task,

But ever to do ill our sole delight;
As being the contrary to his high will,
Whom we resist. If then his providence
Out of our evil seeks to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil.
So directed and devoted, Satan's will renders its own virtues

vile and is its own final punishment. This he perceives:
misery devours him, but still to him no misery is like sub-
mission:
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide. . . .
The lower still I fall; only supreme

In misery; such joy ambition finds. 8
Such resolution, if supporting devotion to high aims, loyalty

to the Ever-Highest, would have made Satan worthy of his
archangelic post; as very

it is, his virtues, in being perverted,
have made his wickedness the blacker. Even so man, created
in God's own image, may yet choose beastliness for his aim
. and sink lower than the beasts. To Milton's mind good and
evil characterize opposite directions of the will, as led by
reason to the pursuit and the humble worship of the higher
aims that elevate and exalt man to God, or as driven by

upstart passion to degrading lusts and ambitions. This latter
is the illusory freedom of the fool, real inward enslavement,
for
This is servitude,
To serve the unwise, or him who hath rebelFd
Against his worthier. . . .
But where the lower is directed by and loyal to the higher,

the lower elevated and ennobled. So-called sensuality
is itself
may be mere nature, animal instinct; or it may be sinful

beastliness, as in Adam and Eve immediately after the fall;
but itcan also be pure innocence, as in Paradise before the
fall; directed and concurred in by reason, it becomes a su-
preme instance of body working up to spirit. Man's evil
and ruin is in deluded into self-degradation by
his being
changing the direction and aim of his pursuit, with conse-

quent bedeviling of his zeal and loyalties. Milton speaks in
"
Lyddas of blind mouths:" unintelligent avidity. This is
evil, when the soul thus turns away from God; this is moral
idolatry:
Their Maker's image .then. .
Forsook them, when themselves they vilified

To serve ungovern'd appetite. 9
Man is own image, and his true destiny

created in God's
isincreasingly to grow like unto God: " Ye shall be holy, for
I am holy." The negating of man's true career, when passion
triumphs over reason and ignoble lusts replace high loyalties,

is therefore a negation of man's humanity. So Christ, in
Paradise Regained, speaks of those who are
Scarce men,
Rolling in brutish vices, and deformed.
But when man, resisting the lure and drag of passion, up-
reaches with redoubled vigor towards the divine, repentant
but never despairing, he rises the stronger because of his
downfall and possesses a paradise within him, happier far,
as the Archangel Michael promises Adam. With Christ's
grace evil is turned to greater good. So the angelic host
sings glory to Christ, to the divine plan of redemption of
man and confutation of the Evil One:
Who seeks
To lessen thee, against his purpose serves
To manifest the more thy might: his evil
Thou usest, and from thence Greatest more good. 10
We may agree in calling this "the main idea of the poem:" u

evil is self-destructive, and good is ever-living. Satan works
only by divine sufferance, and in the end his work is to be

undone by divine grace, and thus Satan will see
How all his malice served but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy shown
On man by him seduced: but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath, and vengeance pour'd. 12
That Paradise Lost, composed as it was by blind, defeated

Milton under the Restoration, portrays evil so grimly, yet
breathes such unshakable confidence in God's justice and love
and in the final triumph of righteousness, is, despite asper-
sions old and more recent, assurance enough both of the
stern manliness and of the sound buoyancy of Milton's
character.
II
In his Cain: A Mystery, Byron represents Adam and Eve

repentant and subdued worshippers of God, with their
children timid and unquestioning: all but one. In this first
family the sacrificial chant of awed acquiescence is disturbed
by the resistant silence of Cain. He refuses to bow in prayer
to a God who forbade man knowledge and allotted him death
for his fruition. Grave doubts torment him:
And this is
Life? Toil! and wherefore should I toil? because
My father could not keep his place in Eden?
What had 7 done in this? I was unborn:
I sought not to be born; nor love the state
To which that birth has brought me. Why did he
Yield to the serpent and the woman? or
Yielding why suffer? What was there in this?
The tree was planted, and why not for him?
If not, why place him near it, where it grew
The fairest in the center? They have but
One answer to all questions, "Twas his will,
And he is good." How know I that? Because
He is all-powerful, must all-good, too, follow?
I judge but by the fruits and they are bitter
Which I must feed on for a fault not mine. ..."
It is his first soliloquy and it sets the tone of the drama.
Byron had read his Bayle, and those acquainted with that
formidable armory can recognize many an old weapon here.
But, whereas in Bayle's folios affirming faith is battling with
scepticism, Byron's drama is the contest of doubt and denial,
with denial in the ascendant. Lucifer but the steady under-
is
tow of Cain'swavering uncertainty, sweeping him on to un-

sounded depths of negation. Cain is not sure that the Creator
is good: Lucifer is certain that he is not good:
Lucifer. He is great
But, in his greatness, is no happier than
We in our conflict! Goodness would not make
Evil; and what else hath he made? But let him
Sit on his vast and solitary throne
Creating worlds, to make eternity
Less burthensome to his immense existence
And unparticipated solitude;
Let him crowd orb on orb: he is alone
Indefinite, Indissoluble Tyrant;
Could he but crush himself, 'twere the best boon
He ever granted: but let him reign on!
And multiply himself in misery!
Spirits and Men, at least we sympathise
And, suffering in concert, make our pangs
Innumerable, more endurable,
By the unbounded sympathy of all
With all! But He! so wretched hi his height,
So restless in his wretchedness, must still

l4
Create, and re-create. . . .
"
Nichol has well called Byron's drama mainly a dialogue
between two halves of his mind." 16 Upon the dread doubt
of Cain, Luciferwould imprint his seal of denial without
doubt or dread; in Cain he recognizes his unwitting wor-
shipper, unwitting but not unresponsive: "Thou speak'st to
me of things which long have swum in visions through my
thought," Cain tells him:
I feel the weight
Of daily toil, and constant thought: I look
Around a world where I seem nothing, with
Thoughts which arise within me, as if they
Could master all things but I thought alone
This misery was mine. . . .
Never till
Now met I aught to sympathise with me.
Tiswell. . . .
Will this troubled doubt be clarified and precipitated into

unqualified defiance, and Cain join the rebel group of Lucifer?
Lucifer relies on strength and unhumbled pride and pro-
fessed passion for truth as substitutes for happiness, and he
imparts his scorn of submissive ease to Cain:
I will have naught to do with happiness
Which humbles me and mine.
But Adah, Cain's wife, distrusts, dreads, and pities Lucifer
by turns:
Thou seem'st unhappy: do not make us so,
And I will weep for thee.
"Alas!" Lucifer answers, "those tears!"
Couldst thou but know what oceans will be shed

. . . The myriad myriads the all-peopled earth
The unpeopled earth and the o'erpeopled Hell
Of which thy bosom is the germ.
Adah is beyond his reach, but on Cain he urges open rebellion,

refusal to submit:
Nothing can
Quench the mind, if the mind will be itself
And centre of surrounding things 'tis made

To sway. 17
What is it binds Cain to the Creator's tether on

that still
this mortal earth? His inability to disdain utterly what he

loves as well as what he hates: both due to his lingering at-
tachment to his petty sphere and to his inadequate percep-
tion of its pettiness. So Lucifer undertakes Cain's education
in disdain; but it is precisely this enlightenment which brings
the midnight to his soul: the promised immortality proves
ruinous. As Lucifer and his neophyte pierce the infinite
spaces like sunbeams,Eden vanishes from sight and the earth
becomes an invisible speck, new worlds come into view,
with Edens in them, and men, and serpents, come into
view, and vanish, and leave Cain with an increasing sense of
the Vast Incomprehensible:
Lucifer. And now I will convey thee to thy world

Where thou shalt multiply the race of Adam,
Eat, drink, toil, tremble, laugh, weep, sleep and die!
Cain. And to what end have I beheld these things
Which thou hast shown me?
Lucifer. Didst thou not require
Knowledge? And have I not, in what I showed,
Taught thee to know thyself?

Cain. Alas! I seem
18
Nothing.
It is not in this seeming nothingness, however, that the

heart of Cain's tragedy is to be sought, but rather in the
boundless reach of his unrealized thought when contrasted
with this seeming nothingness:
Thou show'st me things beyond my power,

Beyond all power of my born faculties,
Although inferior still to my desires
And my conceptions.
19
Thus actuality humiliates his ideals: his world petty, his

problems provincial, his aeons but moments of unreckoned
eternity, his joys and his sorrows alike of no avail, his truths
delusions and his virtues naive, and his beauty a phantom
that fades on closer view. Cain's one undimmed beauty,
Adah's face, has now become a torture : their love for each
other and for their children are agonies, for they are but the
begetters of future untold sorrows.
Thus the inner tragedy must out, and we move inevitably
to the ruinous climax. not simply jealousy of Abel
It is
which leads Cain to murder, nor yet, as in Vigny's concep-
tion, just indignation that the offerings of the indolent herds-
man should have been preferred to those of the hard-working
tiller of the soil. blood which mad-
It is the reek of sanctified
dens Byron's Cain. That his own perplexed but straight-
forward offering of herbs and fruits is rejected, while Abel's
submissive sacrifice of bloody lambs ascends in brightest
flames to heaven, seems to Cain like a horrid substantiation
of Lucifer's charges: God does delight in torture, torture to
man's soul, torture to innocent lambs and their bleating
mothers:
Give way! this bloody record
Shall not stand in the sun, to shame creation!
Abel resists the sacrilegious attack on God's altar, and the

first murder stains the earth. Zillah's shriek of terror follows,
and Cain's chaos of horror, and Eve's unspeakable curse upon
him* Adah's unfailing loyalty like one bright star deepens
the enveloping midnight, but it makes good Cain's words of

her in this dread hour: most beautiful when nearest:
Cain. Leave me! . . .
Adah. I fear
Nothing except to leave thee. . . .
My office is
Henceforth to dry up tears, and not to shed them. . . .
M
The beauty of Cain, Goethe said, "is such as we shall

'
not see a second time in the world/ and Shelley called the
play "a revelation never before communicated to man."
21
Wherein is it thus tragically unique? Byron's Lucifer is not

altogether unfamiliar; his indomitable pride recalls Paradise
Lost, and his cynicism Faust; Ackermann calls him "Milton's
Satan and Goethe's Mephisto in one person. 22 Unique is not
his own character but his relation to Cain. Byron records
neither a losing nor a winning struggle between man and the
Great Deceiver. Strictly speaking, Cain is not tempted at
all. In Lucifer he finds only the full measure of his protest,
the completed sentence of his own verdict, the resolution,

in negation, of his own halting doubts. The tragedy of Cain
is not, as Byron exhibits it, a moral tragedy; it is a tragedy
of cosmic circumstance. The real hero of the drama is the

spirit of Lucifer: Cain seems destined to attain to Lucifer's
stature, and, in his undertaking to realize this destiny, Cain
rises tothe heroic. But to play the role of Lucifer tran-
scends Cain's powers, and therein lies his tragic ruin. In rush-
ing towards Abel's blood-dripping altar to destroy it, Cain
would join Lucifer and his troop of
Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in
His everlasting face, and tell him that
His evil is not good!
But the protestor against the shedding of the blood of lambs

sheds his own brother's blood, and becomes more odious in
his own sight than the God whom he had defied. Therein is
the tragic pity of it, for Cain's sustaining confidence is shat-
tered; his confidence that evil is not inevitable (that is why
he had resented God's admitting it into his world). He re-
sists the docile submission of his parents, brother, and sis-
ters; he will not call evil good, and he seconds Lucifer's rebel-
lion. But on one point he had been adamant, that evil is not
"a part of all things:"
Not of all things. No

I'll not believe it for I thirst for good.
That good should lead him, even while protest-

this thirst for
ing against murder, to murder, is an irony so ruthless, so

in the spirit of utter negation, that it leaves him reeling
and aghast:
And who hath brought him there? I who abhor
The name of Death so deeply, that the thought
Empoisoned all my life, before I knew
His aspect have led him here, and given
I
My brother to his cold and still embrace,

As if he could not have asserted his
Inexorable claim without my aid.
I am awake at last a dreary dream
Had maddened me; but he shall ne'er awake!
That there should be evil at all had tortured him before; but
now he brought low by this doubt settling into conviction:
is
there is no real good, a thought more crushing than his

mother's curse, more than the brand of God upon his brow:
It burns
My brow, but nought to that which is within it!
In this sense we can understand the tragic intensity of the

three last words of the drama: "Peace be with Abel! But
with me/" 2S
Thus we perceive the depth and the source of the Byronic
despair. Byron is indeed of the Satanic school, pursuing
single truth but doubting, indeed scorning, alleged real good.
His despair springs from his cynicism, but the fact that it is
despair which springs from his cynicism shows him to be
something decidedly more than a cynic. So Cain envies Abel
even as he pities him; he wishes himself dead, but he does
not repent: his tragic estimate of things is only confirmed,
not altered. If the depth of Byron is cynical despair, his
exaltation is vigorous and fearless integrity of spirit. AbeFs
bloody corpse at Cain's feet shows him his own ruin, but
that fact too he will face squarely, along with the forbidden
tree of knowledge, and the serpent, and the flaming swords
of the cherubim at the gates of paradise, and his own un-
wanted life of toil and tragedy. He will not content him
with what he is, This "rage and fury against the inade-
25
quacy of his state to his conceptions" is tragic, but it is
also sublime. In Lucifer's parting words to Cain we may

read Byron's own wisdom :
One good gift has the fatal apple given,

Your reason: let it not be ovcrswayed
By tyrannous threats to force you into faith
'Gainst all external sense and inward feeling:
Think and endure, and form an inner world
In your own bosom where the outward fails;
So shall you nearer be the spiritual
Nature, and war triumphant with your own.
26
Of this intrepid resistance Byron's works provide a series

of monologues: his virtues and his vices alike are those of
unsubmission. So in Childe Harold:
But quiet to quick bosoms is a Hell,
And there hath been thy bane; there is a fire
And motion in the Soul which will not dwell

In its narrow being, but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire;
And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore,

Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire
Of aught but rest; a fever at the core,
Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore. 27
Furthermore "the Man/red-idea . . . that knowledge brings

28
trouble and unhappiness" has as its obverse that in the
pursuit of knowledge and truth we attain our tragic human
dignity. So in the Hall of Arimanes, Manfred is not humil-
iated but stands his ground:
His sufferings
Have been of an immortal nature
So even on his death bed he refuses to yield:
The Mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for good or evil thoughts,

its
Is its own origin of ill and end. . . .
This is the sublimity of the Byronic mood, but in the heart
of the sublimity is ever the canker and the venom of the

cynical idea:
Beautiful!
How beautiful is all this visible world!
How glorious in its action and itself!
But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,
Half dust, half deity, alike unfit
To sink or soar, with our mixed essence make
A conflict of its elements, and breathe
The breath of degradation and of pride,
Contending with low wants and lofty will,
Till our Mortality predominates,
And men are what they name not to themselves,
And trust not to each other. 29
The cup of truth is bitter: this is Byron's philosophy in a

word. Bitterness mixes with his ribaldry, and tears with his
laughter as he regards the cup, but also bitter and fierce joy
with the despair, as he proceeds to drain it to the last drop.
His perception of the truth may be half-blind, and sometimes
blind altogether; his own conduct and feelings are frequently
false, theatrical, at times even disgusting. But beneath the
ashes, there still glow his fierce integrity and devotion to
truth, and to these flaming brands he will owe his lasting

ardor in the hearts and minds of men.
Leconte de Lisle, in his Qaln, portrays a Cain irrevocably

converted to anti-theism. Ten centuries of sleep have made
the first human rebel only the more adamant as he awakes.
He challenges divine implacable injustice:
"
Unto the inert clay did I say: Suffer, weep!"
Aroused I longings, and enchained them with a ban?
Stirred ardent love for good beyond the reach of man;
And dreams immortal in time's hour-engulfing sweep?
Urged man to scheme, and crushed the executed plan?
Oh misery! Said I to the dread Lord of earth,

Thejealous God, tormentor of the human host,
Who rides the winds, and roars his orders thunder-tossed:
"Life isindubitably good: do give me birth!"
What care I for this life at such a frightful cost? 30
To be sure this resistance is impotent, but at any rate it

saves man's moral dignity. Yet is man so utterly impotent
before Yahveh? Behold the Creator, repenting him of his
unworthy work, plans the submergence of man by the Deluge.
But Cain undertakes man's cause; the Ark is built, and spite
of the Deluge, man will live, will bear future witnesses of
Yahveh's work, and these witnesses in days to come
evil
him out of his creation. Cain hurls a grim
will rise to cast
shaft of prophecy: From hour to hour the mutinied might of
man shall loosen the clutch of Thy dread arms, shall break
the sacred yoke, shall refuse to hearken to Thy Voice. Let
blood of priestly oppression flow, and lurid smoke rise to
heaven from human holocausts: the children of men will one
day rise in their cradles, will rise to laugh, no longer knowing
Thee. Mellowing knowledge and virtue will lift man up; he
will defy Thee, will spurn Thee, will ignore and forget Thee.
Thy silly starry dome will be pierced by the eye of man and,
in the sweep of worlds on worlds past reckoning, Thou and
Thy and lost. Man's honor
alleged majesty will be engulfed
will reject Thee, and man's intelligence will rule Thee out.
This hope of final sane awakening from the theological
nightmare does not sustain Leconte de Lisle. The rest of
his work usually, though not invariably, lacking in the
is
benignity and respect for man which inspire the revolt of

Qaln. There is lofty disdain and aristocratic despair, and
supreme artistry in the utterance of both, but on these icy
perfections gleam scarcely any rays of compassion or whole-
hearted brotherhood in woe. Leconte de Lisle can portray
the evil chaos of existence, but he evokes no tragic pity.
"
Imagination, passion, learning, unrivalled skill were his,
yet something stiffens all his gifts and repels our sympathy:
whether coldness of heart or narrowness of soul we cannot
3l
tell."
Byron's favorite type of hero (he had a gallery of them)

was wrapped in the dark mantle of evil memories and black
forebodings. These gentlemen of the melancholy brow parade

gloomily through the pages of a dozen literatures, their past
rising up to blight their future, doomed lovers emanating
despondency, particularly in the hearts of romantic maidens.
Russian literature, adolescent in Byron's day, was deeply
touched with his wistful-sardonic rebelliousness: Pushkin's
Eugeny Onyegin is only the chief of a not inconsiderable
company.
It was a bold stroke to make the Fallen Angel himself stir
pity and almost hope as well as dread, and that is what

"
Michael Lermontov (1814-1841) did in his eastern tale,"
The Demon. The exile from heaven, swimming in the infinite
seas of space, finds peace nowhere; the mastery which he
has over the earth, and the evil which he sows in it, give him
no joy in the harvest, and his cosmic scorn only embitters
him the more. Flying over the Caucasus, he sees unmoved

the panorama of majestic beauty, and he sniffs at the more
intimate charms of the Georgian landscape. But when he
sets eyes on GudaPs daughter, a flood of forgotten memories
warmly sweep over his icy being, and anguish of new longing
possesses him. Thamara is both terror-chilled and consumed
by the mysterious spirit's ardor. To escape him, she flees
to the convent-cell, but he is here also. In his new love
for her he sees, if not salvation for his demon-soul, yet bliss
despite his damnation: if she but answer his entreaties, he

would cease tormenting and misleading mankind; indeed he
would make his peace with heaven, would let creation bloom
again in blissful ignorance of evil. All his infinite passion of
hell he would melt into love for her, and she would be wor-
shipped goddess and queen of creation. For one moment
Thamara wavers, and it is her doom and her death. But
the Angel ofHeaven bears her aloft in the uplands of infinite
space. The Demon contests his precious charge, but is over-
borne and is plunged once more into his past: a pathetic,
eternal 'it might have been':
The conquered Demon cursed his longing,
His maddening dreams where love had shone;
And once again he stood relentless,
In scornful arrogance, and dauntless,
Amidst the Universe alone. 32
Ill
"
The Prologue in Heaven " with which Faust opens is
clearly reminiscent of Job, not only in the setting but also

in the fundamental conception of the Devil, revealed by the
Hebrew poet in one telling phrase. To God's unqualified
praise of Job's integrity, Satan answers with a sneer: "Doth
Job fear God for nought?" This cynical dismissal of genuine
piety, sophisticated disdain alike of innocence and of heroism,
moral scepticism, and the vulgar laughing-down of nobility
of whatever sort: this blighting spirit of derision is the spirit
of Goethe's Mephistopheles.
His first words are anticlimax to archangelic laudation.
He cannot follow their lofty speech, but of low insinuations
he has an abundant store. The sublime is to him an object
of ridicule; man's heavenly gleam, reason, Mephistopheles
declares, only makes him beastlier than any beast. With all
his lofty aspirations, man is like a grasshopper,
That springing flies, and flying springs,
And in the grass the same old ditty sings. 33
The exalted and the tragic alike are rejected by Mephistoph-

eles; a cheerful cynicism carries him through, with a lackey's
wink behind the back of Divine Majesty. Neither fierce
Miltonic pride nor Byronic rebellious pathos characterize
him, but vulgar disdain of worth.
34
He openly avows it:
I am the Spirit that Denies!
And justly so: for all things, from the Void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed. 35
He recognizes higher powers (even in the diabolic world he is

no Lucifer or Satan but a Prince of the Realm), but no high
worth; negating all 'good' and deriding the pursuit of it,
he is at home with 'evil':
Thus, all which you as Sin have rated,

Destruction, all with Evil blent,
That is my proper element.
36
The heavenly choir is distasteful to his ear, "a harsh, dis-

37
gusting strumming," but the ribald songs of the drunken
students suit his taste, and the unspeakable orgies of the
Witches' Kitchen and the Walpurgis-Night. It is devilish
magic that thus upsets and transposes all values. "Fair is
foul, and foul is fair," screech the Witches in Macbeth; so
Mephistopheles urges Faust to drink the witch's potion, to
wann his heart with new desire, to be introduced to the
beauty of the world: topsy-turvy beauty, Mephistopheles

observes:
Thou'lt find, this drink thy blood compelling,
Each woman beautiful as Helen. 38
After Gretchen has been lured to her ruin, Faust's wild re-
morse evokes only a heartless laugh from Mephistopheles:
"She is not the first." 39 This contempt for despoiled virtue
is in keeping with his scorn for all that is pure and noble.
Here is malicious sophistry, mocking alike exultation and

despair, the unfiecked bloom of innocence, lush fruition,
withered and decayed undoing. Up and down is all one;
there is no real direction :
Descend, then! I could also say: Ascend!

'Twere all the same. 40
Of this philosophy of sneering negation, the conclusion is
ashen nihilism so Mephistopheles at the death of Faust:

:
Past and Pure Naught, complete monotony!

What good for us, this endlessly creating?
What is created then annihilating?
"And now it's past!" Why read a page so twisted?
'Tis just the same as if it ne'er existed,
Yet goes in circles round as if it had, however:
I'd rather choose, instead, the Void forever. 41
Regarding Faust, Mephistopheles' plans are clearly formu-

"
lated from the start: Dust shall he eat, and with a zest." 42
Insatiate hunger for final and permanent achievement has
leftthe poor scholar disenchanted: his intellect has but re-
vealed its own limitations, and the pursuit of truth has proved
its futility. If the higher life thus fails to attain its goal,
where is lasting satisfaction to be found?
Mephistopheles
promises it with assurance, exacting as payment, however,
ultimate delivery of Faust's soul. For this bargain Faust is
quite ready, provided he formulate the terms of the contract:
When thus I hail the Moment flying:
"Ah, delay thou art so fair!"
still
Then bind me in thy bonds undying,

My final ruin then declare! 43
But in this compact the poor Devil is bound to lose. A

supreme moment of sterile satisfaction, a moment without
future, would indeed be the spiritual end of Faust, and he
needs no blood-bond to seal his commitment. But all that
Mephistopheles can bring to him either arouses a bitter
aftertaste or stimulates still further his ever-outreaching de-
sire. What Faust demands, an experience that would justify
complacence-in-fruition, would, if it were attained, be in-
deed his evil and ruin, for it would negate his active and as-
piring self. But if it were not for Faust's pursuit of this ever-
receding goal, he would not put forth the strength that is in
him, and his active self would not even be affirmed. Thus in
pressing after an aim which, if attained, would prove his
stagnation and ruin, Faust is actually working out his salva-
tion, and Mephistopheles is in fact undoing his own bargain.
In Faust's relations with Gretchen, more than the Witch's
potion is active; genuine love enters to agonize the con-
science-smitten and then the bitterly contrite Faust. And
manifold venture, instead of sating him, only leads him to
understand better what he really demands.
Goethe's devil has esprit, sophisticated wit, as Paulsen
points out, but not Seele, positive, believing, productive,
upbuilding, upward-tending, loving spirit.
44
An enemy of the
light, as his name
signifies, Mephistopheles opposes serious
out of patience with problems.' He is an
'
inquiry and is
expert in make-believe and pretense. He would deceitfully

build up credit and morale; he would relax vigilance over
principles, and lull criticism or conscience by luring easeand
lust. So we cannot believe him to be aware of the holy work
in which he is unwittingly taking a part. It is not his own
cunning, but higher wisdom of which he becomes the vehicle

and the expression, when he characterizes himself to Faust as
Part of that Power, not understood,
Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good. 45
The truth behind these words is an enigma eluding the spirit

of denial. Persistent devotion, even in the form of insatiate
desire, alone in the end can teach it:
A good man, through obscurest aspiration,
Has still an instinct of the one true way.
46
This obscure sense is clarified by experience, and Faust be-
comes aware of what constitutes real worth: significant and

aspiring activity, not mere possession or enjoyment. This
wisdom is taught to Faust; the teaching of it is the main
theme of the Second Part of the drama. The possession
of innocent Gretchen, possession exacting without offering
whole-hearted self-surrender, nor dignified by something
higher and nobler than itself, had brought only ruin and re-
morse, but through ruin and remorse, real though incom-
plete enlightenment, The possession of Helen proves an
unsubstantial and transitory phantom, save in the refinement
and spiritual mellowing of Faust's nature through devotion
to ideal beauty. Political, military, social achievement expand
his range of ambition rather than affording final contentment.
So long as Faust believes that blessedness is to be found in
the placid moment of conclusive attainment, his failure to
reach this desired placidity is to him a source of despair. The
tragedy is thus one of inevitable frustration. Frustration,
however, is not the last word; the devil himself is unwittingly
helping Faust to a higher enlightenment; we have God's
word for it in the Prologue:
Man's active nature, flagging, seeks too soon the level;
Unqualified repose he learns to crave;
Whence, willingly, the comrade him I gave,
Who works, excites, and must create, as Devil.
47
So frustration itself teaches Faust what it cannot teach
cynical Mephistopheles: respect for the aspiring present.
True, he is led to a clearer perception of over-individual
values; but that is not all, nor the main thing. Faust's solu-
tion of the problem of life is not merely in terms of social
uplift and lofty practicality, not in the mere draining of
marshes and building of dikes, to make habitable ground for
millions of men. The important lines should not escape us:
Though not secure, yet free to active toil. . . .
A land like Paradise here, round about :
Up to the brink the tide may roar without,

And though it gnaw, to burst with force the limit,
By common impulse all unite to hern it.
Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence;

The wisdom stamps it true:
last result of
He only earns his freedom and existence,
Who daily conquers them anew. 48
The last line, in the original, is decisive: "Who daily must
reconquer them":
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben
Der taglich sic erobern muss.
The worth of human life, as Faust comes to know it, is not

in fervid enjoyment nor yet
in thrilled or placid contempla-
tion of past attainment, but in noble endeavor and high
hazard: in place of the marsh of stagnation, a paradise of
active toil ever challenged by floods, and a paradise because
thus ever challenged. Only this perception of the eternal
worth of high endeavor can exalt the fleeting moment and
seal it with eternal worth: it is eternal as a link in an un-
ending chain of achieving, ever forging ahead. Faust had

bound himself to be damned as soon as he found any finite
satisfaction self-sufficing. But mellowing experience brought
him to cherish the moment of noble striving for himself and
others: and he was thus forever beyond the reach of Mephis-
topheles.
While man's desires and aspirations stir,

He cannot choose but err. 49
So God declares and so the hazard of evil

in the Prologue,
is ever with us, it, and rejection
but also the resistance to
of dull placidity, and divine discontent, for in them is our
salvation. In our reaching up towards the ideal, Divine Love
draws us upward and on: ever upward-leading and ever-
receding: an ideal forever real because never completely at-
tained, and a grace ever blessing because never quite deserved.
So sing the angels as they bear aloft the immortal soul of
' '
Faust, away from the clutch of Old Iniquity :
Who, ever aspiring, exerts himself,

Him can we redeem. 50
"In these Goethe said to Eckermann, "the key to
lines/'
Faust's rescue be found. In Faust, himself, an ever
may
higher and purer form of activity to the end, and the eternal
Love coming down to his aid from above." 51
IV
Goethe's masterpiece was the outstanding result of a great
and natural revival of interest in the Faust-idea on the part
of German poets, and Goethe has remained in full possession
52
of the field over a score of actual and aspiring contestants.
But, though some of these rival Fa usts have at least earned

their oblivion and should not be disturbed under their dust,
others are significant examples of philosophical poetry, re-
vealing as they do a variety of temperaments and outlooks:
buoyant-heroic, gloomily resolute, hopelessly sullen, defiant,
wailing, sneering, cynical.Even where they are only outline
sketches, they are as it were windows through which we
may look into the inner world of the poets. My choice of
the Fausts I shall consider is determined by my interest in
the philosophy of life of their authors.
The original warp on which the various Faust-textures are
woven is to be found in the sixteenth century Histories of
the dread magician. The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus,
by Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), the earliest Faust of
real literary merit, 53 was based on an English version of the
German Faustbuch, and reproduces through the medium of
a fervid imagination the sixteenth century atmosphere.
Marlowe's Faust, craving
A world of profit and delight,
64
Of power, of honor, of omnipotence,
would "try his brains to gain a deity." Marlowe introduces

a good and an evil angel who strive with opposing counsels
for his will's dominion; the devil's prospectus proves irre-
sistible, and Faustus signs his soul away. The Elizabethan

Mephostophilis is obedient servant to his master Lucifer,
but for cunning, arch cynicism, and horseplay, wistful
all his
gloom pervades him as he remembers his lost heaven:

Thinkst thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal ioyes of Heauen,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hels
In being deprived of eucrlasting blisse?
So at first Faustus has to lend, not borrow, consolation; but

lateron he pays in full for his intrepidity. His will is almost
turned to repentance by the Good Angel's pleading, and
Lucifer himself has to appear, to reseal the pact of Faustus'
doom. The poet holds redemption possible until the end, if
Faustus would only repent: Marlowe's magician proceeds to
ruin because of his deepening conviction that he cannot
repent. Aside from the comical horseplay, some of it sup-
posedly irreverent, which Marlowe appears to supply on
demand, the real tragic action evidences nothing outstand-
ingly damnable except a corruption of the moral will through
magical arts: yet repeatedly he comes forth better than ex-
pected. He had dreamt of glutted lust and wealth and empire.
Actually his first demands of Mephostophilis after the sign-

ing of the soul-contract is for more knowledge about his
"
newly chosen destination: First will I question with thee
about hell." The Emperor is and remains his "gratious
Soveraigne." Five pages before his final damnation, the

apparition of Helen of Troy fans the sputtering and largely
fancied lust into a white heat of consuming imagination:
Was this the face that Launch t a thousand shippes?
65
And burnt the toplesse Towres of Ilium?
One suspects the Marlowe's Faustus would not have been

damned had he not believed his damnation inevitable. The
finalmonologue, a masterpiece of hopeless remorse, is the
more tragic because one pities rather than understands
Faustus' hopelessness. Here the contrast with Goethe is
significant: Goethe's serene refusal to admit ultimate ruin
for his hero, compared with the unfathomed gloom of Mar-
lowe's doomed magician.
Fifteen years before Goethe's earliest version of Faust,

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) was projecting a
drama on the subject; the completed play is supposed to
have been lost, but the Fragment and outline sketch that
we have are in Lessing's characteristic spirit of virile in-
tellectual self-reliance.In Lessing's Prologue, sundry devils
bring the reports of their achievements to Satan's court. An
ambitious princeling of darkness proposes the plan of cor-
rupting God's favorite, Faust: but how? Faust has no vices
nor frailties; his devoted to the pursuit of
whole soul is
knowledge. Satan replies jubilantly: This craving for knowl-

edge is the surest hold we have on him! So Faust's ruin is
plotted in the diabolical conclave. But the Heavenly Host
is vigilant.The Angel of the Lord causes Faust to fall into
profound sleep, and in his place creates a phantom double
of the famous scholar. On this phantom Faust the devil
tries his guile, only to be disabused in the end of his error.
It is the devil's delusion that man's search for truth may
prove his undoing. All that the devil does with the phantom
Faust is seen as in a dream by the real, sleeping Faust, who
on waking thanks Providence for the vision and applies him-
self to the pursuit of truth and virtue with more zeal than
ever. 56 This is the sort of Faust we should have expected

from that Lessing who wrote: "Did the Almighty, holding in
his right hand Truth, and in his left Search after Truth, deign
to tender me the one I might prefer, in all humility, but
57
without hesitation, I should request Search after Truth."
Radically different is the treatment of the Faust-theme

by the pessimists. The Viennese dramatist Franz Grillparzer
(1791-1872) projected a continuation of the first part of
Goethe's drama. In it Faust was to seek salvation and
blessedness "where it is really to be found: in self-limitation
and contentment of soul." 68 He would break with Mephis-
topheles and seek only humble peace. Becoming the tutor
and friend of a youth, the friend of a worthy family, the
friend and later the trusted and accepted lover of a maiden
as pure and simple as Gretchen, is blessedness really in
sight for him? Mephistopheles watches him, slyly encourag-

own assurance of finally pouncing upon
ing, cat-like in his
his poor victim. For Faust is unfitted for innocent joys: the
very love and trust of men, and particularly of his beloved,
only sharpen the cruel sense of his own past ignominy.
Rather than drag his innocent maiden with him, to save her
from being sullied by his attachment to her, he calls the
devil and demands immediate settlement of the dreadful
damnation being that
contract, the one saving grace of his
he is damned alone.
Heinrich Heine (1799-1850) had too keen a sense of humor

to write a Faust-tragedy after Goethe, but humor sufficiently
keen and characteristic to match Goethe's sixty-years' work

by four weeks spent on a Faust-ballet. Der Doktor Faust is a
Tanzpoem in five acts, with Mephistophela as prima ballerina!
The richness of choreographic imagination which Heine
lavishes on his work does not concern us, but rather his con-
ception of the Faust-problem and his solution of it.
In Heine's view "the revolt of the realistic, sensualistic
love of life against the spiritualistically old-catholic asceti-
" 77
cism "the essential idea of the Faust-saga. 59 But this
is
revolt was also one of naturalism and humanism, against

otherworldliness, a revolt of Hellenic stimulus and inspira-
tion. This explains the classical cult of beauty alongside the
coarser voluptuousness of the rejuvenated Faust. It is the
double fire of the Renaissance which is coursing through his
veins. In the old Histories, Faust is represented as causing

Helen of Troy to reappear in all her beauty before his
students: an experience which thousands of Homer's readers
in the Renaissance must have shared.
The zeal for worldly wisdom, the worship of classic beauty,
and rank sensuality thus mixed and clashed in the early
modern soul. The contrast and the conflict of the last two are
portrayed by Heine in his third and fourth acts. In the third,
Faust's orgy of lust at the dance of the witches (on the Hexen-
Sobbat) end in unspeakable revulsion and disgust: unrefined
sensuality has outraged his intelligence and his imagination,
and mere beastliness has refuted itself in his life. Against
this lurid and nauseating riot is the serene heavenly beauty
and harmony of the classic island of Helen: "Real plastic
felicitywithout dismal memories, without foreboding empty
60
longing." The invasion of this island's rhythmic peace by
the discordant fury of the Witch-Duchess whom Faust had
rejected at the Witches' Sabbath, and the riot of destruction
which ensues, symbolize the deadly clash between the two

types of Renaissance sensuousness. This early modern
dream could not last; a disenchantment came, but with it
also new
resolution; the island of blessed beauty is a ruin,
but Faust's sword is plunged to the hilt in the breast of the
Witch-Duchess.
Heine would seek Faust's redemption where Grillparzer
had looked for it; but, like Grillparzer, he expects only dis-
aster in the end. The Faust of Heine's ballet decides to find
his bliss in the quiet joys of home life, but this salvation
comes too late for the cosmic nomad. Mephistophela is a
ravishing and a and
sinister princess of evil: seductive grace
scoffing abandon, but also dark cunning, and ruthless dis-

dain in the end. She exacts, with scornful laughter, the full
terms of her hell-contract with the Doctor. Thus Heine's

balletends tragically, in contrast to Goethe's tragedy which,
as Heine almost tells us, concludes with a heavenly ballet.
Heinrich Heine wept; he could also laugh at his own tears;
but he grudged them too: so beneath the lightmindedness of
this ballet is the asperity of the wretched invalid and world-
contemner, who in the end wept that life was not even
worth his tears. Bahnsen called him a " humorous pessi-
61
mist."
I have seen through you, Nay; I have seen through

The world's vast plan and I have looked too long,
And much too deep; for all my joy has vanished,
And deathless troubles rankle in my heart.
I see right through the hard and stony cover
Of men's houses and of all men's hearts,
all
And see in both lies and deceit and torture.

I read men's thoughts by looking at their faces,
Most of them evil. In the blush of maidens
I see the trembling wish beneath the shame;
Upon Youth's proud and visionary head

I see the cap-and-bells of stupid folly;
And twisted phantom-pictures, crazy shadows
Are all I see, until I scarcely know
If Earth's a madhouse or a hospital. 82
This bitterness is contested by acid self-irony:
Alone by my midnight lamp

I rhymed my groans and my sighs:
They're published by Hoffman and Campe
In small octavo size. 88
Tears without laughter, and unrelieved melancholy per-

vade the work of Austria's chief lyric poet, Nikolaus Lenau
(1802-1850). He found a word in Homer which, he said,
"
fitly described his soul: black all around," 64 but it was black
all around because of the inky blackness within. Lenau was
ever wrapped up in his own midnight, and when it really

extinguished the last flicker of intelligence, in 1844, even then
the poor madman retained a protesting conviction of his
subjectivity: "I am not a delirious, but a lyric poet." 66
Lenau's Faust is Lenau himself, vainly thirsting for abso-
lute certainty and complete self-possession. What passes
for knowledge is occasional obscure glimpsing of an alien
world; but he would not be satisfied were it even lasting and

clear, unless he encompassed, literally comprehended the
world that he knew, unless he made it his own exclusive
content and possession. This is solipsistic fury:
Thus I myself stand face to face with God:
That knowledge only brings me happiness

Which is my own, from him alienate;
M
Myself I must forever feel as mine!
Despairing of getting his questions answered by Heaven,

Faust turns to Hell, and Mephistopheles is ready enough to
help. He has already saved Faust from the brink of death,
so as to have him for his own in life and in eternity. He will
show Truth's own face to Faust, but he promises him even
more: sensual raptures, the joy of triumphant love and of
triumphant hate, fame, honor, power, wealth. He plots to
draw Faust away from Christ, then to alienate him from
Nature, to isolate and throw him upon his bare self, without
refuge or solace:
Then let my hell-fires circle him around:
This way and that he'll wince and creep and bound,
And, like a scorpion, will sting himself. 67
In thus plotting Faust's ruin, the devil is looking beyond:

by undoing God's fair creation he hopes to experience the joys
of counter-creation:
Corrupting his, I'll be creating mine. 68
Faust has demanded in his bargain truth itself. Mephis-

topheles proceeds to teach him the truth about himself, and
first, that he is capable of gross sensuality. The man who in
one scene pronounces himself beyond the saving touch of
woman's love, and that the love of his dearest friend's own
sister, in the next scene seduces a village girl intoxicated by
the strains of Mephistopheles' violin and by the wild dance
that whirls her to dishonor. Lenau's account of the devil's
fiddling is almost uncanny: one hears the gay, luring abandon
of the Magyar dance, but through it and beneath it is another,
sinister lure, the veriest vortex of sensuality. The village
girl will meet Faust again, a-begging with her unwanted
child; he will see her yet once more, a nun in the cloister by
the sea, but beneath the waves that splash against the con-
vent's walls the bones of Faust's child are whitening, and his
remorse and self-contempt will henceforth poison even low
pleasure. Mephistopheles is hateful to him; but, Mephis-
topheles says, right now you need me most, to harden your
weakness and make your sick soul more callous and resistant.
Faust is brought under the spell of Princess Marie's beauty
and inner perfection. Here at last is real love which consumes
him and could, he is convinced, heal and bless. But the Prin-
cess is unresponsive; her thought and heart are Duke Hu-
bert's. Mephistopheles directs the Duke to the royal villa

and induces a clash between him and Faust in which the
latter comes out a murderer. This act seals Faust's doom:
for not only love but nature also have now been alienated
from him. Every and blossom
leaf in the forest calls him a
murderer. He curses Mephistopheles for robbing him of his
innocence, but the devil simply hands him a jug of strong
wine.
Faust's wail at the grave of his mother is in fact a farewell
to The man who had sought wisdom and joy in his un-
life.
attached individuality now finds himself indeed left to his

own desolation. But Mephistopheles promises to exalt him
through self-worship:
My Faust, I'll build to thee a holy shrine,
In thy thought thou'lt worship as divine,

it
Beneath a rocky dome thou'lt bend thy brow,

And to thyself thy supplications vow. 69
This counsel is accepted by Faust as a resolve of desperation:

Inclined to no one, under no one's sway,
I follow, inwards destined, mine own way. 70
This seems to have been Lenau's rational perception of the

essence of evil: rebellious alienation of the part from the
Whole. So he writes in 1836 to Hans Martensen: "Perhaps
all evil may well be conceived as a malorganization of life,
as a revolt of individual life-organs which, oblivious of their

relation to the holy life of the whole, and their submissive
duty, would set themselves up as central, and, subjecting

other allied organs to their demands, in the end upset these
organs and themselves, and hasten death, since all life is
nothing else but a joyous subordination and cooperation
of the particular organs in the larger activity of the soul." 71
And now Faust craves storm, danger; the threat of destruc-
tion thrills him fiercely; he would sail in the teeth of the
wind and forget in the struggle of the present the disaster
of the past.But all is vain. He is unfit for either storm or
quiet; he cannot take life as it comes, in the sanguine manner
of a Gorg. Engulfed in his self-centered midnight, he is
tortured by the conviction of his own insufficiency and nul-
lity:
My self, all empty, meager, dark,
Now hems me round, a coffin stark;
While blows for wilful self I hit,
The devil cast me in the pit.
Entombed alive in murky depths defiled,
Ishook myself awake, eyes bulging wild,
And set myself, with boundless wail and groan,
To gnaw my flesh and bone.
But now my heavy bonds I strain, I sever!
But now more ardently than ever
I stretch my arms out there, above,
From thismy house of death to God, to love!
To, God! Not God, but woe: the same old thought:
"I'm but a creature!" crushes me to nought. 72
Thus hopelessly humiliated in the very ground of his pride

and self-reliance, Faust is finally wrecked. His parting shot
is one of despair and defiance at alleged reality:
I am a dream, with joy, and guilt, and smart,

So dream this dagger plunged into my heart!
(He stabs himself)
VI
To tragic and melancholy, Christian Dietrich
sense
Grabbe (1801-1836) added coarse-grained cynicism. He could
scarcely have felt an alien in the world which he depicts in
his dramas his own life provides but footnotes to the drunken
:
fury of his verse. Lifelong gloom only deepened the impres-

sions of his childhood in the prison-overseer's lodgings, and
alcoholism wrecked whatever he had of self-reliance and
self-respect. His dramas are apt to go to wrack and ruin even
as his own life; their germ-ideas are sometimes titanic, but
they belie their promise in not maturing. The blood-dripping

sword gleaming above smoky ruin fascinated Grabbers im-
agination, witness the list of his protagonists, giants of
world- wrecking might: Sulla, Hannibal, Hermann, the
Hohenstaufen, Theodor von Gothland, Napoleon. These
were to be tragedies exhibiting the self-undoing of self-pro-
pelled and self-seeking power; but Grabbe lacked the serenity
and the nobility needed to realize concretely over-individual
values.
Faust is a cousin-german of Don Juan, and the differences
between the two illustrate significantly characteristic qualities
of Teutonic and Latin ways of life and thought. The Spaniard
fascinatedRomantic imagination; Byron's own characteristic
theme had set the tone, and stimulated imita-
version of the
tors and rivals: Pushkin's dramatic sketch, The Marble
Guest, and Lenau's unfinished Don Juan, pursuer of ever-

new raptures in defiance of the law that
The God of rapture is a God of bounds. 74
The influence of Byron's Cain and Manfred on Grabbers

work is evident, both in fundamental conceptions and in
execution of detail. But it was certainly a flash of genius in
Grabbe to put the German Doctor and the Spanish libertine
in one drama. Don Juan und Faust, with the Devil to com-
plete the sinister triad, was the theme for a world-master; as

it is, even in Grabbe's hands, the play is gripping and attains
occasionally to grand horror in its conceptions. Goethe's

Faust recognized the two souls in his breast:
One with tenacious organs holds in love
And clinging lust the world in its embraces;
The other strongly sweeps, this dust above,
Into the high ancestral spaces. 76
These two souls of Goethe's hero Grabbe would separate and

embody in two rival heroes : a dramatic strategy doing more
violence to Faust's character than toDon Juan's. 76
The contrast between Faust and Don Juan in their rivalry
for the love of Donna Anna provides the action of the drama:
Faust, a will for dominion and possession ever frustrated

because never content; Don Juan, as insatiate as Faust, but
ever drunk with the present moment, reckless of the future
and oblivious of the past. In vain his lackey Leporello re-
minds him of his past amours: he knows only the one: she of
the instant. Killing Donna Anna's bridegroom and her
father disturbs his conscience not at all; he is a man of one
idea at a time, and his mind is filled with Donna Anna's
love. And, knowing him for what he is, she hates him, but
loves him too despite herself. Faust she dreads and abhors;
the devil has put her in Faust's power, in his prison-palace
on the top of Montblanc, but Faust craves her beyond mere
sensual possession; he will have her free and complete love
or nothing. Rejected love turns into fiendish hate, and Donna
Anna dies.
The antithesis between the two men is perfect except for
their common disastrous destiny. Don Juan asks sneeringly:
Why strive for superhuman heights,

When you are just a man?
Faust retorts:
Why be a man,
If I strive not to rise beyond the human? n
When Faust, his hatred turned to bitter remorse over the
death of Donna Anna, seeks atonement by planning to kill
the slayer of her father and bridegroom, Don Juan meets
him with the same nonchalance with which he is awaiting
his 'marble guest/ the slain governor's ghost. Is Donna
Anna dead? His ship will not sink under that blow:
I spread
My sails again, by new winds onwards blown. 78
On this prince of the burning moment Faust would impress

the verdict of eternity; but the devil will have none of it.
He will have them both: first Faust and then Don Juan.
Faust is damned by his inability to attain joyous peace and
to rise above remorse; Don Juan, by his stubborn noncha-
lance and distaste for repentance he is what he is and would
:
rather be Don Juan damned than a saint in Paradise.

So the devil has them both, the insatiate and ever- wistful
seeker and the ever-reckless and insatiate possessor. The
world is the devil's and the fullness thereof; in it those of
alleged virtue do not prevail, for God is too far to hear them
in the hour of their great need; the deviPs own have power
and principality, but they too either fall short of attainment,
or find its wine wormwood, or else have their reckless laughter
laughed back at them in final damnation. Life is a fraud in
any case; even true love cheats itself. So also Lenau's Don
Juan consoles the wailing Donna Isabella after she has yielded
herself to him believing him to be her beloved Antonio: love
is ever an affair of mistaken identity:
The one that in your arms you hold

Is never he that charms your heart. 79
Dante ended his Divine Comedy with praise of "The Love

which moves the Sun and the other stars/' Grabbe is at the
opposite pole; he sees Hate at the helm of the cosmos, and
worse, not simple Hate, but Hate the fiercer because burning
with the memory of hopeless love. It is as if Lermontov's
Demon had returned to earth. Myriads of ages ago the devil
had loved titanically, and that is why his hatred now is so
unspeakable.
80
Therefore he lures and drives men to seek
blessedness in consuming devotion, so as to grind them the
more utterly to dust. Travel we Faust's way of Don Juan's,
Grabbe tells us, it is all one in the end: both ways lead to the
devil's abyss.
In such a world of nightmare, where is the hand of Provi-
dence to be seen? Were God omnipotent, how could he ever
expiate the guilt of having created this tragic chaos? Atheism
"
is after all a consolation. Did not Stendhal write: God's
;;
only excuse is that he really doesn't exist?
So Grabber
No, no I
There is no God! This to his honor

81
Alone will I believe!
Or perhaps there was a God, Faust speculates before the

corpse of Donna Anna:
There was a God once, but he went

To pieces, and his smithereens are we. 82
This desolate thought Philipp Mainliinder is to erect into a

philosophical system, as pretender to the gray crown of
Schopenhauer's dynasty.
CHAPTER VIII
LEOPARDI'S LYRICAL PESSIMISM
An Italian youth in his teens had roused scholars and

academies of scholars to admiration for his philological tal-
ents; the dispenser of literary reputations in his epoch had
called him "the perfect Italian writer." * To this lavish dis-
penser, Pietro Giordani, the youth, Giacomo Leopardi, wrote

letters which are masterpieces of passionate style. They re-
veal him as engulfed in black melancholy and are all-important
to the understanding of his pessimistic poetry. His happi-
ness is wrecked, he writes, by ill health, which robs him of his
one joy, study; wrecked also by his own thought: he must
2
think, yet thinking tortures and consumes him. Condemned
to solitude, denied the relief of escaping from himself, spent,
shattered, and almost blind, without diversion or hope, he is
crawling towards his premature grave.
A tragic life it was, thus to reach its conclusion of despair
at nineteen. Yet the early years had been happy with a
scholar's joy and pride and dreams. The boy Giacomo he
was born in 1798 had been not too obviously frail, and
amazingly precocious alike in ability and in ambition. His
brother Carlo and sister Paolina readily yielded him the
palm of leadership in all the children's games and pageants:
he was the sweet-voiced Filzero, he the Achilles, the Pompey;
when the children played at mass, it was Giacomo who
officiated as priest.
Up to the age of ten the boy was instructed privately; after

215
that began one of the most marvelous careers of premature
study on record.
self-directed The Palazzo Leopardi in
Recanati housed a library of sixteen thousand volumes. It
became the nursery of Giacomo's childhood and the grave-
yard of his adolescence. Adevouring zeal for learning pos-
sessed the lad; in four months he learned Greek by himself,
and then, in addition to his Latin and French, English, Span-
ish and Hebrew so that he could argue with the Hebraists of
Ancona. 3 His brother Carlo, waking at midnight, would see
him on his knees before his little table, poring over folios as
big as himself. He read, he translated, wrote commentaries,
4
collations, sermons and orations, verses in the classical man-

ner, a poem on the Earthly Paradise, an epic in three cantos
on the Three Wise Men, translations from Horace, a tragedy
of his own, Pompey in Egypt. He required a catalogue of his
works, beginning with 1809, when he was eleven! Three

years later he began a History of Astronomy, to contain all
doctrines philosophical and mathematical. He wrote Latin
commentaries on Greek authors, collected fragments of second
century Church Fathers, wrote an essay On the Popular
Errors of the Ancients, translated Homer 's Batracomiomachia,
attempted the Odyssey.
These are not all juvenilia; some are readable even today.
Creuzer had spent a lifetime on Plotinus, but in his third
volume he could quote to advantage from the boy's work. 5
Still in his teens, Leopardi played a learned prank on Italian
Hellenists with his "Hymn to Neptune, of Uncertain Greek

Authorship," alleged to have been discovered by a still less
certain Signor Three Dots. 6 Young Leopardi leaped from
achievement to achievement, and he dreamed great dreams:
already in correspondence with the learned, what a future
awaited him! In his clerical habit he walked about town,
climbed his favorite hill, watched the clouds, the Adriatic
in the far distance;
LEOPARDFS LYRICAL PESSIMISM 217
'
With thoughts
How vast, with what entrancing dreams the sight
Of that far sea inspired me, those blue hills,
Which yonder I discerned and which some day
I hoped to cross, and to my future feigned
7
Worlds unexplored and unexplored delights!
But nature is not so easily cheated, and it exacted a terrible
price of the precocious, ambitious genius, exacted it slowly

but ruthlessly, and left him at the threshold of young man-
hood a complete physical wreck. The Leopardis suffered
from a hereditary tendency towards rickets and nervous
infirmities. To check the onset of these ills, Giacomo needed
sound nourishment and a vigorous gay outdoor life. Six
years of unremitting mental exertion, precisely during adoles-
cence, ruined whatever chance his physique might have had.
While the boy was learnedly mastering obscure folios, his
bones were degenerating, his spine was being curved beyond
redemption, his eyesight ruined. There emerged from the
Leopardi library a hunchback with an emaciated face, pro-
truding cheek-bones, a dilated mouth, complexion earthy
and ugly: 8 a rude jest of matter at the expense of mind.
Of his parents, the one who would have averted the disaster
could not see it coming, and the other did not have eyes for
anything of so slight importance. Count Monaldo Leopardi
was a hopelessly orthodox and reactionary small-town savant,
a thriftless nobleman and a passionate book-collector. He
confessed he had searched for his betters without success;
all the same, when confronted with bankruptcy, he surren-
dered the entire management of his estate to his wife, and

when the pittance she allowed him proved insufficient for
his personal expenses, he would try to wheedle money out
of her by pretending to be buying books, or else, in collusion
with the servants, would resell wine and wheat which she
had bought for the household. Very naturally he retired to
that part of the house where he was allowed to reign undis-
turbed and innocuous. In his library Count Monaldo watched
his first-born's mental progress with excusable pride had he :
not collected the books which his son was reading, was he
not Giacomo's literary guide? Perhaps an archbishop, a
cardinal was maturing before his eyes (hewas set on an
ecclesiastic career for his son) : how was this father to notice
the impending bodily ruin? When Giacomo was a hopeless
hunchback, Count Monaldo saw only another reason for his
making his career in the Church: the ecclesiastic habit would
make the hump less apparent.
Leopardi was of course born of a woman; in truth, however,
he had no mother. One does not have the heart to write ob-
jectively of the Countess Adelaide: adamantine, avaricious,
arrogantly pious. She was determined to restore the Leopardi
fortune: but to restore it for whom? She did not care for her
children, regarding them as liabilities. When her Pierfran-
cesco was born, she censured her husband's incontinence.
She gave no sign of maternal love; her children's kisses were
rebuffed: "Give them to Jesus!" she would say; no affec-
tionate word was tolerated in their letters; they dared not
inquire after her health. Coldest pious disdain of the earthly
and the human mixed in her with the crassest greed. Her
children were to her simply souls which she piously prepared
for heaven, yet her whole life was absorbed in piling coin on
coin. Giacomo was inexpensively and safely out of the way
Not only did she neglect him in his boyhood;
in the library.
again and again she refused him assistance when he man-

fully spent his mite of strength in trying to earn his way.
The Leopardi fortune was restored, but the least of it was
grudged to the one great Leopardi. If the memory of one's
mother is a man's last support in a wretched world, Leopardi's
mother would alone be sufficient to explain his midnight
gloom. It is an unbelievable story, but husband, daughter,
LEOPARDI'S LYRICAL PESSIMISM 219
and son bear witness to it. "I wish you could spend a single
day in our house/' Paolina wrote a friend, "to see how one
can live without life, without soul, without body." 9 Has
ever man what Leopardi wrote in his
written of his mother
Zibaldone? cannot bring myself to quote one sentence
I
must suffice: "She considered beauty a veritable misfor-
tune, and seeing her sons ugly or deformed, she thanked
God for it, not in a spirit of heroism, but with all her
10
heart/'
Doubly touching, by contrast, is the passionate devotion
which bound Giacomo to his brother Carlo and sister Paolina.
Other friends and attachments Recanati did not afford. The
townsfolk had felt him superior and had thought him proud;
now they saw him humped and emaciate; they had their
chance at him, and they took it. They mocked him for his
deformity which they could see, and sneered at his genius
which they could not understand. The town urchins made a
vile round of doggerel to ridicule the hunchback when he
appeared on the street. In vain the uncle Carlo Antici wrote

from Rome, as early as 1813, urging the need of rest and
change of environment, and inviting Giacomo to his home.
In vain the youth himself, already wrecked and finding life
in Recanati intolerable, begged for permission to leave.
Paternal vanity and affection would not permit the young
candle to burn anywhere but in the Leopardi library. To
Countess Adelaide, Giacomo's scholarship and genius were
no source of additional income. Even in her safe and sane
Recanati she allowed her children no diversions and no free-
dom now to let Giacomo wander into the
whatever: was she
wicked and wasteful world? She was far too pious and
penurious for that. Bitter and pathetic are the lines in Le
ricordanze, that masterpiece of Italian blank verse, of which,
as of all Leopardi's poems, Mr. Bickersteth has given us
such fine English versions, which I quote:
Here I drag on, forsaken, all obscure,
Without love, without life; and growing harsh,
As needs I must mid this malignant crew.
Here, self-despoiled of virtue and charity,
I make myself a scorner of mankind
By reason of the herd which hems me round.

Away, the while, flies cherished youth, more prized
Than fame and laurels, more than the pure light
Of day and breath of being: without one joy,
Vainly, in this inhuman dwelling-place
Mid trouble piled on trouble, I lose thee
My barren life's one solitary bloom. 11
II
Like a ray of light in his prison, his correspondence with

Pietro Giordani flooded his soul with the life of the great
world of letters. Giordani's praises sustained and exalted
the wretched youth; his letters also helped to perfect Leo-
pardi's spiritual transformation. The change had been going
on for some time. The young pedant, engrossed in philological
erudition, became a lover of true poetry, became a lover and
himself a poet. Translating the poetry of others no longer
him. The love of poetry served to rouse the lyrical
satisfied
mood; the complacent though miserable little scholar saw

himself with the clear eyes of the poet:
I feel life's flame within me almost dead;

And, gazing round me, in the world there's nought
That can now behold save my death-bed.
I
I feelo'erwhelmed by the vast weighty thought,

So that, with speechless lips and visage blanched,
I hide my pain no longer: it will out. 12
Love itself was to him no longer mere literary material;

Geltrude Cassi made him feel its bittersweet empire, made
him a young Petrarch. Partly in rebellion against his father's
bigotry, partly under the influence of Giordanfs liberalism,
on life altered. His religious ortho-
his entire political outlook
doxy followed the same road as his political conservatism.

Black despair engulfed him. " What do you say of diversion? "
he writes Giordani. "My single diversion in Recanati is
study; my single amusement is that which is killing me; all
13
else is weariness, noia"
The publication of Leopardi's two patriotic poems, which
followed Giordani's five days' visit to Recanati, brought his
life to a crisis. The canzoni marked the poet's full revolt
against his father's reactionary politics; with one leap Leo-
14
pardi found himself in the front rank of Italian writers,
but not in the estimate of his father. Doubly distrustful now,
Monaldo flatly refused his son's petition to leave Recanati.
Leopardi determined to run away from home, and sought to
secure a passport, but his father discovered the plot, and
Carlo did not have an opportunity to deliver the letter in
which Giacomo was to bid his father farewell: "I would
rather be unhappy than undistinguished: I would rather
suffer than be bored: so much more injurious do I find bore-
dom (noia), in my case the mother of deadly melancholy,
than any bodily disease." 15 The son had to submit to his
father, but the incident cost Count Monaldo the last scrap
of his trust and devotion. His mother had never had
them.
Giordani and other friends tried to secure for him a paying
position in Lombardy, at Bologna in vain. A period of
melancholy stupor was followed by a strange readjustment
and a grim resignation. His imagination came as his ally
against suicidal reason. In view of his physical and mental
state, is it a wonder that he did not kill himself? A greater
wonder, in the face of it all, is the vigor of his intellect and his
creative imagination. During these killing years in Recanati
he was writing poetry, prose, literature, philology, philoso-
phy, and all the while he was almost blind. Towards the end
of 1820 his health improved, and he plunged into work again,
studying in particular philosophy. Of the seven volumes of
his Zibaldone, of thoughts on and philosophy,
literature, life,
the year 1820 had contributed less than three hundred pages,
but during the following year he wrote over eleven hundred
pages! Naturally, in the course of the summer, he wrote
Giordani: "My eyes have turned me into an owl, hating and
77 16
shunning the daylight.
In the fall of 1822 Leopardi was at last permitted to go to
Rome, as a guest of his uncle Carlo Antici. But Rome was
not Rome to the young poet. To his brother Carlo he re-
counted his heart-breaking disappointment. Modern Rome
was not the Eternal City for which the young poet and clas-
sical scholar had longed it was simply a big bulky town. The
;
women were ugly, the men stupid; they shrank from ideas
and did not care for real literature. Some of this may be mere
tactics, not to appear unsafely jubilant over his escape from
Recanati. But one cannot doubt the meaning of his report
that only at the grave of Tasso did he find real relief and joy,
7
in tears. "For God's sake, love me/ he exclaims in a letter
77
to Carlo, "I need love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life. 17
He failed in his effort to secure satisfactory employment.
Angelo Mai, now Librarian at the Vatican, did not assist him,
and Niebuhr, the classicist and Prussian ambassador, most
faithful in his efforts, obtained nothing Leopardi could ac-
cept. Later Niebuhr tried to get him to go to Berlin, to Bonn,

as professor; but the Italian feared the rigors of the German
winter. A career in the Church he would not consent to, now
or at any time.
The spring of 1823 saw him back in Recanati. He began
the writing of his Operette morali, contributed to the Anto-
logia. At last a position came his way: the publisher Stella
asked him to come to Milan to direct a new edition of the
works of Cicero and do other literary work for him. Leo-
pardi left Recanati for the second time, stopping on his way
it Bologna. He was now twenty-seven, yet two-thirds of his

ife had already been spent. Ten days in Bologna with Gior-
iani and his friends had pleased him so much that he returned
;here from Milan to work for Stella; to increase his salary he
Save language lessons to the Counts Pepoli and Pappadopoli.

During the cold winter he had to keep to his room wrapped
ip in a sack of feathers. Bologna, taking Giordani's lead,
welcomed him as a great scholar and poet, and for the first
;ime since childhood Leopardi had a taste of happiness. The
vork he had to do, however, was beyond his strength, and, to
jap it all, he had to convince his father, who was doing noth-
ng to help him financially, that it was not below the dignity
)fa Leopardi to work for a publisher and to give language
essons! 18
The winter of 1826 he spent in Recanati, compiling
in Italian prose anthology for Stella, returned the following
spring to Bologna, proceeded in June to Florence, where he

vas welcomed in the liberal Vieusseux-Capponi circle of the
\ntologia. Here he met Alessandro Manzoni, his peer in
genius and his contrast in experience and in philosophy of
ife. Physically he was very miserable in Florence, suffered
'rom bad teeth and eye-troubles (he had to stay indoors until
sundown) add to this stomach ailments. The initial welcome
;
>f the optimist liberals cooled perceptibly after they had time
:o digest his Operette morali. Somewhat later he removed to
Pisa, where climate and environment suited him, and where
le resumed creative poetry which had lagged for several
/-ears. At the University the students applauded him; he
vas in tolerably good health. But the respite was short. His
Drother Luigi's death was a severe shock to his extremely
lervous state, and he found himself increasingly unable to
;vork for Stella, after the
completion of the anthology of
Doetry, and he could not honorably accept the pub-
felt
isher'smoney. The terrible night, orrenda notte, of Recanati

confronted him again. There he had to return from Florence,
in November, 1828, with an apology to his father for bringing
with him overnight his young friend Vincenzo Gioberti. 19
Now there seemed to be no release from his black prison-
house; but once more his poetic imagination came to hig
rescue: to this dismal year and a half we owe some of his
finest lyrics, including Le ricordanze and Canto notturno. Un-
believable spectacle: the man is almost a corpse, yet he creates
masterpieces of the most painstaking and perfect artistry,
and to Pietro Colletta he sends a list of his projected works;
literary, political, moral, metaphysical, psychological, philo-

sophical, philological, including an elaborate comparative
study of the five languages, Greek, Latin, Italian, French,
Spanish!
20
His despair beat down his pride, and he finally
accepted Colletta's offer of anonymous subscriptions for his
support. Relying on this aid, he left Recanati on April 29,
1830, never to return. Pathetic in its deep gratitude is the
which he dedicates the ,1830 edition of his poems to
letter in
his Tuscan friends:"I have lost all: I am a log which feels
and suffers/'but "your love will remain with me all my life,
and will perhaps stay by me even after my body, which is
already dead, has turned to ashes."

21
He entrusted the man-
uscripts of his philological works to Professor De Sinner oi
the Sorbonne, who was to edit and publish them, but who
disappointed Leopardi's hopes. The winter of 1831-32 he
spent in Rome together with the young Neapolitan Antonio
Ranieri, whose devotion to the poet was to be the last refuge of
his dolorous days.Before returning to Florence in the spring
he had been elected member of the Accademia della Crusca.
What bound him to Florence now was a passion, the most
violent of his whole life and the last, for Signora Fanny
Targioni-Tozzetti, wife of a Florentine professor. Friends
he had; friends who admired, pitied, helped; but in no woman
had he evoked genuine love. 22 The Recanati girls whom he
watched out of his window died at the dawn of youth, leaving
only memories which he later wove into lyrics. Signora Gel-

trude Cassi, who spent a few days at the Palazzo Leopardi
with her daughter, did not even know that she had roused
the passion in the heart of the nineteen-year old
first real
library eremite. Some years later he loved Contessa Teresa

Carniani Malvezzi, a brilliant blue-stocking who tried to
keep to literature and friendship and, becoming frightened,
terminated the relation. And here in Florence he was to lose
his heart yet a third time, to a frivolous coquette who found
pleasure in having the first poet of Italy hanging on the least

flutter of her eyelashesand collecting for her autographs of
famous men over Europe.
all Herself pursuing Antonio
Ranieri, she used Leopardi as a handle to hold his friend.
Cruelly she humiliated the proud poetic soul, but when once
Leopardi shook off the baneful enchantment he emerged
finally disillusioned, passion-proof. Consalvo, Aspasia, A se
stesso are the poetic chronicles of this great passion and of the
revulsion from it.
His father's publication of the ultra-reactionary Dialo-

ghetti, which the public had mistakenly attributed to Gia-
como, caused the poet publicly to repudiate the book, and
this fact made it doubly hard to do the necessary thing now
that all his sources of income, including the Florentine, were
exhausted: apply to his father for a regular allowance. He
did so, and was told that he should have to apply to his
mother. And he had to do it, for the twenty scudi a month
that were finally granted him. Ranieri's insistence finally
took him to Naples where the two arrived in October, 1833,
and where, until his death on June 14, 1837, the great poet
of the dolorous life found, if not love, yet devoted friendship
and tireless nursing at the hands of Ranieri and Ranieri's
sister Paolina. A bright page, but the end of it is flecked:
forty years later Ranieri could write a book of self-righteous

abuse of Leopardi's memory. 23
In Naples the dying Leopard! wrote the satirical epic,
Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia and also his greatest
y
poem La Ginestra, the Broom Flower, blooming on the desert

slopes of Vesuvius, where his own last days were spent, in
view of the volcano, reminder of the ashen nothingness of all
things living and the futility of all effort. Here friends visited
him, notably the German poet Platen. Shall we again re-
count his maladies old and new: a swollen knee and leg,
digestive ills, violent nosebleed, asthma, neurasthenia, in-
flamation of the lungs, dropsy, general bodily disintegration?
In this already decayed body the spirit was alive and crea-
tive until the last breath. The closing lines of his poem II
tramonto della luna Leopardi dictated two hours before he
Expired.
Ill
Writing to Sinner in 1832, Leopardi protested against

those who attributed his pessimistic philosophy to his ill
health (thus Niccolini: "I am a hunchback and ill, there-
"
fore there is no God"): Before dying I shall protest against
this weak and vulgar notion, and beg my readers, instead
of blaming my illnesses, to turn to the disposal of my observa-
tions and reasonings." 24 Leopardi's protest is warranted
against those who would treat his ideas as purely pathological
phenomena only of clinical interest. But the adequate inter-
pretation of Leopardi's pessimism requires also an insight
into his own dolorous life. His judgment of life was not the
result simply of impassive external observation but also of
intensely tragic personal experience. The truth is well ex-
pressed by Mestica:Leopardi's pessimism essentiallyis
25
lyrical. The poet and the philosopher were not two men
but one.
Turning from his erudition to consider his own life, in a
lyrical, introspective mood, young Giacomo is overwhelmed
with melancholy. Bewailing his lot in his letters to Giordani,
he enlarges on the idea in his Zibaldone! "I was terrified to

find myself in the midst of nothingness, and myself nothing.
I felt as if suffocated with the thought and feeling that all
26
is nothing, just nothing." Recoiling in horror from his
present, he seeks refuge in the past. Life is bad; it is getting
worse; but it has not always been bad. This is the consola-
tion of the classical scholar: consolation and double bitter-
ness in the contemplation of the Golden Age. In the life
of the race, as in his own life, the age of childhood, the Age
of Fable, is the happy one. Ancient thought was constructive,
creative; modern thought is mainly negative, destructive,

27
critical. Against the straightforward nobility and happi-
ness of the ancients, Leopardi sees modern society petty,
disillusioned, irresolute, and unheroic: this is the sting of
the early patriotic odes:
Oh turn, my native country, and look back
On those bright multitudinous companies,
And weep, and cry out on thyself with scorn. 28
Rebelling against the miserable pretenses of civilization,

Leopardi joins Rousseau in sighing after the spontaneity
and naturalness of primitive man, with his unquestioning
trust in truth, beauty, virtue, love. Not only has civilization
corrupted man and blighted his life with ills of body and
soul; it has also enslaved him; it has robbed him of the very
conditions of happiness. So Leopardi writes in his Zibaldone,
on his first sally into the great civilized world, in Rome: Man
would be happy could he always retain the blessed illusions
of his youth; by himself man would have held fast to these
illusions; it is social life which has served to disillusion the

individual; society is therefore the original and continuous
cause of human unhappiness; the natural life of man, the
happy life, is thus a life of solitude. Thus the youth who had
been eating out his heart in lonely Recanati. 29
Contrary to general opinion, from Aristotle down, Leo-
pardi regards man as the least social of all beings. Having
more vitality than other animals, man has more self-love,
and is thus more anti-social. Back of all human motives is
this basic instinct of self-preservation and self-assertion; it
is vigor, energy, drive. Developed as it is usually into the
deliberate pursuit of selfish ends to the disadvantage of
others, it becomes explicit egoism; the desire for our own
happiness makes us haters of our fellows; the fountain-head
of our weal becomes the source of wickedness and woe. The
desire for pleasure is limitless; satisfaction is decidedly lim-
ited; we are thus doomed to disappointment; and the stronger
a man's desires the more unhappiness is in store for him and
the more unhappiness is he likely to cause. 30 There is no
hope in prospect: civilization and so-called progress only
multiply our desires and accentuate the selfishness of men.
Jesus himself recognized this natural and miserable proclivity
to evil, and by calling it "the World" emphasized the anti-
thesis of nature and virtue: "My Kingdom is not of this
31
world."
So here is man as reason reveals him to us: naturally en-
grossed in futile selfishness: miserable and wicked. Not easily
do we face this truth; the lure of happiness is too strong:
The boy, like a raw lover, hotly woos

32
His though it will cheat him.
life,
A youth rises books sanguine in his hopes that,

from his
whatever may bring others, his own life will be a happy
life to
one, virtuous and ardent. But life in due time teaches us
all its own grim lesson: we see that ruthless cold selfishness,
hatred and envy, slander and deceit, are not exceptional;

we are disillusioned, and lose the sole comfort and happiness
of our being. Justice, patriotism, glory, faith, love: these are
disclosed to us as illusions, phantoms; but without them our
life is of no avail and our world is naught.
38
We find ourselves
"
in pursuit of a felicity which forever beyond us:
is always
34
desirous, although incapable, of infinity/' we are forced
to realize that our house of bliss is founded on sand.
Is it any wonder that men cleave to the phantoms of
blessedness? Like the lover in Leopardi's dialogue on Tasso,
who, whenever he dreamt of his lady, avoided her the next
day, knowing that the actual sight of her would only spoil
the greater beauty of his own vision of her, even so we all
"
shrink from the unlovely actualities of life, and praise and
exalt those opinions, though untrue, which generate acts and
thoughts noble, energetic, magnanimous, virtuous, and use-
ful to thecommon or the private weal; those fancies beauti-
ful and joyous, though vain, that give worth to life; the
natural illusions of the mind." 35 If increased knowledge
thus robs man of his source of happiness by dispelling his
illusions, is not Rousseau right in calling a thinking man
a corrupted being? A destroyer of phantoms, philosophy
leaves man with nothing to sustain him, and is thus a bane
not a blessing. 36
All the same, though illusions be precious, disillusionment
is inevitable:
Phantom-shapes, nought else

Are glory and honour; prosperity and joy
A mere desire; life is without use,
37
Unprofitable woe.
The truth, if truth there be, is that there is no real and absolute
truth, nor any other stable value. This is Leopardi's principle
of relativity. British and French empiricism influenced his
view of the impermanence of value, but more particularly was
he brought to this conviction by his aesthetic studies which
revealed to him the instability of the beautiful. Beauty is a
matter of shifting taste and opinion. There is no proving
beauty to him who does not see or feel it; it is undemonstrable
because purely conventional; it reflects custom, the prestige
of popular renown; or else it expresses illogical caprice:
38
in either case it is altogether relative.
The other values are no better off. Good and evil are noth-
ing absolute. A disapprove of a wolf devouring a
horse may
sheep, but the carnivorous soul of the lion would not con-
demn the wolf, would only envy him. Good is good and evil
evil simply with regard to this or that particular being.
Morality is a matter of mores. Protagoras did not go altogether
astray. Of truth and knowledge, the more we attain the more
we perceive their sinuous unreality. This melancholy con-
clusion the young scholar of Ilecanati had reached early: in
the very first volume of his Zibahlonc is a weary exclamation:
"Oh infinite vanity of truth!" Thought and knowledge are
not only unattainable; they are unnatural and baneful to
man. Hebrew allegory here agrees with the Greek: eating
of the Tree of Knowledge cost man his Eden; the myth of
Psyche teaches the same moral. "He who does not reason
does not err. . . . He who does not think is wisest of all."
There is no absolute stable infinite value. There is nothing
infinite; all is finite, relative and impermanent. The infinite
isa mere idea; it is simply the horizon, the ocean of the
unattained which always stretches just beyond our vision.
We know and we can know no infinite. 39
Leopardi would save, if possible, the fundamentals of
religion. God's infinite perfection, negated in an absolute
sense, may be accepted as relative: perfection as we under-
stand perfection, relatively. But it will not do: the notion
of Divine Providence must go with the other illusions. Is
it not an instance of our uncritical view of things? Man has
imagined himself the crown and goal of creation, has con-
ceived the entire course of things as explicitly designed to
serve human ends. Time had been when Leopardi, despairing
of life about him, had bewailed its unnaturalness, still confi-
dent of the all-wise benignity of Mother Nature. But the

gloom deepens in his soul with the growing conviction that

nature is no mother to us: stepmother, rather, to whom all
our woes and agonies of soul and body are naught. The
materialistic strain in Leopardi, connected with the French
origins of his metaphysics, discloses itself in his developing

view of nature. The world-course is not a divine pageant of
Providence, but of brute, blind, unresponsive matter. are We
lumps of thinking matter, drifting along in the stream of
nothingness. Spirit is a mere word: matter is all-in-all. 40
Yet even of this we cannot be ultimately certain, for meta-

physics in the last chapter is a blank.
Inscrutable
Is all, save pain. 41
But, you say, is it not absurd to think that, with infinite

pains, nature should produce so fine creatures as ourselves,
only to cast them aside? Is it absurd? Here is a boy that most
painstakingly has made a toy, a house of blocks, and with
one wave of the hand or one kick wrecks it all and turns to
something else. So Nature tells the poor Icelander: "Do you
imagine that the world was created solely for you? ... If
I injure you in any way, or by any means, I am not aware of
it, or very seldom; nor if I delight or benefit you, am I con-
scious of it. ... And finally, if by some accident I happened

42
to destroy all your race, I should not be aware of the fact."
A little classic on the geocentric predicament of man's vanity
is the dialogue // Copernico. The more we realize the im-
mensity of the universe, the more clearly is our own petty
insignificance exhibited.
43
A stanza of sombre grandeur and
majestic melancholy from La ginestra haunts the mind:
Leopardi on the slopes of Vesuvius ponders on the vanity
of human life:
Oft times upon these slopes,

Desolate, sombre-clad
In the now hardened flood which still seems surging,
I sit by night; and o'er the landscape sad
Watch in pure azure skies
The constellations star by star emerging,
To which yon ocean lies
A distant mirror, till in calm profound
The world with sparks is glittering all around.
And when I gaze on those far bodies bright,
To me mere specks of light,
And yet in truth so vast
That land and sea, therewith in contrast brought,
Are but a speck; to which
Not only Man, but even
This globe, where Man is nought,
Is quite unknown; and when my eyes I cast
On star-groups, poised in heavens beyond our heaven,
Which distance so enshrouds
They seem to us like clouds, to which not Man
And not earth only, but these stars of ours
In magnitude and number infinite
With the sun's golden light, all blent in one,
Either are unknown or, remote as they
To earth, appear a speck
Of nebulous radiance; what then in my sight
Appearest thou, O son
Of Man? When I remember
Thy state on earth, of which the soil I tread
Bears witness, then in contrast call to mind
That of this mighty Whole
Thyself thou deem'st as lord and end designed,
And how it oft hath pleased thee to fable
That to this obscure grain of sand, called Earth,
The authors of this universe descended
For thy sake, and not seldom would with thee
Converse familiarly, and that this age
Insults good sense by giving vogue once more
To long-derided myths, although of all
It seems instructed best,
And most enlightened; what, then, shall I call
The feeling,what the thought, that in my breast
I entertain of thee, poor mortal seed?
44
Is laughter or is pity thy due meed?
So the starry dome of heaven, which had turned Kant's

mind to the thought of the moral law, stirs Leopardi's thought
to the desolate conclusion of the indifference of ruthless
nature.
More than Giacomo Leopardi's woe is involved here, more
than the hopeless state of Italy, of mankind. A stone hurled
from a cliff into an Alpine lake stirs the quiet depths in in-
creasingly spreading circles and shivers the still reflections
of tree and mountain and shoreline. Thus, Carducci ob-
serves, in Leopardi's poetry personal human happiness sinks
in the confused depths of cosmic infelicity, doglia mondiale.**
This not the world-woe, Weltschmerz, of the romanticists;
is
Leopardi's doctrine of infelidtd expresses the grim convic-

tion that the misery of mankind is inevitable, essential and
unaccountable. Infelicity and mystery: behold our life and
world. 48 We may think our unhappiness the result of unlucky
or malign accident, and remediable: if this or that had not
been, all had been well with us and would be yet, if only
this or that were to transpire. Miserable by necessity, we
insiston believing ourselves miserable by accident. So a man
lying on a hard and uncomfortable bed turns from side to
side and thus spends the whole night, always hoping that
the next turn will make him comfortable. But the truth is
that the bed itself is wrong, and impossible it is in any posi-

47
tion to find comfort on it.
Nought is worthy
Thine agonies, earth merits not thy sighing.
Mere bitterness and tedium
Is life, nought else; the world is dust and ashes.
Now rest thee. For the last time
Abandon hope. Fate to our kind hath given
No boon but death. Now scorn thyself, scorn Nature,
Scorn the brute Power whose reign
We know but by our woes, which are its pastime;
Scorn all that is, for all is vain, vain, vain. 48
This inevitable evil of our mortal state Leopardi's intellect
explains in materialistic terms of blind necessity, unrespon-
sive indifferent nature. But his imagination projects the
shape of a woeful, malign Power, whose vast outlines are only
suggested in the fragment of his uncompleted Hymn to
Ahriman:
Lord and Creator of all things, unfathomed
Iniquity, consummate power and consummate
Intelligence, eternal
49
Fountain of woes, director of all motion. . . ,
In the last volume of the Zibaldone there is a black entry:
"All is evil. That is, all which exists, is evil; that all things
60
exist, is an evil. ." . . This wholesale damnation is re-
tailed in ahundred maledictions throughout Leopardi's works.
Man is ferocious, destructive, odious; hatred and envy de-
vour him. Women have a taste for each other's misfortunes.
"Man is always as wicked as his needs require," we read on
the last page of his published Works, and the last page of the
Zibaldone is a pessimist's rosary: "Men regard life as Italian
husbands do their wives they must needs believe them faith-
:
ful, although they know them to be otherwise. . . . The

rarest thing in society, a really endurable person. ." . .
Turks, Leopardi says, are inferior to their horses; 51 and on

the score of happiness he repeatedly prefers the lot of animals
to that of men; the lines from the Night-Song of a Nomadic
Shepherd of Asia are the first that come to mind:
O flock of mine reposing, happy flock,
Of your own woe, methinks, quite unaware!
How do I envy you! 52
. . ,
And more boldly even, Leopardi prefers the utterly uncon-

scious life of the ginestra blooming on the slopes of the
volcano:
And thou beneath
The deadly weight shalt unresisting bow
Thine innocent head full low:
But not bowed up till then in fruitless prayer

Or mien that cowards show to supplicate
The future tyrant: neither head erect,
With frantic pride aspiring to the stars,
Scorning the desert, where

Thou hadst both birth and home,
Not of thy choice but such as chance allowed:.
But wiser, but so far
Less weak in this than Man, that thou didst never
Deem thy frail stock endowed
By fate or thee with power to live forever. 63
The logic of these preferences is clear, and Leopardi draws

it: non-existence were better than this our life. The greatest
blessing Juno could bestow on Biton and Cleobis, beloved
sons of her priestess, was to make them die gently in the
same hour. For even the unconscious existence of plants
"
and flowers is a spectacle of woe. Enter a garden of plants,
herbs, flowers. Be it as flourishing as you please. Be it in
the best season of the year. You can't turn your eyes in any
direction without finding suffering. This rose is hurt . . .
by the sun which has given it life; it shrivels, languishes,

withers. Ants have infested this tree, grubs the other,
. . .
flies, slugs. . . . The gardener goes wisely breaking, cutting

54
live branches. . . ." This passage should not be mistaken
for maudlin: it is characteristic, not of the sentimentality,
but of the morbid sensitivity of Leopardi.
IV
In a world thus revealed to his reason as vain, wicked,
worthless, what is man to do? Obstinately hope for a better
lifeafter death, or turn a misanthrope, or seek refuge in dis-
dainful apathy, or in suicide? Leopardi glanced down some
of these paths, but he did not follow any one of them.
Of relief and peace in the hereafter, Leopardi's thought
registers a gradual extinction. With the abandonment of
his religious beliefs and his trust in Providence, his belief in
immortality is also eclipsed. To be sure there is his letter of

farewell to Sinner, written six months before his death, in
which he expresses the fear that he will not see him again
"
"unless it be 'on the fields of asphodel/ Is this simply one
Hellenist quoting Homer to another, or shall we conclude
with Sainte-Beuve and Carducci that to his last breath Leo-
56
pardi cherished a lingering perhaps about a life after death?
Be that as it may, certain it is that the entire course of Leo-
pardi's thought discourages hopes of immortality. The world
willnot alter after death it will continue to be the same
my ;
callous nature: what grounds do I have for any hopes?

Proving the soul a simple entity, in good scholastic manner,
avails nothing: if you are so uncertain and mysterious about
the origin of this unique simple entity, what can you really
know about its destiny? Why may it not perish, despite its
simple substantiality, in ways as unknown to us as those in

which it is alleged to originate and to exist alongside perish-
able compound and blood? Not along the path of hope
flesh
lay Leopardi's course:"Hopes of glory or immortality are

things concerning which even the time to laugh at is gone
by."
A misanthrope and a hater of his kind Leopardi never was.
While his ills and deformities robbed him of woman's love,
the devoted friendship which he commanded in so many men
and women was certainly an index of his character: ardor
with patience, kindliness with heroism, candor without in-
solence: here was one who pitied, who smiled with grim
irony, but to whom malice was alien. Giulio Levi calls him
"an angelic nature fallen in a lower world." 67
He had his stoical moments, of course, but his was an
apathy of utter indifference, not the Stoic's serene acquies-
cence in the ways of Providence. By actual experience he
found that resignation diminished pain, and remembered
how, when little Luigi had thrown Pierfrancesco's fishing-

rod out of the window, the lad's weeping had subsided upon
his mother's saying that she would have thrown it out any-
how! Leopardi knew the hedonistic paradox and showed
an occasional streak of Taoistic wisdom: indifference to
happiness is more likely to lead to happiness than the pur-
suit of it. But, while man can suffer passively, he will not
work in vain; resignation breeds torpidity, and Leopardi was
consumed with a zeal for achievement. Indifference to pain,
to evil perhaps; but apathy with regard to his activity and
creativeness was impossible to him. Here is a man who to
the Stoic list of adiaphora, things that do not matter, had
added reason also, the Stoic stock of reliance. Yet, holding
life nothing worth, he yet held to the last scrap of life and
was creatively active to the end. 68

Why did he not commit suicide? Was it because "life is a
thing of so little moment, that a man, as regards himself,
"
should not be very anxious either to retain it or to leave it? 59
He was not always so indifferent. The idea of suicide haunted
Leopardi from the days of his disenchanted youth. The
lines from the Ricordanze come at once to mind:
Already in my youth's first turbulence

Of ecstasy, of anguish and desire,
Ofttimes I called on death, and hours by hours
Would lean o'er yonder fountain, pondering
The thought that 'neath its water I might quench
80
All hope and grief forever. . . .
He argued the matter with himself: is suicide contrary to

nature? But is it more unnatural than continuing this our
unnatural life? 61 To the subject of suicide Leopardi devoted
and Porphyry, and The Younger
his Dialogue between Plotinus
Brutus and Sappho's Last Song lead plainly to the suicide's
conclusions:
When a brave man is bold
And death to live prefers,
62
Shall nature blame his weapon as not hers?
So Brutus; and Sappho:
Death be our choice. Casting to earth the veil

It scorns, the naked soul shall fly to Dis
And mend the brutal blunder of the blind
Distributor of luck. 63
Leopard! sang of Brutus and Sappho, but his own choice

was the choice of Plotinus. Plotinus' own final consent,
however, scarcely expresses the whole thought of Leopardi:
"Let us live, my Porphyry, and together comfort each other;
let us not refuse to bear that part which destiny has assigned
to us of the evils of our race/' A fundamental conflict in
Leopardi's soul makes him cleave to the life his reason has
disdained, and out of this conflict springs his subtly lyrical
poetry. It is the clashbetween Leopardi's reason and its
peer, his imagination, and it brings us to one of the most
significant aspects of his spiritual life.
Leopardi 's reason has convinced him of the illusoriness of

all that might make life worth living, has convinced him of
the actuality of stupid, wicked woe as the sum and substance
of the world. But his imagination lays hold on this sorry
texture of life and irradiates it with its own glow of noble
passion. In the very expression of his conviction that life
is of no worth, worth most precious is experienced. This is
"
the salvation of the philosopher by the poet. The philosopher
isnot perfect if he is merely a philosopher. Reason . . .
needs the imagination and the illusions which reason de-

64
stroys." Precisely in this intense dualism and conflict are
we to seek the dynamic force of Leopardi's poetry. Leopardi
mself early in his poetic career, recognized the character of

,
"
s lyrical activity: Works of genius have this peculiarity
iat, even when they represent the nothingness of things,
ren when they clearly demonstrate and make us feel the
evitable unhappiness of life, when they express the most
rrible moods of despair, yet to a great mind, even though
may be in a state of extreme depression, disillusionment,

ankness, ennui, and weariness of life, or in the bitterest
id most paralyzing misfortunes (whether with reference to
iep and strong feelings or to anything else), they always
rve as a consolation, rekindle enthusiasm; and though
icy treat of and represent no other subject than death, they
store to such a mind, at
momentarily, that life which
least
had lost. And the very knowledge of the irreparable
. . .
inity and falseness of everything beautiful and great is in

self a certain beauty and greatness which fills the soul,
hen this knowledge is found in works of genius. The very

intemplation of nothingness is a thing in these works which
ems to enlarge the soul of the reader, to exalt it and satisfy
65
with itself and its own despair. . . ."
It is no ordinary inconsistency we have here, no mere re-
.salto face the logic of one's argument. Leopardi's reason
ces it: that life is worthless; but this further has to be taken
to account, which reason cannot readily conceive: can a
e be utterly worthless whose vanity has been so nobly and
Dutifully uttered; can love and beauty, virtue and justice
id glory and truth be all illusory, if in imagination they
tve been so perfectly expressed? We shall fail to compre-
jnd Leopardi's work if him only as a pessimistic
we treat
tellect. Confronting the intellect and sublimating its con-
usions is In lyric contempla-
the imagination of the poet.
3n thought itself is swallowed up and despair yields sweet
jgation. This poetic alchemy is disclosed in the little master-
ece V Infinite:
Always dear to me was this lonely hill,
Ay, and this hedge that from so broad a sweep

Of the ultimate horizon screens the view.
But, as I sit and gaze, my fancy feigns
Space beyond space upon the further side,
And silence within silence past all thought,
Immeasurable calm; whereat well nigh
Groweth the heart afraid. And as I hear
The wind sough through these thickets, then between
That everlasting silence and this voice
I make comparison; and call to mind
The Eternal, and the ages dead, and this
The living present, and its clamor. So
In this immensity my thought is drowned:
And sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea. 66
So we read Canto notturno, in which man, face to face with

nature, revealed as less than nothing, and yet as sublime
is
notwithstanding his nothingness; and Aspasia, bitter con-

trast of love's vision with the actuality of the beloved, humil-
iation not ignoble: and Alia sua donna, pure vision of the ideal
lady:
Despite the countless woes

By fate predestined unto Man from birth,
thy essence, as my thought depicts thee,
If in
Thou wert belov'd, existence to thy lover

Would be a heaven on earth. 67
This not escape from woe, but sublimation of it. Even

is
though the beast may be happier than man, since he desires

less and thinks not at all; even though genius may be called
a capacity for unhappiness; yet thought, which shatters man's
happiness and discloses his nothingness, likewise exalts him.
Pascal's reflection on man as a thinking reed has not escaped
"
Leopardi: Nothing proves the greatness and the power of
the human intellect, or the loftiness or nobility of man, quite
so much as man's ability to know and thoroughly to under-
stand and to feel deeply his own littleness." 68 But is one to
marvel or to rail at a Power which has given man the poetic

reach for the sublime and has denied its attainment in actual-
ity and reason? "Bella provvidenza! Fine Providence!"

69
Leopardi exclaims, perplexed by man's duality of character:
Humanity, if wholly
Worthless and frail thou art,
Mere dust and shade, how can thy feelings show
Such loftiness?
part If
Divine, how can thy

noblest impulses
And thoughts with so much ease
Be roused and quenched alike by things so low? 70
Perplexed he is, but not crestfallen, nor will he settle back

in stagnant desolation. Be the world and life as it may,
aspire and create he the wine of his being. He
will, for it is
perceives clearly that "all the value of human life is in the

creation of the inner man." 71 In the hazardous leap of the
spirit towards the phantoms that ennoble life, Leopardi finds
the only true dignity and the salvation of our souls. This is
no easy-going or calculating hedonist, but a grimly heroic
soul:
At all times I have viewed
Craven and abject souls

72
Disdainfully. . . ,
"Man, who gets used to anything, cannot get used to in-

action," Leopardi writes, and, again in the Zibaldone, comb-
ing his languages to find a word that will best express the
forward reach of the heroic: "One should live eiKrj, temere,
73
d I'hazard, alia ventura."
But reason proclaims all and heroism
aspiration futile
ridiculous. Leopardi himself repeatedly ridicules the modern
cult of progress, particularly in the satirical Palinodia.
Despondent pages about progress abound also in the Zt'boZ-
done. Isn't self-perfection futile? In trying to rise out of the
morass of life we only sink more deeply. Blessed be those of
little soul and little thought: they are spared the great an-
guish. The poet's own life, however, was dominated by the
heroic motive, notwithstanding the misgivings of his intel-
lect. In an empirical world of mechanical necessity, Kant
urged us to live as if God, freedom, and immortality were
real. In a world vain, wicked, and woeful, Leopardi lived
and created as if beauty, virtue, truth were realities and not
the phantoms that his reason proclaimed them to be. A call
to high endeavor is the poem To a Victor in the Ball-Game,

and the spirit of noble hazard inspires the Dialogue of Christo-
pher Columbus and Peter Gutierrez. "What is understood by
a state free from uncertainty and peril? If content and
happy, it is to be preferred to any other whatever; if tedious
and miserable, I do not see what other is not to be preferred
to it."
This longing for unrealized worlds, and the sense of desola-
tion and weariness in the midst of the actual, are modern,
romantic emotions. They would have scandalized the an-
cients; but, asGraf observes, 74 Petrarch could have under-
stood them, and Pascal, and Chateaubriand. Leopardi's
experience and estimate of this weariness, noia, were various,
and his fragmentary writings about it are likely to confuse
us. Sometimes noia is the utmost of insufferable monotony
and stagnation, emptiness and desolation and disgust with
life, a killing sense of the nothingness of all, "the most sterile
of human passions, daughter and mother of nullity," weari-
ness everlasting, noia immortale. 75 Carducci has traced its
genealogy to the athymia of St. John Chrysostom, the acedia
of Christian cenobites, the accidia of Dante. 76 To Jacopssen,
Leopardi writes in June, 1823: "For some time
have felt I
the emptiness of existence as if were something real which

it
weighed heavily on my soul. The nothingness of things was

to me the only real thing. It was always with me, like a fright-
ful phantom; I saw about me only a desert; I did not see how
I could subject myself to the daily cares and exigencies of

life,being quite sure that these cares would never lead to
anything. This thought so obsessed me that I thought I
" 77
should lose my reason.
Leopardi's noia is not mere negation, however; it is the
sense of checked activity, frustrated attainment, yes; but it
is not inactivity, it is not mere failure. Man is condemned to
noia because he finds the world hemming him in, because, in
his desire, thought, imagination he isbeyond and above the
actual world that encases him. And a man will be the more
surely destined to experience noia the more intense and the
more expansive his desire or his spiritual activity. So noia,
exquisite dolor of weariness, has also the element of sub-
limity. It is not any particular dolor or weariness, but
"
life itself fully felt, experienced, known, fully present to the
individual and engrossing him." 78
And this sense of the utter
emptiness of life is not itself mere negation: itself is positive,
and the intensity of imagination in works of genius makes the

experience of noia sublimely beautiful. Thus weariness over-
comes itself, noia si disannoia, "by the same lively feeling of
universal and necessary weariness." 79 The sublimity of noia
is well expressed in Pens-ten Ixvii and Ixviii; I quote the
"
latter: Life-weariness is in some respects the most sublime
of human sentiments. Not that I believe that from the in-
vestigation of this sentiment those conclusions result which

many philosophers have thought to gather from it; but
nevertheless, to be unable to find satisfaction in any earthly
thing, or, so to say, in the whole earth; to consider the inesti-
mable amplitude of space, the number and astonishing mass
of the worlds, and find that all is little and petty to the capac-
ity of our soul to imagine the number of the worlds infinite,
;
and the universe infinite, and feel that our soul and our de-
sire would be still greater than such an universe; always to
accuse things of insufficiency and nullity, and endure that

want and emptiness which we call life- weariness; this seems
to me the greatest sign of grandeur and nobleness which

human nature presents. Let it also be noted that life-weari-
ness is scarcely known to insignificant persons, and very
little or not at all to the lower animals." 80
Imagination saves us in a worthless world we take refuge :
Heroic aspiration saves us we re-

in our cherished illusions. :
fuse to bow our head to the actual, and press forward to

worlds unrealized. And sublime contemplation also saves us:
in the noble perception of the emptiness which is life, life
transfigured by our very condemnation of

itself is it: the
sublimity of the ideal judgment is thus revealed. These
heroic emotions have in them nothing of arrogance or cruelty,
nor hatred of one's fellows. Leopard! x>penly protests, and it
is in the last volume of the Zibaldone: "My philosophy not
only does not conduce to misanthropy, as some superficially

observe, and as many accuse me; it essentially precludes mis-
77 81
anthropy. La ginestra has rightly been called, as for in-
stance by Carducci, 82 Leopardi's capital work. Here is the
pitiful nothingness of man, against callous, omnipotent na-
ture, and here man's sublimity also, in refusing to submit and
stagnate. Leopardi's poem is a to mankind, to band in
call
holy alliance of solidarity and brotherly love against the un-

feeling brutality of nature:
Noble of nature he
Who fearlessly can raise
His mortal eyes and gaze
Upon our common doom, and frankly owns,
Subtracting nought from truth,
The evil apportioned us, and that our state
Is humble and very weak;
Who proves himself a great
And gallant sufferer, and doth not seek
To add fraternal strife,
Worst of all ills in life,
Unto his sorrows by accusing Man

Of causing his distress, but lays the blame
On the true culprit her, who though of mortals
Mother by birth, by choice is their stepdame. 8 *
Is virtue an illusion? "But, if this illusion were shared by

all/' Leopardi writes Jacopssen, "if all men believed, and
wished to be virtuous, if they were compassionate, bountiful,
generous, magnanimous, full of enthusiasm in a word, if all ;
the world were kindhearted (for I see no difference between

kindliness and what is called virtue), would not all be hap-
84
pier?"
There is a paradox in Leopardi, which Francesco de Sanctis
"
has expressed finely: Leopardi produces the contrary effect
of that which he intends. Not believing in progress, he makes
you desire it; not believing in liberty, he makes you love it.
He calls loveand glory and virtue illusions, and kindles in
your breast an endless desire for them. You cannot leave him
without feeling yourself the better, and you cannot come near
him without first wishing to pull yourself together and be
purified, in order not to have to blush in his presence. He is a
sceptic and makes you a believer; and while he sees no possi-
bility ofa less dismal future for our native land, he rouses in
your breast an ardent love for it and fires your heart for noble
deeds. He has so low an estimate of human nature, and his
own soul lofty, gentle and pure, honors and ennobles it. ." 85 .
The ardor of the ideal lover and the true hero animate
him ever; one day he copied in large letters in his Zibal-
done these words in which Barth61emy eulogizes Aeschylus:
"His heroes would rather be struck by lightning than be
guilty of any baseness, and their courage is more inflexible
than the fatal law of necessity." 88
CHAPTER IX
ARISTOCRACY WITHOUT ILLUSIONS:
ALFRED DE VIGNY
In the presence of the Almighty Voice out of the Whirl-
wind agonized Job does not "set his cause/' but, awed into
submission, "abhors himself and repents in dust and ashes."
Pascal, despairing of knowing God with his reason, would
gamble on possible assurance through faith, even though the
price were the surrender of our thought wherein, he per-
ceives, lies all our dignity. Alfred de Vigny's body and soul
were not racked with all of Job's torments, neither did he
survey or sound with Pascal all the marshes of doubt in which
our mind gropes. But though unable to move forward with
assurance, Vigny does not yield; he stands his ground; man's
sorry estate rouses in him pity and never scorn; he honors
man's moral integrity above the unreckoned majesty of the
Divine, for man can die for a principle, and is thus greater
than God. 1
Here is a grim aristocrat's pride, Stoic dignity
and fortitude without the compliant Stoic trust in Divine
Providence, and never a sign of misanthropy. In poetry, in
politics, in religion, he inhabits the ivory tower of his own
ideals, unassured but unyielding, an aristocrat despite disil-
"""
lusion.
The epidemic and general despondency which

of dolor
characterized romanticism manifested itself even in some
non-romanticists during the early nineteenth century. Byron,
Lamartine, and Musset, Chateaubriand and Senancour
246
ARISTOCRACY WITHOUT ILLUSIONS 247
(Obermanri), Goethe's Werther, Heine and Lenau, Ugo Fos-

colo and Leopard! express the various strains of this univer-
sal threnody: Christian-mystical, antitheistic, sentimental,
metaphysical, passionate, stoical, misanthropic, humani-
tarian. As the nineteenth century gets beyond its romantic
adolescence, positivism, materialism, realism take posses-

sion of it; the microscope replaces meditation in literature.
Alfred de Vigny was a pioneer among the romanticists, and
from his ivory tower he saw the hosts of naturalism invade
the land. We
should not, however, regard Les destinees as
merely belated romantic wails. Vigny, who prided himself
on having marched first, was not a mere follower even of him-
self. The development in his thought is real and consistent.
Byron's influence on his ideas is undeniable ;

that of Schiller
has been pointed out; 2 that of Frederick the Great is not
unlikely;
s
to understand Vigny adequately, however, we
should see in him more than someone's disciple or the member
of a school.
Those who are bound to reduce a philosophy of despair to
personal disappointment, and pessimism to pique, find the
case of Alfred de Vigny more puzzling than Pascal's or Leo-
pardi's or Schopenhauer's. Pascal's or Leopardi's lifelong ill
health, Leopardi's mother, and also Schopenhauer's, Leo-

pardi's loveless life, and Schopenhauer's long vain struggle
for recognition would have driven unphilosophic men to
despair and suicide. Vigny lived to see in his own life reasons
enough for his gloom, but he was a poet of pessimism at a
time when, strong, handsome, and brilliant, he met the smil-
ing eyes of love and fame. To be sure, we may call him a
pessimist born; or we may thumb our psychiatries in search
of Greek terms to describe this odd despond: melancholia
dysthymia; we may simply quote Shakespeare's Salarino
4
or
"
to Antonio, in the Merchant of Venice: You are sad because
6
you are not merry." But Brunetifcre has rightly perceived
in Vigny 's pessimism a metaphysical suffering: "the dull
anguish that the enigma of destiny stirs at the bottom of the
heart." 6 If this woe, which to the once-born' man appears
'
so unaccountable, is recognized, we may better appreciate

the significance of Vigny's own life-experiences as contribut-
ing to intensify his pessimism, to motivate it in detail, and
later in life also to alleviate it and to turn his eyes from dark-
ness towards light.
He was an aristocrat from the cradle to the grave an : aris-
tocrat first of all in the traditional sense: proud of his name
and race. Somewhat past midway he recorded his
in his life
inability to imagine than those

finer characters in the chroni-
cles of his family. His every thought of his father was a joy;
of his mother, a blessing. What if we learn that some of the
ancestral dignities which the poet treasured were mythical?
'
Perhaps Admiral' Barraudin was no admiral, and perhaps

no Vigny blood was really shed in the Crusades. We need
not go so far back. Alfred's father did fight Frederick the
Great, did enter the king's tent to ask permission to seek his
brother's body on the field of battle. And Alfred's mother
did rear her son in the spirit of aristocratic dignity; she did
teach him that nobility was a trust and a duty. He felt him-
self the last of a great house; the Revolution had wrecked its
fortunes, and Vigny wrote book the long list of lost

in his
family estates. He faced his own

life, noble, and poor as a
noble is poor, a respectable poverty, rich in honor and self-

respect.
The essential nobility of his character it is difficult to
assail. Did he marry Lydia Bunbury for the sake of her
expected millions, and couldn't Sir Somebody Bunbury re-
member his son-in-law's identity beyond the fact that he
was a French poet, so that kind Frenchmen had to go down
the list of poets until he exclaimed: "Vigny? Yes, I believe
that's my man!" But Vigny writes that he never asked his

father-in-law for a penny, and in any case, when the Bunbury

millions failed to materialize, when he found himself mated
to a disinherited invalid to whom his inner life was a closed
book and who could not even read his poems, he gave her,
if not love, at least the devoted care which pity and his
all
sense of honor dictated. We cannot ignore the Dorval affair;

even if Vigny tried to raise Marie Dorval to his own level,
the fact is that he descended to hers. He did live to write:
"I feel in me a secret shame for the first time in my life."
7
But dignity not lacking in the betrayed lover's withdrawal;

is
Samson's Wrath is not an ignoble revenge.

The heart youth had gone to Napoleon; in the
of his
compagnies rouges under Bourbon royalty, the young officer

"
dreamt in vain of combat and promotion, he stifled, im-
prisoned, within this wooden horse which would never be
opened in any Troy."
8
The Bourbons did not give him any
recognition, yet during the revolution of 1830, had the Duke
D'Enghien or the Duke De Berry made a stand in Paris, he
would have risked his life for a house he disdained. Louis
Philippe did notice him, but Vigny, never insolent, was never
servile. For eighteen years he "resisted all the seductions of
9
the house of Orleans." Disillusioned with Napoleon, re-
pelled by Bourbon lack of integrityand courage, disdainful
of the bourgeois nobility of Louis Philippe's shops, ever dis-
trustful of democracy, especially after 1848, Vigny took
refuge in the dignity of his own inner being and remained

to the end "incorrigibly aristocratic." 10
He craved fame: what poet doesn't? But he craved per-
fection above popularity; he would himself have uttered the
words which he puts in the mouth of Milton in Cinq-Mars:
"Were my verses to remain unread for a hundred years
after my death, I should still ever write them." Six times
the French Academy spurned him in favor of other candi-
dates, some of them scarcely remembered today; u and when

he was finally elected a member, the clash with Mol6 over
his speech of reception poisoned Vigny's great day of honor.
He had his great days, of course: the days of the fame of
Cinq-Mars, the night of Othello, the wonderful first night

of Chatterton. But where was lasting satisfaction to be found?
When, in his youth, he had put on the new uniform of the
Red Company, he had not experienced the expected thrill
to the full: "So that is all!" And he lived to find glory dis-
appointing more than once, for what is one to think of glory,
he said, when the sculptor of the Laokoon is unknown?
Pride inhabited his ivory tower, the sad pride of disillusion.
But steps of devoted pity led downstairs to the beds of pain
where day and night for years he nursed first his beloved
mother and then his wife until they both very gradually
sank into the unknown. His father's last words to him had
been, "Make your mother happy." That charge he fulfilled
to the last. "Blessed be then the former misfortunes which
deprived my father and grandfather of their great chateaux
in the Beauce, since they have made me know this joy of a
workman's wage brought to one's mother in secret, without
12
her knowing When, after twelve years of torture, the
it."
'vulture of Prometheus' (cancer of the stomach), which his

doctors neither recognized nor subdued, finally consumed
him in 1863, was his cry of distress unto God a coward's
cry? Twenty-nine years earlier he had written: The man
of honor at his death "looks at the cross with respect, fulfils
13
all his Christian duties as a formality, and dies in silence."
II
Job atop the ash-heap suffers torments, but his real agony
is that he cannot, as a loyal servant of God, make sense of
his torments. His torture is really religious. Vigny's despair

of life is also due, not so much to his direct experience of evil
or to his observation of specific evils in life, as to the half-
(felt, half-reasoned conviction that in this world inner worth

!
neither prevails nor avails. We live in a world which is callous
or even hostile to virtue and high endeavor, a world which
includes pure evil but not unmixed good. In this world
nobility is humiliated, the innocent suffer, and even generous
love may work the ruin of the soul. This essential callousness
and injustice of God, Nature, call it what you will, Vigny
could not understand and refused to accept with submission.
The ever-present sense of it poisoned his joys:
My heart, with joy infatuate,
My drunken heart, has launched its fate
In torrent floods of laughter proud;
But Sorrow's Self before my face
I see, my laughter I efface,
My brow in mourning I enshroud.
14
Our very virtues serve to wreck us, so alien to worth is life.

Vigny's works are cantos of an epic of disillusion. Cinq-Mars
chronicles the earlier chapters of the bankruptcy of the
aristocrat; the last chapters were written before Vigny 's
own Excellence and nobility of character make men
eyes.
inevitably failures in an ignoble world. The multitude may
tremble in awe before the Great Man, but condemn his life
of power to solitude; so Moses prays to God to let him sleep
the sleep of oblivion:
O Lord, I've lived my life in lonely majesty:
15
The sleep of Mother Earth now vouchsafe to me! i
But more often the genius is crushed ; society is too frivolous

for Gilbert, too materialistic for Chatterton, too cruel for
Andr6 Chenier. The world in which a Robespierre disposes
of human destinies does not tolerate "the aristocrats of in-
"
it would level all down
16
telligence : to the nothingness in
which it abides.
Samson's consuming love for Delilah should exalt both, but
it destroys him. The woman he loves betrays him to the
Philistines. IsSamson ruined because his love is sensual and
self-seeking? But self-forgetting devotion may also prove our
undoing. A masterpiece of poetic despair is Vigny's Eloa.
At the grave of Lazarus, moved by pity for the grief of Mary
and Martha, Jesus shed a divine tear. Of this tear of Christ's
love born the angel Eloa. What fatality leads this celestial
is
maiden of pure love to meet the Fallen One? Eloa is moved

to pity, to love; she would redeem Lucifer, yet is herself
swept into the abyss. This spectacle of human life in which
high worth and virtue are frustrated need not make us mis-
anthropic; man deserves pity, not hatred. But if Vigny is
never a hater of men, he is not a lover of God; his thought
and mood are antitheistic. Behold Jephthah's daughter,
virgin innocence sacrificed to a malign Deity. Behold Sarah
in The Deluge: had she married Japhet, son of Noah, she
would have been saved with his household; but she loved
Emmanuel, and neither her love nor his innocence avail to
deliver them from the rising flood of God's wrath.
Is this view of the Almighty too harshly Hebraic? Then
turn to the Gospels, Vigny says; come with me to Geth-
semane. Here is, not human, Divine Innocence, on bended
knee crying out: "Father!"
But dark the sky remains, and God does not reply.
17
In place of doubt and evil, Christ would bring to man blessed

certainty and confident hope. But the night is callous, and
in the woods the Son of God hears the tramp of the mob
and sees the blazing torch of Judas Iscariot. Moreover why
does Christ die? To atone once for all for man's sins? The
death on Calvary should then be expiation enough. Did
" "
not Christ cry out on the Cross It is finished
: "Was there
!
not enough divine blood for the salvation of the human

" 18
race? There is a Pascalian overtone in this note. Vigny
is scarcely a Jansenist, L6on S6eh6 to the contrary, 19 but
there is in his thought not a little of Pascal's grim struggle
with the enigmas of truth and faith. "His Diary often reads
like a continuation of Pascal's Thoughts." 20 Faguet's words
about Vigny may well be read in a reverse order: "He does
not believe in the ideal, but he adores it." 21
But, we are told, God's ways are not man's ways, and his
plans for man are past finding out:
Your glance forever fix beyond this mortal span:

That guiltless men should die, seems fathomless to man;
Be not thou overwhelmed with this, nor seek reply;
Unlike our pity is the pity from on High;
God makes no covenant with man; his hand of fate,
22
Creating without love, destroys us without hate.
And we are asked to look beyond this life. Note the irony
in the closing lines of The Deluge:
"Your father does not come: shall we be punished, then?"
23
"Though death should separate, no doubt we'll meet again."
No doubt, but what reason do we have for hope of anything
better? The prisoner in the Iron Mask has seen nothing in
this life to justify his trust in any hereafter:
"
I do not want it: chains await me there." 24
What is beyond the grave but a look of despair?

this look
"The truth about life is despair. The religion of Christ is a
religion of despair, since he despairs of life and only trusts
25
in eternity."
If we turn away from God to contemplate Nature, we
turn from injustice or possible malignity to stone-blind im-

passivity.
I'm deaf to all your moans and sighs, and scarcely sense
The progress of the human comedy immense
Which vainly seeks a silent audience in heaven. . . .
A mother I am called, but I'm in truth a tomb;

My winter sweeps your dead as in a hecatomb;
My spring is dull to all your adorations. .* . .
Turn from God to nature, and back to God; the conclusion
is the same:
In this chaotic world, I see nothing assured

j
. But Suffering and Death, in which our life is moored. 27
What man
to do, then? Prayers and supplications are*
is
vain; vain violent imprecation, and vainest of all is hope.

all
Understand clearly the firm foundation of despair, and then

consider man's estate: tragic and pitiful it is, but despicable
never! Do dark contemplation: "It is bad and

not resist
cowardly to seek distraction from a noble woe so as to dimin-

ish suffering. One should reflect upon it, plunge the sword
28
courageously to the hilt." Face God, face nature grimly
without murmur and without appeal. Stoic fortitude is
alone noble, not the Stoic trust in a somehow-good universe,
but rather the fortitude of utter silence without hope or
plea: the silence of utter despair in which all is lost save
man's tragic dignity, "this half-silence the true Stoi- . . .
cism of an anguished soul and an averted spirit, the . . .
religion of honor and valor."

29
A Stoic portrait is that of the
dying wolf teaching the hunter who has killed him
How one should leave this life and all its ills and grime:
You know it well indeed, you animals sublime!
What meaning and what gain from this earth do we wrest?
Noble alone is silence: weakness, all the rest.
To groan or weep or pray, is all a coward's moil:

So do with might and main your long and heavy toil,
Where'er the path assigned to you by Fate may lie,
And then, like me, without a whimper, suffer, die. 30 "
The stanza "Le silence" concluding (or appended to) Le

Mont des Oliviers isa poetic document of the dignity of de-
spair:
If in the Holy Garden of Gethsemane

The Son of Man
did pray to God, and prayed in vain;
Deaf, blind, and unresponsive to our misery,
If Heav'n did spurn our misbegotten world of pain,
This scorn divine my mortal honor will defy
With scorn, and silence cold will be my
one reply
To God's eternal silence and to God's disdain. 31
So this is the only respectable way out: not wailing, not

hopeful, but grimly resistant. Do not seek comfort; steel
' '
your soul in saintly solitude : the hyenas never attack the

traveler so long as he stands up and keeps marching on.
This somber fortitude exalts man; and it also stimulates
generous compassion with his fellows: against the malign
majesty of God or the blind majesty of nature, man's is the
tragic majesty of woe:
Live thoti, cold Nature, and in waves of life be borne
Triumphant over us, since this is fate's decree;
Live ever thou and, goddess-like, presume to scorn
Us humble passengers that should rule over thee:
Far more than all your power or all your splendors vain,
I love the majesty of man's unyielding pain:
A single word of love you will not get from me! 32
The penultimate verse, in Vigny's words, contains the sense
of all his philosophical poems: "the spirit of humanity, the
utter devotion to mankind and to the betterment of its lot." 3S
"Were I a painter," Vigny wrote, "I should like to be a
black Raphael: angelic form, somber color." 34 This spirit
of aristocratic standards and generous fortitude serves in
Vigny's life the purposes of a religion. It is the Religion of

Honor. The stories in Servitude et grandeur militaires are
cantos of an epic on Duty. Here is a Kantian exaltation of
Duty: routine devotion to one's army vow even when it in-
volves heart-breaking, hateful obedience (Laurette ou le
cachet rouge) grim devotion to a disillusion which has nul-
;
lified all but man's own self-respect (Captain Renaud) noble

;
self-effacing devotion to duty (Admiral Collingwood). "The
sentiment of Duty ends by so dominating the mind as to
permeate one's character and become second nature, just
as constant use of wholesome nourishment can change the
quality of one's blood and become a factor in one's constitu-
35
tion." Thus arises honor: "Honor is conscience, but con-
science exalted .... It is the
36
Here is the
poesy of duty."
purest and the bravest of religions, an intense and elevated
sense of self-respect, "a manly religion, without symbols or
37
imagery, without dogmas and without ceremonies." "Con-
science should be divinized," Vigny wrote in his Diary,
planning his novel Daphne, with Julian the Apostate as
its hero. Julian's character fascinated Vigny: "If there is
metempsychosis I have been this man. His role, life, char-
acter would have suited me best of any in history." 39 It is the
character of a man who, disillusioned and unable to believe,
yet sees clearly man's utter need of belief and devotion; an
intensely religious man without a religion, an essentially
contemplative soul plunging deliberately and entirely into
action, into the battle of ideals and devotions.
Is Julian's life, is Vigny's utter failure? But how are we
to reckon failure and success? Here the words of Captain
Renaud come to mind: "I saw clearly that events are noth-
ing, that the inner man is everything."
40
And this inner
integrity and worth, candor and fortitude and generosity

preserve and ennoble man in the very pit of disaster. Here
Vigny recalls Leopardi: "The contemplation of misfortune
itself gives the soul inner joy that comes from attending to
41
the idea of misfortune." This is a treasure of truth which
is always ours: "Let us be consoled for all by the thought that
we enjoy our thought itself, and that nothing can rob us of
this joy." 42 A somber treasure All the same, adversity has
!
not crushed us so long as this devotion to truth still remains.

"The day when man has lost all enthusiasm and love and
adoration and devotion, let us bore to the center of the earth,

put in five hundred billion barrels of powder, and let it blaze
" 43
to pieces in the firmament!
From this resigned devotion and despairing generosity
there gradually arises a defiant optimism. "Vigny traverses
44
despair, but does not rest in it." Among the last songs of
the poet of the ivory tower are songs of light and trust,
grimly jubilant songs of an aristocrat despite disillusion.
The poet of despair ends on a note of hope. It is a hope in
man, in woman, in work, and in civilization. Already in 1843
Vigny's poem La sauvage showed how far he had travelled
beyond Rousseau's idolatry of the primitive. Piecing with
her children from the cruelty of the Hurons, the Indian savage
woman seeks refuge for herself and her orphans in the home
of an English settler. Here man has made himself master of
nature, has wrestled with nature's wild domain, has van-

quished and humanized it. In the midst of the trackless wood-
land waste is a garden and a home, a library, the Bible, Shake-
speare. To this refuge the savage woman is admitted. There
is irony in the hospitality. Time was when the Almighty
rejected the sacrifice of the hard-working tiller of the soil,
to accept the blood-smelling smoke of the idle herdsman.
But here Cain has his revenge: nomad savagery, disdainful
of work and of womankind, is here abased before law-abid-
45
ing, home-building thrift. This is the voice of civilization
as it penetrates the jungle:
She says, in building each new city: "See!

You call me Law, but I am Liberty!"
w
This eulogy of civilized man expresses a faith in the prog-

ress of ideals, a faith even in the midst of disaster, of ship-
wreck. So in the poem The Bottle in the Sea, as the storm rages
and the waves beat the dismayed ship to pulp against the
unsuspected and uncharted rocks, as the waters sweep over
the decks, the sailors do all in their power to save their boat
and their lives. But when all effort proves futile, the captain
does the one thing left to him he records latitude and longi-
:
tude of the unmarked reef which the wrecking of his ship has
served to discover; he issues the warning, seals the precious
knowledge in a strong bottle, and trusts it to the waves that
sweep him and his crew to death. The bottle floats long and
alone on endless seas, but at last it comes within the reach of
human eyes and human hands. The captain's hope is not
frustrated, nor is his death and the death of his men in vain.
One more step has been marked in man's mastery over brute
nature. This poem is a song of courage and hope and glory
to explorer, sailor, craftsman, scientist, warriors all in man's
great combat with nature:
The true God, God Almighty, is the God of thought.
The seed that Fate on our deep furrowed brows has cast,
Neglect not, to harvest be it ever brought;
it
Reap, gather in the grain, the soul's own treasure vast;

All redolent it is of saintly solitudes:
Then toss it to the sea, the sea of multitudes!
God's finger willconduct it safe to port at last. 47
A chant of hope, of trust in man is also the poem La flute:

if prove unavailing, and your cause seems to falter
efforts
and fail, and the harmony you are endeavoring to create
turns to discord, do not despair. The flute, not the flutist, is
at fault:
Blame not the soul of man, the beggar-body blame;
What wretched organs here our mind's endeavors shame!
Like crude translators of some bright celestial bard

They stammer. .** . .
The poem UEsprit pur, Vigny's last, written six months

before his death, is impressive in its noble assurance. One
should have Vigny's Diary and his Correspondence well in
hand to appreciatefully the noble pathos of this swan-song.
Vigny contemplates the past glories of his house, and then

considers his own lot:
Dead, all of them, their names forgot without renown;

But read the writing in the Golden Book Divine:
"Two families of France the road of
life passed down;
Their last descendant now

ascends the holy shrine
And writes his name, but not upon the rolls obscure
Of proud knaves, useless rich, but on the tablet pure
49
That Destiny unto Pure Spirit doth assign."
The influence of Comte on Vigny's thought is evident here,

although the poet had too keen a sense of individuality to
find unqualified peace in the Cult of Humanity, and his prob-
lems were too metaphysical in character to be resolved al-
together by anthropocentric or geocentric positivism; his

altruism, moreover, had the note of grim pity that scarcely
accords with the bright cheer of Comte's humanitarianism.
Vigny is brimful of fertile ideas, and his mind is never encased
in a formula. Faguet observes the great concentration of his
u
style: ln his Diary, which is the key to all his thought, he
sometimes sketches in half-a-dozen lines a whole philosophi-
w
calsystem that would have done credit to a great thinker/'
So we should not be too assured in recording Vigny's final
diagnosis and remedy: utopianism in the face of adversity,
grim optimism. For what avails the prospect, be it never so
certain, that the shipwrecked captain's bottle will some day
reach port, that the youth of France will some day read
Vigny and with him honorably face this world's despair? In
the total economy of the vast chaos which we call the uni-
verse, what avail the progress or the stagnation, the pros-
perity or the ruin of France, human profit or loss, terrestrial
book-keeping? Climb Montmartre, look at the immense city
of Paris: "a little higher, this city be, what would
what would
be this earth? What are we
God's sight?" 51 a thought
in
that had disturbed Montaigne also, and harrowed Pascal.
We may perhaps regard Vigny's resolve to trust his destiny
to man's spirit and to enlightened posterity as a Pascalian
hazard and plunge of faith. Or we may, and I think with
more justice, perceive in these last poems the wisdom of
Leopardi's capital work, La ginestra. Has God put us in this
sorry world, face to face with brute unresponsive nature?
Our only hope and reliance then is to be sought in our inner
sense of generous honor. Fortitude, self-respect, pity bind
mankind in resistance to Stepmother Nature. Slowly but
surely scientist and poet and artisan and seer are writing in
the Book of Pure Spirit the mastery of man's soul over its
callousmedium. Slowly but surely, as duty and pity become
our master passions, human life is redeemed from the brute
and human society becomes a true republic. This deepening
of cosmic confidence disdains the supernatural and the ritual-
istic-liturgical aspects of Christianity, but it is

permeated
with the Christian spirit of benevolence, and with respect
for weak but aspiring human nature. Vigny's benevolence
was not merely a poetic gesture, nor was it limited to the
tender care for his mother and for his wife. The poet of
StellOj of Chatterton championed actively the cause of indi-
vidual needy authors, and made their lives more bearable. 52
At New Years' Eve he would review the twelvemonth past
and thank Heaven that he had done no evil to any human
soul, nor written against his conscience nor against his fellow
men.
There are in Vigny gleams of a Zoroastrian hope in the
extinction, and more, even in the reclaiming of evil. In his
Diary is the outline of a projected poem, Satan Saved. In
another passage he contemplates that at the Last Judgment,
"God will come to justify himself before all souls and all
life. He will appear and will speak; he will tell clearly the
why and wherefore of creation, of the suffering and the death
of innocence." Is this a sentence from Vigny's Theodicy? The
"
next sentence reads : On that day it will be mankind, brought
to that will be the judge, and the Eternal, the Creator
life,
i
will be judged by the generations of men." 63 It is like a double-
edged commentary on a verse from the Book of Job.

Do we really know enough to hope? The map is never
finished, and the beast of prey is never quite banished from
our souls. And, who knows, perhaps God regards man's
enterprise as a boy watches the building of a bird's nest:
almost finished, and a brush of the hand destroys it all. Are
our terrestrial prospects any more secure? Vigny has no
answer; he only knows that any other course but that of duty,
honor, pity would be cowardly and would tarnish the one
grain of gold in this world of dross: man's moral endeavor.
"I am an epic moralist," he writes. 54 In all his dismay and
despair he never doubts the inherent and unshakable worth
of noble effort: "What matters it," we read in Daphne,
"if the good is only done, whether one is or is not trampled
under foot?" 65 The ship is being submerged; what am I to
do? Epictetus the Stoic tells me: "Drown like a man."
Vigny:
"Toss your work to the sea, the sea of multitudes."
CHAPTER X
THE WARP OF SCHOPENHAUER
A philosopher's view of life is a fabric of the spirit in which
thread-patterns of reasoned truth or error are woven into the
warp of his personal character or bias, the temper of the man.
In some cases the woof may be so thick or the warp so thin
that the texture produced is of a scientific or otherwise color-
less impersonality. In other cases the thinnest and most
threadbare woof strings together the strong cords of senti-
mental or fanatical bias. In still other cases warp and woof
color and reflect and modify each other in reconciled or un-
reconciled rivalry. These are humanly the most interesting
textures of the spirit, and, who knows, perhaps the most
precious. "The sort of philosophy a man has/' Fichte told
"
us, depends on the sort of man one is."
Towards the middle of the fourteenth century a priest and

warden of the House of the Teutonic Order on the bank of the
Main, in Frankfurt, wrote a book which Martin Luther de-
clared had taught him more of God and Christ and all things
than any other next to the Bible and St. Augustine. The
kernel of this Theologia Germanica is a gospel of self-denial.
Sin is infatuate self-will, blindness to good and to God; in
the true life of Christ the self must be forsaken and lost, must
die altogether. "Be simply and wholly bereft of self. . . ,
Put off thine own will, and there will be no hell." l

Five centuries later, on the right bank of the Main, opposite
the Frankfurt House of the Teutonic Order, the deepening
262
THE WARP OF SCHOPENHAUER 263
twilight of old age was bringing peace to another evangelist

of denial. Arthur Schopenhauer felt himself at home in the
Theologia Germanica. Breaking its intellectual theistic shell
and casting it aside as nothing worth, he found in its kernel-
doctrine of salvation the same truth which had been uttered
in dark sayings of ancient Eastern seers and which he had
sought his life long to express and to establish in reasoned

terms. "Buddha, the Frankfurter, and I," Schopenhauer
used to say: one in their pessimistic insight into life. For the
essential difference between religions consists in this, he
thought, whether they are optimistic or pessimistic. Despite

the superficial bond of monotheism, the essentially optimistic
tone of Judaism makes it really alien to the deeper spirit of
Christianity. It is the perception of evil in the Old Testament
which Christianity has seized upon and emphasized: the
sense of sin, the doctrine of the Fall, which Schopenhauer
calls the redeeming feature of Judaism. 2
True Christianity, Schopenhauer insisted on every occa-
a gospel of deliverance from life. The world is to it a
sion, is
synonym for evil; St. Augustine identifies salvation with the
end of the world. Here is no complacent gospel of happiness:
"The swiftest animal that bears thee to perfection is suffer-
ing," Meister Eckhart wrote, and the very symbol of Christi-

anity is the cross. What Meister Eckhart teaches "in the
fetters of his Christian mythology," the Buddha urges more
3
simply and clearly, unencumbered by theism. Woe is uni-

versal and woe is begotten of selfishness, and deliverance
from woe is deliverance from self. This deliverance from the
bonds of self, this crucifixion of the flesh, this peace of stilled
desire Schopenhauer did not attain; only old age in the course
of nature brought him a measure of it. But he read the
wretched riddle of life and recorded its solution: that which
saints lived out and mystics saw in blessed vision, he under-
took to analyze and to prove.
It is easy and it is futile to taunt Schopenhauer with not
having practised what he preached. His very failure to do so
may serve the more clearly to illustrate his text. Life he
compared to a tragedy, in which the hero may leave the stage
and even step into the audience to watch the play, biding his
time and cue, all the while keenly aware of the tragic d6noue-
ment in which he is to play his part. It is a sorry play Scho-
penhauer witnessed on the stage of life, and a sorry actor he
was in many ways, yet with all his frailties not altogether
unheroic. A more intimate glance into his life and heart may
not lead us to admire, but it will enable us to understand,
and to pity without scorn.
II
The average man accepts the world without question. He

is apt to ascribe suicide to a fit of madness, and the unquali-
fied rejection of life impresses him as the utterance of a dis-
eased mind. Those who would explain Schopenhauer's pes-
simism pathologically find no lack of material in his family's
history. The Schopenhauers, of Dutch ancestry, had long
been settled prosperously as merchants and landowners in
Danzig. The philosopher's great-grandfather, Johann Scho-
penhauer, had been, in 1716, host to Peter the Great, and had
warmed his stoveless guest-chamber by burning gallons of
brandy on the stone floor.The grandfather, Andreas Scho-
penhauer, married Anna Renata Soermans, to whom the
troubled strain in the Schopenhauer family may be traced.
She was adjudged insane and placed under a guardian's care
during the last years of her life. Her two younger sons were
clearly tainted: Michael Andreas was from his youth an
idiot; Karl Gottfried, who studied in Gottingen, dissipated
mind and body in riotous living and died of consumption. The
two elder sons had apparently exhausted the family's stock of
intelligence. Steady and enterprising, they pushed the Scho-
penhauer house to the front rank in Danzig. Johann Fried-

rich, however, died young. Hcinrich Floris, the eldest, was a
powerful, intelligent, hard, proud, defiantly independent and

man of inflexible honor, ruthless candor,
choleric patrician, a
volcanic wrath, impenetrable depths of gloom and epically
4
ugly.
When he sought the hand of the beautiful light-hearted
Johanna Henriette Trosiener, almost twenty years younger
than himself, she accepted him readily, without any illusions
of romantic love, but with great respect for him and for his
preeminent position in the life of the city. His patrician pride

impressed her, and for his storms of wrath she had had abun-
dant training in the house of her own violent father Trosiener.
So she married him, and retired to his country villa, with its art
treasures, horses and spaniels and octave of lamb-bells, its
garden and little lake, and the sea in the distance. Here
Johanna would read French and English novels all week, and
on Saturday Heinrich Floris would return from the city,
sometimes bringing guests along. Only once did he ride over
in the middle of the week, to announce the fall of the Bastille.
The Danzig oligarch, travelling with his wife, was expect-
ing a son and heir, and wanted him to be born on English
soil. But Johanna's homesickness cut their tour short, and
the child was born a Danziger after all, on February 22, 1788.
He was baptized Arthur, because his father wanted the future
head of his house to have a cosmopolitan name, the same in
English, French, and German. The son was to be a free Euro-
pean patrician, like his father. But the oligarchy of Danzig
was in danger. Heinrich Floris, who refrained from making
use of a Polish title of nobility or from accepting Friedrich's
invitation to settle in Prussia, was not the one to submit to

Prussia's encroachment on his native free city. When, in 1793,
the Prussian troops entered Danzig, the Schopenhauers were
on their way to the free city of Hamburg.
To prepare him for a commercial career, young Arthur was
sent at the age of nine to Havre. There he spent two years
with the family of a M. Gr6goire, for whose son Anthime he
conceived great friendship. He returned to Hamburg know-
ing French better than German, and all his life remembered
his Havre years as his happiest: a sinister reflection on his
life at home. There seems to have been little capacity for hap-
piness in Schopenhauer's being, and much in his youth to
develop his genius for gloom. His parents, especially -his
mother, cultivated the society of literary and learned men,
but he was definitely intended for a merchant's career.
Arthur's heart loathed banker's books and craved poetry,
art, learning. His honored father was inflexibly bent on ruin-
ing his life; his light-hearted mother was impatient with his
moods. Between the two, the boy was lone and depressed;
his sister Adele, who was to cherish him with such sad devo-
tion in after-years, was yet too young to understand.
"My son shall read the great book of the world," Heinrich
Floris said,and met Arthur's insistent pleas for a classical
education by offering him as an alternative an extended tour
to France and England, on the express condition that he
definitely accept his own commercial plans. The lure suc-
ceeded, but the long journey did not realize the expected
pleasures. The youth had already shown uncanny insight
into the dark recesses of life. In England, where he spent
some time in a boarding-school at Wimbledon, he had an eye
only for the restrictions and the bigotries of English life.
In Toulon the hopeless lot of the galley-convicts depressed
him, and in Lyons he saw men and women merrily promenad-
ing in streets and in the square where but ten years before
their parents had been mowed down by grapeshot. Through
Switzerland, Bavaria, and Austria the Schopenhauers pro-
ceeded to Berlin, where they separated, the father returning
to Hamburg, the mother and son to the old Danzig home,
where Arthur was confirmed. His gloomy moods the parents

perceived but did not understand. His mother urged him to
Dvercome his remote bearing with people and grow more
affable; his father wrote him to improve his epistolary style
and penmanship and writing-posture, as behooved a future
solid banker. Arthur returned to Hamburg to eat his heart
;>ut in the commercial office of Senator Jenisch.
The Schopenhauer's change of residence had proved very
costly, and the Danziger's commercial preeminence remained

3nly a memory to him in Hamburg. Heinrich Floris did not
Decome a naturalized citizen of his adopted city. Sullen and
Droken pride, financial worries, growing deafness and lapses
)f memory and recognition embittered his last years, and
ivhen one day in April, 1805, he fell into the Hamburg canal,
:he accident was judged by many, and later by his son also,
is a case of suicide.
Ill
His father's death made Arthur's life doubly hard, as now

i sense of honor and pious loyalty to his paternal will bound
lim to a hateful occupation, the while his mind and heart
perversely courted literary and scientific interests. His
nother had a gift for suiting self, and resolved to
her cheerful
nake the most of her
young widowhood. Leaving her son to
his ledgers, she moved with Adele to Weimar, arriving there
just before the battle of Jena, and was very soon at home to all
the Olympians. It was the second spring of her spirit. Twice a
week her salon welcomed men like Goethe, Wieland, Grimm,
the two Schlegels, and especially Fernow, to whom she was
particularly devoted and the writing of whose biography was

her first literary venture. The Duke Karl August smiled on
her at court. She wrote Arthur of her many suitors: a Frank-
furt merchant, a noble Kammerherr, a Councillor Conta who
ordered his every minute to suit her wishes; all this she re-
hearsed to her son in frank delight, breathing the divine air
of the German Olympus and thrilled with the new powers
and talents which Weimar was bringing out. And mean-
"
while from his counter Arthur wrote her wailing letters: All
is disintegrated in the stream of time. The minutes, the
countless atoms of pettiness into which each action crumbles
are worms which gnaw and destroy all that is great and reso-
lute. The dreadful commonplaceness crushes all aspiration.
There is naught to be serious with in human life; dust is not

worth it. What are eternal passions for this petty wretched-
ness?
Life is a jest; and all things show it:
thought so once; but now I know it."

5
I
And not only the merchant's ledgers kept him from soaring
to perfection: a poern written during these months reveals
only too clearly the tortures of his soul, torn between the
tug of flesh and the flight of the spirit:
Oh lust, oh hell,
Oh senses, oh love,
Not to let go,
Nor yet to vanquish !
From Heaven's summits

You've dragged me down
And cast me here
In this earth's mire. . . .
Even more clearly is the voice of the later pessimist heard

in these verses:
What more desirable indeed
Than utterly to vanquish
This empty miserable life,
What no desire could ever consummate,
Though heart should break with longing on the spot.
How fine 'twould be, with light and gentle step
The desert of this life on earth to roam,
The footstep never sticking in the mire,
The eye-glance never turned away from Heaven. 8
Was it desire to be rid of epistolary nightmares, was it a

rare flash of maternal pity, was it plain good sense on Jo-
hanna's part which led her at last to consult with Fernow
whether Arthur was too late to begin preparing for the uni-
versity, and on his advice to release her son from the bonds
of commerce? In 1807, at the age of nineteen, he plunged into
Greek and Latin, first at Gotha and then at Weimar, with
such intensity that in the short span of two years he leaped
into the University of Gottingen.
If his mother had thought of curing his pessimism by
putting Homer in his hands, she was sorely mistaken. In her

Weimar salon the sun, moon, and stars of Germany shone in
turn around Arthur but did not penetrate his midnight.
Johanna found his wailing presence in Weimar far more in-
tolerable than his wailing letters had been. She could ad-
minister bitter pills to others, and told her son in so many
words to condemn the world elsewhere, if he must, but to
leave her in peace. Keep to your own lodgings, she told him:
in my home, of course, you are a welcome guest, when I am
at home to guests, "if you would only refrain from all your
disagreeable disputing which makes me also cross, and from
all your lamenting over the stupid world and the misery of
mankind, for all this always gives me a horrid night, and I do

like sound sleep." 7
The philosophical bent of Schopenhauer's mind asserted
" "
itself early. Aenesidemus Schulze in Gottingen started
him with the advice to avoid all philosophers, and especially
Aristotle and Spinoza, until he had first mastered the divine
Plato and the marvelous Kant. From Gottingen he pro-
ceeded to Berlin, hoping to learn from Fichte, but found his
Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge) to be only Wis-
senschafts-leere (Empty Knowledge). Physical science, litera-
ture, history, art, classical learning, all were to him soil in
which his own philosophy was germinating. Here was no
young pedant being initiated into technique, but one who
felt himself a young titan and was already preparing to pro-
vide the materials for the next chapter in the history of phi-
losophy. At Weimar, in April, 1811, he confided his plan of
lifeto the seventy-eight-year-old poet Wieland. "Life is a
precarious matter: I have resolved to spend mine meditating
upon it." The death-earnest manner which commended it-
8
self and to Goethe amused the Jena flappers who

to Wieland
tittered at theyoung man sullenly gazing by himself out of the
window. "Little ones," Goethe advised them, "leave him
over there in peace; one of these days he will grow above the
heads of us all." 9
His mother tittered with the flappers, when she was not out
of patience with her son. On receiving her copy of his doctor's
dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Suffi-
cient Reason, she remarked that the root smelled of the apoth-
ecary. The son replied that men would be reading him when
not one copy of her works was to be had. She retorted that
the entire edition of his works would then still be unsold.
A grim fate was to fulfill both prophecies, the mother's before
the son's. Back of these sour family pleasantries there was
serious tension between the two. Johanna's manner of life
was taxing the Schopenhauer estate; but doubly irritating
to the son were his mother's intimate relations with the court-
ier Miiller von Gerstenbergk whom she had living in her own
house and with whom Schopenhauer refused to come to any
terms. Johanna would not sacrifice Miiller to Arthur, and
the son broke forever with his mother.
Meanwhile an interest in Goethe's theory of colors, which
led to Schopenhauer's writing a special treatise on the sub-
ject, brought him into intimate contact with the old poet,
for whose genius Schopenhauer retained a reverence which
no other German besides Kant commanded. The theory of
vision and colors, however, was only a special interest. Scho-
penhauer's main attention was already being devoted to a

philosophical system that was to mark the step beyond Kant.
In Dresden, to which he had been drawn by its music and
art-treasures and by the fine library, his aggressive assurance
earned him, in a literary circle, the epithet Jupiter tonans.
But, along with the Jovian thunders, quietly the philosophy
of his life was germinating within him. We can now trace,
in the eleventh volume of Paul Deussen's definitive edition of
the Works, the genesis of Schopenhauer's system, in the origi-
nal notes and rough drafts from the years 1812-18. The read-
ing of these early sketches deepens the impression that his
philosophy was in the main fixed as early as 1814, and adds
"
force to his words written in 1813 in Berlin: Under my hands
and more in my mind grows a work, a philosophy which
still
willbe an ethics and a metaphysics in one: two branches

which hitherto have been separated as falsely as man had been
divided into soul and body. The work grows, slowly and
gradually aggregating its parts like the child in the womb.
I become aware of one member, one vessel, one part after
another. In other words, I set each sentence down, without
anxiety as to how it will fit into the whole; for I know it has
all sprung from a single foundation. It is thus that an organic
whole originates, and that alone will live. Chance,

. . .
thou ruler of this sense-world Let me live and find peace for
!
yet a few years, for I love my work as the mother her child.
When it is matured and has come to the birth, then exact
from me my dues, taking interest for the postponement." 10
IV
When the work was done, in 1818, Schopenhauer was con-
vinced, and remained convinced throughout his life, that he
had solved the riddle of existence and pointed out the path
of salvation through insight. He planned accordingly to
have his signet-ring engraved, with the Sphinx falling head-
long into the abyss. To Brockhaus in Leipzig he offered his
work as "a new philosophical system, new in the full mean-
ing of the term, not a new exposition of old ideas, but a most
coherent course of thoughts, which have never before come
into any human head. The book will, I am firmly
. . .
convinced, be in the future the source and the occasion for

a hundred other books." u
Brockhaus accepted the work of the thirty-year-old sage
sight unseen, as the clean copy of the manuscript was not
yet completed. Unavoidable delay in the printing of the book
threatened to delay Schopenhauer's projected trip to Italy
and also filled him with quite ungrounded suspicions of his
publisher's honesty.A disgracefully bitter correspondence

with Brockhaus ensued, which the latter with perfect right
definitely terminated.
At the end of September, 1818, Schopenhauer left for
Italy by way of Vienna, and was alreacly-in Rome before
hisown copies of The World as Will and Idea reached him.
Time brought together in Italy four great contemners of
this world,who, as Gwinner puts it, could well have held a
Congress of Pessimists: Chateaubriand was in Italy, and of
course GiacomoLeogardi, ten years Schopenhauer's junior,
and Byron was in Venice. Schopenhauer did not come to
know Leopardi until late in life, when Adam von Doss helped
to introduce him more intimately to the Italian poet's works.
For his failure to meet Lord Byron, which grievously dis-
appointed his sister Adele, he had his own jealousy to blame.
Goethe had given him a letter of introduction to the author
of Childe Harold, but he spent three months in Venice without
making use of his opportunity. Italian beauties claimed his

heart no less than the beauty As he was walking
of Italy.
one day on the Lido with his Dulcinea, a rider galloped past
them. "Look at the English poet!" the Venetian girl cried
out ecstatically, and remained as in a revery the rest of the
day. Schopenhauer put his letter of introduction away,

but lived to regret his pique of jealousy in after years.
His Italian trip was brought to a sharp conclusion by dis-
astrous news of the failure involving the Muhl house in Dan-
zig, in which part of his share and all of his mother's and
shares of the family estate were invested.
sister's He fought
hard to win his mother and sister to his side against the
proposed thirty per cent, settlement and, failing this, held
out alone. It was his patrimony that assured him of freedom,
of learned leisure, and he was determined on teaching Herr
Muhl Danzig that one could be a philosopher without
in
being a simpleton. In the end he recovered his money from

Muhl intact only to lose it later in Mexican bonds.
His wrangles over the thirty per cent, settlement served to
estrange him still further from his mother, and this time,
alas, also from his sister. To her, who had idolized him
and shared his many glooms, this estrangement was a bitter
sorrow which poisoned her increasingly lonely life.
The Muhl trouble, which for a time had endangered his
economic independence, helped to confirm him in his deci-
sion to enter the academic career, and after some preliminary
inquiries, he applied for and was admitted to a docentship
at the University of Berlin a crusader for philosophic truth
:
in the very citadel of Hegelian charlatanry, no less! His

expectations may be judged from the Vita which he sub-
mitted to the Berlin Philosophical Faculty, and also from his
letter to Dean Bockh, to the effect that no time for his lec-
tures would suit him quite so well as the hour in which Herr
Professor Hegel held his Hauptkollegium. 12 The anticipated
reduction of the Hegelian fortress did not take place, nor did
Beelzebub have to make a sortie. Apart from a brief en-
counter with Schopenhauer at the first trial lecture, in which
Hegel seems to have got the worst of it, the latter was ap-
parently unaware of his young colleague's existence. Scho-
penhauer's lectures proved a complete fiasco. He retained the
announcement of his course in the Berlin catalogue until
1832, and later planned a second attempt in a South-German
University, but his first course of lectures was really his last.
The reader of the lectures, in the ninth and tenth volumes
of Deussen's edition, will find Schopenhauer's academic
failure hard to explain. The few who listened to them must
have found the delivery attractive, if the reports of Schopen-
hauer's gifts of oral discourse are to be at all credited. Clarity,
keen logic, driving power, brilliant style, ready and most

varied allusion, irony, grim humor, all were his. But philoso-
phy in Berlin was under Hegel's sway. What chances had this
avowed enemy to attract many students when he had put
his lecture-hour to compete with HegePs main course?
The book into which he had poured his life was fulfilling his
mother's cruel prophecy. Herbart reviewed it with apprecia-
tion,notwithstanding his radical disagreement with the phi-
losophy of The World as Will and Idea. Jean Paul Riehter
described it as a philosophical work of genius, bold, many-
sided, keen and profound, and compared it to a desolate

bottomless Norwegian lake, sunk in a dark wall of steep
cliffs, where the sun never penetrates, and only the stars of
the day's sky are seen, and over which no bird flies, and no
wave stirs. 13 The book, for all that, fell stillborn from the
press, though its very title should have kept it alive. "The
Kantian antithesis of the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon,
the phenomenalistic doctrine that the world of our experience
and knowledge through understanding is only a world of
ideas, the turn in metaphysical standpoint from the theoret-
ical to the practical reason, the observation that the true
essence of things consists in Will," writes Windelband, "all
these fundamental doctrines of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling
were comprehended in Schopenhauer's catch-word." 14
Assured that he had solved the world-enigma, Schopen-
hauer had to feed his pessimism on that bitterest of diets,

the apathy of mankind. He was convinced that the pro-
fessional guild was in conspiracy against him, to undermine
him if necessary, to condemn him to eternal silence if possible.
For his part he reacted with savage vigor: poor young
Beneke's review he ^denounced as a liar's patchwork; if he
had called Fichtea windbag, he now turned on Hegel, the
Beelzebub and Caliban of philosophic Germany, with vitriolic
diatribe and abuse. Even so loyal a disciple as FrauenstSdt
could not stomach them, but Schopenhauer insisted on re-
taining and underscoring them in his works. One doubts
whether his own 'arrival' in the fifties gratified him any
more than the simultaneous collapse of Hegelianism.
Life bristled also with petty annoyances. One of them
cost him a pretty penny. In the private entry which he
shared with another lodger in Berlin he found one day three
strange women gossiping. He complained to his landlady
and was assured that the disturbance would not be repeated.
But it was, and as the landlady was absent at the time, he
himself asked the three women to leave. Two of them com-
plied,but the third, a seamstress, refused, whereupon Scho-
penhauer, coming out of his room a little later with his
walking-stick and finding her again in his entry, again asked
her to leave. Upon her second refusal, he shoved her out,
and when she once more returned, pushed her more violently
down the stairs. The result was a lawsuit for bodily injuries,
which passed through many courts; in the end Schopenhauer
was condemned to pay the sewing-woman fifteen thalers a
quarter as long as she lived. When she finally died he recorded
the event epigrammatically: Obit anus obit onus.
V
The cholera which swept off Hegel in 1831, frightened
Schopenhauer out of Berlin, and after some thought he settled
on Frankfurt as permanent residence, and there, with a brief
intermission in Mannheim, he spent the rest of his life.
Seventeen years of almost complete silence followed the
publication of his masterwork, but when The Will in Nature
appeared, in 1836, it stirred not a leaf in philosophical Ger-
many. The acceptance by Rosenkranz and Schubert of
Schopenhauer's insistent suggestion that the text of the

first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason be used in their
edition of Kant's Works was a flash of recognition of a man

whom everybody had apparently agreed to ignore. To be
sure, the Norwegian Royal Society of Sciences in Drontheim
crowned his prize-essay on the Freedom of the Will in 1839;
but the very next year the Danish Royal Academy rejected
his prize-essay on the Basis of Morality, although it was the
only one that had been submitted for the competition. The
Danish disapproval of his disrespectful treatment of the
Post-Kantian summi philosophi had been responsible for
their rejection of his work, and it roused his fury. He pub-
lished both essays together, marking them on the title pages
"
crowned" and "not crowned" respectively. But crown and
no crown were all one to the unresponsive public. For over
twenty years he had been assembling supplements to his
main work, manifold illustrations and elaborations as well
as further discussions of special topics. But Brockhaus re-
fused to undertake a second edition of The World as Will and
Idea with its Supplements, and only Schopenhauer's pathetic
insistence and his offer of his manuscript gratis finally in-
duced the publisher to risk the venture, in 1844, and thus
for the second time to lose his money.
Was it Charles Lamb who resolved, if his contemporaries
would have none of him, to write for antiquity? Thirty years
of unrecognition had not sapped Schopenhauer's own con-
fidence in the eternal truth of his philosophy, but they had
countersigned and sealed his disdain of the Zweifiisser, bipeds,
among whom he had to live his life. The image of the Sphinx
plunging into the abyss was to have been his signet; now he
chose for the top-cover of his snuff-box the picture of two
horse-chestnuts, to remind him of the deceptive values and
false appearances of existence. To apathy he replied with
disdainful assurance, proud and pathetic: "If at times I
have felt unhappy, that has been due, after all, only to a
blunder, to a personal confusion; I have mistaken myself
for someone else and complained of his woes: for instance, a
Privatdozcnt who has
not obtained his professorship and who
gets no students; or for one maligned by a certain Philistine
or gossiped about by a certain scandal-monger; or for the
defendant in a lawsuit for assault; or for a lover disdained
by his precious maiden; or for a patient kept at home by his
illness;or for such other persons afflicted with such miseries.

But myself have been none of all these; that was all alien
I
fabric of which, let us say, rny coat was made, which I wore
for a while and then discarded for another. Who am I, then?
The author of The World as Will and Idea, who has given the
solution of the great problem of existence, a solution which
perhaps displaces all previous ones, and which at any rate
will keep busy the thinkers of ages to come. I am that man,
and what can trouble him during the years that he still has
15
to breathe?"
"Where thy there will thy heart be also." In
treasure is,
judging Schopenhauer's personal pessimism, as in passing

judgment on his private life, we should not lose sight of the
passage just quoted. Nietzsche could ask ironically what
sort of a pessimist was this that played the flute; and Kuno
Fischer and others might doubt if Schopenhauer's pessimism
was really fast color, or even if it was genuine. 16 Here is a
man who has managed to retain his share of his patrimony
and has lived comfortably as a gentleman all his life. He has
watched the tragedy of World- Woe on the stage of life, more

rapt than anyone but seated all the same in a most com-
else,
fortable seat. Here a man who preaches asceticism to
is
others, but confesses with ready resignation that he is too

sensual to practice his own gospel. But does Schopenhauer's
own sensuality prove him insincere, and does his sturdy good
health and his outwardly comfortable life prove him merely
petulant in his pessimism? Surely Video meliora proboque,
deteriora sequor was written before his time; and surely it is
a plebeian's analysis and conclusion that a man cannot be a

genuine pessimist, and should not be one at all, if he dines
every night at the Englischer Hof. Back of all this discord
between Schopenhauer's philosophy and his personality,
there are, as Volkelt points out against Kuno Fischer, the
discords in Schopenhauer's personality itself. If we are so
well acquainted with these discords, and in general with the
dark sides of Schopenhauer's character, we owe it to Scho-
penhauer's own candor. No one is a hero to his valet, and
while in some respects Schopenhauer was always on parade,
he was "no hypocrite, but the sincerest character that ever
was." 17 Much of his cynical frankness regarding himself
reflects his contempt for the bipeds, Zweifiisser, on the same
principle that leads Dostoyevsky's character Prince Valkov-

sky, in The Insulted and Injured, to show his contempt for the
'
by reciting the most shameless stories in his presence.

hero'
There are unlovely, amusing, pathetic, revolting traits in
Schopenhauer's character. He was sensual; he was in many
ways shameless. Something of a coward he was, and afflicted
from his childhood with fright that bordered on mania. When
he was six years old, his parent^ returning from a walk found
him in perfect despair, imagining that they had abandoned
him. During his adolescence and while a student in Berlin
he worried over his imagined and unimagined diseases. In
1813 he feared conscription; the fear of the small-pox sent
him out of Naples, and the fear of the cholera led him to
move from Berlin to Frankfurt. In Verona he was obsessed

with the worry that he had taken poisoned snuff. Although
he found street-noises intolerable, and consequently reckoned
man's intelligence in inverse ratio to his capacity to endure
noise, his fear of a fire caused him always to live on the
ground floor. He was morbidly suspicious; a noise at night
would make him jump and reach for the sword and loaded
pistols that he always had by his bedside. Suspicion was
particularly strong where his chief treasures were concerned.
All his life he was afraid of plagiarists; he distrusted his
publishers, even Brockhaus; and, after the manuscript of his

Parerga had been repeatedly rejected by the publishers, and
Frauenstadt had finally found one willing to print it in Berlin,
Schopenhauer wrote his own arch-evangelist not to let any
man have a look at his essays, lest they steal his thoughts
18
before publication !
Even if his pride is to be counted a virtue, still how shall

we condone his consuming vanity and his importunate love
of flattery? When, after the publication of the Parerga und
Paralipomena, his philosophy began to bring him fame in

the fifties, he classified his main followers under the rubrics
of apostles and evangelists Adam von Doss was his Apostel
:
Johannes, Dorguth his Urevangelistj and Frauenstadt his

Erzevangelist. His disciples could not quench his thirst for
adulation; no worship was too excessive. The man who had
disdained the popular philosophers, and, in his utter obscur-
"
ity, had found comfort in the Arabian proverb, Among
quartzes, adamant is outlawed/' now devoured every line
written about himself. The first business of his evangelists
was to write about him; the second, to scour the journals
and newspapers for scraps of Schopenhaueriana. Send every-
thing that mentioned his name: he would pay the* postage!
There is really no quoting of samples here; a liturgy of self-
glorification is in his letters of the fifties until disgust mingles
with pity in the reading. Was there ever so great a man,
whose old age correspondence was as petty?
Behold all these things are fact, but what use is to be made
of them? Paint Schopenhauer as black as you please: sensual,
selfish, surly, sullen, stubborn, self-conceited: have you
disproved his pessimism, or only ballasted his text with

footnotes? Is the beggar insincere in his appreciation of
riches? No more is Schopenhauer in his gospel of world-
contempt and asceticism. But actually the case against
Schopenhauer is not as strong as it is sometimes made out
to be. Did he fight tooth and nail with Muhl for his patri-
mony? Did he worry lest his mother should try to deprive
him of part of his share? Did he keep his valuable papers
hidden in falsely labelled envelopes, to mislead possible
thieves? Schopenhauer's main defense may be gathered from
his dedication of the second edition of The World as Will
and Idea to the memory of his father. Convinced of his in-
ability to make a professional success and earn his own liveli-
hood, Schopenhauer regarded his economic independence as
an indispensable condition of his doing the work on which
his life had been staked. Therefore his veneration for his
father who had made him economically independent, there-
fore his constant readiness to battle for his funds with
anyone, therefore his almost morbid fears of thieves and
swindlers, which led him to suspect even the friend of his
childhood, Anthime Gregoire. Vain he was all his life, defi-
antly vain throughout the long years of his obscurity, gloat-

ingly vain and arrogant when fame at last arrived, and, as he
put the Nile reached Cairo. But if his old-age letters are so
it,
petty and pitifully naive in their insatiate eagerness for praise,

they admit perhaps of another interpretation. Schopenhauer
had served his long sentence of apathy; when at last the doors
of his cell of unrecognition crashed through and the light of
sunshine gleamed on his white head, the man who had defi-
antly written in his obscurity, "I am the author of The

World as Will and Idea!" displayed no false modesty in his
hour of fame. His masterpiece was his own child; we can
charge his vanity to paternal pride. Besides, Maria Groener
urges, was he so conceited after all, considering who he was?
Did not Goethe write: "Only ragamuffins are humble!" 19
Hard-hearted he was, but simple kindliness was not alto-
gether extinct in him. Of decided interest is the story of his
devotion to his dog At ma, and particularly the intimate
account of his daily life as observed by Lucia Franz, in whose
father's apartment Schopenhauer lived as a lodger for over
a year, until his death in 1860. We have had the Schopen-
hauer portrayed in his books, in his letters, in the memoirs of
disciples and of enemies. Here are a child's memories, and
they reveal humanity and kindliness, and softer, more
generous traits of character which had quite escaped the
mature associates and observers of the great pessimist.
So his life's story reads itself out. There is bitter irony in
his choice of a snuff-box cover with horse-chestnuts painted
on it. There is tragedy in his wistful outcry as he gazes on
the picture of the saintly Trappist, Abbe Ranc6. There is
pathos in his words to his biographer G winner: "So life has
strewn roses in my path too: to be sure only white roses." 20
The philosopher of pessimism was no hero, no saint, but his
devotion to his philosophy reveals both heroism and saintli-
ness. No one can question his right to inscribe on the title-
page of his Parerga Juvenal's line: Vitam impendere vero. To

stake one's life for the truth: it was the living motto of his
life.
CHAPTER XI
GROUNDS AND LIMITS OF SCHOPENHAUER'S
PESSIMISM
I
Schopenhauer compared his philosophy to Thebes with

its hundred gates. Kuno Fischer sees only four gates: Kant,
Plato, the Vedas, Buddha.

1
The main door is the Kantian;
it is as the one and true heir to Kant's crown that Schopen-
hauer ever proclaims himself, in opposition to the other post-

Kantians. To Rosenkranz he writes: "I have taken only
one step beyond Kant, but not up in the air, as all the acro-
bats of my time, but on firm and solid ground." 2 His own
chief claim as a technical philosopher was that he had solved
Kant's problem of the thing-in-itself.
Schopenhauer's theory of knowledge accentuates Kant's
phenomenalism. The world of our knowledge is a world in
which the mind is at home, a world organized by the mind.
No object without a subject; no subject without an object;
the world is my idea. The naive realist imagines that he sees,
hears, smells, tastes, touches real, entirely extra-mental
things, that he knows a world which exists as he knows it
independently of his knowing it. Kant, admitting that
things-in-themselves are, declares that we can never know

what they are. All that we can know is experience in terms of
space, time, causality.
This philosophy is in diametrical opposition to all
idealistic
substantialist metaphysics, materialistic or spiritualistic.
'
Soul-substance/ to Kant, is hollow sound without meaning;
and we can rightly regard Kant also as the true and final
282
SCHOPENHAUER'S PESSIMISM 283
destroyer of materialistic dogmatism. Materialism, Schopen-

hauer says, is a persistent attempt to set up a system of
physics without metaphysics, to make the phenomenon the
thing-in-itself. But "nothing can be more clumsy than that,
after the manner of all materialists, one should blindly take
the objective as simply given in order to derive everything
from it without paying any regard to the subjective, through
3
which, however, nay, in which alone the former exists."
Man is the metaphysical animal. Physics is not metaphysics
"
any more than indefinitely extended breadth is depth. Those
persons who believe that crucibles and retorts are the true
and only source of all wisdom are in their own way just as
4
perverse as were formerly their antipodes the Scholastics."
To be sure those who peel the husks of nature may imagine
they are dissecting its kernel; all of them ostensibly suitors
of Penelope, they yet sleep contentedly in the house of
Odysseus, each by the side of his chosen maid-servant,
banishing all thought of the sovereign mistress.
This express repudiation of materialism and its votaries

should be kept in mind; it is in agreement with Schopen-
hauer's theory of experience and with his Kantian inheritance.
Notwithstanding a misleading materialistic bias which is
manifest in Schopenhauer's metaphysical account of the
intellect, it is clear that with historical materialism, and
especially with the materialism of his own time, Schopen-
hauer would have no part and lot. The references to Biichner
in his correspondence should leave little doubt as to his own
attitude towards materialism, which he repeatedly called a
philosophy for barbers' and apothecaries' apprentices. When
he quotes Cabanis, when he treats the intellect as a mere
cerebral phenomenon, he is not to be confused with the
materialist,any more than when he calls the brain parasitic,
a pensioner of the body and its highest efflorescence. The
difference between Schopenhauer and the materialist is
radical: the latter would derive thought from matter, the
immediately given from the mediately given, all the while
forgetting that the matter of which he discourses is always
necessarily object of a subject. But when Schopenhauer treats
thought as a phenomenon of the brain, thought and brain,
mind and body (themselves always correlative) must both
be to him instruments and objectifications of the reality,
which is the ultimate ground of them both and which tran-
scends both subject and object.
We have now reached the point from which Schopenhauer
would step beyond Kant. The thing-in-itself is neither
matter nor mind, it is will. The world in its ultimate reality
is not a system of intelligence nor a mechanical order of
things; its inmost nature is best described by the analogy
of our craving, driving, seeking character. Just as Hegel,
conceiving of reality as the progressive self-organization of
differences,and finding in the thought-process the most
adequate and characteristic expression of this essential
nature of all reality, chose " Thought" as his magic word, so
Schopenhauer's radically different metaphysics leads him to
call the ultimate reality "Will." That which sends the
falling
stone to the earth, the iron filings to the magnet, the sun-
flower towards the sun, the moth to the lighted candle is
the same, and the same as that which sends the lover to the
arms of his beloved. But this is nowise equivalent to "the
insane opinion that the stone moves itself in accordance with
a known motive, merely because this is the way in which
6
will appears in man."
Will is that which is most immediate in consciousness, and
prior to the subject-object dualism; and like a magic spell,
it unlocks to us the inmost being of all nature. It germinates
in the plant; through it the crystal is formed and the magnetic
needle turns to the North; it is manifest in chemical affinities,
in repulsion and attraction, decomposition and combination,
cohesion, gravitation. All these are different only in their
phenomenal existence, but in their inner nature are identical.

Organic or inorganic, conscious or unconscious, as the case
may be, the will ever presses for its fulfilment, meeting im-
pact with resistance, adapting means to end, responding to
stimuli, seeking the gratification of instincts, acting on mo-
tives, on purpose, loving, hating, hoping, fearing, scorning,
envying, enthusing, aspiring. Here is a teleology prior to
and more ultimate than intelligence. "The bird builds the
nest for the young which it does not yet know; the beaver
constructs a dam the object of which is unknown to it; ants,
marmots, and bees lay in provision for the winter they have
never experienced; the spider and the ant-lion make snares,
as if with deliberate cunning, for future unknown prey;
insects deposit their eggs where the coming brood finds
future nourishment. The larva of ..the male stag-beetle
. . .
. . . makes the hole in the wood for its metamorphosis as

big again as the female does, in order to have room for its
"
future horns. 6
Gills, claws, teeth, fins, wings are all instruments of the
will:the water pouch in the stomach of the camel, the sail
of the nautilus, the eagle's far-seeing eye, the dog's keen
nose. And likewise an instrument of the will is man's think-
ing power. Phenomenally, in terms of the subject-object

dualism, the mind is the not-body; ultimately body and
mind are objectifications and tools of the will-reality, elabo-
rate means to attain its ends. What the snake does with its
venom, the bird or the insect with its color mimicry, that man
accomplishes with his deliberately thought-out method of
attack and defense.
II
Ubiquitous and ever-active is the will and it ever fails of

final attainment. Eternal becoming and endless flux char-
acterize its inmost nature; every attainment is only the be-
ginning of a new pursuit. And right here is the seed sown of

Schopenhauer's pessimism. For in man will is manifest as
desire, and desire essentially insatiate. Will is want: its
basis is need, deficiency; we want what we want, what we

lack, and this consciousness of our lack is the kernel of suffer-
"
ing. "Pain." Schopenhauer wrote in 1817, arises not from
not-having, but from the desire to have, and yet not hav-
7
ing." This desire for what we lack, unsatisfied, is pain; the
desire satisfied is pleasure,which quickly passes into another
painful state of further desire, or else into a more general
sense of desires gratified, which is tedium.
We can clearly see, then, that from Schopenhauer's point
of view pleasure is the exception, pain the rule in human life.
Pain is the fundamental, positive, and primary; pleasure is
negative and secondary, the temporary alleviation of pain.
"I know accordingly no greater absurdity than that of most
metaphysical systems which explain evil as something nega-
tive, while it is exactly the positive which is making itself
felt/ 8 Ribot 9 observes that here also Schopenhauer has
7
learned from Kant, except that what Kant mentions only

has developed into an important doc-
in passing his disciple
trine. Will is effort, is desire, is painful. "The desire lasts
long, the demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and

10
scantily measured out"; it is like the crust thrown to the
beggar, that he may be hungry tomorrow also. In the plants

there is no sensibility and no pain, but from the lowest animal
life clear up the scale, as consciousness ascends, pain also
increases: "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."
Not only pleasure secondary and negative, impermanent:
is
it isonly a brief transition. Either the will reasserts itself

in a new desire and a new pain, or life lapses into the dull
sense of desires gratified, for desires that have been gratified
are dust to him who can think of nothing further to spur him
on. Life presents a more or less violent oscillation between

pain and boredom. While the poor are ever battling with
need, with pain, the rich are desperately at war with ennui.
The illusory hope of real satisfaction sends rich and poor on
the road, and the tramp meets the tourist. But on the road
of craving desire no final satisfaction and no peace is to be
found. "It is essentially all the same whether we pursue or
[lee, fear injury or seek enjoyment; the care for the constant
demands of the will, in whatever form it may be, continually
occupies and sways the consciousness; but without peace no
true well-being is possible. The subject of willing is thus
constantly stretched on the revolving wheel of Ixion, pours
water into the sieve of the Danaids, is the ever-longing
Tantalus." u
Even if the pleasures of life were real and permanent, even
if life yielded a balance of pleasure over pain, still life would

fall short of justification, for the evil remains: my
present
well-being cannot undo my
past suffering or the present and
past suffering of others. -As Petrarch says:
A thousand joys don't make up for one torment. 12
One beggar, one sick man, one corpse were enough for Gau-
tama. But worse still: pleasure is mere froth and vapor, like
the wine provided by Mephistopheles in Auerbach's cellar,
"
after every sensuous pleasure we also say:
And yet methought I were drinking wine." 13
Life a lie and it is a wicked lie. Man is a creature of

is
desire, and thus normally selfish. Egoism is limitless; man is

bent on attaining the utmost of pleasure; whatever is in his
way rouses his hate and his ruthless opposition. Were each
person to choose between his own destruction and that of
all other men, who can doubt what the decision would be in
most cases? Each man regards himself as the center of the

world: "No sharper contrast can be imagined than that be-
tween the profound and exclusive attention which every
person devotes to his own self, and the indifference with
which, as a rule, all other people regard that self, an in-
difference precisely like that with which he in turn looks
14
upon them."
Politeness is but a screen, which men have adopted for
hiding the shameful sight of their real motives. But the least
pressure pushes the screen aside and reveals our naked
selfishness. Well might we pray, "lead us not into tempta-
tion: let us not see of persons we are."
what manner A 15
code of politeness not enough; a corps of policemen is

is
required to keep the peace. "The thousands that throng

before our eyes, in peaceful intercourse each with the other,
can only be regarded as so many tigers and wolves, whose
teeth are secured by a strong muzzle."
16
Homo homini
lupus. ',
With Hobbes, Schopenhauer describes life as a war of each
against all. Strife only reveals that variance with itself which
is essential to the will. "The will to live everywhere preys
upon itself, and in different forms is its own nourishment, till
finally the human race, because it subdues all the others,

17
regards nature as a manufactory for its use." Crystals in
process of formation meet, cross, and disarrange each other.
The young hydra, while still joined onto the old, fights with
it for food. Cut the Australian bull-dog ant in two head
and tail rush into battle. In Java Junghuhn saw a plain as
far as the eye could reach all covered with skeletons of large
turtles, five feet long. On coming out of the sea to lay their
eggs, they are attacked by wild dogs, which, by their united
strength, turn over the turtles, strip off the small shell of
their stomachs, and devour them
alive. But often then a
tigerpounces upon the dogs.
18
From this field of bones, turn
to hundreds of other fields where some arch-fiend in the
form of a conqueror has put hundreds of thousands of men
"
opposite each other and said to them: Shoot each other with
guns and cannon !"
19
And
they have done so. History is
the recital of wars, the peaceful years are but pauses between
the cat-fights.
Normal and is selfishness, but the wickedness, the
universal
suffering may reach staggering extremes. The egoist seeks
his own advantage and is ever ready to strike down all who
oppose him; but cruel spitefulness leads men to strike down

others for the pure joy of seeing others suffer. Caligula
wished the whole world had but one single neck, so that he
could sever it all at one blow. From these two sources spring
the vices of men, the bestial vices of eggism: greed, gluttony,
lust, selfishness, avarice, covetousness, injustice, hardness of
heart, pride, arrogance, etc. the devilish vices of spitefulness:

;
disaffection, envy, ill-will, malice, pleasure in seeing others

suffer, prying curiosity, slander, insolence, petulance, hatred,
anger, treachery, fraud, thirst for revenge, cruelty. "It is

an array," Schopenhauer comments, "reminding one of the
20
Princes of Darkness in Milton's Pandemonium." Life's
everyday sordidness and misery may not impress the callous

spectator, "but one only needs to bring before his eyes the
horrible suffering and misery in which even his own life is
so clearly established, and the horror of it must certainly
grip him: then indeed lead him through the infirmaries,
military hospitals, and surgical chambers of torture, on
through the prisons, through the Leads of Venice, the slave
markets of Algiers, the torture chambers of the Inquisition,
over the battlefields and through the judgment halls, unlock
forhim all the dark dwellings of misery where it creeps away
from the gaze of cold curiosity, and finallyfrom Dante read
tohim the death of Ugolino and his children from starvation
in the tower and point out that this has really happened
more than once," 21 and then this world will disclose itself to
him for what it really is the scene of tormented and agonized
beings who exist by devouring each other, each ravenous
beast the living grave of others. Where did Dante learn about
his Inferno? Optimism, theodicies, and all prattle about this
best of all possible worlds are idle, and they are wicked,
cruel sneers at the endless and unspeakable miseries of man.
This is human a hospital for incurables. If there be
life:
"
any purpose in seems
life, it to be suffering. Work, torture,
trouble, and need is certainly the lifelong lot of almost all
men." 22 |Men are like lambs gamboling in the meadow the
while the butcher picks them over one by one.' Life is as
wretched as it is vile. Here is the blind mole, unweariedly
digging with its shovel claws from birth to death: to what
purpose? To eat enough to engender another blind digger.
And here is a cotton spinner: a child of five he entered the
factory and there has spent his life, performing the same
mechanical labor, ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, year in,
year out: to what end is the satisfaction of drawing breath
thus dearly purchased? Life is a wretched jest, as Voltaire
called it, and wisdom, ancient and modern, has agreed with
him. From Homer and Sophocles and Euripides to Shake-
speare and Byron and Leopardi we hear the same sad re-
frain, and the old words of the Sage Bias still hold true:
"Most men are bad." In all Homer Schopenhauer does not
find one truly magnanimous character, although many are
good and honest; and "in the whole of Shakespeare there
may be perhaps a couple of noble, though by no means
23
transcendently noble, characters to be found." Abject
selfishness,boundless avarice, well-concealed knavery, and
also poisonous envy and fiendish delight in the misfortunes of
24
others are so universally prevalent that the slightest excep-
tion surprises us. But the optimist bids us: open your eyes
and look at the world, how beautiful it is in the sunshine,
with its mountains and valleys, streams, plants, animals,
25
and so forth. "Is this world, then, a raree show?" Scho-
"
penhauer exclaims. The world is glorious to look at, but
" 26
dreadful in reality. Instead of inventing a hell in after-
life, look about you: all the materials for hell are close at
hand.
Past, present, and future are all one, progress is vain
tedium. Life, essentially tragic, a sorry
is in its details
monotonous comedy: as in the dramas of Qozzi, the motives
and incidents in each play are different, but the spirit is
ever the same, and ever the same are the characters. "Pan-
taloon has become no more agile or generous, Tartaglia
no more conscientious, Brighella no more courageous, and
Columbine no more modest." ^ Life does not have evils, it is
evil; as Calderon says:
The greatest of man's sins

Is that he was ever born. 28
Life a bankrupt, a business that does not pay expenses;

is
the will is an effort which frustrates itself. The less of life, the
better; its brevity is its only virtue. This is the wisdom of

Hamlet's soliloquy: "Our state is so wretched that absolute
annihilation would be decidedly preferable." 29 This, too,
is Othello's judgment of life in his words to lago:
Fid have thee live;

For, in my sense, 'tis happiness to die.
So also Palmira to Mohammed in Voltaire's tragedy:
The world is made for tyrants; live and reign!

30
From all this torture is there no relief? Out of this dark

cavern of illusion shines there no beacon light of enlighten-
ment? From the craving weariness and the thirsty evil of
life is there really no peace? We have heard the pessimistic
verdict on life, wholesale and in detail: what is Schopen-
hauer's gospel of salvation?
III
Like Ulysses who in all his many trials never wept, but
burst into tears on hearing his early heroic exploits sung in
the palace of the Phaeacian king; or like that English client
in court who wept as his case was set forth by his counsel
and declared: "I never knew I had suffered half so much till
7 31
I heard it here today/ so the reader is apt to turn away
from Schopenhauer's portrayal of life with Hamlet's words

on his lips:
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fixt
His canon 'gainst self -slaughter! O God! God!

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fieon't! Oh fie! . . .
But suicide is not the way out, for the ground of all woe
isthe insatiate will-to-live, self-asserting desire. This desire
the man who takes his own life does not deny or destroy.
He of it precisely the vehemence with which he wills
is full ;
life rebels against suffering brings him to the point of

and
destroying himself. "Just because the suicide cannot give
" 32
up willing, he gives up living But here is no salvation,
for suicide registers the victory, not the defeat, of the
tyrant will; the deliverance is altogether illusory, the will
remains; only one of its individual manifestations has been
destroyed. Deeper than individual life and death are the
sources of woe in this world, and deeper and more radical
the path of salvation. Not life is to be denied, but the will
that is manifest in life, not the sufferings of existence, which
the slave of desire finds intolerable, but its illusory joys are
to be perceived and scorned and denied. In the midst of
life, the desires of life and the will to live are to be curbed.
Not death, cessation of life, but desireless peace, cessation
of craving, is the blessed goal.
Here intelligence may come to our aid. Normally the in-

tellect is a creature and tool of the will. In fact it is by virtue
of his reason that man is the wicked animal: the brute's snarl
isthe response to an actual irritant, but man in revenge will
harbor the evil resolve long after the original stirring of his
wrath, will harbor it and with cold disdain will withstand
the advances of tenderer emotions. So Mephistopheles speaks
of man to whom the spark of divine light has been vouchsafed :
He calls it reason, its use makes him free

Far beastlier than any beast to be. 33
Like a strong blind man, carrying on his shoulders the lame

man who can see, even so are will and intellect. But in
exceptional instances the intellect may gain so clear and so
profound an insight into the nature of things that it may
gain temporary, habitual, permanent emancipation from
the craving will. The man who can see may check for a
moment the strong blind man's headlong rush, may turn his
course round about, may stop it altogether.
The first way out of the bondage of desire is in artistic
contemplation. Raised by the power of the mind, a man may

relinquish the common way of looking at things as related
to each other and to his own will and advantage; he may so
lose himself in the object as to lose sight for the moment of
his own individuality and will; his mind as a clear mirror
of the object may become one with it. "Then that which
is so known is no longer the particular thing as such; but it is
the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate objectivity of the
will at this grade; and, therefore, he who is sunk in this per-
ception is no longer individual, for in such perception the in-

dividual has lost himself; but he is pure, will-less, painless,
34
timeless, subject of knowledge." This is desireless contem-
plation, the aesthetic experience, the perception of the Pla-

tonic Ideas. Like the silent sunbeam that pierces through
the rushing, Aimless storm of craving passion is the steady
glance of genius; the desire and the pursuit of particular
things is like the rushing waterfall with its innumerable
showering drops: the perception of art is like the rainbow
gently resting on this raging torrent.
The intellect thus perceives clearly the world of will, it-
self being free for the moment from the miserable aims of
self. The lofty dome embodies before his eyes the conflict
between gravity and rigidity, burden and support: this is
the essence of architecture. The beauty and grace of animal
and human form is revealed in sculpture. In painting the
rush and complexity of life is caught in a single moment of
time, and the spirit that has stifled self-will and passion
breathes, calm and gentle, from the picture of the saint.
Poetry reveals the essential life and character of man, in all
his efforts and actions. It utters itself directly in the lyric;
but the most profound insight of the poet discloses the un-
speakable wail and woe of human life, its essential infelicity,
the strife of will with itself, the triumph of evil, the scornful
mastery of chance. This is Tragedy, the summit of poetic
art, and through the contemplation of it all the deeper in-
sight is attained not that there are evils in life, but that life
:
is an evil thing that had better not be. Tragedy thus prepares
the way for that curbing and quieting of the will-to-live which
leads to the ultimate release.
But highest of all the arts is music, which expresses, not
the manifestations of the will, but the will itself, its secret
history and "all its emotions and strivings, with their mani-
fold protractions, hindrances, and griefs." 35 The disquietudes
of the heart, its desires and aversions, and its various degrees
of relief are uttered in the alternate play of disquieting
chords that rouse longing, and the more or less quieting and
satisfying chords. Thus the major and the minor keys un-
lock to us the two basic moods of the soul, serenity, or at
least healthiness, and sadness or depression.
This is the liberating work of art: when thus lifted out of

the endless stream of willing, the mind observes things
"
without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely
objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are
ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all at once
the peace which we were always seeking, but which always
fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us
of its own accord, and it is well with us. It is the painless
state which Epicurus prized as the highest good and as the
state of the gods; for we are for the moment set free from
the miserable striving of the will; we keep the Sabbath of
the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands
36
still."
Alas for the impermanence of this salvation! "So near us

always lies a sphere in which we escape from all our misery;
but who has the strength to continue long in it? As soon as
any single relation to our will, to our person, even of these
objects of our pure contemplation, comes again into con-
37
sciousness, the magic is at an end. ." It is not enough
. .
to contemplate the inner nature of the will and woe: the

momentary escape and from life is not enough; radical
relief
and permanent relief is needed. So art is to the man of in-
sight, not a path out of life, but only an occasional consola-
tion, "till his power, increased by this contemplation and at
last tired of the play, lays hold on the real. The St. Cecilia of
Raphael may be regarded as a representation of this tran-

sition." 38 It is the transition from art to morality and to
asceticism, from beauty to virtue and to holiness.
IV
Schopenhauer found in Buddhism the religious version of
his philosophy; and in no other respect is his reliance on
Buddhism so thorough as in his moral gospel of deliverance
from self. The self-centered life is illusory and wicked:
ignorance and misery spring from the same source. The
Buddha who preached peace through enlightenment, the
saint who has banished the lure of self, has pricked the bubble
of individuality; his life is a life of love because his mind has
been emancipated from the illusions that breed selfishness.
This in brief is also Schopenhauer's theory of morals. The
only real mark of acts truly moral is the absence of selfish
motive; such deeds are actuated by interest in one's fellow
beings, by pity for the suffering, sympathy with the cast
down, justice and loving-kindness towards all. If the weal
and woe of others affect my entire being so as to dominate
my volition and motivate rny deeds, then it is that compas-
sion (Mitleid) enters, "the direct participation, independent
of all ulterior considerations, in the sufferings of another,
leading to sympathetic assistance in the effort to prevent or
remove them.'
7
The compassionate man is just, he does
39
not shift onto the shoulders of others the burdens which

life brings to us all; but loving-kindness moves him rather
to relieve the heavy-laden and lighten their load.

The egoist, the malicious man, looks at all the world from
the point of view of his own self-centered individuality.
An impassable gulf separates him from his neighbor. But
the compassionate man has more or less completely effaced
the distinction between his own interests and those of others;
beneath the multiplicity of this our world of shadow-shape
existence he has perceived the more profound and ultimate
"
reality. No suffering is any longer strange to him. ... It
is no longer the changing joy and sorrow of his own person
that he has in view, as is the case with him who is still in-
volved in egoism. He knows the whole, comprehends
. . .
its nature, and it consists in a constant passing

finds that
away, vain striving, inward conflict, and continual suffering.

. .
.
Why should he now, with such knowledge of the world,
assert this very life through constant acts of will, and thereby
bind himself ever more closely to it, press it ever more firmly
to himself? The will now turns away from life; it now
. . .
shudders at the pleasures in which it recognizes the asser-

tion of life. Man now attains to the state of voluntary re-
nunciation, resignation, true indifference, and perfect will-

40
lessness."
"To be just, noble, and benevolent is nothing else than to
41
translate my
metaphysics into action." This is the ancient
wisdom of the Upanishads: Tat twam asi, This thou art,
and compassion is really the practical expression of an in-
'
sight which passes understanding: Every purely benevolent

act, all help entirely and genuinely unselfish, being, as such,
exclusively inspired by another's distress, is, in fact, if we

probe the matter to the bottom, a dark enigma, a piece of
mysticism put into practice; inasmuch as it springs out of,
and finds its only true explanation in, the same higher knowl-
42
edge that constitutes the essence of whatever is mystical."
Most rare and astounding is compassionate conduct, and
profound are the experiences that may occasion it. Arnold
von Winkelried, to open a way for his comrades, clasps in
his arms as many hostile spears as he can grasp and rushes
forward to his own death. Raymond Lully is admitted at
last to the chamber of the fair lady he has long wooed, when
she, opening her bodice, shows him her bosom frightfully
eaten with cancer. From that moment, as if he had looked
into hell, the passionate man goes to the desert to do penance.
Suffering itself has sanctifying power; pain is the lye that
purifies life. One path
to salvation proceeds from perception
and knowledge of the misery of life; a second path proceeds
from great suffering itself.
"My whole philosophy," young Schopenhauer wrote, in
"
1817, reduces itself to this: The world is the self-knowledge
43
of the Will." The keystone of all is resignation and denial
of the will. Ethics and metaphysics are here one in a way
radically different from Plato's. The denial of the will is the
practical expression of the insight into the heart of reality
which is ultimate philosophical wisdom. This is wisdom:
to perceive the nothingness of value in the universe; for this
is indeed the value of life, that it teaches us not to wish for it.
Ifwe thus realize the metaphysical significance of com-

passion, we see that it leads beyond itself to something more
thorough and final. Relieving the distress of life leads the
moral saint to the resolve to relieve and be relieved of the
essential distress, life itself. Thus compassion leads to as-
ceticism. Just as the sexual passion is the supreme affirma-
tion of the will-to-live, so voluntary chastity is its supreme
renunciation. The man in the grip of sexual passion imagines
that he is seeking his own highest fulfilment and gratification,
and all the while he is but a tool of the will, fulfilling its end,
the perpetuation of the species, the continuance of the

wretched tragi-comedy of life. The ascetic has perceived the
wretchedness of the tragi-comedy: he will not play any more,
the willitself he has curbed within him, and its empire over
him is at an end.
To such a profound insight into life, and to such heroic re-
solve, individual life or death are as indifferent as is life in
general. Death is but the final payment of that debt which
was contracted at conception and birth; and to each man
death is a great reprimand you have ever sought your own
:
pleasure and advantage, but see, you are nothing lasting,

you are nothing. From all the lusts of life the ascetic is free,
a contemptus mundi, a supreme blessed indifference exalts him.
"
Every thing is alike to me/' Madame Guion writes, "I can-
not will anything more: often I know not whether I exist
or not." 44 A sublime melancholy is the ascetic's, which is
also a joy ineffable, far more profound than any condition
of desire. The man who has divorced life itself and espoused
chastity, scorns his own meat and drink. His appetites are
all renounced and death to him brings no reprimand: he does

not struggle to avert it, nor does he violently seek it: volun-
tary starvation seals the denial which his every thought and
act have signalized.
Before us is the thoroughgoing denial of all that is: "That
constant strain and effort without end and without rest at
all the grades of objectivity, in which and through which the
world consists; the multifarious forms succeeding each other

in gradation; the whole manifestation of the will; and,
finally, also the universal forms of this manifestation, time

and space, and also its last fundamental form, subject and
object; all are abolished. No will: no idea, no world/' 4&
Schopenhauer's answer is famous: "That we abhor an-
nihilation so greatly, is simply another expression of the fact
that we so strenuously will life, and are nothing but this
will, and know nothing besides it. ... What remains after
the entire abolition of the will is for all those who are still
full of will certainlynothing; but, conversely, to those in

whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our
world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways is
46
nothing."
"If we admit that all is will, that all will is effort, that
effort attains its aim only in exceptional cases, and that all
frustrated effort is pain, that life, that is to say pain, does

not end with death; ft is only one possible
follows that there
remedy, to suppress pain by suppressing life, by suppressing
the will. And as the body is the will made visible, to deny
the body through asceticism to deny the will. Just as pro-
is
creation perpetuates life and woe, so the suppression of it

in chastity is a suppression of the species. Consequently
the ideal which Schopenhauer proposed to mankind is a
suicide en masse by metaphysical means. In logic," Ribot
concludes his summary, "all this is very well. In reality it is
" 47
another matter. It is the logic of the theory which we
should first its well-being is only on the surface.
diagnose, for
Our question may
first be stated bluntly: how can the will
deny itself? Or it can be expressed more systematically,
with reference to Schopenhauer's philosophy: in a system of
thoroughgoing pessimism what room is there for a doctrine
of salvation? Or yet conversely: is a world which admits of
salvation, even though it be through utter resignation, a
world of wholly negative value?
Already in the forties Schopenhauer's earliest followers,
Becker, Frauenstadt were worrying over the difficulty of
reconciling the denial of the will with the universal necessity
of motivation. If character is unchangeable, how is the con-
version to saintliness possible? If all that takes place is
determined ultimately by the will-to-live, then how can nega-

tion of the will take place? If the will-to-live is universally
dominant, how is the ascetic's choice of voluntary chastity
to be explained? If the intellect is but the tool of the will,
like claw or beak or venom, how can the saint, at the apex
of intelligence, deny the will altogether? Should we not
perhaps postulate, in opposition to the self-assertive will
and its subservient intellect, a higher will-denying intelligence
and also a higher Will? Schopenhauer does not minimize

the difficulty, but he does not meet it. He relies here on
Kant's doctrine of the empirical and the intelligible character:
the former is, of course, always necessarily determined,
Schopenhauer would say, by the self-assertive will-to-live.
"But the entire will-act, which is the intelligible character,
as it in itself and atemporally wills, may just as well not will,
instead of a Velle, it may just as well be a Nolle" 48 But is
there no gradual attainment of saintly insight, a gradual
approach to complete negation of the will? Schopenhauer
replies: This growing insight prepares, but does not bring
about gradually the will-denial. Only when intelligence has

reached its apex of exaltation, its boiling point, does this
entirely new phenomenon, the denial of the will, take place.
A wanderer pursues his course, lantern in hand. Suddenly he
sees that he is at the brink of an abyss, and turns about.
The wanderer is the will, the lantern is the intellect. The
wanderer does not turn a little to the right or to the left; he
turns completely about, he abandons his former course alto-
gether. The conversion is radical, and it is sudden, not grad-
ual. The empirical, will-determined character has not been
mended, but ended and given up altogether. There is mystery

in this deliverance from the will: repeatedly Schopenhauer
"
quotes the words of Malebranche: Liberty is a mystery."
The peace of God passeth all understanding. 49 This re-
creation of man is what the Church calls a work of grace:
we must be born anew. The natural man, the assertion of
the will-to-live, is symbolized in Adam, but grace, the denial
of the will, salvation, is in Christ, who is God incarnate.
"Certainly the doctrine of original sin (assertion of the will)
and of salvation (denial of the will) is the great truth which
constitutes the essence of Christianity, while most of what
remains is only the clothing of it, the husk or accessories." 60
Jesus Christ is thus to Schopenhauer the symbol or person-
ification of the negation of the will-to-live.
But the Christian mystery is not to be compared to Scho-
penhauer's. The enigma of evil in Christianity concerns
creation, finite existence: in a universe grounded in Perfect
Goodness how can evil be permanent, and why should it
be at all? Dismal as is its view of the phenomenal world
(original sin), Christianity is essentially and ultimately
optimistic. Perfect in wisdom and goodness and power is
its ultimate reality, God, perfect and prevailing. But Scho-
penhauer's mystery, as we have seen, is a mystery of good,

and its solution demands a thoroughgoing revision of his
metaphysics and cosmology. Deeper and more ultimate
than Schopenhauer's pessimism is his doctrine of salvation,
deeper and more ultimate, and far more enlightening. The
metaphysical significance of compassion and asceticism is
more profound than Schopenhauer allowed: it reveals to us

the more ultimate nature of the will-reality. "So then,
behind the raw, unmoral will," we read in Volkelt, "a deeper
will-kernel is hid; the morally significant will. . . . Now . . .
we can perceive this will-to-live, which was proclaimed as

the deepest and ultimate reality, that it is a shell, behind
which lurks the Will as a morally momentous power." 51
We are now on the way to perceive new meaning in the very
contradictions of Schopenhauer's philosophy. The confusion
in Schopenhauer's use of intelligence and will has been pointed
out often enough. The will is blind, blundering, aimless,
but it has manifested itself in and has for its tool
irrational,
purposive intelligence. But we should not be misled into
mistaking confusion for final contradiction. Schopenhauer's
philosophy is in many ways a drama of reality. Confused and
discordant appear its characters at the outset; more and
more fully are they revealed to us as we move to the climax.
The four parts of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea
are four acts of a drama their order and sequence are not
accidental and indifferent, nor are we moving on a plane.
There is increasing depth and height, penetration and exalta-
tion of insight as we proceed. Not only the audience or
readers, the dramatist himself may learn about his characters,
and it is poor criticism to abuse an author because his char-
acters go their own way anddo not follow his own projected
course for them. Tolstoy's men and women do not always
conform to his texts and sermons; they have characters of
their own, and Anna Karenina is not the less great as a novel
because Tolstoy finds Levin too real to manage. Enough
if both author and reader, both dramatist and audience have
been led to perceive new abysses in the human soul and in
reality. All the greater is the novel or the drama because it
has thus deepened our insight. Abstract consistency is not

the sovereign virtue either in literature or in philosophy.
Point out the discrepancy, the shift of viewpoints in the
successive stages of Schopenhauer's philosophy, to be sure;
but it were mere pedantry to rest satisfied with such criticism.
Consider the world of experience: is it not a phenomenal
system of events in space and time, causally related and
always involved in the subject-object dualism? But look
more deeply: behind the phenomenal scheme, back of this
Maya veil of experience is the blind, blundering, aimless Will;
the rational shell holds an irrational kernel; intelligence
is at the beck of desire the will-driven soul is a slave of in-
;
and wicked. This pessimistic meta-

satiate craving, miserable
physics not merely a substitute for the preceding idealistic

is
theory of knowledge, not merely inconsistent with it: we

witness here a grim expansion of thought, the dark recogni-
tion of the limitations of the phenomenal, the sense of un-
sounded, dismal depths, and profound despair. are We
plunged in what seems impenetrable, whirling chaos that
sweeps us resistlessly about, and there seems no way out of
the whirlpool and no beacon-light ahead. But a beacon-
light does appear, and a way out, not to firm ground that eye
can see or hand or foot can touch, but surely out of the whirl-
pool of will-driven desire. There is momentary respite in
art, there is the lasting quietism of compassion and chastity,
and Nirvana. For one to whom the whirlpool has been all-
in-all, the out-of-it, to be sure, without content,
is bodiless,
nothing. When
Schopenhauer says "we
freely acknowledge
that what remains after the entire abolition of the will is for
all those who are of will certainly nothing," B2 he is
still full
unconsciously criticising the finality of his own pessimism.

For, these are the concluding words of The World as Will and
" whom
Idea conversely, to those in the will has turned
and has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with
77
all its suns and milky-ways is nothing. And nothing,
narrow and inadequate, is likewise the view of things as
essentially and hopelessly will-driven and irrational. Not
only the will at peace in the sublime moment of aesthetic
is
contemplation, not only the will is curbed and negated by

the moral saint the pessimism of Schopenhauer is thereby also
:
curbed and negated. The world is not so worthless if it includes

souls that are pessimistic about it, that condemn it, and that
seek and find a way out, be this way the way to apparent
nothingness. Condemnation is not only the reverse of esteem:
it is also its obverse. Even on Schopenhauer's premises a
world which includes a Buddha, a Theoloyia Germanica, a
Schopenhauer is not a world that warrants absolute pessi-
mism. Thus Schopenhauer's aesthetics and ethics, running
counter as they do to his pessimism, may teach us what they
have not taught him wisdom more final than his pessimism.
:
They serve to indicate the limits of his pessimism, and there-

foredemand its radical revision.
The world whose nature has been disclosed to us in the
whole of Schopenhauer's philosophy is certainly not a world
which warrants docile, complacent optimism. It demands
a heroic, perhaps a Zoroastrian view. But absolute, hopeless
gloom it does not demand nor warrant. Like Gautama,
Schopenhauer had eyes to see darkness and a genius for gloom,
but, like Gautama again, he sensed within himself enlighten-
ment and the clear path of salvation. No philosopher has
been more personal than Schopenhauer, according to Paul-
63 64
sen; none since Pascal, according to Ruyssen. Out of the
roots of his heart's agonies have sprung the ashen shoots
of his pessimism. But Schopenhauer's philosophy is not ob-
jectively personal: it does not take due account of itself.
The man who condemned the world confronted it disdain-

fully,but not disdaining himself; he who preached the vanity

and tedium of attainment never doubted the lasting value
of his own work. In all this he was inconsistent: had his
judgment of the world explicitly included himself, Goethe,
Plato, Kant, Beethoven, Rossini, Buddha, Arnold von
Winkelried, Abb6 Ranc<5, Madame Guion, it would have
been different in its finality. Is the laurel crown a crown
of thorns covered with leaves? Small reason for despair
here, if man will have laurel crowns at any cost. The sun
risesand shines on an earth in which there is as yet no life:
"I am the sun and must rise because I am the sun: look on
me who can!" Beautiful, green, and blooming is the oasis,
and it bewails its lonely charms, spent as they are on the
desert-waste. But the desert answers: "Were I no waste,
thou wert no oasis!" 55 Here are echoes from the agonies of
Schopenhauer's own spirit, but they are not agonies of pure,
absolute despair. The note of heroic worth is in them all.
The recognition of the personal element in Schopenhauer's
view of life nowise justifies a treatment of his philosophy as a
pathological phenomenon. With romantic intensity Schopen-

hauer perceived the tragic side of life, own life affording
his
him no lack of material. He could make no reasoned sense
of the tragedy, and his irrationalism is more rightly to be
regarded as a conclusion from its pessimism than as its
premise. Keenly conscious of supreme worth, philosophic,
aesthetic, moral-mystical, he yet saw it as wholly alien in this

vale of woe, and demanding for its full utterance the renun-
ciation of the world. Hence his nihilistic gospel of salvation.
The paradox and the inconsistency in Schopenhauer are
fundamentally religious. Not without reason did Tolstoy
call Schopenhauer "the most gifted of men," and as late as
1890 retained Schopenhauer's picture and no other in his

room. 56 Not without reason did Schopenhauer look to the
opposite bank of the Main, to the house where five hundred
years earlier a Frankfurter had written Theologia Germanica.
For is not this the Christian truth also, only outwardly
inconsistent and paradoxical: man is a sinner tainted and
wholly bad, yet he is also the son of God. The self "will not
admit that it really is what it is in fact." 57 His mind is a tool
of the tyrant will, he is greed, lust, egoism, cruelty personified;
but see, his is also disinterested, aesthetic contemplation,
his is the pure intelligence that sees through the will, that
curbs and denies the will, his the compassion, the chastity,
the blessedness, the peace of the saint.
This paradox and mystery raise a still more ultimate one,
which Schopenhauer recognizes, but renounces as wholly
beyond his ken. Why paradox and mystery? Whence
this
is the great discord that permeates this world? If the roots
of individuality go as deep as the assertion of the will-to-live,'

and are thus extirpated in the act of will-denial, then what
would I be if I were not the will-to-live? Whence finally
this will that may either assert itself or be denied altogether?
These are questions to which no answer may be given. Our
minds are unsuited to deal with them. "With our intellect,
this mere tool of the will, we are everywhere striking upon
insoluble problems, as against the walls of our prison/' 68
A knowledge of the ground of the very inmost being-in-itself
of things is thus unavailable, for it transcends the forms of
knowledge and consciousness: "so much as to the limits of
my philosophy, and indeed of all philosophy." 59
"Whatever torch we may kindle, and whatever space it
may light, our horizon will always remain bounded by pro-
found night." 60 And at the conclusion of his lectures Scho-
penhauer quoted Lucretius:
In what a gloom of life, in what dire perils
Are spent our years, however few they be! fll
The brighter the philosophical light that illumines the dark-

ness of existence, the greater will the all-surrounding darkness
and "the more intelligent a man is, the

disclose itself to be,
more keenly aware is he what darkness surrounds him, and
62
just this stimulates him philosophically." Why this world
has so much evil that thwarts and resists the good, why it is
thus and not otherwise: is thus no problem of ours? Goethe
wrote in the album of a student, and Schopenhauer quoted
to Adam von Doss: "The good Lord has indeed created
the nut, but he has not also cracked it." 63 And well it is so.
CHAPTER XII
HARTMANN'S PHILOSOPHY OF THE

UNCONSCIOUS
. Twenty-five years after the publication of The World as

Will and Idea Schopenhauer literally had to beg his publisher
Brockhaus to try out a second enlarged edition of his master-
piece. Hartmann's publisher Heymons brought out seven
editions of The Philosophy of the Unconscious in six years,
to be followed by five more in Hartrnann's life-time. That
this was merely a publisher's triumph, Hartmann, of course,
would have been the last one to admit. But in the preface to
his seventh edition the thirty-two year old author speculates:
Had Schopenhauer been fortunate enough to find a real
publisher, had the thirty years of unrecognition been spared
him, who can tell what his creative powers might riot have
given to the world, and how profoundly and how much earlier
the entire course of nineteenth century philosophy might
not have been affected thereby! We should not be over-
whelmed by these regrets. No author doubts that there is a
special pouch in hell for slothful publishers, but it would
scarcely do to blame the House of Brockhaus for Germany's
long neglect of Schopenhauer. When the master-pessimist
composed, Hegel was conducting the Symphony of the
first
Absolute. It took thirty years before the pessimistic strain

had a real chance in the concert of German thought, and it
was precisely during that opportune season that Hartmann's
violoncello stirred the public ear.
308
PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 309
Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann was born in 1842, the

only son of a captain of artillery who later rose to the rank
of major-general. Unlike Schopenhauer and Leopardi, he had
a very happy childhood and in his memoirs speaks with feel-
ing of his father's intelligent care and of his mother's tender
affection. The early mental development of the child suffered
from no neglect; his father directed the course of his studies,
and in school he leaped years ahead of his comrades. He
showed very early a preference for ploughing his furrow by
himself, a distaste for the routine of school, and decided
though not obstinate enthusiasms and aversions. Homer did
not charm this boy, and Demosthenes left him unmoved,
but the simple greatness of Thucydides captivated him, and
he was profoundly affected by the Apology of Socrates and
by Sophocles. The purely formal and technical sides of
mathematics, did not interest him,
science, particularly of
but rather the philosophical significance of the ideas and
processes. The religious school-instruction served to stimulate
him and he seems to have been something
philosophically,
of a hereticfrom the very start. Besides his school- work he
had special instruction in art and music, in both of which
he showed technical skill and some original power. There
is no evidence of early depression beyond the usual melan-
choly moments of a youth of unusual intelligence and gravity.

The general early impressions are cheerful; cheerful and
pleasant also on the whole are his reports of his teachers. All
the same, he counts the day of his graduation from the
gymnasium as perhaps the happiest in his life.
The university did not attract Hartmann : its schedules and

its pedantry repelled him, and likewise the roughness and
looseness of student life. The loftier tone of the younger
officers inthe army and his father's example inclined him
towards a military career, and he entered upon it in the
belief that only as a soldier could he live as a whole man.
But closer acquaintance with men in barracks disillusioned
him: his comrades did not understand his high aspirations
and he did not relish all their pleasures. One suspects that
Hartmann would have reconsidered his choice of a career
in any case, even had he not been compelled to do so. As it
was, a severe contusion of the knee, which refused to heal
and developed into grave rheumatism, finally settled the ques-
tion of army life for him. He was now twenty-two, having,
"
as he believed, lived through and experienced more things,
overcome more errors, stripped off more prejudices and seen
through more illusions . . than is vouchsafed to many
.
"
educated people throughout their entire lives. 1 Such a man
was bound to be a poet or a saviour of society, or, failing
both, perhaps a vagrom philosopher. Hartmann tried art
and music first, but he was a critic keen and honest enough
to perceive that he was not meant to create lasting beauty.
Wisdom was his last refuge: he undertook to solve the riddle
of the universe. Towards the end of 1864 he began his first
main work, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, finished it in
two years, kept the manuscript in his desk another year,
and when it appeared in November, 1868 (dated 1869, fifty
years after Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea) was,
as he tells us, the most surprised man in Germany to find
himself a world-famous philosopher before thirty.
The public was inclined to treat the young man's work
as his final and completed philosophy, whereas he regarded
it rather as a projected outline and Chapter I. He did not
know what resting on his oars or laurels meant; he found him-
self the object of world-wide discussion, and wrote as much as
all his critics put together. Hartmann's systematic works

run to some sixteen thousand pages, on all the problems in
the philosophical calendar, and then essays and articles
without count on all things known, surmised, and unthink-
able, in philosophical reviews, in monthlies, weeklies, dailies.
He composed music in his leisure, and had a drama, Tristan

und Isolde, to his credit, or on his conscience.
He married twice. His Agnes Taubert, was an
first wife,
enthusiastic pessimist; work, Der Pessimismus und

her
seine Gegner, is considered in our next chapter. She died
in 1877. Eighteen months later Hartmann married Alma
Lorenz who made it the business of her life to safeguard her
husband's energy, keep it from being dissipated in controver-
sies, and into

direct itsystematic writing. The Hartmann
home in Berlin was a nest of devotion and peace. The philoso-
pher lived in and for his family, and he was a loyal friend.
It became a proverb in the capital: "If you would like to see
contented and cheerful faces, then go to the pessimists." 2
He died in 190G, at the age of sixty-four, in the forefront of
German philosophers in spite of his being a free-lance with-
out academic connections. Windelband characterized him,
rather too generously, I think, as the author of one of the
two "most significant systems of philosophy ... of nine-
teenth century Germany/ 3 In spite of protracted illness
7
and pain, the invalid lived to see the philosophical plan of his
youth realized in detail. His own life seemed an index of his
philosophy of life: eudaemonological pessimism and teleo-
logical optimism, life, on the whole unhappy, could yet
realize its goal.
II
"Whoso brings much, will bring to many something/'

4
One cannot read through Hartmann without being impressed

with his high synthetic power. He is a system-builder in
the classical manner. What he brings, therefore, he brings
as a bee, not as an ant. An intelligent discussion of his pes-
simism may not ignore its relation to the rest of his philos-
ophy. Ihave no desire to spread out unduly, however, and
shall be as brief as I can in dealing with the setting of the
stage on which the Tragedy of the Unconscious is being
acted. First of all it will help us to get our cue right if we
consider Hartmann 's position in relation to his predecessors.
Here we are not without expert guidance: no one has tried
harder than Hartmann to define clearly his place in the his-
tory of philosophy.
Kant is the gate through which one enters into the nine-
teenth century, and it is natural for contemporary philoso-
phers to look up their Kantian ancestry. The orthodox view,
familiar to all readers of historical manuals of philosophy,
traces the direct line of succession from Kant, through
Fichte and Schelling, to Hegel, and the movement Kant-to-
Hegel has been treated often enough as one integral process
of thought. But Schopenhauer has not been without his
champions upholding and
his claim as the only true heir
bearer of Kant's crown. Hartmann, when occasion demands
it, is also apt and able to hunt up Kantian genealogies in his
own behalf. 5 But he protests against the Kantomania,

Kantvergotterung, in German philosophy, and is more con-
6
cerned to define his position with reference to Hegel, Schel-

ling,and Schopenhauer, who provide him with his important
philosophical alternatives.
The outstanding fact in the philosophy of Hartmann's
day was the antithesis of Hegel and Schopenhauer. Hegelian-
ism still dominated the academic lecture-hall; the standard
aesthetics, protestant theology, philosophy of history and
history of philosophy, all bore the Hegelian stamp. But
Schopenhauer dominated the unanointed philosophy of the
day. The two were antipodal all along the line. Schopenhauer
built on the very elements in the Kantian philosophy (sub-
jective idealism) which Hegel disavowed. HegePs metaphys-

the capitalized Notion: the world is for him a
ical principle is
spiritual system; the Real is the Rational; the universe makes

sense, makes for sense, makes good sense. This is the op-
timism of the self-confident Logos: "The world-process is

development, the development is logical, what is developed
" 7
is the logical, and aside from it there is nothing. Of all this
Schopenhauer's system is an explicit and unqualified denial.
The world is in reality irrational, blind striving, is essentially
and irremediably miserable, a tragic blunder. On the one
side, "the thinker with the most sublime genius for abstract
speculation which the earth ever produced "; on the other
an amazing master of keen perceptions "in each of which,
Columbus-like, he stands an egg on end in the simplest way
in the wo rid. " 8
The pessimistic tenor of The Philosophy of the Unconscious

very naturally led the casual reader to list the author with the
disciples of Schopenhauer. Against this interpretation of his
philosophy Hartmann protests vigorously and with good
reason. Although being on the whole a Schopenhauerian in
his estimate of the world-process, Hartmann finds Schopen-
hauer altogether one-sided in his ultimate explanation of the
world. He objects to Schopenhauer's metaphysical dis-
missal of reason as mere phenomenon of the blind irrational
will;within the realm of the phenomenal, he objects to
Schopenhauer's subjective idealism; he perceives a covert
materialism in Schopenhauer's account of the intellect, and
regards it as inadequate and worthless. He opposes Schopen-
hauer's metaphysical estimate of mechanism and teleology.
He regards the account of the origin and destiny of in-
dividuality in The World as Will and Idea as insufficient and
self-contradictory. The distinction between empirical and
intelligible character has which Schopenhauer
corollaries
has not thought out, and serves to raise the issue between
monism and pluralism or monadism in metaphysics; re-
garding this issue Schopenhauer is very confused, as is
exhibited perhaps most strikingly in his view of salvation

through individual self-denial of the will. Even in his pes-
simism Hartmann, as we shall see, is no mere disciple of
Schopenhauer, and his practical program is a rejection of
Schopenhauer's quietism.
Hartmann's radical critique of Schopenhauer however does
not constitute him a Hegelian. In method, in philosophical
equipment and outlook, Hegel is free from most of Schopen-
hauer's vices, but he also lacks Schopenhauer's virtues.
Shall we say that Hegel's world is like Athena, issued fully
armed and complete from Zeus' head? Surely it shows how
far the single strength of thought can go: how far short of
the goal. In the world Hegel sees only spirit; he has no heart
for nature; nature has no history, and ultimately reality is for
him history, spiritual process. But even though reason be the
hero of the play, yet it is after all not the whole play, nor yet
its author. The play, the w orld-process, is history, but,
r
Hartmann holds, it is natural history, which includes but is

not exhausted by intelligence. The same observation would
apply in axiology: the triumph of reason in our experience
may justify a very relative, but surely not an absolute
9
optimism.
Methodologically, Hartmann rejects the Hegelian dialectic
in favor of induction, but he is Hegelian enough to observe
that, between two contradictories, the greater truth is in the

middle. Precisely on Hegelian grounds the issue cannot be:
either Hegel or Schopenhauer. Hegel's own philosophy is
not the final synthesis of thought; it also becomes thesis
in its turn, involves an antithesis, demands a more ultimate
synthesis. The Hegelian pantheism of the Idea, panlogism,

is the thesis; the Schopenhauerian pantheism of the Will,
panthelism, is the antithesis. The problem of problems im-
posed by the situation in philosophy as Hartmann conceived
itwas to find the synthesis of this dialectical triad. This he
undertook to do, and he found his guide in Schelling; not
only in the Schelling of the Jena days, known to us as the
second step from Kant to Hegel, but also and more partic-
ularly in the Schelling of the forties.
Schelling is the most variously fertile of German philoso-
phers. Hegel's dependence on him is familiar to all students
of the history of philosophy. What is not so familiar, how-
ever, the fact, pointed out by Hartmann, that Schopen-
is
hauer's central doctrine may be read out of Schelling ten,

twenty years before the publication of The World as Will and
Idea (1819). "The source of self-consciousness is will (1797).
. . . There is finally and preeminently no other Being but
will. The will is primary Being and to it alone are applicable
all itspredicates: groundlessness, eternity, independence of
" 10
time, self-assertion (1809). Schelling, doing his thinking
in public as Hegel sarcastically observed, did not perhaps
see life steadily and see it whole, but he did see it a good many
times, and saw a good many sides of it well. The philosophies
which he thus served to stimulate or else anticipated, he
was also later instrumental in reconciling. This was the out-
come of his positive philosophy, the last of the four or five
systems through which he ran in his one lifetime.

The truth about reality, then, as Hartmann following
Schelling it, sees lies between Hegel and Schopenhauer.
They are both right in recognizing one ultimate aspect of the
real, wrong in ignoring or depreciating the reality of the other
ultimate aspect. Schopenhauer treats intelligence as a by-
product or tool of the Will-to-live. Hegel treats will as a
subordinate moment
in the ultimately logical process. But
Schopenhauer's blind will-to-live cannot account for the
intelligence which it is supposed to generate, nor can the

logical significance of Hegel's explain its own
world by itself
actuality, its coming to be. If we

use the terminology of
Spinoza, we may say that both Hegel and Schopenhauer are
in the similarly grave embarrassment of treating an attribute
as the substance, and trying to derive the other attribute
from it. 11 Will and Idea, creativeness and intelligence, drive
and significance, are both attributes, incommensurable and
complementary. Neither can be derived from the other; they
are the two ultimate moments of the real. These two factors
are involved in the world-process throughout the one making
:
activity possible, the other determining the nature of the

activity. We see here for instance the two elements which
go to make causality possible: "That in general anything
comes to pass, that the effect follows, depends on the Will;
that the effect, if it follows, follows with necessity as this and
no other, depends on the Logical. That things be, is de-
. . .
termined by the alogical Will; what things are, is determined

12
by the logical Idea."
Schopenhauer had compared will and intelligence to a
strong blind man carrying on his shoulders a cripple who can
see. Hartmann corrects the picture: "It is not a blind man
who a lame one showing the way, but it is a single
carries
whole and sound one, that certainly, however, cannot see
with the legs and walk with the eyes." 13 The ultimate of
ultimates is neither Will nor Idea: that is, neither one to
the exclusion of the other. Schelling called A; Hart-
it ^ 14
mann calls it the Unconscious, Absolute Substance, Absolute

Subject or Spirit. It is the source, the core, the goal of reality.
The progressive recognition of it in German philosophy marks

its progress.'"Schelling in his Philosophy of Identity showed
the right road by recognizing the absolute as the eternally
unconscious; Hegel advanced along the side of the uncon-
scious Idea, and Schopenhauer along the side of the uncon-
scious, alogical Will; both of which sides were reunited in
15
Schelling's last system in the principle of Absolute Spirit."
What Schelling had perceived in principle, Hartmann now
undertakes to understand and, more important for our
purpose, to estimate in detail. It is the main theme of The
Philosophy of the Unconscious.
III
Hartmann compares the sphere of the Unconscious to the

well-cultivated vine-clad hill that has yielded fine fruit and
crops but not the long-expected hidden treasure. He proposes
to seek the golden store "in the noble ores of its rocky beds,
rather than on the surface of the fruitful earth." l7 The sub-
soil of consciousness, however, is not brute matter. Hart-
mann's survey of nature leads him to reject a mechanistic
it; but the teleology of nature is un-
for a teleological view of
conscious teleology. That mere mechanics or mere chance can
explain, for instance, eyesight, he regards as outside the
bounds of probability. By mathematical calculations of his
own he undertakes to show that this probability is less than
But it is not by such ingenious reck-
fifteen per ten million. 18
oning that he would persuade himself of the claims of uncon-

scious teleology in nature. He surveys bodily and mental life
and finds in both manifestations of the Unconscious. The
slightest bodily movement presupposes the unconscious idea
of the position of the corresponding nerve-endings in the brain
and the unconscious will to stimulate them. Instinct is pur-
"
posive action without consciousness of the purpose. Instinct
is not the result of conscious reflection not a consequence
of bodily organization not mere result of a mechanism
founded in the organization of the brain not the effect of
a dead, and essentially foreign mechanism, externally adher-
ing to the mind but the individual's own activity, springing
from his inmost nature and character. " 19 The Unconscious
is manifested as the dominant factor in reflex action and in
the reparative power of nature; materialism is incapable of
accounting for numberless facts of everyday experience. The

action of mind on body is in the end inexplicable except by
means of an unconscious will. If bodily activity points beyond
chance and mechanism to teleology, mental life points be-
neath consciousness to the underlying Unconscious.
Hartmann examines instinct in the human mind, devoting
particular attention in a long chapter to the Unconscious in
sexual love, which recalls but does not match Schopenhauer's
famous chapter in the second edition of The World as Will and
"
Idea. Where one is conscious of no will in the satisfaction of
which an existing pleasure or displeasure could exist, this
will is an unconscious one. The obscure, ineffable,
. . .
inexpressible in feeling lies in the unconsciousness of the

accompanying ideas."
20
Character and morality, aesthetic
judgment and production, language, thought, sense-percep-
tion, all hark back, beyond consciousness, to an unconscious
direction. "The laboratory of volition is hidden in the Un-
21
conscious."
7
Neither eighteenth century 'design in nature nor Dar-
winism can explain the beauty of the peacock's tail; the
conscious feeling and the idea of the beautiful point in the
end to the unconscious processes. Thought leans on intuition;
all real philosophy is, in the first and in the last chapters at
"
least,mystical: witness Spinoza, flower of philosophical
22
mysticism." In history the struggle between lower and
higher races does not proceed by conscious plan; a power
beyond our conscious projects moves resistlessly, eradicating
the inferior. To retard or try to check this process in the
interests of alleged mercy is to cut off a dog's tail kindly,
23
that gradually, inch by inch.
is,
Consciousness and material existence both require for

their ultimate explanation the recognition of the unconscious.
In this world-process, what is the precise status of conscious-
ness; what is its origin and its final cosmic role?
According to Hartmann, the initial possibility of existence
is due to the unaccountable will-activities of the metalogical
Unconscious. These will activities are alogical opposing each ;
and recoil, and are thus confronted with the

other, they clash
amazing fact of externality. Thus arises consciousness: it is
"the stupefaction of the will at the existence of the idea not

2*
willed and yet sensibly felt by it" "The World consists
only of a sum of activities or will-acts of the Unconscious, and

the ego consists of another sum of activities or will-acts of
the Unconscious. Only so far as the former activities inter-
sect the latter does the world become sensible to me; only so
far as the latter intersect the former do I become sensible to
25
myself." The mind, which forHartmann is prior to con-
sciousness, has, according to its own nature, the ideas which
it wills and which form the contents of its will. This self-
contained peace of the Unconscious is disturbed by organized

matter; sensation takes place, not self-evoked but received
from without. The unconscious mind is now conscious. As
Hartmann expresses it, in an outburst of eloquence, "the
great revolution has come to pass, the first step to the world's
redemption taken; the idea has been rent from the will,
to confront it in future as an independent power, in order
to bring under subjection to itself its former lord. This
amazement of the will at the rebellion against its previously
acknowledged sway, this sensation which the interloping

idea produces in the Unconscious, this is Conscious-
26
ness:'
Observe now in this drama of world-redemption that it is
to be a tragedy, a redemption through woe. In the very

origin of consciousness pain is involved: "The breaking of the
will on the resistance of a foreign will crossing it, or the
centripetal rebound, is
sensation, and moreover, as non-
satisfaction of the will, pam-sensation." 27 And the increase
of knowledge is increase of sorrow: to the experience of pain
is added and superadded theclear perception of evil and of
apparently stupid Consciousness has involved un-
guilt.
conscious mind in pain and dissatisfaction, has raised the
problem which only the intelligent mind can meet and solve,
We have now approached Hartmann's account of experience
as on the whole miserable and his program of salvation
through negation of the cosmic will.
IV
"
It is related of an ancient Brahmin that he was so affected
with astonishment at the sight of an insect-capturing plant,
that, forgetful of meat and drink, he remained seated before
it till the end of his life."
28
The inerrant fitness of the activ-
ity of the Unconscious has a similarly hypnotic effect on us:
we find in nature infallible, unhesitating adaptation of means
to ends, not only in the general scheme, but in the least de-
tail. The absolute clairvoyance of the Unconscious, its ever-
suitable direction of all data, its ceaseless and most appro-

priate intervention at every step of the process dazzle us
and hold us spellbound. We
proclaim this world the best
possible of worlds, God's own world, and therefore a good
and a happy world. This is the conclusion which the theist
isapt to draw from his recognition of teleology in nature.
Here Hartmann advises us to proceed with caution and
watch our step. The infallibility of the infinite omniscient
Unconscious does involve the conclusion that this is the best
possible world under the circumstances of there being a world
at all! But to call this world the best possible in the sense of
perfect, altogether good and faultless, a bower of bliss in

which all evil is somehow good, merely the shadow in the
lovely picture: to proceed to such optimistic conclusions

is to be guilty of bad logic and poor observation of the facts
of life. This world may be the best possible world and may
yet be a world of woeful experience, the tragedy of which is
intensified by the ideal values which intelligence strives to
realize in it. be the best possible world in that
Indeed it may
it points to its own The sharp distinction be-
extinction. 29
tween the evaluation of the world in hedonistic-eudaemono-
logical and in teleological-evolutionistic terms is regarded

by Hartmann as his own contribution to axiology. He regards

this distinction as essential to all true morality and all intel-
ligent religion. It is well to keep this point in mind, and not

to confuse Hartmann's philosophy with absolute pessimism
or Weltschmerz or miserabilism: a confusion against which
he tirelessly protests.
Evaluation may be in logical or in alogical terms. In the
logical scale we consider knowledge-values, aesthetic, moral,
redemption-values; likewise developmental and teleological
values; in the alogical scale we have will- values and pleasure-
30
pain values.
The epistemological pessimist (sceptic, agnostic) doubts
the possibility of real knowledge and regards the alleged
knowledge-values as illusory. Against him we cannot main-
tain that our knowledge is either complete or adequate.
While we may be optimistic regarding the ultimate perfec-
tion of attainable knowledge, its present state demands a
much more modest estimate. But even this more modest
"
epistemological bonism" does not justify us in regarding
knowledge-values as of intrinsic or absolute worth. What is
good knowledge is not on that account good; what is known
well it may yet be a pity to know. The fact is that science
is indifferent to worth.
In the realm of aesthetic values, a similar conclusion
holds. Beauty is not the ultimate standard or the last word
in axiology, as some aesthetes would have it. The world
might be a misbegotten hell, but to the artist it would still
have its appropriate beauty. A thing of beauty need not be
a joy forever. The universe as a whole is neither beautiful
nor ugly.
The universe as a whole is also neither good nor evil.
Moral values are as relative as aesthetic values; they are
real only in the experiences and judgments of moral agents.
We find in this world virtue and vice; our judgment of the
balance between them may lead us to ethical optimism or to
pessimism, but a sound philosophy cannot lead to despair
or to jubilation; its task, as Spinoza told us, is to understand.
Ethical optimism, if at all possible, is always only in prospect.
The present is even less likely to yield us moral than scientific
or aesthetic satisfaction. The values in the logical scale are
realized in development and aspiration. This is particularly
true of the redemption-values of the religious life: salvation
is possible only in a tragic world, in a world recognized as
essentially tragic, a world in the tragedy of which one is
moved to play or to share a hero's part.
Confidence in evolution- values is a postulate of epistemo-
logical, moral, and religious optimism. A developing world
is a moving not a stagnant world; seemingly a circle, it is
really a spiral. Faith in evolution-values is faith in the
reality of growth, of cultural progress, of advance towards
some goal. It is an insurance against the blight of dead
monotony. Evolutionistic optimism thus finds its completion
in teleologicaloptimism of which, in fact, the other varieties
are to be regarded as special aspects. Teleological optimism
is conviction that the world makes sense, has an end, is
intelligible. An anti-teleological optimist is an unthinkable

contradiction: unthinkable, but not extinct.
In the alogical as far as will-values are concerned,
scale,
any kind of worldbetter than no-world, and while we have
is
here no basis for distinguishing better or best, any world

whatever indifferently good. The pleasure-pain values are
is
logically inexplicable facts of feeling which reason may not

ignore and which philosophy must reckon with, for they
are of prime importance in all axiology. Is the attainment of
happiness the prime purpose of creation? Then it were im-
pious to doubt that life yields a positive balance of pleasure.
But should life yield a balance of pain, then, if there be any
purpose and goal, it will have to be sought elsewhere than in
pleasure. "The measurement of cosmic value in hedonistic

terms thus neither below the dignity of science nor is it in-
is
directly disposed of by measurements in other than hedonis-

tic terms. ... In the pursuit of this investigation, Wertlehre
becomes Wagungskhre; for the pleasure value in existence is

positive or negative, depending upon this, which of the two,
31
pleasure or pain, outweighs the other." Aside from our
own individual attitude, whether it be one of Weltschmerz or
of imperturbable personal cheerfulness, this question regard-
ing the pleasure-pain balance in life admits of an objective
study and a scientific answer. Is this balance positive,
negative, or a zero of indifference? Pessimism in this field

may be a purely theoretical doctrine, as little of a depressed
state itself as a biological doctrine is a living organism, or
thd science of opiates is itself a narcotic.
Turning thus to eudaemonological axiology or weighing of
the balance of pleasure in life, Hartmann surveys the various
possible standpoints. In a spirit of negative dogmatism, we
may declare the problem absurd: pleasure and pain being in-
commensurable, there being no real compensation and ac-
cordingly no 'balance/ Or else, while admitting that an
absolute intelligence might cope with the problem ("God
knows how!") we may declare it to be past our mortal ken.
Or we may be sceptics, doubting whether we can solve the
problem. Or again, in a positively dogmatic manner, we may
assert that the balance of pleasure over pain, or of pain over
pleasure, is a maximum, holding to superlative eudae-

monological optimism and pessimism respectively. Or still
once more we may declare that pleasure and pain match and
compensate each other in a balance of indifference. Or
finally, in a critical spirit, we may reckon the pleasure-
pain balance as relative, as inclining to pleasure (meliorism),
or to pain (peiorism), or else perhaps, while admitting the
actuality of the balance, regard it as indefinite and infinites!-
mal, past reliable reckoning. Of these three varieties of a
critical view, Hartmann's theory is the second. His con-
clusion is peioristic: life is on the whole more painful than
pleasant; but he is much better informed about the pain-
fulness.
The empirical-inductive survey of everyday life is a
melancholy recital. If we take a cross-section of life, we find
unmixed but scarcely unmixed good. All along the line
evil,
pain, fear, countless ills, ruinous labor, disappointment sway
the balance. Trace the average man's career from birth to

death: how dim is the light, how dark the shadows in the
picture! In this art of dolorous recital Schopenhauer has
made it very difficult for anyone to approach him. What
Hartmann lacks in brilliant insight, he makes up in com-
prehensiveness and detail of observation. One example will
illustrate his procedure: here is Hartmann's account of the
home life in which the average man seeks assured happiness
in this sorry world. The reader will remember that Hartmann
himself was happily married.
"
Family happiness is even in normal circumstances un-
certain. Either husband or wife is not of much account, or
they are not quite suited to each other, or the marriage is child-
less, or else yields so rich a crop of children that daily care

visits the home, or efforts to prevent too many births poison
conjugal happiness, or the illnesses of parents or children cast

a shadow over the home, or the parents must need bewail the
loss of the very children who seem dearest, or else the worry
over some blind, deaf-mute, imbecile, epileptic, or otherwise
sickly or invalid child embitters their joy in the others. If the
children grow up, then the school-worries over lazy or un-
gifted children weigh over the parents more than over the
children, and perhaps there is a light-minded, good-for-
nothing among them. Should the children all fare well, then
suddenly the mother dies, and leaves her husband to worry
how with strange help he can bring up the children, or else

the father himself passes from the home circle and leaves
the family in sudden need. ."
32
A paragraph immediately
. .
following this retails with equal impartiality of detail the

trials and tribulations of the unmarried folk.
'
Thejoys and blessings of the higher life' are likewise
mixed and uncertain. The thinker's joy isknown to few,
but arduous futile labor is the lot of the many who set out
on the path of knowledge. This is even truer in the life of
art: how
exceptional the success, the joy of creation, genuine
understanding and recognition, how common the bitter
futility of untalented endeavor, the still more bitter and fu-
tile struggle with stupid apathy! Here, in science and art,
pure joy is indeed to be found; alas that it is so rare! The
moral life does yield attainment of worth; of this Hartmann
has no doubt, but he doubts that happiness marks the
attainment of virtue. Peace of heart, a neutral state, is all
that the moral hero can expect. And religion, far from being
a source of happiness, is rather designed to cure man of his
predilection for it.
This general conclusion from experience is supported by

detailed psychological observations, by reasoning, and by
demonstrations as to how and why pain preponderates over
pleasure. An instance or two must suffice. "Pain is (apart
from the complete blunting of the nerves by great pain) the
more painful, pleasure the more indifferent and cloying, the
" 33
longer it lasts. Concomitant pleasures weaken each other,
but concomitant pains enhance each other; one chance un-
pleasantness can ruin the happiest day, but the day of misery
is scarcely relieved by an incidental pleasure.
Hartmann does not subscribe to Schopenhauer's doctrine

that pain is primary and positive, and pleasure only negative,
the temporary alleviation of pain. It is true that, owing to
the fact that there is far more pain than pleasure in life,
most pleasure does follow the remission of pain, but this does
not affect the truth in principle that pure positive pleasure
is to be had. Examples may be found, not only in intellectual
and aesthetic experience, but also in the sensual life. Hart-

mann, however, shares Schopenhauer's general conclusion
that man's hope of a lasting balance of happiness in this life
is doomed to disappointment.
The pathetic expectation of a balance of happiness in this
life is called by Hartmann the first stage of man's illusion.
"Happiness is considered as having been actually attained

at the present stage of the world's development, accordingly
attainable by the individual of today in his earthly life." 34
The progress of intelligence lays bare this illusion: even in
the realm of most intense desires and passions, hunger,
love, ambition, to mention only three, the pains of the un-
satisfied far exceed in frequency and in intensity the pleasures
of satisfaction. The supreme attainable felicity is painless
contentment: a dreamless Hartmann's elevenfold
sleep.
dolorous inventory of life exhibits it as a losing business.
Disappointed in his expectations here and now, man turns
his hopes to the hereafter, and now conceives happiness as
attainable by the individual in a transcendent life after
death. In the life of the individual the transition from the
first to this second stage of the great illusion corresponds to
the passage from the blithe trust of innocent childhood to

the wistful yearning of adolescence. Representing it in the
history of the race is the succession of Greek-Roman-Jewish
antiquity by Christianity. On the extreme weariness of life
in the ancient world falls the ray of the Christian hope of
personal immortality, a hope the brighter because of the dark

despair and disdain of the present life. Hartmann misses no
opportunity to brand this hope as not only illusory but also
pernicious: illusory because reflecting belief in the eternal
reality of the empirical self, and pernicious because springing
from self-centeredness and egoism. How could there be any

individual happiness in the hereafter? Even if we overlooked
for the moment
the overwhelming empirical evidence of the
dependence of our self-consciousness on the bodily organism
and the consequent illusoriness of the belief in personal
existence after death, even if we ventured to speculate on
mere suppositions, what happiness could we predicate of life

beyond death, however conceived? The view of reincarnation
could only regard the soul as involved repeatedly in the same
sorry round of bodily existence, whether on this earth or
elsewhere. The hope that our soul may be reborn in a happier
world rests on the supposition that our earth is the stepchild
of the Absolute. But what justifies us in regarding our un-
happy globe as the drudge or the wretched experimental

station of an otherwise blissful universe? All analogy is
35
against such fancies. The conception of disembodied exist-
ence precludes consciousness, feeling, memory, precludes also
any discussion of pleasure-pain. The desire for immortality
arises from egoism, and the relinquishing of this desire
and hope is a prime condition of genuine morality and true
religion. This second illusion man must dispel; in dispelling
it, he renounces utterly the quest of happiness along the
lines of individual satisfaction.
This is genuine advance, but it is not enough. For a third
stage of the illusion of happiness must now be transcended:
this is the belief in social progress, so characteristic of our
modern age. Happiness is relegated to and sought in the
future of the world. But what justifies this sublime faith in
progress? How is progress to bring us real felicity? 36 Civiliza-
tion brings forth new diseases to match the advance of medi-
cine, and even medicine does win the race with disease,
if
"
cheerful youth will always form only a fraction of man-
w
kind, and the other part be composed of morose old age."
Death will always be with us, and in life, domination of one
man by another, and discontent, and with the increase of
knowledge, increased doubt and dismay. "With the advance
of culture, demands increase always more rapidly than the
means for their general satisfaction/'
38
He who rests his
hopes of happiness on civilization and progress should con-

sider the world as he has it: are the most civilized people the
most or the contented? The progress of human culture
least
is of value, but why? Because it releases for mental exertion
human energies which at lower levels of existence have been

employed in the satisfaction of elemental needs. Man has
thus more opportunity to understand the futility of life's
quest of happiness, to tear the veils of illusion, to see the
truth and find the way out misery of life. That is
of the
to say, in savage life Eduard von Hartmann would have had
to hunt and fish and grub to keep alive, and his sixteen
thousand pages of gray wisdom would have been left un-
written.
So the progress of intelligence gradually brings humanity
to the realization that self-centeredness is as stupid as it is
futile and pernicious, and that the quest of happiness is doomed
"
to defeat. After the three stages of illusion of the hope of a
positive happiness it has finally seen the folly of its endeavor;
it finally foregoes all positive happiness, and longs only for
39
absolute painlessness, for nothingness, Nirvana."
Hartmann's Nirvana should not be confused with the
Buddhist or the Schopenhauerian quietist goal of individual
self-renunciation. Schopenhauer's doctrine is open to the
serious objection which we considered in the previous chapter
and which Hartmann presses vigorously: "How should it be
possible for the individual to negate his individual will as a
whole, not merely theoretically but also practically, as his
individual volition is only a ray of the Only Will?" 40 But
even supposing that the impossible were to happen; suppose
that through asceticism, eremite vigils, and voluntary starva-
tion, one certain egoistic

will has been denied, one self-
engrossed individual extinguished, what would that signify?

Simply that one man has died: "To the Only Will the conse-
quences would have been the same if a tile had killed that
man; it continues after, as before, with unenfeebled energy,
with undiminished avidity/ 41 And even if all men were to
7
turn ascetics, and mankind were to die out gradually by

sexual continence, the remedy would be no more radical
than before. Nature, the Unconscious, would evolve some
new type to replace man, and the sorry tragi-comedy of
existence would go on.
In The Philosophy of the Unconscious Hartmann regards the
ascetic endeavor after individual negation as "an aberration
only in procedure, not in aim" In his later work, Das sit-
42
tliche Bewusstsein, he offers a less favorable diagnosis: "The
goal of the denial of the will is clearly here also decidedly

43
egoistic." Morality and religion demand the utter uprooting
of selfishness; redemption is not redemption of self but
redemption from self. The denial of the will is not to be

individual in any sense, and nowise partial. It should be uni-
versal and final, and should register the extinction of the
entire world-process.
We have come now to the climax of Hartmann's philos-
ophy: a fantastic eschatology which has aroused amazement
and ridicule, and which Hartmann himself, never explicitly
abandoning, has yet in his later writings subjected to revi-
sion and higher criticism. Instead of ascetic withdrawal
from life, he advocates provisionally the affirmation of the
will-to-live, not in the sense of egoism, but in the sense of
complete devotion to life and
pains, active participation
its
in the business of living, in the advancement of culture and
progress. All this is to be provisional, a preparation for the

grand finale of cosmic will-negation. The progress of culture
and intelligence will disclose to men in increasing numbers
and measure the essential infelicity of life. The
in increasing
largest part of the Unconscious Spirit manifests itself in

humanity and exceeds the will objectified in organic and in-
organic nature. When, as a result of progressive pessimistic
enlightenment, humanity's will-denying power comes to out-
weigh the world-affirming power objectified in unenlightened
'
nature, and when furthermore the consciousness of mankind
has been completely awakened to the folly of volition and the
misery of existence, and has conceived a resistless yearning
1
''for the peace and painlessnoss of non-existence, and when, as

a third condition, perfected communication between the
peoples of the earth has made a simultaneous common re-
solve possible, humanity will be able, by one universal act
of will-denial at the proper moment, to vote the world out
of being.
The boldness of this young recruit's strategy roused

general amazement; the more so as it was intended to crown
"
a philosophy of speculative results according to the induc-
tive method of physical science." The assumption involved in
Hartmann's first condition that the world-negating will-
power of disillusioned humanity should exceed the world-
affirming will-power of the rest of the cosmos was regarded
" 44
as one belonging to the region of airiest fancy," Even
Mainlander, boldly credulous in his own speculations, found
in Hartmann's Cosmic Extinction Vote good occasion for
satire: "From all parts of the world arrive telegrams. . . .
You burst out a cry of joy and rush forthwith to the Fran-
in
zosische Strasse and there, let us say, you wire ten thousand
'
dispatches to this effect World-redemption tomorrow noon
:
twelve o'clock sharp. All to commit suicide simultaneously,

weapons optional.' .
Immediately thereafter the Twi-
. .
45
light of the Gods begins." Hartmann stated at the outset
that by cosmic will-denial he did not mean a mere suicide of

humanity en masse. Already in 1874, when only thirty-two,
he was characterizing his first magnum opus as "a work of
" 46
youth, with its characteristic merits and defects. In a
note written some twenty years after the first publication of
' '
The Philosophy of the Unconscious, he explained his mean-
ing: universal will-denial and the end of the world-process,
he should be regarded, not naturalistically, but as a
said,
supernatural act "by which the Cosmic Being withdraws it-
self from its former will-manifestations and gives up, along
with the phenomenal world, also its laws and its apparent
"
substance (matter). 47
On this hyperphysical interpretation of cosmic extinction,
the third condition, mentioned above, of "a sufficient com-
munication between the peoples of the earth" by "the per-
fection and more dexterous application of technical dis-
coveries ... to allow of a simultaneous common resolve" 48
should have to be ruled out.It is in fact not only neglected

but explicitly omitted by Hartmann in his later writings. 49
Hartmann's eschatology has been the object of as particular
*
attention on the part of his critics as his doctrine of creation.'
The Universal World-Extinction Congress, the praise of this
best of all possible worlds because it admits of being voted
out of existence, and in particular Hartmann's comforting
description of this miserable world as "a painful mustard
plaster which the cosmic One-and-All applies to itself, in
order to draw out an inner pain and thus to eliminate it," 50
have led many to share the judgment of Kurt that "a more
muddled chaos of philosophical fancies ... is indeed very-
51
difficult to conceive." But it is not enough to cite page and
line, and laugh in scorn at this "mustard-plaster metaphys-
ics." When a philosopher explains that 'he could not pos-
sibly have meant' this or that passage written twenty, thirty
years earlier, it is much less to the point to confront him with

his rejected early words than to understand the full signif-
icance of his rejection of them. Hartmann's later explanation
of the cosmic will-extinction vote is very significant: it serves
to indicate an important shift in his axiology, a shift in
emphasis which we may observe generally in all his writings.
It is scarcely a shift from pessimism to optimism, but it is a
shift from general negation towards partial affirmation. The
hedonistic pessimist holds his ground to the end and does not
retreat beyond the ramparts of peiorism. But instead of
proceeding from hedonistic pessimism to a cosmic threnody,
as he did in his youth, the mature Hartmann keeps increas-
ingly in view the reality of the non-hedonic values of life.
John Stuart Mill's radical revision of Bentham did not
save him from continuing to believe himself to the end a
utilitarian. Hartmann's radical and increasing departure
not only from the letter but also from the spirit and the
flavor of Schopenhauer's axiology leaves him in similar con-
fusion regarding the full meaning of his own procedure.
The present exposition of Hartmann's account of value has
relied mainly on his first and on one of his last works. It
is to be trusted that the lack of uniformity which this double
source lends to an exposition of Hartmann's philosophy of
life has not been unduly accentuated. Should we boldly
confront the Grundriss der Axiologie with the latter part of the
Philosophy of the Unconscious, evidence would be abundant
of the real change in Hartmann's emphasis. Should we
further make use of the guidance which Hartmann himself
provides in the Grundriss der Axiologie by his copious refer-
ences to his earlier works, we would see that the shift is not
sudden but gradual and characterizes the entire course of
Hartmann's philosophical writings.
In what sense is Hartmann's thought as it progressively
utters a philosophy of negation? Hartmann negates
itself,
the reality of pleasure-capital in life; he would disclose the
illusion ofeudaemonological hopes; he points at this hope

and craving as feeders of egoism, and denounces egoism as the
hidden spring of all spurious morals. This is the first and the
lastword of his capital work, Das sittliche Bewusstsein. Be the
eudaemonistic pseudo-ethics positive or negative, individual
or social, earthly-empirical or transcendent, it is alike un-
availing. Morality demands the emancipation from the
preoccupation with happiness, and it culminates in the
ethics of redemption: "Real existence is the incarnation of
the Deity, the world-process records the passion of God in-
carnate and at the same time the road to the redemption of
the one crucified in the flesh; while morality is the cooperation
in the shortening of this pain and of the path of redemption."
In these closing words of Das sittliche Bewusstsein, Hart-
mann's philosophy of religion is forecast. The fundamental
postulate of religion as of morality is "pessimism in its
broadest scope ": 52 not the pessimism of the Gospels, which
Hartmann calls Entrustungspessimismus, that is, pessimism
springing largely from the intolerable sense of present miser-
able conditions, as due to man's frailty and sin, 53 but a meta-
physical pessimism more nearly allied to the Buddhist, lead-
ing to the emancipation from self-engrossment and its
illusions a pessimism more precisely with regard to the

attainability or the importance of happiness.
54
Egoistic craving is "the root of all evil striving." But
the world is not only in need of redemption, it is also capable
of being redeemed. To be sure, nothing is except God's will,
and God wills the evil in the world. But he
in this sense
wills it "not ... as something that should exist and last,
but as something that must be overcome, which exists just
77
in order to be negated. 55 Evil may thus be of value and
significance to morality as a spur to resistance. "Evil is the

pike in the fish-pond of the moral world-order, which keeps
the good carp from becoming too lazy and the pond from
w This
turning stagnant through their peaceful inactivity."
kakodicy, as Hartmann calls it, or teleological justification
of evil,is in no sense an everlasting Yea to actuality; it is
the grim recognition that life, is a life of toiland combat,

and that these are the conditions for the attainment of any
moral values. The we should keep in
justification of evil,
57
mind, is
teleological, not eudaemonological.
The world-process is thus "a unique great tragedy/'
"the world-tragedy of the divine spirit." 58 The world-
process is "the means of God's self-redemption from that in
him which should not be." 59 "God's redemption consists in
the universal denial of the will which to be attained through
is
the redemption of the world, i.e., in the return of the will

from a state of actuality to one of potentiality." 60 In this
work of redemption, man, emancipated from egoistic craving,
can participate, and is thus lifted up to over-individuality.
"Thus God can redeem the world only in so far as he himself
is redeemed thereby; he cannot redeem the world as such
without redeeming himself. Just as little can God redeem

me as individual personality. .But I can indeed redeem
. .
God, i.e., I can cooperate positively in the world-process

which is to bring about his redemption." 61
This idea is central and climacteric in Hartmann's "auto-
soteric,autonomous, cosmotragic, immanent religion of the
Absolute Spirit." 62 Hartmann contrasts his eschatology with
the Christian. The Christian theologians look forward to
the last day when the world will be no more and God will
again be all in all: but on one condition: "They must then
still God's undimmed
be there so as to share in the bliss of
63
glory." It is this subtle egoism which requires eradication.
Is this world a vale of sorrows, and what true Christian can
contest this charge? then surely the extinction of the cosmos,
the return from the actuality of existence to the pure poten-
tiality of the Absolute, is not an irreligious notion, nor does
itinvolve metaphysical nihilism. The denial of the world-

process is the affirmation of pure potentiality, and vice versa:
each of these is the negation of the other: which of the two is
preferred depends on our axiology. An extinguished cosmos is

to us Nothing, but as Schopenhauer told us, for those of us
who have denied the will, this our seemingly so real world,
with all its suns and milky ways is nothing. Pessimism
leads us to universalize our choice between the reality of the
willed cosmos and the willed no-cosmos. And this sublime
cooperation of man with God in the redemption-extinction

of the cosmos is to be accomplished precisely through the
gradual spread of pessimism, through the emancipation of

the human spirit from the gay or wistful illusion of hedonistic
64
egoistic optimism.
Certain initial difficulties confront us here. How is Hart-
mann's Unconscious to function as God, and what can be
the meaning of the divine self-redemption? Hartmann has
carefully and very elaborately disposed of theism; his God
is not personal, and if we speak of 'Him/ it is only for con-
venience in expression. But how is Hartmann's "concrete

monism" to include the character which he ascribes to God;
how can he write that "love is the Absolute's highest form
of moral manifestation?" 65 What love does the Absolute
Unconscious have to reveal? Well does Sommer point out:
"The Absolute has nothing to reveal, its essence consists only
in of blind Will and logical Idea;
an inexpressible composition
individuals are utterly devoid of love, for their essence is
engrossed in egoism and inbred impulses and instincts of the
loveless Unconscious; love is quite groundless in this cheer-
66
less and desolate view of the world." As a matter of fact,
however, Hartmann's view of life is not cheerless; he does
conceive the world-process as one of divine redemption
through self-emancipated love and through cultural progress
in the world. Certainly if we hold Hartmann to his early
text, his redemption is not possible, and his critics are right
in treating his doctrine of redemption as a grotesque pendant
to the fantastic eschatology of The Philosophy of the Uncon-
scious. But Hartmann's later axiology does serve to indicate
the necessary revision of his earlier metaphysics. This
revision is not executed by Hartmann in explicit terms;
instead, he endeavors to fit and adjust, or pours new wine
into old bottles.
Some of his critics have rated him an important philosopher
not because but in spite of his pessimism, or have regarded
the latter merely as Hartmann's personal reflection of the
Zeitgeist: the young German of the fifties and sixties writes
of this misbegotten cosmos; the man of later and more hope-
67
ful days is the evolutionary optimist. Certainly we may
note a decided change in Hartmann's procedure. The philoso-
pher who had condemned the whole world-process because
it did not yield to man a balance of pleasure, is also the
philosopher who advocates the overcoming of eudaemonism,
theoretical and practical, as the prime condition of true
ethics and religion. He is not merely a eudaemonological
pessimist; he is an evolutionistic-teleological optimist.
also
Even with regard to pleasure his later designation of his
view is not superlative, but only comparative pessimism or
peiorism. With regard to the non-hedonic values of life he
inclines to optimism.
Hartmann's later philosophy of life is an example of what
real devotion to values is still open to one who has renounced
and discarded the quest This world of
of pleasure-values.
ours, as he views not a bower of happiness, but in it

it, is
intelligence may aspire to the attainment of genuine values

and, as we have seen, its very evils may well be a challenge to
our spirit to negate them, be it for that purpose necessary
to negate the world-process itself. This negation of the world-
process, again, comes to mean, not a solemn world-congress

to vote the world out of existence, nor anything literally or

Even if it were possible for united
allegorically catastrophic.
humanity to put a full stop to the present world-process,
would the redemption so conceived be final? The absolute
Unconscious cannot be extinguished; it may once again
become manifested in a world-process; opposed alogical
will-activities may once again collide and recoil, giving rise
to consciousness, and raising the curtain on another cosmic
tragedy. Be the actors in that tragedy as pessimistically en-
lightened and as brave as ourselves, their cosmic extinction
vote may, in turn, prove no more final than ours. Hartmann
to be sure reasoned that the chances of such a repetition of
the world-cycle are at worst even, and the probability ^.
"That an number of such epochs of actual
indefinitely large
existence (Buddhist kalpas) should proceed from God's
eternal being, is extremely improbable (for n number of
68
epochs, the probability would be ^)." Hartmann insists
on the validity of this reasoning and adheres to his initial
judgment that the chances of world-redemption diminish
progressively and "the probability
~
becomes so small that
it is practically sufficient for consolation."
69
The comfort
and the logic of this reasoning seem alike dubious.
But we should not allow Hartmann's use of allegorical-
liturgical speech in his philosophy of religion to confuse us

regarding the changed meaning of his ideal of redemption-
through-negation. This ideal in his pessimistic philosophy
comes to mean the continuous resistance to evil, characteris-
tic ofman's higher spiritual life. Within the frame of his
own concrete monism, Hartmann is entertaining an idea that
corresponds to that of the denial of worldliness in the theism
So Paul Christ observes
of the Christian gospel of salvation.
that "Whatever is true, beautiful, and good in Hartmann's
ethics is derived, not from his pessimism, but from an
antagonistic and ineradicable idealism, an unconscious

" 70 "
Christianity. Whosoever shall seek to gain his life shall
lose but whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it." n
it,
Our value scale is not completely applicable to the Abso-

lute. The Absolute does not know; for it there is no beauty
nor ugliness, no good nor evil. Even as the object of religious
worship, it is only as within-the-world that we conceive the
Absolute as God, and then we conceive of his world-woe as a

postulate of religion. But world-woe does not signify a
meaningless, valueless world: "The teleological scale and
that of pleasure-pain are nowise conflicting in the Absolute.
72
In the Absolute eudaemonology and teleology coincide."
All this to be sure is hypothetical; and while phenomenal
comparative pessimism or peiorism remains even if we reject
the doctrine of the Absolute as unwarranted speculation, the
evolutionistic-teleological optimism does require for its full
justification the axiology of the Absolute. Hartmann's bold
venture in absolutism is thus seen to concern his vindication
of the positive values and his teleological optimism.
His use of the term 'God' does not imply a belief in an
absolute consciousness or personal world-author or director.
In his Grundriss der Metaphysik 73 he lists eleven arguments
in favor ofan absolute consciousness, only to criticize them
turn and to advance eighteen against the belief, to his
all in
mind an adequate assortment. The spiritual activity of

Hartmann's God is unconscious and this should be kept in
mind in all our discussion of his account of God's world-woe,
divine grace and divine redemption goal. These are all to
be taken in a decidedly Pickwickian sense. The very use of
the term Erlosung, redemption, in Hartmann's philosophy
has been regarded as an impertinence, "a hopeless offspring
" 74 "
of pessimism thus jStefJes insists that Hartmann teaches
;
75
desperation and absolute resignation, not true redemption."
Hartmann opposes teleological pessimism as firmly if not
as repeatedly as eudaemonological optimism. That the world
PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 33d
is aimless he denies as vigorously as that its aim is the

attainment of pleasure. The hopeless view of life without
a goal is to him intolerable: suicide would be the normal
corollary of such a philosophy. He rejects such a view even
when it restricts itself to a phenomenalistic form and proceeds
to quietism. If teleological pessimism is hopeless desperation,
hedonistic optimism makes for weakness, softness, cowardice
in the presence of pain; it is a check to heroic endeavor and a
bar to cultural advance. A bower of happiness may prove
more intolerable than our poor world with all its troubles.
Hartmann quotes Schiller:
Some fear and some hope and some sorrow:

Else how live from today till tomorrow
Else how bear the dull load of a life
Unrelieved by some change or by strife? 76
But man is too weak a creature to cope with a world which he

believes to be one of unmitigated woe. Such a dismal view
may also lead to suicide. Between the two extremes Hart-
mann proposes his comparative pessimism or peiorism with
regard to happiness: it discourages softness and hardens
man into a heroic mould. Thus Hartmann is led to his "most
"
auspicious constellation a cheerful temper with a theoretical
:
peiorism; and thus also we reach his practical vindication of

his view of life; not miserabilism, not Weltschmerz or despera-
tion, but, with no disdain and little hope of happiness, firm
devotion to the pursuit of the higher aims and values that
ennoble life and redeem the world by overcoming evil and
defying frustration. The worth of life, "eudaemonologically
" 77
disintegrated, is teleologically once more restored.
Particular interest attaches to the fact that Hartmann,
pessimist though he is regarding the attainability of positive
happiness, and rather lukewarm and grudging in his affirma-
tion of attained moral, aesthetic, or religious values, never
hesitates on the reality of teleological value: the reality of
aims, goals in the universe which render our present activity
significant. In thus emphasizing real purposiveness in the
world, he is inconsistent; for what purpose, what end or aim
or teleology could the Unconscious have? That he insists
notwithstanding on his teleological optimism is doubly
significant: despite his pessimism and alongside his alogical

Absolute is this reality of the reach after value, this purpo-
siveness and self-transcendence essential to value which he
recognizes clearly in the world-process, even if he is unable to
provide adequately for them in his metaphysics.
Avery enlightening process of development is thus to be
observed in Hartmann's thought. It manifests the inad-
equacy of eudaemonistic axiology. But it does more. It

show aesthetics, ethics, and religion as necessarily resting
on the metaphysical affirmation of value, on teleological
optimism; it shows that Hartmann, as he recognizes more
intimately the reality of the higher values, shifts the pes-
simistic emphasis in his estimate of the world. Schopenhauer's
utter despair of the world is rejected by Hartmann, but
while sharing the teleological-evolutionistic optimism of the
Hegelians, he would point out to them that this sort of op-
timism does not preclude hedonistic pessimism. Hegel him-
self, Hartmannmaintains, is virtually, if not in outspoken
terms, a eudaemonological pessimist: not outspoken because
of his extreme rationalism and his preoccupation with the
78
eulogy of the Absolute Idea. More alive than Hegel toithe
actuality of the irrational in the universe, more systematic
and logical and less impressionistic a mind than Schopen-
hauer, Hartmann gives us a philosophy of life which, if it
lacks the opposite virtues of the one or the other, escapes
in its middle course also some of their main defects.
The change in the architect's plan revealed in the progres-
sive erection of this immense philosophical structure is as
instructive as it is sometimes exasperating. Itself the record

of an axiology gradually modified to meet the demands of

ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion, Hartmann's
system reveals, altogether in spite of its author's intentions,
but perhaps better than any other system of thought, the
limitations of pessimism. In this particular respect it is even
more instructive than the philosophy of Schopenhauer.
The progressive revision of its negations is a delineation of the
character and scope of the different values which our judg-
ment of the world discloses to us. The serious embarrass-
ments in which Hartmann is involved in his ethics and
philosophy of religion are due to his insistence on gathering
grapes and figs from his thorns and thistles, or rather he
finds figs and grapes on his alleged thistles and thorns, and
would have the full benefit of his crop without allowing his
trees the better names which they have earned for them-
selves. This metaphysical ungraciousness need not mis-
lead us. The positive statement of theory of values in Hart-
mann's philosophy is the more informing because it proceeds
from an initial attitude of negation, and the delineation of
the values is perhaps the more vindicating just because it
has been, as it were, exacted and delivered only on demand.
CHAPTER XIII
A GERMAN SLOUGH OF DESPOND
We have noted already the conglomerate character of

Schopenhauer's system, which even his genius was not able
to fuse into a unitary whole. There is a sort of dramatic unity
in the action of Schopenhauer's philosophical tragedy, but
it has not been articulated logically, and those whom it most
moved to thought set their minds to overcome its dilemmas.

Schopenhauer's correspondence records his consuming desire
for expert and ardent disciples, letter-perfect and loyal
'
to the letter of his doctrine. But, for all his apostles' and
'evangelists,' and notwithstanding the broad and sustained
popular interest in his philosophy, an interest in which
Kant alone among his German predecessors excells him,
Schopenhauer did not inaugurate a definite and lasting
philosophical tradition. Who are the competent orthodox

followers of Schopenhauer? The Schopenhauerians are mostly
and differ from each other in the parts of their
'of the left,'
common master's doctrine which they deny or neglect in
order to bear down on some other parts or aspects. We need
only to consider the outstanding features of "this system,
constructed mosaic-like from a priori aperqus;" l its ultra-
Kantian subjective idealism, the individualistic leanings of
its monistic metaphysics, its irrationalistic voluntarism, and
its near-Platonic objective idealism, its partial and very
misleading materialistic bias, and its dominant pessimistic
tone, and we should not be surprised at the great variety
342
A GERMAN SLOUGH OF DESPOND 343
of possible revised versions which speculative zeal has

evolved.
It is instructive to note that even the most intimate and
perhaps on the whole the most loyal of Schopenhauer's
immediate disciples, Julius Frauenstadt, his literary executor
and the first editor of his Works, departs not inconsiderably
from the teachings of the master. This is due not so much to
his early Hegelianism, which he did his best to forget, 2 but
rather to his desire to achieve a logically consistent Schopen-
hauerianism. His principle of method is the following:
"
Where a philosopher makes two contradictory assertions,
both cannot be accepted for his real and true meaning, but
only one of them, and the other must then be regarded as
7
abandoned by his true meaning/ 3 Frauenstadt would thus
deliberately ignore the plurality of conflicting motives in
Schopenhauer's philosophy, all genuine, and requiring for a
true synthesis more than the use of a blue pencil. His pro-
cedure is thus radically different from Hartmann's, who
rightly takes him to task for making Schopenhauer's thought
" 4
less inconsistent but also emptier and more meager."
While Mainllinder and Bahnsen, as we shall see, develop
Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will into a pluralistic meta-

physics, Frauenstadt on the whole adheres to the dominantly
monistic tone of The World as Will and Idea. But, in distinc-
tion from the determined pessimism of these two, Frauenstadt
departs so far from his master as to fight shy of the very
term 'pessimism.' He resists the near-Brahmanic illusionism
of Schopenhauer's subjective-idealistic theory of knowledge,
and with his more serious trust in knowledge is to be found
a more positive estimate of the world-process. Like Schopen-
hauer he champions compassion, but his ethics does not point
to a nihilistic finale; he tones down decidedly his master's
threnody.
In order to proceed from Schopenhauer towards a philoso-
phic affirmation, one needs a different method and a different
attitude towards Schopenhauer than is evidenced in Frauen-
stadt's attempted revision of his master's philosophy. Carl
Du an idea, fertile with possibilities which are
Prel proposes
not adequately worked out. He would welcome suffering
as a discipline of the individual will that should bring it to
renunciation; his Nirvana, however, is not one of annihilation
but "the transcendental order of things, which is also not
attained by quietism, but rather by restless activity on the
battlefield. . Not in itself, therefore, should the will-to-
. .
live be renounced, though indeed every stage of progress

attained by it should be renounced, not in favor of the
nothing, but in favor of a higher stage, and that this may
happen have we placed ourselves in this world of preponderat-
&
ing suffering." More
instructive in our study of the after-
math ofSchopenhauer the vaster and more critical under-
is
taking of Eduard von Hartmann discussed in our last chapter.

We shall now turn to examine briefly two really amazing
developments of Schopenhauerian will-metaphysics: Main-

lander's individualistic salvation-philosophy of the Will-to-
die, and Bahnsen's dialectical irrational pluralism, the
philosophy of irreducible cosmic contradiction and conflict.
To offset and to set off the heroic speculative irresponsibility
of these two, a briefer mention will first be made of a more
moderate apologist for pessimism, Agnes Taubert.
II
Agnes Taubert's father was, like Hartmann's, a general of

artillery. The friendship of the parents brought the young
people together, and from the very first Eduard and Agnes
shared a common attitude towards life and a common pur-
pose. They married in 1871. Agnes was not only a devoted
wife and mother, but also an effective champion of pessimism
on her own account. How effective and how independent,
may be judged from the fact that her little book of 164 pages,
Der Pessimismus und seine Gegnerj which appeared in 1873,
four years before her death, won for her a distinct, if modest,
place in the history of nineteenth century pessimism. While
writing explicitly in answer to some eight critics of Hart-
mann, she did not write as Hartmann's wife; the initial A.
Taubert on the title-page hid her identity from those not
intimate with Hartmann's family, and he did not go out of
his way it, so that for years writers referred to her
to reveal
as a man. has been suggested that Agnes Taubert did
It
wield a masculine pen. She wrote more clearly and more
vigorously than Hartmann; Heymons, their publisher,
thought that she influenced her husband's writing for the
better by making it more direct and to the point. Hartmann
declared that she first set the pessimistic issue on the scientific
path.
Taubert eschews romancing, metaphysical or other flights,
and keeps resolutely to experience. The question of the value
of life she would answer by surveying the alleged sources of
it. The question is considered in explicitly hedonistic terms:
"Is worth living?" means "Does life yield positive hap-
life
piness?" She counts her many blessings one by one, and

finds them mostly misnomers. Youth, health, freedom,
prosperity, love and benevolence, enjoyment of nature,
aesthetic and moral satisfaction, the joys of the hereafter,
social progress: these leave the balance of happiness decidedly
negative. Taubert's survey is more objective than that of

her betters; she does not gloat miserably over this miserable
world, and she is not grudging in her recognition of weal
wherever she finds it. No optimist could desire a more
eloquent account of the improvement in the everyday life
of the European masses during the last two centuries than is
to be found in her tenth chapter. Progress is a reality; living
conditions are astonishingly better. But they have not made
men happier. As Schopenhauer told us, the pleasure-bent
our racing desires outstrip our satisfactions
will is insatiate;
through social progress, and leave us increasingly discon-

tented.
which sends people
It is precisely the optimistic delusion
and dooms them to disappoint-
in futile pursuit of happiness
ment and discontent. Pessimism, far from being a cheerless
philosophy of life, is rather the source of true consolation in
such a world as ours. For is not this, after all, the one im-
portant question: "How are we, the disillusioned, to live on?"
To one who has truly perceived the futility of the pleasure-
hunt, can bring no disenchantment. Freed from their
life
ignoble attachment to pleasure, the true moral worth and

meaning and dignity of life, in friendship, science, and art,
can express themselves and be realized. Without illusions
and, if not gaily, at least cheerfully, men can devote their
energies to the repression of selfishness and the alleviation
of crying needs and flagrant miseries; even the available
pleasures in life are doubly cherished in their dark frame, and

no petulant discontent poisons and degrades human life.
To disillusioned and deliberate intelligence pessimism is thus
not only a gospel of peace but a call to noble activity. Accord-
"
ing to Taubert, pessimism stimulates us most effectively
not only to endure life, but to live it to the full in a manner
6
truly worthy of man."
"
Hartmann criticized this hopefulness: Taubert will not
hear of a negative goal of evolution, but rather finds the im-
manent aim of the culture-process in the alleviation of suffer-
ing, and thus admits ... a certain harmony between the
common weal and the development of civilization, in de-
cided contrast to my view of the antinomy between these
7
two." All the same we are bound to note the cheerful
which comes occasionally, and rather reluctantly, from
strain
Hartmann's violoncello, and we may wonder whether, in the
relation of Eduard von Hartmann and Agnes Taubert, the

man's view of life was brightened or the woman's darkened.
"
In Sully's judgment, Taubert reads very much like an
optimist who has made a mistake by stumbling into a system
of pessimistic philosophy, and who vainly strives to extricate
himself from the treacherous bog." 8
III
Schopenhauer's attempted revision and completion of

Kant's philosophy involved him, as we have se^n, in serious
difficulties. If the world of our experience is merely phenom-
enal, appearance, and our intelligence merely the tool of

the one universal will-to-live which alone is ultimately real,
if accordingly no change in character through enlightenment
is conceivable, then how could we ever explain or admit the
possibility of salvation through individual will-denial?
A '
reverent disciple of Kant and standing on Schopen-
hauer's shoulders,' but proceeding in a different direction from
Hartmann, Philipp Batz (1841-1876), who wrote under the
name of Mainlander, endeavors to provide a sound philo-
sophical basis for his unwavering confidence in the reality
and finality of self-salvation. Here is a profound pessimist
profoundly convinced that there is a way out. The individual
will is real; it can change its character through enlighten-
ment and attain redemption redemption through final
self-extinction! This philosophy, as fantastic a fabric as
speculative gloom perhaps ever spun out, is a metaphysical
system of voluntaristic pluralism of the Will-to-die. Main-
lander entitled his work The Philosophy of Redemp-
tion.
He sets out from the indisputable reality of the individual

will. My own reality is alone axiomatic to
me; the reality of
all else is for me an inference, a conclusion, a conjecture,
possibly an illusion. And when I say, I alone am indisputably
real, I do not mean my body, my mind, my world : I mean the
individual will which constitutes the ultimate reality and
inmost kernel of my being. This, Mainlander holds, is
the great truth; Kant and the Buddha approach it from
different directions: Kant, by proving that all I can know,
the world and myself in it, is phenomenal appearance; Bud-
dha, by completing this truth with the doctrine of Karma:
Karma, the individual will-to-live. This last, in
real alone is
Mainlander's judgment, based exclusively upon his own
peculiar interpretation of Spence Hardy'stwo works, Manual
of Buddhism and Eastern Monachism, is the first axiom of
esoteric Buddhism. He asks us also to believe that it is
likewise the first truth of esoteric Christianity. Though
Christ taught the reality of the external world, which Buddha
denied, the central truth of both is the same: in Buddha,
the inexpugnable reality of his karmic will; in Christ, the
incarnation of God in him, God's only begotten Son. When
"
Christ teaches, Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but
my words shall not pass away," he, like Buddha, is teaching
absolute individualism: "I and the Father are one" "I,
Buddha, am God." The same axiom is uttered in a dark
passage in the Upanishads, which is quoted by Schopen-
hauer: Hae omnes creaturae in totum ego sum, et praeter me
g
aliud ens non est.
So then we are told: for each individual there is only one

indubitable reality: his own will. Gautama, to himself alone
real, is to Mainlander perhaps a phantom; and to me now,
writing atmy desk, they are both phantoms, and my poor

essay about them likewise a phantom; but indubitably real
is my own self, my will: indubitably real to myself, but, in
a phantom to you, gentle reader Is this philosophical
its turn, !
madness? Mainlander answers: "This is not an insane stand-

10
point, but only one that could drive one to insanity." It
is the standpoint of the mystics. So Angelus Silesius:
I know that, but for me, God would not last a wink:
Were I no more, He too must desolately sink! ll
The essential egoism of the individual will, its self-engross-

ment and self-centeredness, is thus clearly accounted for.
If we assume the reality of others, it is in order to make
clear to ourselves the reality of our own will-efforts and will-
conflicts. Buddha's view of others as really in need of re-
demption was essential to his own self-redemption. Thus

Mainlander would reconcile what he calls esoteric and exo-
teric Buddhism. We begin with the indisputable reality of
our own individual will, and we proceed to the assumption
of other real individual wills.
But whence is this universe of coexisting individual wills?
Mainlander's answer to this question explains both his
pessimism and his doctrine of salvation. He recognizes in
the universe only clashing individual wills, and no God; his
philosophy, as he tells us in the very preface to his work, is
atheism. But it is also theism. While there is no God, in or
out of the world, there was a God. This pluralistic world,
which excludes the present reality of God, demands the
assumption of God's pre-cosmic reality, as a condition of its
coming into being.
We come now to Genesis I in Mainlander's philosophy and
religion. "In the beginning was the Act/' was Faust's ver-
sion. It is also Mainlander's version. In the beginning was the
act, the deed of God. What God what deed? We can de-
scribe this pre-cosmic God as simple infinite unity. Its one
single deed was to will its extinction, Nichtsein. As simple

unity, however, God simply could not pass away. The ac-
complishment of this task required the disintegration or
splitting up of the pre-cosmic divine unity into a multiplicity
of individuals. This immense manifold world, then, has
come into being in order that in and through it God's Will-to-
die might be realized. So the first and last thing God ever did
was to die: the cosmos is the instrumentality and the process
of God's extinction: "God died, and his death was the life
"
of the World. One is reminded of the destiny of Pan Ku, in
old Chinese mythology. His death initiated the creation of
the world. "His breath became the wind; his voice, the thun-
der; his left eye, the sun; his right eye, the moon; his blood
flowed in rivers; his hair grew into trees and plants; his flesh
became the soil; his sweat descended as rain; while the para-
sites which infested his body were the origin of the human
12
race."
What is an individual will, then? Ostensibly a will-to-live,
unconscious or conscious drive or desire for self-preservation
and self-enhancement; really, however, it is a striving for
self-extinction, a will-to-die. This will-to-die, which Main-
lander recognizes even in gases, fluids, and inorganic solids,
is exhibited ever more clearly as we
the scale of being.
rise in
In place of the law of the conservation of energy, he holds

that energy is ever diminished and becomes extinct. The
working out of the pre-cosmic God's expiration is manifest
most completely in human life. Insatiate desire, ever luring
us on the hunt for pleasure, and ever disclosing its futility,
war and cruel industrial oppression of man by man, poverty,
sickness, failure, old age, "the heartaches and the thousand
natural shocks that flesh is heir to," all goad us into a realiza-
tion of the essential infelicity of common sensual life. On
the other hand, the occasional blessedness of whole-hearted
benevolence, the bliss of the saint, the exquisite joy of
aesthetic creation and contemplation, the pure perception
of truth in science, the generous struggle for the emanci-
pation of man from political and economic oppression:
these all serve to fill us with a wistful sense of what life
would be, were it not futile individual craving. Our very
joys, even the noblest, serve to confirm us in our essential
will-to-die; they show us what is better than insatiate
desire, and thereby disclose to us what is best of all and

alone good in the end.
"He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow," wrote
Ecclesiastes, and Mainlander's estimate of the course of
human culture sustains his view. "The principal law of
civilization is pain; the will is thus weakened and spirit is
enhanced. It continually educates man, and makes him
ever more susceptible to pain. Civilization
. . . kills. . . .
As bleached bones mark the road through the desert, so the

monuments of collapsed culture-realms, indicating the death
of millions, mark the course of civilization." The cultural and
spiritual perfection of man is a preparation for the rejection
of life: "To be a
philosopher, means to learn to die: this is
the last conclusion of wisdom." 13 The eyes of the sage in-
cline towards the grave. So, in the poem Ldzaro of the
Colombian poet Jos6 Asuncion Silva, the dead Lazarus weeps
for joy when Jesus brings him back to life, but four weeks
later find him wandering among the tombs of the old cem-
etery, wishing he were there again.

A pessimista man who is ripe for death. Through en-
is
lightenment he has been emancipated from the egoistic in-

satiate greed; his will has thus been transformed, and moral
enthusiasm has possessed his being. This complete change of
character, as Mainlander maintains against his master
Schopenhauer, is not only possible, but is an outstanding fact
essential to morality and religion. This utter penetratidh and
possession of the will by the truth that life is an evil and that
it were better not to be: this is the philosophical denial of the
And as man perceives unmistakably

individual will-to-live. 14
the essential evil of
life, so he also sees clearly the way out.
The "great sad voice" from the dark pulpit of James Thom-
son's City of Dreadful Night has a word of grim cheer:
O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief;

A few short years must bring us all relief:
Can we not bear these years of labouring breath?
But you would not this poor life fulfill,
if
Lo, you are free to end it when you will,

Without the fear of waking after death.
Mainlander does not agree with Schopenhauer regarding

suicide. He would not bar the exit which even the Stoic left
open to overtaxed misery. But, while he rejects Schopen-
hauer's idea that the individual life is only a phenomenon
and that the cosmic will survives the act of suicide, and holds
against his master that the individual will is real and that it
does find final end of all its sorrows in death, Mainlander
points to a higher path out of the stinking morass of life.
For how can I seek extinction for myself when I leave others
after me in the bog? Indeed only the childless one is really
extinguished in suicide, for the others continue their wretched

careers in their children. The suicide deprives himself of the
chance of teaching others the true gospel. To end life really,
we must end its perpetuation. This is Mainlander's sovereign
remedy: complete continence, and he becomes the avowed
arch-apostle of virginity as supreme and final virtue. The
hour of destiny is not the hour of death, but the hour when
man faces the question: shall I or shall I not become respon-
sible for the beginning of another life, for the forging of an-
other link in the wretched chain of individual existence?
The eulogy of virginity he finds in the gospel of Buddha and
of Christ, of all great and true religion, and the wisest of
men have recognized it, even while admitting their own failure
to attain unto the lofty practice. He quotes to this effect
a striking page from Humboldt's memoirs. Complete chastity
delivers us from "the bond that binds us most firmly to the
world": 16 and his one gratitude is that he has been enabled
in word and deed to share and to answer the call of Orestes,
in Goethe's Iphigenia aus Tauris, which he uses as the motto
for the metaphysical sections in his philosophy:
I thank you, O ye gods,

That you have destined me in childlessness
To die my death. And hearken thou to me,
Love not the sun nor yet the stars too dearly.
Come, down with me to the dark realm descend. . . .
Come, childless, guiltless follow me, descend 16 !
Mainlander, ranking with Goethe the poet of Parzival,

which he calls the most profound poem in the world, would
revive the Order of the Holy Grail, consecrated to the pur-
suit of the four cardinal virtues: love of country, justice,
lovingkindness, and chastity, the last being the summit of

perfection:
If the Grail's sign thou wouldst bear,
Woman's love thou must forswear. 17
He urges the virgin soul, man or woman, to prize its unflecked

purity above all else in life he counsels those who are already
:
parents at least to direct their children into the path of child-

less salvation. He does not advocate the hermit's life for
all. "One withdraw completely from the world, will
will
escape into solitude and will mortify himself like a religious

penitent, convinced that only a constantly humbled will
can persist in renunciation; another one will keep on with
his calling; a third will, just as before, dry the tears of the
unfortunate with word and deed; a fourth will fight for his
nation or for all mankind, will invest his utterly disdained
life in the work of hastening the attainment of the ideal state
in which alone the redemption of all can take place." 18
So Mainlander, in the prophet's seat, surveys the future.
Socialism, as it brings ever nearer economic justice and
universal education, will bring men ever nearer the light.
A time will come when all men will freely enter into the world
of Shakespeare and Goethe, will understand Kant and Scho-
penhauer, will learn the truth of life from Buddha and Christ.
A time will come when men and women will live together as
brothers and sisters, in pure intellectual union without any
carnal stain, working side by side, or else in solitude, for
the hastening of the great extinction for which the whole
creation groans. And in the death of everyone that dies
chaste, the pre-cosmic God's will-to-die will have attained
unto fulfillment. Thus ever nearer on the horizon gleams the
)
New Jerusalem of esoteric Christianity, gleams the Buddhist

Nirvana, the City of Peace in Extinction. "In the heart
of things, the immanent Philosopher sees in the entire cosmos
only the deepest longing for complete extinction; it is as if

he heard clearly the call that pierces all the celestial spheres:
Redemption Redemption Death to our Life and the cheer-
! ! !
" 19
ing reply :
you all will find extinction and will be redeemed !
I have been content to give in brief outline the pessimistic

philosophy of salvation of one who has not been sure even
of a sentence in the histories of philosophy. Its fantastic
quality and its speculative unrestraint lend it a certain ex-

warped versions of
otic interest, and, despite its frequently
philosophic and religious commonplaces, it as frequently

manifests keen and revealing insight. Mainlander's book
needs wide margins, for the reader who is not carried away
by the author's ardent style is bound to register serious
objections. proceed from the declaration of the ultimate
Why
reality of the individual wills to the assumption of a pre-
cosmic simple divine unity; and what can be the metaphysical
status of a reality whose entire career is chronicled in the
one statement that it willed its own extinction? What basis
in fact isthere in this "scientifically established atheism
and pessimism" for the doctrine of the gradual diminution
of energy and for the pessimistic-salvational exploitation
of this doctrine? Should one criticize, or should one merely
state, without comment, Mainlander's version of esoteric
Christianity as cosmotheistic atheism? In the Doctrine of
the Trinity he makes a "small grammatical substitution";
Athanasius taught
"
: God is, the Christ is, the Holy Ghost is. "
Mainlander: "God was; Christ is ( = this World); the Holy
Ghost is God's Way to Extinction!" 20 Or should one take
any notice of the fantastic if somewhat shamefaced Utopian-
ism of Mainlander's esoteric evangel? The reign of God the
Father lasted about 4000 years, and the reign of Christ about
half as long, 2000 years: therefore the reign of the Holy
Ghost should be half of that or about 1000 years, at the end
of which time all mankind is to be saved through extinction !
Mainlander informs us further that, after mankind's cessa-

tion through complete continence, animal life and plant life
will follow in the path of extinction, and then the lower
forms of being, until all that is shall lapse into non-being,
21
absolute void, nihil negativum. "It is finished!"
With regard to Mainlander's sovereign remedy, Hartmann
has observed, much to the point, that, if it is precisely through
enlightenment that one is led to recognize and to embrace
the ideal of complete chastity, this ideal will be embraced,
at least at the outset, only by a select enlightened minority.
Should these select few die childless, it would only mean that
generation after generation the utterly unredeemed sensual
majority of mankind will survive and reproduce itself, so
that, instead of leading to the salvation of mankind, Main-
"
lander's plan, if followed, would simply serve to make
humanity more and more animal, would contribute to the
ascendency of stupidity and brutality over intelligence and
22
morality." Hartmann has likewise pointed out Main-
lander's failure to reconcile his two moral principles of egoism,
necessary expression of the genuinely real individual will,
and the individual's whole-hearted devotion to the common
weal, to the Whole: the reconciliation of the endeavor after
self-redemption with the struggle for universal redemption
thus remains unachieved. 23
The peculiar significance and interest of Mainlander's
views are due to his fundamental attitude expressed in the
very title of his work, Die Philosophic der Erlosung. He is a
pessimistic Salvationist. He begins with Schopenhauer's

gospel of deliverance from the will-to-live, and to this end
endeavors to revise and reconstruct the metaphysical ground-
work of his master. Becker, Frauenstadt, and other disciples
of Schopenhauer speculated how the cosmic will could be
really curbed and denied; Mainlander asked: Since the will
does really curb and extinguish itself, what sort of a will is it?
His individualistic metaphysics is the answer. Salvationism
isthe central note of Mainlander's thought, and this salva-
tionism leads him occasionally to vacillate in his pessimism.
Even aside from the fact that he confessed his own happiness
in his pessimistic chaste apostolate, and as late as one month
"
before his death wrote of his peaceful solitude" in which he
24
was "so unutterably happy," his objective estimate of
human not as pessimistic as either Schopenhauer's or
life is
Hartmann's. In his critique of the latter, an attack abound-

ing in clean hits, but marred by bitter sarcasm and invective,
'
he challenges Hartmann's first stage of illusion.' Not all
alleged happiness is illusory, he tells the philosopher of the
Unconscious: "You treat the pleasures of art and science as
illusory; here I must decidedly dissent. These pleasures are
so pure and fine that, if man could abide in them forever, life
would be the highest good." 26 But Mainlander looks forward

with assurance to the day when every workingman will know
his Goethe and his Kant, and he firmly holds the will to be
capable of transformation through enlightenment. If art

and science and the higher spiritual life generally can be made
the increasingly universal possession of man, and if in them
are pure bliss and beauty, then how could, or why should
the progressively enlightened will reject life? Instead of wil-
ling the cessation of high spiritual endeavor in order to end
the coarse miseries of life, may it not, should it not rather, at
whatever cost of pain or apparent outward defeat, cherish

of life, and because of them
and cleave to the higher values
bless life for the gold despite the dross?
These hints of possible lines of criticism may serve to
indicate the almost bewildered sense of cosmological and
axiological confusion with which the reader of Mainlander is
left. Particularly striking here is the significant feature of
philosophies of despair to which we cannot too often call
attention, for the further study of it may well lead us to the
very heart of our problem. Pessimism is in Mainlander's
case a sort of devotion. He cherishes so passionately the
higher values that to see them contaminated by the coarse
fabric of life drives him to black despair; while on the other
hand, his perception of his own ability to understand and

to reject the polluted evil business of living gives him a grim
sense of exaltation, akin to religious fervor, which has a sus-
taining quality of its own. On Mainlander's altar of nothing-
ness the flame of pessimistic devotion burns so ardently that
the spectator ponders and pities, but remains unconvinced
regarding the finality of the philosophy of despair.
IV
Julius Frauenstadt modifies and mollifies the pessimism
of his master Schopenhauer; but Julius Bahnsen departs from
Schopenhauer's letter only in order to emphasize the asperity
of his spirit. Towards the end of his life Schopenhauer
assumed pontifical manner: in Bahnsen he certainly had a
a
26
disciple 'more Catholic than the Pope.' Yet this ultra-
Schopenhauerian was brought up on Hegelianism, and, at
least formally, undertakes the same technical task which
engaged Hartmann: a synthesis of Hegel and Schopenhauer.

A comparison of the radically different ways in which this
task is accomplished by Bahnsen and by Hartmann would
exhibit the essential opposition between the two and would
be of added interest owing to the fact that Bahnsen was
stimulated in the delineation of his theory by his contact with
Hartmann.
Hartmann, as we have observed, regards Hegel's Idea and
Schopenhauer's Will as the two aspects or attributes of the
one substantial metalogical Unconscious. In his own philoso-
phy, he believes, Hegel and Schopenhauer correct and com-
plete each other. Bahnsen, however, would revise Hegel by
capitalizing the irrational or Schopenhauerian moment in
the Hegelian dialectic, and he would complete Schopenhauer
by excising from his philosophy the last vestiges of rational-
ism. The Hegelian dialectic, as we know, is a process in which
the essentially rational character of reality is progressively
elicited. This logical character of the dialectic Hartmann
accentuates and adopts as one fundamental character of his
Unconscious. This logical character precisely is what Bahnsen
repudiates: the dialectic of the world-process, according to
him, is not a logical dialectic, explicitly or implicitly; the
ultimate reality is Will, and it is not logical in any ultimate
sense. The dialectic of the world-process is the clash of Will
with itself, an and irremediable conflict; it is a
irrational
dialectic of Will and Bahnsen calls it a Realdialek-
actuality.
tik, to distinguish it from the mere concept-dialectic of the
Hegelians. Thus he would out-Hegel Hegel in the interests
27
of his master Schopenhauer.
The essential doctrine of Bahnsen affirms the clash
and
and negates
contradiction in the Will-Reality of the world,
its fundamentally logical character. His mainwork is en-
titled Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt, and
its first volume begins with this quotation from Shakes-
peare's Troilus and Cressida:
O madness of discourse,
That cause sets up with and
against itself!
Bifold authority! where reason can revolt
Without perdition, and loss assume all reason

Without revolt: this is and is not. .
. .
. that a thing inseparate

. .
Divides more wider than the sky and earth. 28
There no meaning in the world-process, no far-off divine

is
event, no real teleology of whatever sort. Hartmann's

evolutionary optimism is thus entirely rejected by Bahnsen.
We cannot speak of development or purpose or final goal
in the universe: the world is not a cosmos but a chaos of
"
clashing will-strains, an inextricable tangle of contradic-
tions of the most tragic negativity." 29
The thoroughgoing irrationalism of Bahnsen leads him even
beyond his master. He casts aside the Kantian idealism
and the monism of Schopenhauer. The Will-Reality is not
one, and manifests in its activity no unity of character. The
Will eternally tears itself in self-partition (Selbstentzweiung) ;
reality is eternally at war with itself. "The logically impos-

sible is actual fact, and the logically necessary is in actuality
ruled out." 30 Schopenhauer's picture of history as an endless
cat-fight (Katzbalgerei) is here elaborated into a metaphysic:
"a pluralistic, anti-logical, real-dialectical individualism." 31
Irrational atheistic individualism, a world-view of the
meaningless eternally self-tormenting and self-rending chaos
of will-forces: a dismal view of a woeful and futile world:
miserabilism is a mild name for it. "The primal mystery
of the Will consists in this, that it finds peace nowhere except
in the unrest of ever-impetuous striving despite all frustra-
32
tion." unblushing and unreluctant pes-
Here at last is
simism; it
repudiates the notion of development as a vestige
of optimism, and would put no trust in salvation through
hope in progress or even through self-denial. Salvation

through art and science is likewise disdained as illusory:
these are no higher or deeper visions into the nature of reality;
in an irrational world they are vain phantoms, and the
thought of their ultimate futility only deepens the woe as it
poisons the initial joy of the enlightened mind. Even moral-
ity, compassion, denial of the will are no final goals, nor do
they avail to save us from the irremediably self-centered

and self-conflicting Will, "The law and the prophets demand
that I love my neighbor as myself: so much of selfishness must
needs remain in all benevolence." 33 To Hartmann's three
stages of illusion Bahnsen adds a fourth: the illusory hope
of any kind of redemption, whether through individual or
cosmic will-denial, here or hereafter, eudaemonologically
or teleologically: all these are vain, adolescent dreams of an
awakening from the nightmare of existence. The perversity
of the world is congenital and beyond repair. You may ob-
serve and delineate it: redeem it you cannot. "The goal of
all ideal striving is, essentially, the metaphysically impos-
34
sible."
Bahnsen's pessimistic individualism very naturally directed
his attention to characterology, in which he attained some
distinction. His character studies, and in particular his
sketches of Shakespeare's women, exhibit a Schopenhauerian
eye for the dark sides of human life, but without Schopen-
hauer's clarity or force of expression. Bahnsen writes apho-
risms burdened with parentheses and manifold illustrations
and asides; his style has the vices without the virtues of
Nietzsche's. It is gloomy writing, and the author vainly
protests his personal cheerfulness. His intellectual auto-
biography, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward, is a record of dis-
appointments personal, domestic, patriotic, literary, aca-
demic: brief cantos of an unmelodious epic of tribulation
and woe. A devoted Schleswiger, he was forced to submit
to detested Prussian dominion; his wife, whom he worshipped,
died seventeen months after their marriage, and his second
marriage was unhappy. A Tubingen doctor of philosophy,
he hoped in vain for an academic career. "Bahnsen, Bahnsen,
where are your chances?" 35 his comrades would call to him,

and he lived and died a miserably paid, snubbed and mal-
treated school-teacher, the victim of small-town intrigues
and petty tyrannies. He lived to see Hartmann rise to fame
by betraying, as he believed, the cause of true pessimism and
by dubious self-advertising practices, while his own books
either did not get published, or did not get reviewed, or did
not sell, or came out inopportunely, or collapsed through the
bankruptcy of the publisher.
He admits that his tongue, when occasion demanded it,
could be ruthlessly cutting, 36 but he insists that his pessimism
is not merely the expression of a sour mood, but a soundly
established philosophy of life. The systematic criticism of

his doctrine has been a particular object of Hartmann. Are
the "henads," as Bahnsen calls the clashing individual will-
forces, mere results of the self-partition of the Cosmic Will,
which, for all its self-rending, remains ultimately one? Or
are the henads ultimate in their own right, that is, monads?
All the difficulties in which Leibniz's monadism is involved
confront us here, plus the prime difficulty of Bahnsen's
essential irrationalism. If the henads have aseity, the doc-
trine of their conflict and the primal Will's self-partition
require serious revision; if the henads are but individual

functionings of the one primal Will, then Bahnsen's pluralism
37
loses metaphysical status.
But, one may ask, how can such dilemmas affect a philos-
opher who begins by disclaiming any rhyme or reason in the
universe? Of more concern to our study of Bahnsen's pessi-
mism than his henadism would be the essential irrationalism
of the doctrine. It is of interest to observe, and it is a point
that requires further attention, that the more pronounced
is, the more unqualified seems
the irrationalism of a pessimist
to be his pessimism: witness Hartmann Schopenhauer
Bahnsen. Certainly no real value can be expected from a
world conceived as utterly irrational and meaningless. This
"
is James Thomson's sense more tragic than defeat and
blight," in The City of Dreadful Night:
The sense that every struggle brings defeat

Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
Because they have no secret to express;
That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
Because there is no light beyond the curtain;
That all is vanity and nothingness.
Bahnsen's philosophy is a dolorous elaboration of his first

epigram written at the age of seventeen, in 1847, "the year
of his birth as a philosopher ": "Man is only a self-conscious
38
Nothing." Huber calls this nihilistic philosophy "the ut-
most extreme to which pessimism has gone, or for that matter
could go." 39 Bahnsen himself, in his character-study of Lady
Macbeth, quotes Shakespeare's words which he calls "an
40
instinctive paraphrase of abstract nihilism":
Life's but a walking shadow. . . .
. . . It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
In such a world of self-rending, meaningless actuality, how

is one to live his life? Bahnsen answers: "Not to despair is'
the surest mark of spiritual might: without hope, to live as
41
if one still hoped, ."
. and furthermore, to smile at one's
. !
The only pessimism worthy of the name is a

futile fortitude.
pessimism tragically earnest and at the same time grimly

humorous: I am a
puppet in the hands of Infinite Perversity,
and there absolutely no way out of it, but I know it, and so
is
take the puppet-play in which I take a part with a sense of

humor; I laugh at the puller of the strings, and this is my
42
revenge. But in a world of hopeless irrationality what would
justify Bahnsen's high estimate of this tragic-humorous

attitude, or the preference for any attitude over any other?
In the meaningless puppet-play of existence, has any puppet's
philosophy any meaning, or any puppet's reaction any
value?
CHAPTER XIV
A GRADATIONAL VIEW OF THE NATURE OF EVIL
I
It is a sound principle of criticism that a philosophy of life,

however large the body of particular evidence on which it
bases its conclusions, however close the abstract consistency
of its principles, yet falls short of adequacy so long as it
cannot account for itself. On this reef many a philosophical
system is shipwrecked: consistent materialism, for instance.
("The materialistic account of the world involves the exclusion
of intelligence and its values as ultimate aspects of reality.
In a world thus conceived, all theory and all truth would be
so much weather/ and therefore materialistic philosophy
'
and its claim to truth would become either meaningless or

self-contradictory.
As our survey of the philosophies of disdain and despair
has repeatedly shown, this sort of self-refutation is flagrantly
manifested in unqualified pessimism.) The pessimist cannot
assume the 'naturalistic' actualism and indifference to alleged
values in which the materialist is apt to seek refuge. His is a
tragic philosophy, and the more dismal his account of the
crowding evils of life, the more intense his disgust with
wretched existence, the more unreserved his negation of the
reality of good, the more amazing should his own philosophy
appear to himself. For what is more assuredly admirable
than noble disdain and worthy resistance? As we have ob-
served more than once, an utterly worthless world would not
admit of being condemned, and the world is not devoid of
364
A GRADATIONAL VIEW OF EVIL 365
real value, at any rate not so long as it includes upright and

forthright contemners of itself.
Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Mainlander, Bahnsen, and all

the gray cloud of witnesses thus unwittingly and to a greater
or less extent point elsewhere than they intend. (Were all the
facts of life as dark as the pessimistic survey portrays them,
and were all men bovine in their dull response, the world
might perhaps deserve the pessimist's stern verdict. But
that stern verdict itself, manifesting as it does a sense and a
standard of worth higher than bovine dullness, is a fact
which compels reconsideration of the case. ) Even if no other
reason were available, pessimistic philosophy itself, in so
far as it is a reasoned protest and more than a mere moan
and troubled weather, would alone refute the extreme pes-
simistic condemnation of life. This is of course the ancient
paradox of scepticism. The sceptic's only refuge is in being

passively non-committal the first word he utters in advocacy
:
of his doctrine, his own defense of it serves to disprove it.

For it is the assertion of no mean degree of knowledge, to
affirm than no knowledge is to be had. Utter and aggressive
nihilism in the field of value, whether theoretical or practical,
in consistency negates itself.
Again and again in our previous discussion, and now once

more at the beginning of this concluding chapter, attention
has been called to this aspect and implication of pessimistic
philosophy. were sorry pedantry, however, if we were to
It
remain with the exhibition of this pessimistic para-
satisfied
dox. Reasoned dissatisfaction with life does reveal one
variety of heroic reaction which, in resisting evil, reaffirms
positive worth and the tragic dignity of life; but shall we
deny that italso reveals wellnigh insurmountable obstacles
to positive worth which it were dull complacency to ignore?
Not so easily is pessimism reasoned out of court. If its own
noble disdain disproves the finality of its verdict, yet even
more clearly does it disclose the shallowness of the ostrich
philosophy of placid or stubborn contentment, the pitiable

sense of security of a head buried in the sands of dogmatism
and eyes closed to the grim actualities of existence. This
double wisdom pessimism and tragedy teach us: thus im-
posing on us the weight of the world's woe and the problems
that it raises, cosmological, ethical, religious.
II
The affirmation of the illusoriness or themere finitude of

evil may be dictated by various motives and may reflect
different and even partly conflicting spiritual moods a theolo-
:
gian's jealousy for the spotless character of his one omnipo-

tent God, a pantheist's mystical disdain of what eyes can see
when open, an insistent absolutist or quasi-aesthetic demand
for the harmonious and perfect finality of the cosmos, a com-
placent or a neurotic persistence in pronouncing reality
fundamentally and ultimately good and all alleged evil mere
appearance and error.
The from the necessity of
theological predicament issues
recognizing and indeed emphasizing evil, the misery and sin
of unredeemed man, while at the same time holding the
Creator all-perfect and
blameless.^
An explicit imputation of
sin and an intense consciousness of our evil state is indis-
"
pensable to a religion of salvation. Wretched man that I
am!" St. Paul exclaims, setting the tone of a hundred saints'
lamentations. But the more extreme the saint's abhorrence
of sin and of 'the World,' the more resolute is his insistence
thatGod is nowise responsible for evil.
The intellectual and moral perplexityresulting from this
duality of conviction directs theology in different ways.
Piety may seek an escape from its embarrassment in virtual
or in explicit dualism. So the Zoroastrian, holding fast to the
antithesis of good and evil, refusing to admit that these two
could have the same source and ground, and regarding Ahura-
Mazda as infinitely good and the creator of good, postulated
a counter creative power, Ahriman, to account for the pres-
ence of evil in the world.) So Manicheanism, combining Per-
sian with Greek ideas, assailed and left lasting scars in
Christian theology, capitalizing the Christian disdain of the
fleshand 'the World into a dualistic doctrine of God and
'
Matter. But, while theological dualism, referring good and

evil to opposed cosmic sources, would thus safeguard the
moral reputation of God, in the end it also allows monism to
prevail. Evil is real, it is alien to God and opposed to God,
but it does not deserve to be real and it will not prevail.
In the end Ahura-Mazda's hosts will utterly destroy Ahri-
man's band; the world will be purged of all evil, and only
pure good will remain. If a grim sense of the moral strug-
gle dictated a dualist theology to the Zoroastrian, a confi-
dent meliorism enabled him to look forward to a monistic

finale.
The monism of Augustinian and Calvinist
aggressive
Christianity involved
is in serious dilemmas. In branding
human free will as the real cause of evil in the world, this
sort of theology may treat man as having cosmic initiative,
thus showing only imperfect emancipation from dualism
or pluralism. Or else it may rely on the explanation of evil
as mere privation of the good, in order to secure an antithesis
between good and evil serious enough to serve the purposes
ofa solemn doctrine of salvation, but without incriminating
God or jeopardizing the essential monism of the system. This
and subsidiary perplexities, and the disposal of them, engage
theologians Catholic and Protestant, and the number of
alternative solutions isscarcely exhausted. If one group of
apologists seem to deserve Job's ironical designation, advo-
cates for God, another group, growing of late, appear to be
touched with Job's own tragic concern for moral integrity,
the more tragic owing to the vastly increased range of human
existence and accountability in Christian as distinguished
from Jewish vistas. C Do the facts of life easily rule out un-
deserved suffering? Is the world's course really a pageant
of Divine Providence and steady justice? Are storms, earth-
quakes, hurricanes and pestilence and the thousand less lurid

but no less ruthless blights and destroy human
that afflict
life explained away so readily as just consequences of man's
first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree? Does
Eternal Loving Justice, lovingly electing some undeserving

children of Adam
to grace, justly allow multitudes of other
undeserving children of Adam to expiate in person the in-
herited consequences of Adam's alleged free will in which
they themselves had no part and lot?
The moral enormities which these questions challenge have
led some modern minds, in their reaction particularly against
Calvinist rigidity, to manifest readiness for radical departures
in theology. This world of ours impressed William James as
too various to allow of being summed up, either as to sub-
stance or character, in any monistic formula. In this world
real good is to be found, and flagrant evil, one as real as
the other, and likewise a vast region of manifold gray in-
difference, the realm of non-committal actual nature. In
this multi verse evil is not to beargued out of existence; it is
real enough and opposition, else the moral
calls for real
struggle is superfluous and the tragedy of life a farce in

"
wretched taste. It feels like a real fight, as if there were
something really wild in the Universe which we, with all
our idealities and faithfulnesses are needed to redeem." * ,'
The best we have a right to hope, is that the struggle, real

and hard enough, is yet not futile, that possibly and in ways
at present unknown to us this half-wild and half-saved
Universe is ever more truly being redeemed. In this process
of redemption grace is no divine gift of which we are the pas-
sive but "God himself

recipients, .
may draw vital
. .
2
strength and increase of very being from our fidelity/'
Without the rigid cosmogony of Zoroastrian dualism, this
frankly and flexibly pluralistic conception of a Finite Deity
represents a certain interesting strain in modern religious
thought: the tendency to safeguard and justify moral heroism
by heroic sacrifices in monistic theology. Infinity, omnipo-
tence, creationism, all have to go, that in the end God may
remain the first and chief upholder of an order that is worthy to
prevail. Yet even James needs more assurance than he is pre-
pared to claim: the assurance, for instance, that the natural
"
order of physical science is not ultimate but the external
. . .
staging of a many-storied universe in which spiritual forces

have the last word and are eternal." 3 Act on this assurance,
he counsels us, and your very act serves to justify the assurance.
James' heroic doctrine is explicitly not the terminus but
a signpost of cosmic speculation. Does it point to no more
than half-hesitant half-trustful meliorism? Can it lead to a
demand for fuller vindication of that deserved and prevailing
dominance of spiritual forces to which it hopefully aspires?
Can it secure the more flexible frame of pluralistic cosmology
without lapsing into the vagaries of polytheism? These ques-
tions suggest a more ultimate systematic point: Is the notion
of a finitegod the sole residuary legatee in the alleged liquida-
tion of the monistic estate in theology? Or may it not be that
the collapse of philosophical and theological absolutism calls
for a radical revision of monism in more concrete and explic-
itly dynamic terms rather than for its abandonment in
favor of nondescript pluralism? Even he who, with good
reason, holds to this second alternative should not fail to
acknowledge the wholesome emphasis which the modern
pluralist has put on this variously real, concrete world of
experience, and the pluralisms refusal to call black white or to
abuse the moral vocabulary.
III
The conviction that our day-by-day life is beset with evil

assumes a radically different meaning in absolutist minds.
Recognize the sphere and range of evil, we are advised; it
is in and of the day-by-day, it is a characteristic of finite
experience and limited to it. Evil is essentially finitude; in<

the infinite perfection of Ultimate Reality it is somehow
absorbed and transcended. Whether in the ancient form of
Brahmanic pantheism or in its more modern absolutist ver-
sions, this sort ofphilosophy has been led by the very errors
and evils that embroil our finite world to depreciate the
reality of the finite. world in which errors and evils
(The
abound is itself an error, an illusion, Maya. Transcending
and sublimating it is the infinite and perfect Absolute. That
even a monadistic philosophy like that of Leibniz yielded to
the lure of this sort of theodicy only indicates the wide range
of its influence.
This view has already caused us grave misgivings. The
description of evil as essentially imperfection or limitation
of finite being, the reduction of the antithesis good-evil to
infinite-finite, replacing as it does a moral by a metaphysical

distinction, virtually dismisses all the moral or value-aspects
of the problem. If 'evil' in the end is merely finitude, then
'good' presumably is but infinitude, and it is hard to see how
the Infinite is really good: a serious matter for theology; but,
more serious for philosophy, it is hard to see what room is

left for the recognition of any value or what meaning attaches
' '
to the very perfectionof the Absolute, to assure which all
finite evidence has been so loftily ruled out of court.} Absolut-
ism, setting out religiously to exalt God, is thus apt to find
itself, after all its pious renunciations of our unworthy world,
forced at last to face a stark actualism in which things
simply are, finite or infinite, with nothing really worthy or
unworthy. Thus is Gospel judgment visited on him who

would know and exalt infinite God and begins by ignoring
his finite brother.
To be sure, we may, with Spinoza, confront and accept
reality as that which simply is, inviting analysis of its struc-
ture and contemplation of its infinity, but ultimately pre-
cluding evaluation in terms of good and evil, terms strictly
human in reference and connotation. But in that case our
deep appreciation of Spinoza's noble ethics will be sustained
only if we neglect the metaphysics on which it is supposed to
"
rest. If we interpret Spinoza to mean that values while
relative to men . are founded in the nature of things and
. .
are not arbitrary/' 4 it is hard to see why they are not ulti-
mately in and of the nature of things. But if we explicitly
treat values as human
inventions, then we may reflect that
the perfection of rationality, as it leads us to see all things
under the pattern of eternity, finally points to a consumma-
tion in which reason, completely emancipated from partiality
and mere finitude, reaches, beyond good and evil, to the
vision of Substance as it is and simply is, Eternal Actuality.
If we hold
to this sort of metaphysics, a further difficulty
confronts us, itself twofold in character. Whatever their
real cosmic status, good-evil are convincingly real in so-called
finite experience. Pronounce them partly or wholly illusory:
if you propose in their place a view of reality that precludes
worth in the distinctive sense of the term, that concentrates

on analysis and explanation and dismisses evaluation, what
ground do you have for urging your view as true and thus as
worthy of being preferred to the view which you would aban-
don? So in the end evaluation in some sense persists even
'
in the most determined naturalism/
Another side of this difficulty is even more disturbing.
Calling a thing 'merely finite' or illusory does not really
dispose of it. What is the relation of this merely finite mani-
festation to the Ultimate Reality that is thus distortedly
and illusorily manifested? Is it really alien to the essential
character of the Absolute that it manifests itself in such an
illusory manner? This difficulty is the more embarrassing

the more pronounced our disgust with mere finitude and yet
the more decidedly religious our attitude and procedure with
respect to the Absolute. So Brahmanism was reluctant to
deal with the problem, why the one universal Brahman should
have become manifested in this Maya world of wretched
particularity.
Some modern systems of absolutism have sought a monistic
conclusion, not by the disdainful utter erasure of the finite
or its mystic absorption in the Infinite, but by the more
concrete relating of the two. In this attempted rapproche-
ment idealistic systems of thought reveal varying degrees of re-
spect for finite individuality and its values, from pronounced
championship of personal-social categories as essential to

a spiritual view of Reality, to a point of view from which " both
the world of the intelligence and that of morality, both truth
and goodness, turn into phenomenal appearances, that is,
into things which manage to exist without being real, and
which in becoming real and passing into the Absolute cease
to exist." 6
But must value, in reaching its apogee, find
also its extinction in the Perfection of the Absolute?
A caricature may sometimes bring out certain characteris-
a physiognomy more effectively than a portrait.
tic features of
So some of the features of absolutism which we have been
criticizing are exhibited flagrantly and without the balancing
influence of a disciplined logic in the reckless and confused
body of assertions and denials that constitutes the 'philos-
ophy' of Christian Science. The alleged originality of Mrs.
Eddy, no longer a tenable alternative after the publication
of The Quimby Manuscripts* is of no interest to us here.
What interests us is the peculiar design of illusionism which
Mrs. Eddy adopted and embroidered

as the thought-texture
of her faith, in so far asconcerns the problems before us.
it
Christian Science would solve the problem of evil by pro-

nouncing our ills illusory, an error of 'mortal mind/ The
evidence of experience to the contrary is rejected, since for-
"
sooth health is not a condition of matter but of Mind; nor
can the material senses bear reliable testimony on the subject
7
of health." Such error
may be far-spread, as stubborn as it
is pernicious, but when enlightened by the Truth man can
overcome and transcend the illusion. We may labor under
grievous delusions, as the founder-mother did when she
"
wrote to Dr. Quimby about spinal inflammation and its
her
train of sufferings gastric and bilious;" 8 but insight and il-
lumination will show us as it showed her that disease is but
error, and that, for instance, arsenic is poisonous only because
of men's general delusion that it is a poison.
There is confusion at the outset here. If pain and sickness
are but errors of mortal mind, then the alleged healing is a
' '
misnomer, and in the reported cures the accounts of griev-

ous ailments should most charitably be taken as concessions
to the conventional speech of mortal mind/ 9
'
But the
real trouble is deeper. Grant, as we readily do, the real
service of Christian Science in calling general attention to
the imaginary (but none the less evil!) psychopathic char-
acter of certain illnesses, overlook discrepancy or extrava-
gance of statement, pass over the flagrant rejection of the
testimony of immediate experience, strain credulity to the
limit regarding fact and theory alike, and, notwithstanding
allevidence or judgment to the contrary, affirm that suffering,
disease, and other evils are mere error. All the same, does
this view justify the complacent optimism in which it issues
in theology or in social philosophy?
If the evils of life are but illusion, is this illusion aught but
evil? That life should have real evils calling for real resistance,
this mancan understand and can gird up his loins. But,
here God's own world, really perfect, a very paradise did
is
man but know it; and yet in this bower of bliss man labors
under grievous illusions of harrowing alleged diseases, to his
sorrow believing that arsenic is a poison, tortured apparently
by the seeming suffering and decease of those he loves, and
in the end like all men before him succumbing to the fixed
delusion that he is dead. To entertain this view of the world
as a diabolic deception of man, and, precisely by believing
this doctrine, to be suave and complacent, cosmically and in
practical social relations: this is surely a disclosure of the

amazing illogical capacities of the human mind that a pes-
simist could well feature in his dismal exhibit.
To this variety of confused and reckless theodicy by fiat
onemay answer with the words of Galileo, E pur muove:

se
facts are not so easily argued out of existence. Or one may
suggest the appropriateness of canonizing Bottom the Weaver
for his proposal to notify the timorous ladies of Midsummer
Night s Dream that the lion in his tragedy was
1
no real lion
but only Snug the Joiner in disguise. Or perhaps one may rec-
ommend, as further food for complacent enlightenment,
Maupassant's little classic, The Necklace, the story of how
Mathilde Loisel loses a diamond necklace borrowed from a
friend, is kept by pride from confessing the loss, but instead
borrows with her husband thirty-six thousand francs to
purchase its duplicate, and is aged and broken by ten years'
hard labor in paying back the money, only to learn, when in
the end she tells her friend about it, that the original necklace
was of paste diamonds, worth five hundred francs at most,
and that the tragedy of its loss was only an error of mortal
mind!
IV
If absolutism looks disdainfully over and beyond the trou-
blous world of weekday experience to contemplate the Sabbath
peace and perfection of the Eternal, hedonistic empiricism is

wedded to the particular and reduces the problem of evil and
of the worth of the cosmos to a question of pleasure-pain
balance. Whether life isworth living, and whether one is to
inclinetowards the Everlasting Yea or the Everlasting Nay, is
judged to depend on this, whether pleasure outweighs pain
or pain pleasure. So the philosophy of value turns out to be
simply a matter of hedonistic metrics or bookkeeping.
Leaving out of account for the moment the ethical ade-
quacy of the hedonistic calculus as a test of the worth of
human life, and considering only the calculus itself, it prom-
ises more than it seems likely to deliver. The phrase
1
pleasure-pain balance' suggests a claim to statistical pre-
cision, a standard of measure, reliable reckoning of amounts
or units of pleasure and pain. Does our life actually allow
of such a hedonistic audit and inventory?
It is clear that in such an attempted judgment on life
lengthy jeremiads cannot be allowed to take the place of

statistical reports. Human existence is vastly complex and
various and may provide dismal exhibits to suit the most
confirmed pessimist. Schopenhauer and Hartmann have
shown us how much evil together with how good can be little
crowded into a composite biography of Man. To him who

needs no conviction the pessimistic account may seem con-
clusive, but to another, perhaps Matthew Arnold's, in
Empedocles on Etna:
Shall we, with temper spoil'd,
Health sapp'd by living ill,
And judgment all embroiFd
By sadness and self- will,
Shall we judge what for man is not true bliss or is?
Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done;
To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes?
A 'scientific' statistical settlement of this issue seems un-

likely. How unlikely, Paulsen intimated in his proposal,
instead of judging human life wholesale, to estimate the
hedonic balance of a man's single day's experiences: "A.
Receipts in Pleasure: 1. Slept well equal so many units;
2. Enjoyed my breakfast 3. Read a chapter from a good
;
book 4. Received a letter from a friend

;
etc. B. Pain: ;
1. Read a disagreeable story in the paper 2. Disturbed ;
by a neighbor's piano 3. Received a tiresome visit

;
4. ;
Ate burnt soup ;

etc. The philosopher is requested to in-
10
sert the amounts in the proper places." If you cannot
enter the separate items, how can you be so sure about the
totals, and is not your final estimate of the balance but a
general impression, inadequately supported and unduly
bilious, or else perhaps too sanguine? fPetrarch's line, and the
opposite which it suggests, should prove disturbing to hedon-
istic reckoning:
A thousand joys don't make up for one torment. 11
Hedonistic calculation is further complicated, as all critical

readers of Jeremy Bentham know, by the fact that a man's
estimate of a pleasure or a pain varies: it is different when
anticipated, when actually experienced, when remembered.
Shall we judge each experience on its merits, moment by
moment? But moment by moment consciousness may be
exhausted or dominated by an intense experience of pleasure
or pain leaving little or no occasion for comparison or cal-
culus.Or shall we rely on our cooler judgment in the matter?

But what is it, and, even though it shows our erstwhile honey
to be but wormwood in retrospect, can it alter the actual
record of the former experience? And is it really wormwood
even in retrospect?
C (
How sad and bad and mad it was,
But then, how it was sweet! 12
Or again, shall we let the impartial spectator judge for us?

But who is he to be? Shall we choose a Hartmann, agreeing
with him that if, despite the countless miseries of human life,
men live on contentedly, the reason is that they are too
still
stupid to recognize their wretchedness? Or shall we rather

select him or her who opined that the inner side of every cloud
isbright and shining and so wore clouds inside out to show
the lining?
Ruling out the probability of reaching a reliable computa-
tion of pleasure-pain units in our experience, Sully under-
took to show that we may arrive at a fair notion respecting
"
the pleasure- value of our life, thus transforming the ques-
tion 'Does pleasure exceed pain?' into the other question,
" 13 '
'Is happiness attainable? But this shift of the question
does not evade the difficulty raised by Hartmann's reflection
just cited.Men are not intelligent enough to realize how un-
happy they are, the pessimist declares, and the optimist
maintains the very opposite. Hedonistic reckoning is thus
complicated by the demand that in certain circumstances
men ought to be (that is, if they were intelligent, would be)
unhappy or happy. Pessimist and optimist differ in their
judgment of the merits of a particular case, and in the coun-
sel of wisdom which they offer, but they both employ in the
end standards other than actual experienced pleasure and
pain.
The hedonistic calculus fails to provide a true criterion
of the value of not only and not mainly because it falls
life,
short of precision, but because of its inadequacy and even

irrelevance. That men live disconsolate and dreary lives,
blindly groping for a happiness which is actually theirs for
the asking, is a fact as common as it is pitiable.
^So Goethe
teaches us homely wisdom:
Wilt them roaming e'er importune?
See, the good it lies so near.
Only learn to grasp thy fortune,
For thy fortune's always here. 14
On a loftier plane Epictetus pleads for a recognition of true

happiness in virtue: "Show me a man that is sick and
happy; in danger and happy; on his death-bed and happy;
an exile and happy; in evil report and happy! Show me
him, ask again. So help me Heaven, I long to see one
I
" 16
Stoic! Thus the pity of it is not so much that men are un-
happy as that they do not know where to seek and find true
and worthy happiness. ^
Contrariwise, few things are as depressing and disgusting
as men's actual toleration or even enjoyment of ignoble condi-
tions and ways of life. The old proverb quoted by St. Peter
is to the point: "The dog turning to his own vomit again;
and the sow that had washed, to wallowing in the mire." 16
More tragic than disgusting is the state of countless multi-
tudes the world over, living lives of squalor and daily in-
dignity to their human nature. Shall we say that their
apparent acquiescence and cheerfulness constitute their

lives blessed? Indeed rebellious discontent would be the
firstbright gleam in their existence. In Tolstoy's study of
the masses submerged in the Moscow slums, nothing was more
disquieting than the dull and sometimes gay contentment
of countless dwellers in the gutters of life. Tolstoy in his
mission of redemption was actually more unhappy than
those he was trying to save from poverty and filth of body
and soul. Shall we pronounce Tolstoy worse off than his
paupers?
Man may be happy not realizing the indignity of his
life, or he may be miserable because of his petulance and
his incapacity to perceive the precious values within his
reach; or again he may be oppressed by a tragic infelicity,

the result of high desires in a sordid and unresponsive world.

"In respect of this better aspect of my life," Royce wrote,
"I suffer because of the very depth and magnitude of my
ir
meanings." In all these cases the pleasure-pain balance
discloses its inadequacy and irrelevance. fThe reckless
hedonist would do well to remember John Stuart Mill's
words: "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a
pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool
satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion,
it is because they only know their own side of the question.
The other party to the comparison knows both sides." 18
We have seen that an estimate of the value of life in terms
of experienced pleasure and pain
not only statistically
is
unavailable but really of No one can contest that

no avail.
happiness is one of the elements of a worthwhile life; but
the final judgment of a man, and of human life generally,
isnot in terms of actual pleasure and pain that may be had
but in terms of the worthiness of the pleasure or pain in ques-
tion. Hedonism fails through axiological insufficiency: a
standard other than pleasure-pain is needed if pleasure and
pain are to be tested, graded and so integrated with the other
values of life. To ignore the demand for such a standard is
to giveup the essential task of evaluation. Happiness itself
has been defined as "the harmonious and steady develop-
ment of all our capacities in their order of excellence." 19
The important question, after all, is not, Are men happy or
unhappy? but rather this, Is it well that men are thus and
thus happy or unhappy? So hedonism, optimistic or pes-
simistic, points beyond itself to some more adequate type of
evaluation. *>
lThe advocacy in modern utilitarianism of the principle,

the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and the
general advance from egoistic to universalistic hedonism,
imply the virtual adoption of a criterion no more adequate
than the hedonistic: that the good and the evil in life are
measurable in terms of benevolence and egoism. ^
One of the standing problems in ethical and religious
thought has concerned this issue between self-assertion and
self-denial. Buddhism found in self-centeredness the source
of all evil, and sought salvation through the extinction of
self. Likewise we read in the Theologia Germanica: "Be
simply and wholly bereft of Self. Put off thine own will,
. . .
and there will be no hell." So again Pascal: "The selfish bent

" 20
is the beginning of all disorder. Theological ethics has
though not always as explicitly as here,
characteristically,
taken the same position: to attain moral perfection, man
must radically overcome his native selfishness.
Hobbes outraged respectable England with his doctrine
that man could organize a morally satisfactory state on the
basis of egoism. Against Hobbes, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson
maintained that man is not a anarch by nature, and
selfish
sought moral-social perfection in the normal balance between

selfish and benevolent impulses, that is to say, a balance
which inclined towards benevolence. But, while the Hobbist
view was wholly impious in the theologian's eyes, this view
of the natural benevolence ofman seemed also unchristian
in its pagan assumption that mere once-born man could
attain moral perfection. The note of denial is so strong in
Christian thought ancient and modern just because the
theologian had found avarice, lust and greed, in a word, self-
assertion, dominant in the life of unregenerate man. Even
the Golden Rule and similar maxims insist at best only on a
reconciliation through sympathy: I am imaginatively to put
myself in the place of others and do as I would be done by.

It is assumed, then, that in all my activities and relations my
concern for self is to be the standard. Self-regard is recog-
nized, and also the disparity between self-regard and benevo-

lence: to overcome this disparity, the magic of sympathy is
invoked. But it is a magic that only the grace of God can
fully work in the life of a man.
Three secular efforts to trace the path of moral perfection
out of the narrow confines of selfishness deserve particular
notice. Hedonism, in emphasizing the pursuit of pleasure
and happiness, inclines at first to exclusiveness, impressed
as it seems by the thought that the pursuer of pleasure must
necessarily pursue the pleasure which he knows directly,
namely own. Bentham, while recognizing in his hedonis-
his
tic calculus the factor of extent, and while insisting on the
principle of impartiality (everyone to count for one and

no one for more than one), yet finds the motive for be-
nevolent action in one's own vicarious enjoyment of the
pleasures of others. John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism is
genuinely altruistic in its intentions; but how are self-sacrifice,

the Golden Rule, the individual's pursuit of the greatest
happiness of the greatest number, to be justified on hedonis-
ticgrounds? Here, as also in his doctrine of different kinds
or grades of pleasure, Mill really goes beyond the frame of
stricthedonism. Sidgwick, in his plea for the disinterested
pursuit of happiness, whether my own or my neighbor's,
seems to overlook the fact that happiness is bound up with
interest and is immediately known to me only as experienced
by myself. The pleasures of others are, after all, only hear-

say pleasures to me: what hedonistic motive can I have
for preferring them to own?
my
*
How, then, can I espouse and pursue what runs counter to
my desires? Kant and his followers seek an answer to this
question by a distinction between the empirical and the moral

will, the lower and the higher self. The law to which one
submits despite his desires is not a law imposed from with-
out, but the law of the self's moral reason. ^
(A argument proceeds from evolutionary
third line of
grounds. Spencer would show that exclusive egoism defeats
its end as surely as pure altruism. Reconciliation and com-
promise are to be attained through the increasingly better

adapted relations of man to man, which will make sympathy
more normal and the purposes and ends of men less conflict-
ing.
The view that man is self-assertive by nature led Schopen-
hauer, as we have seen, to the radical view that normal human
conduct that morality consists in compassion alone,
is evil,
and that moral perfection points to the negation of the will-

to-live. This doctrine invited the sharp reaction of Nietzsche:
if healthy man is by nature self-assertive, why seek moral
perfection in the denial of the will-to-power? Why not rather
disdain weak pity and ruthlessly press for the nobler strength
of Superman?
{ The issue thus becomes accentuated in modern discussion.
Contemporary moralists try to prove that the self is essen-
tially social, and that the true interests of self and society
do not conflict, but what constitutes true interest in this
sense is not clearly brought out, and in the face of actual
conflict between ourselves and others, we are ordinarily urged
to develop altruistic zeal for reasons not explicitly stated, or
make our own ethics as we go.>
else are left to
The main idea to guide the revision of this confused chap-
ter in ethical theory is set forth in Green's Prolegomena to
Ethics, and we may use Green's doctrine of shareable goods

in order to sketch a possible settlement of the old issue
between egoism and altruism.
We are instructed in different ethical theories to seek moral
perfection in benevolence and active sympathy, or else in
aggressive self-asaertion, or else in some sort of compromise
between the two. Let us test the adequacy of these views
and formulas by considering some undisputed examples of
excellence and saintliness and some cases of obvious and

flagrant vice. We
are told that, of the things that abide,
love is the greatest. Behold Dante's love of Beatrice, Tenny-
son's love of Hallam, Father Damien's love for the Hawaiian
lepers, the devotion of a hundred saints to God can we

: con-
vey the true spirit of this love and devotion in terms of egoism
or of altruism, or of any compromise whatever between
the two? The devotion of man to woman, of man to man,
of man to men, of man to God is seen to involve utter sur-
render and oblivion of but also enhancement in self-ex-
self,
pression and self-affirmation. It is a paltry miser's idea of
philanthropy to confuse it with mere self-denial; nothing

would so easily repel love as the note of almsgiving in the be-
stowal; and how must the good God be regarding the near-
saints who love him in a spirit of self-sacrifice? At the apex
of moral perfection, the issue between self-assertion and self-
denial evidently loses meaning what we admire here cannot
:
be stated either in egoistic or in altruistic terms, for here is

utter self-denial together with complete self-affirmation.
At the other end of the moral scale, consider a libertine, a
miser, a cruel brute or tyrant, a traitor. Here are men cor-
rupting, exploiting, oppressing, torturing their fellows and
doing all this, we are told, for their own self-gratification
and
self-aggrandisement. But, if we examine the matter more
closely, we see flagrant self-neglect and self-destruction here.
Don Juan, Scrooge, Richard the Third, Judas have really
'forgotten themselves' in the blind pursuit of some outlaw
passion; in a very true sense of the word, their lives are lives
of self-negation and self-destruction.
The assertion of one self means the denial of another, and
what we condemn in the vicious man of whatever variety
is not his self-assertion but rather the sort of self he has
chosen to affirm and the sort of self he has chosen to deny.
If now we consider that the term 'self' signifies aims chosen,
objects of pursuit or devotion, in a word values, we may ren-
der our discussion clearer by distinguishing the main objec-
tives of action, in so far as one's assertion or one's denial of
them involves the assertion or the denial of them by others
and thus the so-called conflict between egoism and altruism.
Of the values or goods which we pursue, some cannot be
shared, some can be shared, and some must be shared to be
attained at all. Two men starving hungry and food only
for one; two men meeting on a bridge just broad enough for
one: these are familiar examples of situations involving con-
flicting interests, competition and combat. So long as we are
concerned in the pursuit of material goods and advantages
we are enmeshed in conflict and the issue of egoism and al-
truism is bound to vex us: shall we press for our own advan-
tage, shall we draw back and yield the gain to others? Even
here, of course, I may be instructed that my
neighbor's gain
isnot necessarily my loss, that employer and employee do
not necessarily have opposed interests, that capital and labor
need not be at daggers drawn. All the same, on the level
where material goods are sought competition prevails and
not clearly compatible with the satisfac-
self-satisfaction is
tion of others.
On a somewhat higher plane of endeavor we pursue goods
which are social in character, can be shared, and are not
diminished in being shared. Even material prosperity may
possess this character. The rise or fall of prosperity in
Europe may well condition similar rise and fall in the United
States.Success and satisfaction in personal relations, in the

pursuit of career or ambition, need not involve conflict; men
may find themselves partners in enterprises in which they
need not feel that they are always grasping for each other's
share.
But what we observe as we proceed to the highest levels
of human endeavor is that the end pursued must be shared
to be attained at all. A scientist has discovered a new truth,

a law which will revolutionize his science. Shall he keep it
as his own private possession? Unless he share it with others
it cannot be a vital truth in his science: to have the full
measure of it himself, it must be in the thought of others.

Or here is another scientist who has discovered a cure for a
dread malady. This treasure he literally does not have, it is
not a cure, until he has given it to the world. (The poet's
song, the artist's vision, the composer's harmony are doubly
attained in being shared:
He docs not write at all whose poems no one reads,
21
as Martial has it My moral perfection

in one of his epigrams, j
demands the moral perfection in others. Morally

eliciting of
I cannot possibly gain except as others gain with me and
through me. Hosea's effort to reclaim his faithless wife

serves to transfigure morally his own interests and out-
look on life and makes him a tragic prophet of the Lord. The
wisdom of religion is that to gain our life we must lose it, for
we truly keep only what we have shared and bestowed.
Not only the moral aristocracy of life serves to reveal this
truth; the homely nobility of everyday life exhibits it on all

sides. Consider the spiritual solidarity of parent and child,
brother and sister in every real home; the devotion of men and
women to
f
some Cause' that dominates asit also expresses
their individuality. Nothing so surely cures us of ethical

snobbery as a fair-minded perception of the range of generous
'disinterested' interest in the lives of common' people, '
cheerful self-identification with the lot and interests of others

due to the dominance of the self by the zest for higher values.
This is not to be confused with mere gregariousness. Further-
more, the sensual mutuality of voluptuaries is not to be cited
as an objection to this view. Lust as distinguished from
love involves mutual exploitation two barterers each one con-
:
vinced he is making a fine trade, each using the other as a

means. This is the very reverse of mutual respect and gener-
ous devotion.
Moral downfall does not proceed from altruism to selfish-
ness, but involves a degradation in the values that are pur-
sued by the agent. Just as soon as spiritual goods are, as we
say, commercialized and regarded as sources of material
advantage, the spirit of man topples down into the market-
place and once more he is holding tight to his purse: the
scientist is now thinking of priority of publication, the in-
ventor of patent-rights, poet and artist of copyrights, royal-
ties, and laurels, and even the near-saint is worrying over his
order and place in the heavenly procession. In the scientist
as scientist, in the poet as poet, in the saint as saint the issue
between self and not-self does not arise, but it flares up the
moment they descend to the view of their values as sources of
material advantage.
The difference between low and high in morals is thus not
the difference between selfish and unselfish; it is the difference
between the peddler and the poet. The peddler's soul cannot
understand the generous objectivity and impersonality of
the sage, the singer, or the saint. These seem so blind to their
own interests, so impractical and innocent/ The peddler
'
calls the philosopher a visionary, the poet mad, the saint a
world-denying ascetic. It is useless to teach the peddler al-

truism; on the level on which he lives, to teach him altruism
(
would be to run counter to the healthy forces of life.' But
as he rises above the peddler's level he gradually warms to the
pursuit of higher goods, of goods that not only can but must
be shared to be attained at all. So the rise to moral per-
fection may be viewed as an advance from conflict to com-
munity of not through the abstract denial of the
interest,
self, but through its enrichment and exaltation. A more
concrete view of the moral self enables us to recognize that
the issue between egoism and altruism, apparently insoluble
at lower levels of conduct, is at the highest levels meaning-

less, and all along the line artificial as far as a genuine under-
standing of the moral situation is concerned, or an estimate

of the value of life.
VI
{ of the problem of evil and of the alternative

Our survey
proposed solutions has revealed several sources of confusion.
The endeavor to recognize and to clear up these confusions
has suggested a better way out. The theory which is now
presented in conclusion makes no presumptuous claims to
originality or novelty: enough if it preserve the sound
elements of other doctrines and avoid their confusion of
issues,unwarranted preconceptions, insufficient respect for
fact,and undue complacency or depression.
One thing seems clear at the very outset this is a world of
:
good and evil, however we may have to define the two.

Wholesale and unqualified condemnation of the world, and
likewise suave dismissal of evil as unreal are plainly at vari-
ance with the facts of life, are indeed self-refuting views.
Value, whatever its more adequate definition, has this
essential character of bipolarity: it is positive or negative,
in whatever field we may examine Truth implies and is
it.
meaningless apart from error; virtue is similarly related and

opposed to vice, beauty and justice and happiness to their
"In the scale of existence/ Dean Inge
7
respective opposites.
writes, "there are no minus signs. . But
. . the moral
. . .
standard is essentially dualistic, and the dualism cannot be

transcended without transcending the standpoint of moral-
22
ity.'' Using the terms good and evil in the broadest sense
to designate value positive and negative, we are bound to say
that, if either is admissible, both must be. We have them
both on our hands, both actual. Our problem is to under-
stand the relation between them, and the essential character
of the world which the perception of their relation serves to
reveal. So axiology and cosmology may contribute to each
other.
The attempted reduction of evil to finitude is a virtual re-
jection of the clear point with which we start, and, as we have

seen,, leads not to the solution but to the abandonment of the
problem of evil. The reduction of good and evil to pleasure

and pain ignores the variety and complexity of value, and,
instead of simplifying our problem, serves only to confuse it.
The reduction of good and evil to self-denial and self-assertion
narrows the range of value unduly and even in this narrow
range is disclosed as artificial and as dictated by theological
and other preconceptions rather than as warranted by
experience. )
The essential defects of the theories just reviewed are two.
First, the outright dismissal of evil or its reduction to finitude

involves an evasion of the characteristic problem of value and,
in particular, by reducing moral to metaphysical evil, rules
out ethics. Second, the proposed equating of good and evil
with pleasure and pain, or with self-denial and self-assertion,
mistakenly looks for sheep and goats in the world, treating
good and evil as distinct things or aspects or qualities, as if
we could say of x that it is and remains good and the good,

and of y that it is evil and the evil in the world.
The realm of value is too vast and complex to be thus
forced in the frame of any such x and y. This undue simpli-
fication of the problem of evil, furthermore, overlooks the
fact that truth, for instance, has no status in isolation but is
always relative to a context, and not only may but charac-
teristically does lose, in another context, its truth character
and is disclosed as an error. And likewise with the other
values. The
value-character of reality, in other words, is not
to be sought in individual things or aspects or qualities that
stay put, that can be isolated and exhibited for praise or
execration. Good and evil, truth and error, beauty and jus-
tice and the rest arewhat they are always in relation, in
certain contexts, and in different contexts and relations
may and do disclose a metamorphosis: the sheep turn out
to be also goats! Yet even if philosophy of value could be
formulated with offhand simplicity in terms of pleasure-pain
or benevolence-selfishness, the real problem of theodicy
would still remain: How are we to estimate a world in which
sheep and goats have thus been picked out and opposed to
each other?
Value positive or negative is not to be located in certain
areas of existence but is a fundamental and ultimate charac-
ter of all existence. No thing is value, but in all things value
of some sort may be sought, recognized, enhanced, frustrated.
The value-character of reality is a character which is postu-
lated, andin being postulated involves a demand for its
realization or a demand for its negation, and in both demands
a fundamental recognition of higher and lower and an incip-
ient or determined preference. Valuation is thus bound up
with conative experience; it implies a moving world in which
interest stimulates will-activity, in which intelligence is not
a mere passive recipient of the factual, but an active partici-
pant, preferring, demanding, resisting. The true is what we
should believe and maintain; the beautiful is what we should
enjoy and cherish; the good is what we should pursue, do,
love, and uphold; and so with the other values, and in all
these cases the chosen value the preferred claimant setting
is
us in opposition to rival invasions of interest. 23

t The world discloses value only in and to personal experi-
ence. Values are personal in reference and connotation.

This main principle, which commands weighty support, has
found classical expression in Green's formula: Values are
24
always "relative to value for, of, or in a person." Some of
the reasons for upholding this view have been stated in the
lastchapter of my work, The Problem of Immortality, and
perhaps need not be rehearsed. )
This principle of the relation of value and personality, how-
ever, is liable to a certain grave misinterpretation. It may be
expressed in the doctrine that value is merely personal, that
nature is indifferent to value, that value of whatever sort is
merely read into nature by persons, is as it were a poetic fic-
tion of reality. In support of this opinion is cited the mere
factuality of existence as physical science deals with it. But
does the physical-scientific view of nature exhaust reality?
Is not and the
scientific activity itself, possibility of physical
science, an indication that the range of reality transcends
factual-mechanistic categories? What would be the chemical
formulae of a true and of an untrue chemical theory? (Nature,
in the full and only proper sense of the word, is not merely
factual and indifferent to value, for nature includes human
nature, includes scientific, logical activity and its standards,
aesthetic creation and contemplation, moral endeavor and
ideals, religious worship. These are all in and of nature,
quite as real certainly as atoms, electrons, positive and nega-
tive charges. An utterly impersonal universe would not
allow of value or valuation, but the universe is not wholly
impersonal. That values are essentially bound up with per-
sonality thus nowise a reflection on their reality; indeed,
is
quite the contrary, if we only consider the range of being that
is exemplified in personality. Value is personal; its range and

roots are the range and roots of personality, and these, after
all, reach over all nature. To ignore this last is to ignore the
problem "how a universe without mind or value could pro-

26
duce mind and value." )
Personal activity may not be as common as mechanical
process, but this observation is neither surprising nor relevant
to the reflection it is intended to convey. The apex of the
pyramid is not any the less apex because it covers less area
than the base. Was there a long time during which there
was neither man nor man's thinking and valuation in nature?
All the more clearly, then, should we recognize that nature
among its other capacities had and has the making of human
nature in it. The lower we perceive the sub-human range of
nature to extend, the clearer evidence should we find, in
nature's attainment unto personality, of its essentially
dynamic, upward-reaching character. So John Keats wrote
words of wisdom which Bernard Bosanquet was to interpret
and develop: "The world is the vale of soul-making." 26
But we should also recognize the arduousness of this attain-
ment. We should be on our guard not to oversimplify our
cosmology either in the manner of the subjective idealist
or in the manner of the materialist.
Personality and valuation serve to exhibit more adequately
and as it were in fuller maturity characteristics and capac-
ities which reality manifests less adequately and in germ and
bud at lower levels of existence. The clear perception of the

values of life evident to critical intelligence may enable us,
without any anthropomorphism or mythology, to perceive
the promise of them all along the line. So far is nature from
being indifferent to worth.
VII
C It the essence and nature of everything, Spinoza told us,

is
to endeavor to persist in its own being. In a world of things

and processes different in character, difference and conflict-
in-relation are just what we should expect. It is of the essence
of fire to set the green wood aflame, and it is of the essence of
the moisture and the sap in the wood to delay flaming and to
extinguish the fire. It is the nature of the invading horde of
germs to take hold, multiply and take possession of the or-
ganism, and it is the nature of the organism to resist the infec-
tion which threatens its health and life. It is as natural for
a dog's ravenous hunger to cause it to snap the bone out of
another dog's mouth as it is for our social sense and reason
to control appetite. The 'flesh and the spirit' are both
7 '
'nature/ each in its sphere persisting, each in relation to

the other and overarching to dominate the other. Our life,
and the world we live in, may be conceived as a vast con-
course of activities self-persisting, counteracting, conflicting.
But this cosmic concourse is a scale or hierarchy of activ-
ities. Things are not indifferently on a par; the difference
among them is gradational. What the specific order of grada-
tion is, in different fields of experience, constitutes the special
problem of the philosophy of value in its various branches,
logical, aesthetic, ethical. The meaning of the terms

higher'
'
and lower'
'
is itself ever-expanding: signifying difference in
complexity and range of categories, enhanced self-realization
and self-judgment. The hierarchy points from mechan-
ism to life and consciousness, from unconscious and non-
rational to self-conscious and rational activity, from law-
conforming process to action on principle and in pursuit of

ideal ends. )
That there is some sort of hierarchy, however, that there
is higher and lower in the world, is not a conclusion of valua-
tion but its prime presupposition. Its very outlook is grada-
tional. The first axiom of the philosophy of value is: there is
is higher and lower in the world,
a hierarchy of being, or there
some things are preferable, better, worthier than others.
Grant this way of looking at the world, for unless we do the
problems of value not only cannot be solved but cannot even
arise: what, from such a point of view, is evil?
(
In this gradational view of things, evil is literally degrada-
tion, the surrender of the higher to the lower in the scale of
being, the effective down-pulling incursion of the lower

against the higher. This definition of evil would apply irre-
spective of the judgment as to what in any specific case is
higher or lower, for such difference of judgment would in-

volve a corresponding difference of judgment as to what in
the circumstances is evil, and would reaffirm this fundamental
conception of the nature of evil. )
The perception of the cosmic process as gradational in
character and the personal response to this perception find
expression in the various categories of the philosophy of value.
Thus the self-maintenance of the higher and its reaching
to ever fuller realization and enhancement is progress,
whether cosmic, biologic or human-social. {Man's degrading
surrender to a lower incursion involves him in varieties of
vice. His effective resistance to the baser invasion is virtue.
His self-satisfaction at any stage of advancement is compla-
cency and marks stagnation this we may call the sin against
:
the Holy Ghost. His sense of inability to maintain himself on

high ground or to attain ground still higher, if due to the con-
viction that the universe is callous or hostile to the enhance-
ment of worth, gives rise to a consciousness of frustration,
the tragic sense of life. ^
' '
If we survey normal valuation in different fields of expe-
rience, this definition of evil finds substantial warrant and

illustration. So disease involves the actual or the impending
or threatened disorganization and degradation of bodily
structure, the breakdown of highly complex and articulated
tissue into tissue cruder or more elementary, like a riot or
rebellious chaos upsetting the well-ordered state: deforma-
tion and growing together of joints, atrophy of muscle or
bone, purulent effusion; filling up of air-cells with a viscid
mass of amorphous exudation, coagulating and consolidating
the lungs; wasting away of cells and organs into a caseous
pulp; degeneration of highly specialized brain-structure and
perversion of cerebro-neural activity; inflammation, sup-
puration, lesions, necrosis, paralysis partial or general, cessa-
tion of functions essential to continued life; death, disintegra-
tion and putrefaction of tissues, dust and ashes. The career
of microbes and bacteria are in their own way as natural as
ours: what is evil is rather their ascendency, in disease, over
the higher course and career of man. So Pascal's and Leo-
pardi's and Dostoyevsky's illnesses, and Keats' premature
death, and Lenau's and Schumann's mental eclipse sadden
and perplex us. We resent these rude jests of matter at the
expense of mind. But this invasion may and does stir man to
worthy resistance, stimulating medical intelligence in the
cure and prevention of disease and in the alleviation of pain.
There are no doubt limits to this resistance; as Petrarch put
it, only death can keep a young man from old age.
27
But
whether or not faced with insurmountable obstacles, man
here develops vigor and insight in resistance, and heroism
even in defeat. Pascal has shown us, against Ecclesiastes,
that man does have preeminence above the beasts, that he
does not die as a beast dies. }
In the field of the higher values evil manifests itself simi-
larly, as degradation, perversion, frustration. Error and

fallacy result from the failure of the mind to maintain itself
on the intelligent level. Prejudice, dogmatism, partisanship,
emotional bias, hasty generalization, confusion, tautology,
irrelevance, self-contradiction: in all these logical evils intel-
ligence is perverted and clouded; its r61e is usurped by
lower faculties, and it fails to attain the truth- value of ideas
or, as Professor Fite would put it, "the fullness of critical
28
imagination."
In the realm of art, beauty and ugliness are always relative
to a certain development of taste and spiritual heritage,
culture, and refinement. Plato's Symposium is the classical
vision of the sublime career open to man in his rise to higher
and higher perception and love of Beauty: the sublime career
and also its hazards and responsibilities. What normally
satisfies a crude primitive taste may prove wearisome or re-
pulsive to amore cultivated nature, and enjoyable to it only

when becomes depraved. So jazz is good music for
itself
savages, but not for the heirs of Bach and Beethoven.

In the economic life, and particularly in modern industry,
evil is flagrantly manifest in the mechanization of human
energy and human life. Is not this the radical evil in the
economic system, the treatment of human labor as goods,
as something to be bought and sold, exploited and discarded
when worn out: man regarded as a cog in the machine, as so
much productive material, as merely an economic agent to
be replaced in part or altogether by more perfected machinery
or more effective manipulation? This system is evil in that
it registers the actual or threatened defeat of human by brute
material factors. Modern civilization in utilizing the resources
'
of nature may show natural piety/ restraint and respon-
sibility to later generations, or it may wastefully squander
and exhaust the means to its own effective future activ-
ity. In applying science to the demands of modern industry,

man may use the forces of nature as levers for the upbuilding
'
of the higher values, and in this sense even brute' nature
may be as it were vicariously humanized; or it may and it
does drag human life to the level of crude matter. It all
depends on the objectives that dictate the course and direc-
tion of our technically expert society.
So again we may view the flagrant evil of war in the life
of modern humanity. The rise of man from savagery and
barbarism to civilization has made his life increasingly
international. This actual international life industrial,
intellectual, social demands of man a corresponding
cosmopolitan morality that should enter and dominate
international relations: through arbitration, world-coopera-
tion, and appeal to the judgment of a world-conscience.
This is the path upward, leading to peace, to the higher and
fuller life of mankind. Modern war, on the contrary, is the
dragging down of civilized nations to the levels and
methods of barbarism and savagery.
In the moral field more narrowly conceived, the same
principle holds true. That which is natural to the beast may
well be a vice in man. In fact the beast is never beastly.
Beastliness is not mere animality; it is degradation of the
human to the brutish level, a level natural to the beast but
unnatural to man. So we read in Dante :
Consider of what origin ye are,

You were not made to live as do the brutes,
But to seek virtue and to learn the truth. 29
When man forgets his human distinctiveness, his character-

istic role and career in nature, to tread the jungle-track of
beastliness, his vices are just this, degrading. The finest

example of this truth in tragedy that comes to mind is in
Hamlet's scene with his mother:
Look here upon this picture, and on this,

The counterfeit presentment of two brothers: . . .
This was your husband. Look you now what follows.

. . .
Here is your husband. Have you eyes?

. . .
What Judgment . . .
Would step from this, to this?
This is the evil: Hamlet's uncle was no fit mate for Queen
Gertrude. Replacing her former worthy husband by this
"
mildewed ear"
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there. . . .
Such an act
. . .
As from the body of contraction plucks

The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words. . . .
This idea of vice as essentially self-degradation St. Augus-

tine has expressed in words of profound insight which will
bear repeating: "When the will abandons the higher, and

turns to what is lower, it becomes evil, not because that is
evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is per-
verse. Cum enim se voluntas relicto superiore ad inferiora
convertit, efficitur mala: non quia malum est, quo se con-

30
vertit, sed quia perversa est ipsa conversio."
LThe view of existence which is here developed recognizes
unflinchingly the actuality of evil, but is not on that account
plunged in pessimistic despair. It is nowise to be mistaken
for the complacent theory of evil as the mere shadow in the
picture or the discord swelling the larger harmony. Evil is

'
not somehow good/ any more than sinking is somehow rising.
Evil is evil and the opposite of good, contrary in course and
direction. But it is a fact that what at a lower level and from
a lower point of view passes for good and at that level is
good discloses from a higher point of view its insufficiency,
and adherence to it at the higher level becomes evil. So again
St. Augustine writes: "He who inordinately loves the good
which any nature possesses, even though he obtain it, him-
self becomes evil in the good, and wretched because deprived
of a greater good." 31 In that sense, but in that sense only, we

could well say that all good is somehow evil. So far at any
rate is the view here advocated removed from complacency.
Thus it is the destiny of every good theory to open up
vistas of inquiry, realms of evidence, new problems which
in the end indicate the shortcomings of the theory and cause
itto be replaced by one more adequate. It is the destiny of
every truth in the end to help prove itself an error and itself
again an element in a higher truth. In the entire realm of
value every solution is but the better setting of a new prob-
lem, every achievement but the clearer recognition of a
greater task. Spinoza's principle which we recognized is
only one half of the truth; our dynamic universe requires
also the other half, which Unamuno has expressed so elo-
quently in his disturbed and disturbing book, The Tragic
Sense of Life: "Every created being not only tends to pre-
serve itself in itself, but to perpetuate itself, and, moreover,
to invade all other beings, to be others without ceasing to be
itself, to extend its limits to the infinite but without breaking
32
them." Not bare
identity of structure, nor yet change and
bare sequence of discretes, but growth, unfolding and genuine
enhancement of perfection, active, arduous, and inexhaust-
characterize the world-process.
ible,
The vaster the field of attainment and advance, the
greater is the range of possible error and frustration. Indeed
the perception of a certain value as in some respects inade-
quate and unworthy is the first step in the attainment of the
higher and worthier value. The criticism and the collapse

of the lower truth are the birth-pangs of the new truth; re-
morse and repentance, the thresholds to saintliness. Life does
not lose but gains in tragic hazard as it gains in prospect
and in dignity. Not self-sufficiency and bland placidity, but
vigilant aspiration marks the heroic soul its ideals are always
:
in the van and its march to higher values never ceases. Far
from content to accept the adulation of those with lower
standards, it is ever keenly aware of the vast unattained and,
by it judging its own attainment, finds itself ever short of the
mark. Didn't James Martineau write somewhere: "The
blessings of a satisfied conscience are least experienced
where they are most deserved "? So we read of Leonardo da
Vinci: "What to others appears perfection is to him teeming
with error." 33 So Socrates' high conception of knowledge
led him to count himself ignorant. So Jesus: "Why callest
thou me good?" 34
( It is of the essence of value, then, that it recognizes no
finalterminus or conclusion. The target, to borrow a phrase
from Professor Boodin, 36 is a moving target. Perfection has
its base, of course, but its base is always a springboard.
Perfection is perfectibility. All along the line of human en-

deavor this truth is demonstrated, and on the higher peaks of
achievement it stands out most clearly. Theology, to be sure,
has demanded a conception of God in terms of absolute
perfection, a perfection all past perfect or present absolute,
without prospect or problems. But, as we have endeavored to
indicate elsewhere, 36 this conception of divine perfection car-
ries over inappropriate mechanistic notions of completeness
and plenitude into the realm of value. If we conceive of God
as the Apogee of Value, then God's perfection must be dy-
namic: it is not the alleged terminus of perfectibility, but its
cosmic course, its heart and soul. Matthew Arnold wrote of
"the enduring power not ourselves which makes for righteous-
ness." 37
The core of reality is this eternal perfectibility: the
heavens declare it; evolution cosmic, biologic, or human-
social discloses it; man's logical, aesthetic, and moral activity
reveals its sublime range. Man's idea of God is his gesture
towards the dizzy utmost of value, the infinite reach and end-
less it. When our vigor fails and our lot seems hope-
span of
less,and the abyss wells up to engulf us and our ideals, when
wild Nature seems to mock our helpless dignity, and dull
scepticism whispers harsh doubts of the reality of value, and
all that worthy in our world is 'scientifically' exhibited as
is
ephemeral and episodic, then the very tragedy which the

cosmos thus reenacts in our experience serves to save us from
despair: in our own loyal aspiration after values we find our
conviction that they are in and of Reality and abiding. And
this conviction of the ultimate reality, conservation, en-
hancement of value is man's God.
faith in
In God is no stagnant plenitude but plenitude of ideal
activity, no dull placidity but ever-heroic redemption of the
world from the hazard of settling back. "My Father worketh
38
hitherto, and I work." Not less than myself but more is
God thus resistant to the evil tug of the downpulling and the
inert and the complacent. For just this upward-urging,
ever more perfectly active character of the cosmos is what
we can intelligently mean by God. And the evil tug is not
outside of God
or alien to the divine nature, but just as in
finitebeings so in the cosmic system of them, in God, it is
the negative moment, the obverse of positive enhancement
and ideal activity. For there can be no higher without its
corresponding lower.
There accordingly no coming to terms with evil, not
is
ever. Only he straightforwardly 'accepts the universe' who

accepts it unreservedly as a battleground of achievement,
only he who in thus accepting it is clearly aware of evils to
be resisted and overcome. It has been said that the way to
understand best the articles of the Creed is to keep clearly
in mind the heresies which they were meant to combat. So the
pursuit of truth is through the clearance of error, and virtue

is in resistance to vice, and beauty is won through the re-
fusal of ugliness. But this does not mean that error or vice
or ugliness are accepted as any the less evil because they are
conditions of good: they are to be resisted. The only view
of the world that might justify pessimistic despair would be a
view that perceived no evil in it, nothing perverse, nothing
lower to surmount or overcome, and therefore nothing higher
to challenge our endeavor: no problem, no task, no hazard of
defeat or frustration: dull, placid monotony! There is a re-
ported saying of Machiavelli: "The worst misfortune in
not sickness, nor poverty, nor grief; but tediousness." 39
life is
Pessimistic philosophy, as we have seen, may have the reverse

effect of that intended by the pessimist: it may be a goad to
the sluggish. Evil and the perception of it are conditions for
heroic recognition and pursuit of value, be it truth, beauty,
goodness; for "powers subjected to no strain. atrophy . .
" 40
and eventually disappear. In this sense evil is always only
relative to good; but, paradoxically, if we refuse to perceive
and resist it as evil, then it becomes evil absolute and utterly

damns the very man who makes his peace with it.
This is the outlook for a world that admits of valuation:
this contest, contact and conflict, of higher and lower, ever
persisting, each achievement opening new prospects, raising
new problems, imposing new duties, facing new hazards.
There is a grim element in this idea; we can apply to our
"
purpose words which Plato wrote in the Theaetetus: Evils
. . can never pass away; for there must always remain
.
4l
something which is antagonistic to good." But another
version of this truth, and one more inspiriting, is Emerson's:
"Within every man's thought is a higher thought: within
the character he exhibits today, a higher character." 42 Good
and evil are not distinct realities and have no status in isola-
tion; they are always relative to each other. Evil is that
ever-present side or factor in the actual world, by resistance
to which a possible worthier side or nature affirms itself
and gains reality through attainment. This contest is at the
heart of things; it has neither beginning nor end, and it makes
our world significant and stirring. The gradational theory
of the nature of evil thus expresses essential characteristics
of our logical, aesthetic, and moral activity, does justice to
the complexity and dynamic hierarchy of nature, and points
to an idea of perfection which does not nullify the funda-
mental character of value of which perfection is rightly con-
ceived as the apogee.
NOTES
CHAPTER I. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IN THE GREAT
RELIGIONS
1. Cf. Tsanoff, The Problem of Immortality, 1924, Chapters III and XIL
2. Prolegomena to Ethics, 5. edition, p. 210.
3. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 83.
4. Quoted from James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 83.
5. "Walt Whitman," Leaves of Grass, McKay edition, pp. 62 f.
6. Maitri Upanishad, 1 :4, transl. in R. E. Hume, The Thirteen Principal
Upanishads, 1921, pp. 413 f.
7. Chandogya Upanishad, 6:9 ff., transl. in R. E. Hume, op. cit., pp.
246 ff.
8. The Problem of Immortality, pp. 215 f.
9. Cf. Schopenhauer's Supplement to his World as Will and Idea,
Chap. XLVI, ad fin.; cf also Johannes Huber, Der Pessimismus,
.
1876, pp. 12 f., 20 ff.

10. Iliad XVII, 446 f.; XXIV, 525 f.; transl. by Lang, Leaf, and Myers.
11. Cf. Otto Pfleiderer, The Philosophy of Religion, transl. by Allan
Menzies, Vol. IV, pp. 3 f.
12. Prometheus Bound, transl. by Lewis Campbell, first soliloquy.
13. Cf. Huber, Der Pessimismus, pp. 13 f.
14. Iliad VI, 146 ff.; transl. by Lang, Leaf, and Myers.
15. Agamemnon, 1326 ff.; transl. by Lewis Campbell.
16. Oedipus Rex, 1186 ff.; transl. by Lewis Campbell.
17. Transl. by A. S. Way.
18. Libation-Bearers, 1016 ff.; transl. by Morshead.
19. PhUoctetes, 440 ff transl. by Lewis Campbell.
.
;
20. Religion in Greek Literature, 1898, p. 285.

21. Ibid., p. 304.
22. Republic, 380, 381; cf. 379, 391; Jowett's translation of Plato is
quoted.
23. Republic, 380.
24. Timaeus, 42.
25. Phaedrus, 246.
26. Phaedo, 79.
403
27. Republic, 610.
28. Statesman, 272 f.
29. Discourses of Epictetus (Arrian), I: 14, 1-6 (H. Crossley's transla-

tion in The Golden Sayings of Epictetus).
30. Meditations, IV: 19, transl. by Casaubon.
31. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, II, 180 f.; transl. by Cyril Bailey.
32. History of Philosophy, transl. by J. H. Tufts, 2. edition, p. 87.
33. Theaetetus, 176.

34. De Providentia, quoted here from Jules Martin, Philon, 1907, p. 100.
35. Emile Bre"hier, Les idees philosophiques et religieuses de Philon
d'Alexandrie, 1908, p. 274.
36. Enneads, III: ii: 14; the translation quoted in these pages, unless
otherwise indicated, is Stephen MacKenna's.

37. Enneads, II: ix: 13.
38. Enneads, II: ix: 13.
39. W. R. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, Vol. I, p. 257.
40. Enneads, III: viii: 4; translation in Inge, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 152.
"
41. Walt Whitman," Leaves of Grass, McKay edition, pp. 47, 62.
42. B. A. G. Fuller, The Problem of Evil in Plotinus, 1912, p. 130.
43. Cf. Eduard von Hartmann, "Plotin's Axiologie," in Zur Geschichte
und Begrundung des Pessimismus, 2. edition, pp. 29-63, esp.
pp. 62 f.
44. Grundriss der Geschichte der griechischen Philosophic, 1883, p. 290.

45. Op. ciL, Vol. I, p. 135.
46. Thomas Whittaker, The Neo-Platonists, 2. edition, p, 68.
47. Cf. his edition and translation of Plotinus, Paris, 1924, Vol. I, p. 111.
48. Enneads, I: viii: 5, 8.
49. Enneads, I: viii: 11.
50. Enneads, I: viii: 7.
51. J. E. Boodin, Cosmic Evolution, 1925, p. 41.

52. Winter's Tale, IV: iv: 89 ff.; cf. Boodin, Cosmic Evolution, p. 75.
53. The Philosophy ofReligion, Vol. IV, pp. 10 f.
54. R. T. Flewelling, Christ and the Dramas of Doubt, pp. 78 f.
55. Job, iv: 7.

56. Job, xii: 6.
57. Job, iii: 25.
58. Genung, The Epic of the Inner Life, 1900, p. 20.
59. Ecclesiastes, i: 2, 14, 9.
60. L. W. Batten, Good and Evil: A Study in Biblical Theology 1918, t
p. 101.
iii: 19 f.
NOTES 405
CHAPTER II. THE CHRISTIAN-MEDIEVAL TRADITION

1. I Cor., xv: 22.
2. Romans, vii: 24.
3. Romans, viii: 38 f.
4. II Timothy, i: 12.
5. St. Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum, VI: 4; English transla-
tion of St. Augustine's Works, edited by Marcus Dods, Vol. V,
- pp. 173 f.
& Cf O. Piiimacher, Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit
. und Gegenwart,
2. edition, p. 54.
7. Confess. X: xxxiii (50); Works, Vol. XIV, pp. 272, 273.

8. Confess. I: iii; Works, Vol. XIV, p. 3.
9. Contra Epistolam Manichaei, XXXIII; Works, Vol. V, p. 133.
10. De Civitate Dei, XII: 6; Works, Vol. I, pp. 488 f. (Translation
slightly revised).
11. De Gratia Christi et dc Peccato Originali, II: 46; Works, Vol. XII,
p. 89; cf. in this connection De Civitate Dei, XII: 3 sqq.; Contra

Epistolam Manichaei, XXV
(39); Contra Faustum Manichaeum,
VI: 8; XXI: 14; Confess. VII: xvi (22); Works, Vol. I, pp. 484 ff.;
Vol. II, pp. 4 f., 25 f.; Vol. V, pp. 136, 181, 395; Vol. XIV, p. 162.
12. De Civitate Dei, XII: 8; Works, Vol. I, p. 491.
13. Contra Julianum Pelagianum, III: iii (9); cf. Jules Martin, Saint
Augustin, 1901, p. 190.
14. Contra duas Epistolas Pelagianorum, II: ii (2-3); Works, Vol. XV,
pp. 271 ff.: St. Augustine's skillfully drawn series of contrasts
between the Pelagians and the Manicheans.
15. De Gratia Christi, XXXV (38); Works, Vol. XII, p. 35.
16. De Civitate Dei, XIX: 4; Works, Vol. II, pp. 302, 306.
17. De et Gratia, XI (31) Works, Vol. XV, pp. 99 f.
Correptione ;
18. De
Correptione et Gratia, XII (37); Works, Vol. XV, p. 106.
19. Quoted here from Joseph McCabe's St. Augustine and His Age,
p. 384, Note. McCabe would amend the passage to read: "except

to a theological microscope," and informs us that he was once the
happy possessor of such an instrument.
20. De Spiritu et Littera, XXX (52) Contra duas Epistolas Pelagia-
;
norum, I: iv (8); II: ii (2); Works, Vol. IV, p. 211; Vol. XV, pp.
243, 272.
21. De Gratia Christi, XXVI (27); De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, VI (13),
IX (21); De Praedestinatione Sanctorum, II (3); Works, Vol. XII,
p. 27; Vol. XV, pp. 27, 34 f., 122.

22. De Correptione et Gratia, VI (10); Works, Vol. XV, p. 78.
23. De Praedestinatione Sanctorum, VIII (16); De Dono Perseverantiae,
IX (21); Works, Vol. XV, pp. 139, 187.
24. De Correptione et Gratia, VIII (19); Works, Vol. XV, p. 87.
25. De Correptione et Gratia, XIII (40); Works, Vol. XV, pp. 108 f.
26. Philippians, ii: 12.
27. The Philosophy of Religion, Vol. IV, p. 19.

28. De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, XXII (44); Works, Vol. XV, p. 63.
29. De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione, I: xvi (21); Works, Vol. IV,
p. 21.
30. Quoted from Nourrisson, La philosophic de St. Augustin, 1866,
Vol. II, p. 373.
31. Cf. C. II. C. Pirie-Gordon, Innocent the Great, 1907, p. 19.
32. De Contemptu Mundi, sive De Miseria Conditionis Humanae Libri
Tres, Migne, Patrologia Latina, Vol. CCXVII, Paris, 1889, Col-
umns 701-746.
33. 76u*.,I:l.
34. Ibid., 1:2,3, 6, 7.
35. Ibid., I: 9, 11.
36. Ibid., I: 13, 21, 29.
37. Ibid., II: 1.
38. Ibid., Ill: 1, 17.
39. E. Gilson, Saint Thomas D'Aquin, 4. edition, p. 11.
40. A.-D. Sertillanges, La philosophic morale de St. Thomas D'Aquin,

2. edition, p. 8.
41. Summa Theologica, Prima Secundae (I-II), Q. Ill, Art. 8.
42. Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. LXXIII, Art. 3; transl. by Fathers of the
English Dominican Province, Vol. VII, p. 298; cf. Summa Theo-
logica, I-II, Q. LXXXVII, Art. 4; II-II, Q. XX, Art. 1.
43. Sertillanges, St. Thomas D'Aquin, 4. edition, Vol. I, p. 321; cf. pp.
322 f.
44. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 326, 327.

45. Op. cit., p. 6.
46. Of the Imitation of Christ, transl. published in "The World's Clas-
sics," I: 1, 3.
47. Ibid., Ill: 48; I: 22; II: 1; cf. Ill: 27.
48. Ibid. t III: 55.
49. Ibid., II: 11; III: 3, 21.
50. Ibid., Ill: 47, 8.
51. Circe, transl. by H. Layng, London, 1744, p. 18.
52. Ibid., pp. 164, 145.
NOTES 407
53. Ibid., p. 188.

54. Ibid., pp. 249 f.
CHAPTER III. PASCAL'S DESPAIR OF REASON

1. Oeuvres completes, Paris, Gamier, Vol. II, p. 313.
2. Cf. Pascal, Oeuvres, Grands Scrivains ed,, Vol. XI, pp. 133 ff.;
F. Strowski, Pascal et son temps, 4. edition, Vol. Ill, pp. 34 ff.
3. Port-Royal, 8. edition, Vol. Ill, p. 48, Note.
4. Oeuvres, Vol. VI, p. 41.
5. Oeuvres, Vol. XII, p. xxvii; Vol. XIV, p. 343.
6. Cf. V. Giraud's introduction to the edition of the Pensees in the
Collection GaUia, p. xxv; cf. also Giraud, La vie heroique de Blaise
Pascal, p. 155.
7. Pascal son temps, Vol. Ill, p. 313.
et
8. Oeuvres, Vol. X, pp. 4 f.; cf. Vol. XII, p. 13.

9. Oeuvres, Vol. XII, p. 78.
10. Port-Royal, Vol. II, p. 412.
11. Cf. Oeuvres, Vol. XIII, pp. 214, 216.
12. Oeuvres, Vol. XIII, p. 139; cf. pp. 13, 132.
Oeuvres, Vol. XIII, pp. 126 f.
t Lucien LeVy-Bruhl, History of Modern Philosophy in France, Engl.
transL, Chicago, 1899, p. 92.
15. Oeuvres, Vol. XIV, pp. 230 ff.; cf. Strowski, op. cit., Vol. II, pp.
290 ff.
16. Cf. in this connection Strowski, op. cit., Vol. Ill, pp. 292 ff.; Jacques
Chevalier, Pascal, 9. edition, pp. 195 ff.; Sully Prudhomme, "La
me*thode de Pascal," in the Revue de Paris, Sept. 1, 1894; J. La-
porte, "Le coeur et la raison selon Pascal," in the Revue philoso-
phique, Vol. GUI, 1927.

17. Oeuvres, Vol. XIII, p. 440; cf. Vol. XII, p. Ixxxvii.
18. Oeuvres, Vol. XIII, p. 318.
19. Oeuvres, Vol. XIII, pp. 198 f., 201.
20. Cf. Boutroux, Pascal, 6. edition, pp. 178 f.

23. Loc. cit.
24. Oeuvres, Vol. XIII, p. 154; cf. p. 271.

26. II. Timothy, i: 12.
27. Le scepticisme: Aencsideme-PascalrKant, 1865, p. 329; cf. p. 327.
"
29. James Thomson, Parallel between Pascal and Leopardi," in his
translation of Essays, Dialogues, and Thoughts of Giacomo Leo-
pardi, p. 91; cf. Pre*vost-Paradol, Studes sur les moralistes franc,ais,
1913, pp. 136 f.
30. Oeuvres, Vol. XIII, pp. 261 ff.; transl. by Albert Gufrard in his
Reflectionson theNapoleonic Legend, p. 268; cf. Oeuvres, Vol.

XIII, pp. 303 f., 314 f.
CHAPTER IV. SCEPTICISM AND THEODICY

1. Cf. Ludwig Feuerbach, Pierre Bayle, in his Sdmmtliche Werke, 1905,
Vol. V, pp. 123 ff.
2. Bayle, Dictionnaire historiquc et critique, 1780, Vol. Ill, pp. 305b,
306a.
3. Cf., W. Bolin, Bayle, in Feuerbach, op. cit., p. 3.
4. Lactantius, De Ira Dei, 12; Bayle, Did., Vol. Ill, p. 625b; English
translation quoted from William King's Essay on the Origin of
Evil, 1731, p. 294.
5. Diet., Vol. Ill, p. 625b.
6. Cf. Diet., Vol. p. 626a: "Paulician answer" to Lactantius;
Ill,
Diet., Vol. Ill, p.306a: "Continuous de faire parler Zoroaster";
Diet., Vol. Ill, p. 542: "Voyons ce qu'un Maniche*en pourrait
repondre a ce discours d'un Orige*niste"; cf. also Feuerbach, op.
cit., pp. 219-226: Bayle's list of seven propositions in favor of
orthodoxy and nineteen against.

627 ff.;
7. Cf. Diet., Vol. Ill, pp. 544a, cf. Reponse aux questions d'un
provincial, in Oeuvres diverses, Hague, 1737, Vol. Ill, pp. 662 f.,
817 f., 869 ff.; also Otto Lempp, Das Problem der Theodicee in der
Philosophic und Litteratur des 18. Jahrhunderts, 1910, pp. 24 f.
8. Feuerbach, op. cit., pp. 242, 244, 245. Cf. Oeuvres diverses, Vol. Ill,
pp. 652a, 796, 809 ff., 814.

9. Diet., Vol. Ill, pp. 318 f.; Oeuvres diverses, Vol. Ill, pp. 662a, 666,
682. Cf. Bayle, Rtponse aux questions d'un provincial, Vol. II,
1706, p. 134.
10. Diet., Vol. Ill, pp. 631b, 629a.
11. Diet., Vol. Ill, p. 733a.
12. Diet., Vol. Ill, pp. 634b, cf. pp. 306b, 625a, 627a; Oeuvres diverses,
Vol. Ill, p. 832b.
13. Diet., Vol. IV, p. 635; cf. Vol. Ill, pp. 626b, 544b, 627, 629, 631b,
636a.
14. Diet., Vol. Ill, p. 733b,
NOTES 409
15. Diet., Vol. IV, pp. 617 ff.; cf., Feuerbach, op. ctt., p. 183, quoting
further from Bayle.
16. Diet., Vol. IV, p. 619.
17. Op. cit., p. 272.
1
18. Feuerbach, Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibniz schen
Philosophic, in his Sdmmtliche Werke, 1905, Vol. IV, p. 108.
19. Leibniz's System, 1902, p. 474.
20. Eckhart: Leibniz "spoke well of everybody, and made the best of
everything, er kehrte alles zum Besten"; The Monadology, and
Other Philosophical Writings, transl. by Robert Latta, 1898, p. 17.
21. Leibniz, Opera Philosophica Omnia, ed. Erdmann, 1840, p. 470.
22. Clodius Piat, Leibniz, p. 248; cf. Nourrisson, La philosophic de
Leibniz, 1860, pp. 273 f.

23. Cf Leibniz's Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld,
.
and Monadology, transl. by Montgomery, pp. 118, 119; Opera,

ed. Erdmann, pp. 519, 521; cf. p. 669: "Libertas est spontaneitas
intelligentis"; Monadology, etc., transl. Latta, p. 146; Opera, ed.
Erdmann, p. 669: "Omnes tamen actiones sunt determinatae et
nunquam indifferentes, quia semper datur ratio inclinans quidem
non tamen necessitans, ut sic potius, quam aliter fiat. Nihil fit
sine ratione."
24. Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz,
1900, p. 172: "A monism is necessarily pantheistic, and a monad-
ism, when it is logical, is as necessarily atheistic."

25. This traditional designation of Leibniz's God, according to Ber-
trand Russell, is not to be found in Leibniz's works (op. cit.,
p. 187).
26. Otto Lempp, Das Problem der Theodicee, p. 50; cf. pp. 49 ff.
27. Opera, ed. Erdmann, pp. 509 f.

28. Ibid., pp. 507, 548.
29. Monadologie, 89; transl. byLatta, p. 269.
30. Opera, ed. Erdmann, p. 261; transl. by A. G. Langley, New Essays
concerning Human Understanding, 1896, p. 201.
31. Opera, ed. Erdmann, p. 472.
32. Ibid., pp. 548 f.; cf. p. 538.
33. Gerhardt, Die Philosophische Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, Vol. Ill,
p. 33; quoted here from Bertrand Russell, op. cit., p. 296.
34. Opera, ed. Erdmann, p. 510.
35. Op. cit., p. 189; cf. Monadologie, sections 40-41.
36. The Philosophical Works of Leibniz, transl. by G. M. Duncan, 2.
edition, p. 286.
37. De Origine Mali, 1702; English translation, with notes, 1731, p. 73.
38. Bayle adds: "On ne sauroit comprendre qu'il ait pu s'imaginer
que le bien moral surpasse le mal moral; ce seroit une faussete* trop
manifesto," Oeuvres diverses, Vol. Ill, p. 653; cf ., Bayle's extended
critique of King, ibid., pp. 650 fL; King, Origin of Evil, pp. 78,
273 ff.
39. Origin of Evil, pp. 285 f .
40. Ibid., p. 80; cf. pp. 52 ff.

41. Ibid., pp. 81, 93 f., 299.
42. Ibid., p. 134; cf., pp. 116 ff., 125, 130 ff., 142 ff., 191, 232.
43. Ibid., pp. 181, 185 ff., 197 ff., 223.
44. Ibid., p. 316.
45. Ibid., pp. 296 ff.
CHAPTER V. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY OPTIMISM

1. Cf. Otto Lempp, Das Problem der Theodicee, p. 79, Note.
2. The Moralists, in Characteristics, ed. by J. M. Robertson, Vol. II,
pp. 64 f.
3. Ibid., p. 108; cf. p. 65.
4. Ibid., pp. 22, 23, 107.
5. Ibid., pp. 57 ff.
6. Ibid., p. 107.
7. Ibid., p. 109.
8. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3. edition, Vol.
II, p. 33.
9. ASystem of Moral Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 215.
10. Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part VI, Section ii, Chap. 3.
11. Ibid., Part I, Section iii, Chap. 1.
12. Works, Oxford edition, Vol. I, p. 54.
13. Tsanoff, The Problem of Immortality, p. 252.
14. Observations on Man, Vol. Ill, p. xi.
15. Ibid., Vol. pp. 35, 419, 426, 430, 437.
I,
16. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 420; Vol. II, pp. 15, 16, 23 f.

17. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 83; Vol. II, pp. 28, 29; Sully, Pessimism, 1877, p. 58.
18. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. II, p. 66.
19. Observations on Man, Vol. Ill, pp. 479, 485; Vol. II, p. 491.
20. The Light of Nature Pursued, 1768-1774, Vol. II, p. 165; Vol. Ill,
pp. 223 f., 226, 231, 233, 178.
21. Ibid., Vol. Ill, pp. 234 ff., 239, 236, 257; Vol. IV, pp. 304, 430.
22. Quoted from Sully's Pessimism, p. 59.
NOTES 411
23. Philosophical Works, 1754, Vol. IV, p. 296.

24. Ibid., Vol. IV, pp. 323, 335, 297 ff., 357; Vol. I, pp. 67 f.; Vol. V,
pp. 37, 45; OttoLempp, Das Problem der Theodicee, p. 130.
25. Cf., however, Walter Sichel, Bolingbroke and His Times: The Sequel,
p. 426: "The real problem raised is as old as the Book of Job:
Why should the righteous suffer? and Bolingbroke's answer re- 7
mains at bottom the Scripture's: Is God a man?'
26. "Pope ein Metaphysiker!" written in collaboration with Mendels-
sohn, in Lessing's Werke, ed. Georg Witkowski, in Meyers Klas-
siker, Vol. Ill, p. 329.
27. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century,
Vol. II, p. 350.
28. Essay on Man, IV, 35 ff.; Ill, 27; I, 240 f., 279 f.; IV, 49 ff.
29. Ibid., IV, 123 ff.; I, 57 ff.; II, 1 f.; Ill, 316 f.; I, 155 ff., 289 ff.
30. Works, Vol. II, 1871, p. 333.

31. Job, xiii: 7 ff.
32. Cf . in this connection, particularly with regard to Reimarus, Lempp,
op. cit., pp. 149-170.
33. Philosophisches Lexicon, 4. edition, enlarged by J. C. Hennings,1775,
Vol. pp. 457, 458, Article "Bose," pp. 460, 461.
I,
34. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 463; Vol. II, p. 1528; Vol. I, pp. 470, 1406.
35. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 1528.
36. Oeuvres, Lyons, 1756, Vol. I, p. 193.
37. Ibid. t Vol. I, pp. 202, 208.
38. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 252.
39. David Strauss, quoted here from Ludwig Fulda's edition of Brookes'
poems, in the Deutsche National-Litter atur series, hereafter cited
as D. N. L., Vol. XXXIX, p. 288; Walter Raleigh, Milton, p. 255.
40. Der Schopfer der Vergissmeinnicht selbst spricht:
Vergiss mein nicht!

(D. N. L., Vol. XXXIX, p. 351).
41. Sind auch in Wolfen viele Dinge zu unserm Nutzen noch zu
finden.
Wir haben nicht nur ihrer Balge im scharfen Frost uns zu
erfreuen,
Es dienen ihrer Glieder viele zu grossem Nutz in Arzeneien.
(Ibid., p. 378).
42. Fur die Schwindsucht ist ihr Unschlitt, furs Gesicht die
Gaile gut;
Gemsenfleisch ist gut zu essen, und den Schwindel heilt ihr
Blut;
Auch die Haut dient uns nicht minder; strahlet nicht aus
diesem Thier,
Nebst die Weisheit und der Allmacht auch des SchSpfers
Lieb herf Or?
(Quoted here from H. Hettner's Litteraturgeschichte des
achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, Part III, Book I, 4. edition,
p. 312).
43. Ein wohlgesetzt Gemuht kan Galle siisse machen,
Da ein verwehnter Sinn auf alles Wermuth streut.
(D. N. L., Vol. XLI-2, p. 17).
'
44. Zweideutig Mittelding von Engeln und von Vieh. . . .
. .Vielleicht ist unsre Welt, die wie ein Kornlein Sand

.
Im Meer der Himmel schwimmt, des tlbels Vaterland! . . .
Und dieses Punkt der Welt von minder Trefflichkeit

Dient in dem grossen All zu der Vollkommenheit. . . .
. .Wann du der Thaten Grund uns wiirdigest zu lehren,

.
Dann werden alle dich, o Vater! recht verehren.

(Ibid., pp. 34, 92, 93, 95, 103, 104)
45. Es offnet Leibniz mir des Schicksals Heiligtum,
Und Licht bezeichnet seine Pfade.
(D. AT. L., Vol. XLV-2, p. 54).
46. So schwindet nach und nach das Uebel aus der Welt,
Das jetzt die Ordnung stort und unser Gluck vergallt;
So wird die Zukunft erst des Schopfers Giite preisen.
Dann lost sich alles auf. . . .
Wer jetzt im Dunkeln tappt, wird dann im Lichtmeer

schwimmen,
Und jeder Misston rein, zum Klang der Spharen stim-
men. . . .
(Werke, Goschen ed., 1856, Vol. XXV, pp. 136 f.).

47. Cf. F. B. Kaye's edition of The Fable of the Bees, 1924, Vol. I,
p. xlviii.
48. Ibid., p. 36.
49. Leslie Stephen, op. tit., Vol. II, p. 372.
50. Quoted here from T. O. Wedel's article, "On the Philosophical
Background of Gulliver's Travels" in Studies in Philology, October,
1926, p. 437.
51. "Day of Judgment," quoted here from Leslie Stephen, op. tit.,
Vol. II, p. 373.
52. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, in Green and Grose's edition
of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, Vol. II, p. 381.
NOTES 413
53. Ibid., pp. 382, 391, 397.

54. Ibid., pp. 413, 414.
55. Ibid., pp. 436, 437, 438.
56. Night Thoughts, I, 14; V, 88, 99; VII, 151, 180; IX, 255.
CHAPTER VI. THE DESPAIR OF CIVILIZATION

1. Oeuvres completes, ed. Moland, Vol. XXII, p. 405.
2. Deuxieme discours de la liberty Oeuvres, Vol. IX, pp. 390 f.
3. Remarques sur les Pensees de Pascal, Oeuvres, Vol. XXII, p. 44.

4. Trait^ de metaphysique, 1734, Oeuvres, Vol. XXII, p. 201.
5. Essai sur les moeurs, Chap. IX; Oeuvres, Vol. XI, p. 235; transl.
in John Morley, Voltaire, p. 322.
6. Oeuvres, Vol. IX, p. 475; cf. p. 471.
7. Oeuvres, Vol. IX, p. 476.
8. Oeuvres, Vol. XVII, p. 584.
9. Oeuvres, Vol. XXI, p. 218.
10. Oeuvres, Vol. XXI, p. 217.
11. Gerhard Gran, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Engl. transl., pp. 314 f.
12. Second Letter to Malcsherbes, translation quoted from Morley,
Rousseau, Vol. I, pp. 133 f.
13. Morley, Rousseau, Vol. I, p. 135.
14. Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, 1835, Vol. I, pp. 470, 475.
15. Oeuvres, Vol. I, p. 491; quoted here from Jules Lemaltre, Jean
Jacques Rousseau, Engl. transl., pp. 92 f.

16. Oeuvres, Vol. I, p. 551; transl. in Morley, Rousseau, Vol. I, pp. 167 f.
17. Cf. Gerhard Gran, Jean Jacques Rousseau, p. 347.
18. Reply to Bordes; Oeuvres, Vol. I, p. 499, Notes; quoted from Le-
maitre, op. cit., pp. 93 f.
19. Arthur Chuquet, J.-J. Rousseau, 4. edition, p. 32.
20. Oeuvres, Vol. IV, 1836, p. 224.
21. Oeuvres, Vol. IV, pp. 239 ff., 244, 246.
22. Morley, Rousseau, Vol. I, p. 311.
23. Quoted from Morley, Voltaire, p. 16.
24. Hoffding, Rousseau und seine Philosophic, 1897, p. 74.
25. Ibid., pp. 106 ff., 126.
26. Oeuvres, Vol. I, p. 558; quoted from Lemaltre, op. cit., p. 113. Cf.
Petrarch's different turn to a similar reflection: "You have not

the speed of the horse, but he gallops for you." (Entretiens sur la
bonne et mauvaise fortune, 1673, Vol. II, p. 396).
27. Third Letter to Malesherbes; Oeuvres, Vol. I, p. 397.
414 THE NATURE OP EVIL
28. Cf. Diaries of Leo Tolstoy: Youth, 1847-1852, transl. by C. J. Ho-
garth and A. Sirnis, p. 141 (March 29, 1852).
29. Cf. L. N. Tolstoy, Pysma (Letters), edited by P. A. Sergeyenko,
Vol. I, 1910, p. 132 (Letter to N. N. Strakhov, March 9, 1879).
30. Cf. Pysma, Vol. I, p. 121 (Letter to Strakhov, Nov. 13, 1876).
31. Cf. Pascal's Life, written by his sister, in his Oeuvres, Vol. I,
pp. 66 ff.
32. Cf. Letter to M.Dudtchenko, December 10, 1903, reporting con-
S.
versation with W.
J. Bryan, Pysma, Vol. I, p. 282.
33. Pysma, Vol. II, 1911, p. 57 (Letter to A. A. Fet, September 28,

1879); translation quoted from Aylmer Maude, Life of Tolstoy:
Later Years, p. 10.
34. Pysma, Vol. I, pp. 142 ff.; transl. in Havelock Ellis, The New Spirit,
1890, p. 225.
35. The World and the Individual, Vol. II, p. 340.
36. Pysma, Vol. II, pp. 155 ff. (Letter to an English editor, December
15, 1894).
CHAPTER VII. THE DEVIL IN MODERN POETRY

1. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3. edition,
Vol. II, p. 352.

2. Quoted from Gerhard Gran, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Engl. transl.,
1912, p. 97.
3. Inferno, IX, 61 ff.:
O voi che avette gP intelletti sani,
Mirate la dottrina che s'asconde
Sotto il velame dei versi strani.
(Johnson's translation quoted in the text).
4. Paradise Lost, V, 572 ff.
5. Paradise Lost, V, 772.
6. Ibid., Ill, 130 ff.
7. Ibid., Ill,214 ff.
8. Ibid., II,190 f.; I, 105 ff., 254 ff.; IX, 171 ff.; Paradise Regained, III,
209 ff.; Paradise Lost, I, 159 ff.; IV, 75 ff., 91 f.
9. Paradise Regained, IV, 145; Paradise Lost, VI, 178 ff.; XI, 515 ff.;
Lyddas, 119; cf., Saurat, Milton: Man and Thinker, 1925, pp. 19 f.
10. Paradise Regained, III, 85 f.; Paradise Lost, XII, 587; VII, 613 ff.
11. A. H. Gilbert, "The Problem of Evil in Paradise Lost," Journal of
English and Germanic Philology, Vol. XXII, p. 181.

12. Paradise Lost, I, 217 ff.
NOTES 415
13. Cain, Act I, Scene i, lines 64 ff.
14. Cain, I, i, 144 ff.

15. Byron, p. 146.
16. Cain, 167 f., 174 ff., 189 ff.
I, i,
17. Cain, 465 f., 518 f., 519 f., 522 ff., 213 ff.
I, i,
18. Cain, II, ii, 414 ff.

19. Cain, II, i, 80 ff.
20. Cain, III, i, 303 f., 460 ff., 547 ff.
21. Quoted from Byron's Works, Poetry, Vol. V, editor E. H. Coleridge,
p. 204.
22. Richard Ackermann, Lord Byron, 1901, p. 127.
23. Cain, I, i, 138 ff.; II, ii, 237 f.; Ill, i, 371 ff., 500 f.
24. Cain, I, i, 45.

25. Byron's letter to Moore, Nov. 3, 1821, quoted here from the Globe
edition of his Works, p. 791, Note.
26. Cain, II, ii, 459 ff.
27. Childe Harold, III, xlii.
28. S. C. Chew, The Dramas of Lord Byron, 1915, p. 81.

Jr.,
29. Manfred, II, iv, 53 ff.; Ill, iv, 129 ff.; I, ii, 36 ff.
30. Ai-je dit a Targile inerte: Souffre et pleure!
Aupr&s de la defense ai-je mit le de*sir?
L' ardent attrait d'un bien impossible a saisir,
Et le songe immortel dans le ne*ant de Theme?
Ai-je dit de vouloir et puni d'ob&r?
O mis&re! Ai-je dit a Timplacable Maltre,

Au Jaloux, tourmenteur du monde et des vivants,
Qui gronde dans la foudre et chevauche les vents:
La vie assure*ment est bonne, je veux naitre!
Que m'importait la vie au prix ou tu la vends?
31. A. L. Gue*rard, French Prophets of Yesterday, p. 200.
32. Translation by N. Jarintzov, in her Russian Poets and Poems, 1917.
33. Die immer fliegt und fliegend springt
Und gleich im Gras ihr altes Liedchen singt.
(Prolog im Himmel). The translation quoted in the text
Bayard Taylor's, hereafter cited as B. T.
is
34. Cf. David Masson, The Three Devils, 1874, pp. 41 ff.
35. Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint!
Und das mit Recht; denn alles was entsteht,
1st wert dass es zu Grunde geht.
(Erster Theil: Studierzimmer; B. T. t Vol. I, p. 64).
36. So ist denn alles was ihr Siinde,
Zerstorung, kurz das Bose nennt,

Mein eigeintliches Element.
(Ibid., B. T., Vol. I, p. 55).
37. B. T., Vol. II, p. 299.
38. Du siehst, mit diesem Trank im Leibe,
Bald Helenen in jedem Weibe.
(Erster Theil: Hexenkiiche; B. T., Vol. I, p. 112).
39. B. T., Vol. I, p. 203.
40. Versinke denn! Ich konnt' auch sagen: steige!
's ist einerlei.
(Zweiter Theil: Finstere Galerie;B. T., Vol. II, p. 68).

41. Vorbei und reines Nicht, vollkomrnnes Einerlei!
Was soil uns denn das ew'ge Schaffen?
Geschaffenes zu nichts hinwegzuraffen!
"Da ist's vorbei." Was is daran zu lesen?
Es ist so gut, als war' es nicht gewesen.
Und treibt sich doch im Kreis, als wenn es ware.
Ich liebte mir dafiir das Ewig-Leere.
(Zweiter Theil: Grosser Vorhof des Palasls; B. T., Vol. II,
pp. 295 f.).
42. Staub soil er fressen, und mit Lust (Prolog im Himmel; B. T. 9

Vol. I, p. 15).
43. Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! du bist so schon!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zu Grunde gehn!
(Erster Theil: Studierzimmer ; B. T., Vol. I, p. 68).
44. Schopenhauer, Hamlet, Mephistopheles, 3. edition, p. 214.
45. Ein Theil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Bose will, und stets das Gute schafft.
(Erster Theil: Studierzimmer; B. T., Vol. I, p. 54).

46. Ein guter Mensch, dunklen Drange,
in seinein
Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.
(Prolog im Himmel; B. T., Vol. I, p. 14).
47. Des Menschen Tatigkeit kann allzu leicht erschlaffen,
Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh;
Drum geb ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu,
Der reizt und wirkt und muss als Teufel schaffen.
(Ibid.; B. T., Vol. I, p. 15).
NOTES 417
48. ImInnern hier cin paradiesich Land,

Da rase
draussen Flut bis auf zum Rand,
Und wic sie nascht, gewaltsam einzuschiessen,
Gemeindrang eilt, die Liicke zu verschliessen.
Ja! diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben,
Das ist der Weisheit Ictzter Schluss:
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
Der taglich sie erobern muss.
(Zweiter Theil: Grosser Vorhof des Palasts; B. T. Vol. II,
t
p. 294).
49. Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.
(Prolog im Himmel; B. T., Vol. I, p. 14).
50. Wer immer strebend sich bemtiht,
Den konnen wir erlosen.
(Zweiter Theil: Bergschluchten, Wald, Fels, Einode; B. T. t
Vol. II, p. 459).
51. June, 1831; quoted here from B. T., Vol. II, p. 459.
52. Cf. B. T., Vol. I, pp. 345 f., Note.
53. Heine calls it "ein geniales Meisterwerk," Sdmmtliche Werke, Meyers
Klassiker edition, Vol. VI, p. 502.
54. Tucker Brooke's edition, Oxford, lines 81 f.
55. Lines 312 547, 1019, 1328 f.
ff.,
56. Cf. Lessing's Werke, in Deutsche National-Litteratur, Vol. LX-ii,
pp. 160-174; Vol. LXIV, pp. 196 ff.

57. Cf. William Hamilton, Metaphysics, Lecture I, citing an array of
similar viewsfrom Aristotle to Jean Paul Richter; cf. also W. R.
Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, Vol. II, p. 239.
58. Grillparzcr, Sdmmtliche Werke, Moritz Necker edition, Vol. X,
p. 179.
59. Sdmmtliche Werke, Meyers Klassiker edition, Vol. VI, p. 506.
60. Ibid., Vol. VI, p. 490.
61. Mosaiken und Silhouettcn, 1877, p. 166.
62. Ich schaue durch die steinern harten Rinden
Der Menschenhauscr und der Menschenherzen,
Und schau' in beiden Lug und Trug und Elend.
Auf den Gesichtern les' ich die Gednaken,
Viel schlimmer. In der Jungfrau Schamerroten
Seh' ich geheime Lust begehrlich zittern,
Auf dem begeistert stolzen Junglingshaupt
Seh* ich die lachend bunte Schellenkappe;
Und Fratzenbilder nur und sieche Schatten
Seh* ich auf dieser Erde, und ich weiss nicht,
1st sie ein Tollhaus oder Krankenhaus.
(Die Heimkehr: Gotterddmmerung; translation by Louis
Untermeyer, in Poems of Heinrich Heine, revised edition,
1923).
63. Ich schrieb bei nachtlicher Lampe
Den Jammer, der mich traf ;
Er ist bei Hoffmann und Campe
Erschienen in Klein-Oktav.
(Quoted here from Pliimacher, Der Pessimismus, 2. edi-
tion, p. 115).
64. Werke, edited by Castle, Vol. V, p. 150.
65. Ich bin kein delirischer sondern ein lyrischer Dichter.
(Werke, Meyers Klassiker edition, Vol. I, p. xciii).
66. Ich will Ihm gegenuber treten,
Begliicken kann mich nur ein Wissen
Das mein ist und von seinem lossgerissen.
Ich will mich immer als mich selber fuhlen.
(Faust: Die Verschreibung).
67. Dann lass ich rings um
ihn mein Feuer brennen,
Er wird im Glutring hierhin, dorthin rennen,
Ein Skorpion sein eignes Ich erstechen.
(Faust: Der Teufel. The frequency of this scorpion-simile
in romantic poetry is significant; we find it in Byron, in
Vigny, in Shelley, in Coleridge; cf. S. C. Chew, Jr., The

Dramas of Lord Byron, p. 68, Note).
68. Verderbend mich als Gegenschopfer fuhlen.
(Faust: Der Teufel).
69. Mein Faust, ich will dir einen Tempel bauen,
Wo dein Gedanke ist als Gott zu schauen.
Du sollst in eine Felsenhalle treten
Und dort zu deinem eignen Wesen beten.
Das Waldgespr&ch),
(Faust:
70. Niemanden horig mehr und unterthan,
Verfolg ich in mich einwarts meine Bahn.
(Ibid.).
71. Werke, edited by Castle, Vol. IV, p. 234.
72. Mein Ich! das hohle, finstre, karge,
Umschauert mich gleich einem Sarge.
Im Starrkampf wilder Eigensucht
NOTES 419
Lebendig in den Grabesfinsternissen,

Hab ich, erwacht, die Augen aufgerissen,
Und ich begann mit unermess 'nen Klagen
Mich sejjber anzunagen.
Ich habe nur gesprengt die dumpfe Haft;
Mit doppelt heisser Leidenschaft
Streck' ich die Arme wieder aus
Nach Gott und Welt aus meinem Totenhaus.
Nach Gott! doch nein! der Kummer ist es nur:
Konnt ich vergessen, doss ich Kreatur!
(Faust: Fausts Tod).
73. Ich bin ein Traum mit Lust und Schuld und Schmerz,
Und traume mir das Messer in das Herz. (Ibid.).
74. Der Gott der Freuden ist ein Gott der Schranken.
(Werke, Meyers Klassiker edition, Vol. II, p. 431),

75. Die cine halt in derber Liebeslust
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich voin Dust
Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.
(Enter Theil: Vor dem Tor; B. T., Vol. I, p. 45).
76. Grabbe, Werke, Vol. II, p. 136.
77. Wozu iibermenschlich,
Wenn du ein Mensch bleibst?
Wozu Mensch,
Wenn du nach tibermenschlichem nicht strebst?
(Don Juan und Faust, Act III, Scene iii).
78. Ich spann'

Die Segel wieder, fahr* mit neuem Winde!
(Act IV, Scene iv).
79. Und wen auch im Arme halt,
sie
Ein andrer ist's als den sie meint.
(Don Juan: Don Juan und Isabella).
80. Don Juan und Faust, Act II, Scene ii.
81. Nein, nein!
Es ist kein Gott! Zu seinem Ehre
Will ich das glauben.
(Herzog Theodor von Gothland; quoted 'here from Huber,
Der Pessimiamus, p. 56).
82. Es gab einst einen Gott, der war
Zerschlagen wir sind seine Stucke.
(Act IV, Scene iii).
CHAPTER VIII. LEOPARDI'S LYRICAL PESSIMISM
1. Epistolario di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Prospero Viani, with new
material by G. Piergili, 3 volumes, 1925, Vol. I, p. 88.
2. Epistolario, Vol. I, pp. 86 f.
3. Giovanni Mestica, Studi Leopardiani, 1901, p. 3.
4. Epistolario, Vol. Ill, p. 475.
5. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, Vol. IV, 1870, p. 367.
6. Leopardi, Scritti letterari, edited by Mestica, Vol. II, 1899, pp. 89 ff.
Regarding Leopardi's early studies, cf also Paul Hazard, Giacomo

.
Leopardi, 1913, pp. 9 ff., 23 ff.

7. E che pensieri immensi,
Che dolci sogni mi spir6 la vista
Di quel lontano mar, quei monti azzurri,
Che di qua scopro, e che varcare un giorno
10 mi pensava, arcani mondi, arcana
Felicita fingendo al viver mio!
(Le ricordanze).
8. G. A. Cesareo, La vita di Giacomo Leopardi, 1902, pp. 25 ff.
9. Lettere a Marianna ed Anna Briyhenti, 1887, quoted here from
Hazard, op. tit., p. 21.

10. Edited by Carducci and published under the title Pensieri di varia
flosofia e di bella letteratura, in seven volumes. Quotations are
from the 3. impression of Vol. I, and from the 2. impression of the
other six volumes (cited hereafter as Zibaldone)', Vol. I, pp. 411 f.
11. Qui passo gli anni, abbandonato, occulto,
Senz 'amor, senza vita; ed aspro a forza
Tra lo stuol de' malevoli divengo :
Qui di pieta rni spoglio e di virtudi,

E sprezzator degli uornini mi rendo,
Per la greggia ch' ho appresso: e intanto vola
11 caro tempo giovanil; piii caro
Che la famae 1'allor, piu che la pura
Luce del giorno, e lo spirar: ti perdo
Senza un diletto, inutilmente, in questo
Soggiorno disumano, intra gli affanni,
O dell 'arida vita unico fiore.
( The Poems of Leopardi, edited with Introduction and Notes
and a Verse-Translation in the Metres of the Original, by

Geoffrey L. Bickersteth, Cambridge University Press,
1923).
NOTES 421
12. Sento che va langucndo entro mio petto

vital fiamma, e 'ntorno guardo, e al mondo
La
Sol per me veggo il funeral mio letto.
E sento del pensicr F irnmcnso pondo,
Si che vo '1 labbro muto e '1 viso smorto
E quasi mio dolor piu non ascondo.
(Appressamento delta morte): Quoted from Bickersteth, op.
cit., p. 11.
13. Epistolario, Vol. I, p. 57.
14. Cf. Epistolario, Vol. Ill, p. 95.
15. Epistolario, Vol. I, p. 217; translation from Bickersteth, op. tit. t
p. 17.
18. Epistolario, Vol. II, pp. 31 f.
19. Epistolario, Vol. II, pp. 304, 336 f.
20. Epistolario, Vol. II, pp. 356 ff.

21. Epistolario, Vol. II, pp. 404, 405.
22. Cf. "Gli amori di Giaeomo Leopardi," in Mestica, Studi Leopar-
diani, pp. 55-190.
23. Ranieri, tiette anni di sodalizio con Giaeomo Leopardi.
24. Epistolario, Vol. II, p. 479; cf. Iljalrnar Hahl, Les tendances morales
dans Voewrre de Giaeomo Leopardi, Helsingfors, 1896, p. 14.
25. Studi Leopardiani, p. 45.
26. Zibaldone, Vol. I, p. 195.
27. Opere, edited by G. Mestica, 1906, Vol. II, p. 386; Zibaldone, Vol. IV,
pp. 388 ff.
28. Volgiti indietro, e guarda, o patria mia,

Quella schiera infimta d' immortal!,
E piangi e di te stessa ti disdcgna.
(Sopra il monumento di Dante).
29. Cf. Zibaldone, Vol. V, pp. 228 ff.; Vol. II, pp. 53 ff.; Vol. IV, p.
376.
30. Cf. Zibaldone, Vol. V, p. 298; Vol. II, pp. 232 ff., 246; Vol. IV,
pp. 270 ff.
31. To this point Leopardi returns repeatedly: cf. Zibaldone, Vol. I,
p. 223; Vol. II, p. 91; Vol. IV, pp. 251 f.; Opere, Vol. II, pp. 373 f.
32. IIgarzoncel, come inesperto amante,

La sua vita ingannevole vagheggia.
(Le ricordanze).
33. Cf. Epistolario, Vol. I, p. 291; Zibaldone, Vol. IV, pp. 289 f.
34. Operette morally Opere, Vol. II, p. 19; transl. in Essays, Dialogues
and Thoughts of Giacomo Leopardi, by James Thomson ('B.W)>
London, Routledge, p. 106.
35. Opere, Vol. II, p. 238; Thomson's transl., p. 261.
36. Cf. Zibaldone, Vol. I, p. 165; Vol. VII, p. 60.
37. Fantasmi, intendo,
Son la gloria e 1* onor; diletti e beni
Mero desio; non ha la vita un frutto,
Inutile miseria.
(Le ricordame).
38. Cf. Zibaldone, Vol. II, p. 393; Vol. Ill, p. 422; Vol. VI, pp. 270 f.,
359; Romualdo Giani, L'Estetica nei "Pensieri" di Giacomo
Leopardi, 1904.
39. Zibaldone, Vol. I, p. 181; Vol. IV, pp. 391 f.; cf. Vol. I, p. 439;
Vol. II, pp. 105 f .; Vol. VII, pp. 66 f., 108 f., 238 f.
40. Cf. Zibaldone, Vol. Ill, pp.269 ff.; Vol. VII, pp. 29 f., 191 ff.; cf. also
Mestica, Studi Leopardiani, pp. 452 ff.; A. Graf, Foscolo, Manzoni,
Leopardi, 1914, pp. 251 ff.; G. A. Levi, Storia del Pensiero di
Giacomo Leopardi, 1911, pp. 122 ff. Cicero speaks of nature as
our stepmother, and both St. Augustine and Bayle quote him with
approval: Bayle, Dictionnaire, Article "Ovid," Remarque E; cf.
T. O. Wedel, "On the Philosophical Background of Gulliver's
1
Travels,' Studies in Philology, October, 1926, p. 443.

41. Arcano & tutto,
Fuor che il nostro dolor.
(Ultimo canto di Saffo).
42. Opere, Vol. II, p. 107; Thomson's transl., p. 170; cf. Zibaldone,
Vol. VII, pp. 198 ff.
43. Cf. Zibaldone, Vol. II, pp. 461 f.
44. Sovente in queste rive,

Che, desolate, a bruno
Veste il flutto indurato, e par che ondeggi,
Seggo la notte; e su la mesta landa
In purissimo azzurro
Veggo dair alto fiammeggiar le stelle,
Cui di lontan fa specchio
II mare, e tutto di scintille in giro
Per lo vdto seren brillare il mondo.

E poi che gli occhi a quelle luci appunto,
Ch' a lor sembrano un punto,
E sono immense, in guisa
NOTES 423
Che un punto a petto a lor son terra e mare

Veracemente; a cui
L' uomo non pur, ma questo
Globo ove 1' uomo e nulla
Sconosciuto & del tutto; e quando miro
Quegli ancor piii senz' alcun fin reinoti
No di quasi di stelle
Ch a noi paion qual
;
nebbia, a cui non 1* uomo
E non la terra sol, ma tutte in uno,
Del numero infinite e della mole,
Con T aureo sole insiem, le nostre stelle
sono ignote, o cosi paion come
Essi alia terra, un punto
Di luce nebulosa; al pensier mio
Che sembri allora, o prole
DelF uomo? E rimembrando
II tuo stato quaggiu, di cui fa segno
II suol ch' io premo; e poi dalP altra parte,
Che te signora e fine
Credi tu data al Tutto, e quante volte
Favoleggiar ti piacque, in questo oscuro

Granel di sabbia, il qual di terra ha nome,
Per tua cagion, dell' universe cose
Scender gli autori, e conversar sovente
Co' tuoi piacevolmente, e che i derisi
Sogni rinnovellando, ai saggi insulta
Fin la presente eta, che in conoscenza
Ed in civil costume
Sembra tutte avanzar; qual moto allora,
Mortal prole infelice, o qual pensiero
Verso te finalmente il cor m'assale?
Non so se il riso o la pieta prevale.
(La ginestrd).
45. Degli spirili e delle forme nella poesia di Giacomo Leopardi, 1898,
p. 38.
46. Cf. Francesco de Sanctis, Studio su Giacomo Leopardi, 7. edition,
p. 279; F. A. Aulard, Poesies et oeuvres morales de Leopardij 1880,
Vol. I, pp. 35-40.
47. Opere, Vol. II, pp. 168, 339; Thomson's transl., pp. 215, 346.
48. Non val cosa nessuna
1 moti tuoi, n di sospiri e degna
La terra. Amaro c noia
La vita, altro nulla; c fango 6 il mondo.
mai
T acqueta omai. Dispera
L' ultima volta. Al gener nostro il fato
Non dond che il morire. Omai disprezza
Te, la natura, il brutto
Poter che, ascoso, a comun danno impera,
E 1' infinita vanita del tutto.
(A se stesso).
49. Re delle cose, autor del mondo, arcana
Malvagita, sommo potere e somma
Intelligenza, eterno
Dator de' mail e reggitor del moto. . . .
Cf. Cesareo, op. cit., p. 149; the translation of this passage

in the text is by the present writer.
50. Zibaldone, Vol. VII, pp. 104 f.

52. O greggia mia che posi, oh te beata,
Che la miseria tua, credo, non sai!
Quanta invidia ti porto!

(Canto notturno).
53. E piegherai
Sotto il fascio mortal non renitente
II tuo capo innocente:
Ma non piegato insino allora indarno

Codardamente supplicando innanzi
Al futuro oppressor; ma non eretto
Con forsennato orgoglio inver le stelle,
N6 sul deserto, dove

E la sede e i natali
Non per voler ma per fortuna avesti;
Ma piii saggia, ma tanto
Meno inferma dell' uom, quanto le frali
Tue stirpi non credesti

O dal fato o da te fatte immortali.
(La ginestra).
54. Zibaldone, Vol. VII, pp. 106 f.; cf., Opere, Vol. II, p. 85; Thomson's
transl., pp. 153 f.
55. Epistolario, Vol. I, p. 556; Odyssey, XI, 539; cf., Sainte-Beuve, op.
cit., p. 415; Carducci, op. cit., p. 121.
56. Opere, Vol. II, p. 291; Thomson's transl., p. 300; cf., Zibaldone,
NOTES 425
Vol. II, pp. 101 ff.; cf. also Tsanoff, The Problem of Immortality,
pp. 303-310.
57. Op. cit., p. 166.
58. Cf. Zibaldone, Vol. I, p. 177; Vol. VI, p. 419; Vol. V, p. 50.
59. Opere, Vol. II, p. 276; Thomson's transl., p. 290.
60. E
gia nel primo giovanil tumulto
Di contend, d' angoscc e di desio
Morte chiamai piu volte, e lungamente
Mi sedetti cola su la fontana
Pensoso di cessar dentro quell' acqu *,
La speme e il dolor mio.

61. Zibaldone, Vol. Ill, pp. 473 ff.; cf. Vol. I, pp. 176, 177, 183; Vol. IV,
pp. 124, 219 f., 272, 302 ff.
62. Quando gl' infausti giorni
Virile alma recusa,
Riede natura, e il non suo dardo accusa?
63. Morremo. II velo indegno a terra sparto
Rifuggira Fignudo animo a Dite,
E il crudo fallo ernendera del cieco
Dispensator de' casi.
64. Zibaldone, Vol. Ill, pp. 396, 397.

65. Zibaldone, Vol. I, pp. 349 f.; transl. in Bickersteth, op. cit.,
p. 104.
66. Semprc caro mi fu quest' ermo colle,
E questa siepe, chc da tanta partc
Dell' ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
Spazi di la da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, eprofondissima quiete
10 nel pensicr mi fingo; ove per poco
11 cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello

Inlinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando: e mi sovvien P eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e il suon di lei. Cost tra questa
Immensita s'anncga il pensier mio:
E il naufragar m' e dolce in questo mare.
67. Fra cotanto dolore
Quanto all' umana eta propose il fato,
Se vera e quale il mio pensier ti pinge,
Alcun t' amasse in terra, a lui pur fora
Questo viver beato.
68. Zibaldone, Vol. V, p. 223; cf. Vol. IV, pp. 224 ff., 318; Opere, Vol. II,
p. 55; Thomson's transl., p. 131; Pascal, Oeuvres, Vol. XIII, pp.
261 ff.; cf. Gentile's Proemio to his edition of the Operette morali,
1925, pp. xlvii f.
69. Zibaldone, Vol. IV, p. 213.
70. Natura umana, or come,
Se frale in tutto e vile,
Se polve ed ombra sei, tant* alto senti?
Se in parte anco gentile,
Come i piii degni tuoi moti e pensieri
Son cosi di leggeri
Da si basse cagioni e desti e spenti?
(Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna).
71. Levi, op. tit., p. 158.
72. Sempre i codardi, e P alme
Ingenerose, abiette
Ebbi in dispregio.
(II pensiero dominante).
73. Zibaldone, Vol. Ill, p. 478; Vol. IV, p. 292.
74. Op. tit., pp. 330 f.
75. Zibaldone, Vol. I, pp. 184 f.; Vol. Ill, p. 383.
76. Carducci, op. tit., pp. 14 ff.
78. Zibaldone, Vol. VI, p. 421.
80. Opere, Vol. II, p. 362; Thomson's transl, p. 365.
81. Zibaldone, Vol. VII, pp. 361 f.
82. Op. tit., p. 113.
83. Nobil natura & quella
Che a sollevar s'ardisce
Gli occhi mortali incontra
Al comun fato, e che con franca lingua,
Nulla al ver detraendo,
Confessa il mal che ci fu dato in sorte,
E il basso stato e frale;
Quella che grande e forte
Mostra se nel soffrir, ne* gli odii e F ire
Fraterne, ancor piu gravi
D' ogni altro danno, accresce
NOTES 427
Alle miserie sue, P uomo incolpando

Del suo dolor, ma da la colpa a quella
Che veramente 6 rea, che de' mortal!
Madre 6 di parto e di voler matrigna.
84. Epistolario, Vol. I, pp. 454 f.
85. Saggi critici, 30. edition, pp. 297 f.
CHAPTER IX. ARISTOCRACY WITHOUT ILLUSIONS:

ALFRED DE VIGNY
1. Vigny, Journal d'un poete, Entry for the year 1843.
2. Cf. Richard Huber, Alfred de Vigny ols Philosoph, Marburg Diss.,
1913, pp. 89 ff.
3. Cf. N. Serban, Alfred de Vigny et Frederic II: 6tude d'influence
litteraire, Paris, 1920.
4. Cf. Otto G. Harlander, "Alfred de Vignys pessimist ische Weltan-
schauung," in Romanische Forschungen, XXIX, 1910, p. 414.
5. Cf fimile Monte"gut, Nos morts contemporains, Premiere serie, Paris,
.
1883, p. 345.
6. "Alfred de Vigny," in Revue des deux mondes, 1891, p. 691.
7. Le*onSe'che', Alfred de Vigny et son temps, p. 87.
8. Servitude etgrandeur militaries, Baldensperger edition, p. 143.
9. Correspondance, 1816-1863, 2. edition by Emma Sakellarides, p. 245.
10. Edmond Esteve, Alfred de Vigny, sa pensee et son art, Paris, 1923,
p. 19.
11. Cf. fi. Charavay, Alfred de Vigny et Charles Baudelaire, Candidate
a I'Acadtmie Franâise, Paris, 1879.

12. Journal d'un poete, December, 1837.
13. Ibid., 1834, near the beginning.
14. Moi-meme, crddule a joie, ma
J'enivre coeur, je me noie
mon
Aux torrents d'un riant orgueil;
Mais le Malheur devant ma face
A passe*: le rire s'efface,
Et mon front a repris son deuil.
(Le malheur).
15. O Seigneur! j'ai v^cu puissant et solitaire,
Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre!
(Moise).
16. Stdlo, Baldensperger edition, p. 205.
17. Mais le ciel reste noir, et Dieu ne re*pond pas.
(Le Mont des Oliviers).
18. Stella, p. 192.
19. Op. cit. y pp. 292 ff.
20. Albert L. Gue"rard, French Prophets of Yesterday pp. 183 f ',

.
;
cf . Marc
Citoleux, Alfred de Vigny, pp. 240 ff.
21. Quoted here from Baldensperger's edition of Vigny's Poemes, p. 414.
22. Tiens toujours tes regards plus haut que sur la Terre;
La mort de 1'Innocence est pour rhomme un mystdre;
Ne t'entonne pas, n'y porte pas tes yeux;
e*
La pitie* du mortel n'est point celle des Cicux.

Dieu ne fait point de pacte avec la race humaine:
Qui cr6a sans amour fera p6rir sans haine.
(Le deluge).
23. Ton p6re ne vient pas; nous seront done punis?
Sans doute apres la mort nous serons re"unis.
24. Je n'en veux pas; j'y trouverais des chalnes.
(La prison).
25. Journal, 1834, ad Jin.
26. Je n'en tends ni vos cris ni vos soupirs; a peine
Je sens passer sur moi la comedie humaine
Qui cherche en vain au ciel ses mucts spectateurs. . . .
On me une mdre, et je suis une tornbe.

dit
Mon hiver prend vos morts comme son he*catombe,
Mon prin temps ne sent pas vos adorations!
(La maison du berger).
27. Je ne sais d'assures, dans le chaos du sort,
Que deux points seulement: La souffrance et la mort.
(Paris).
28. Journal, 1835.
29. F. Baldensperger, Alfred de Vigny, Contribution a sa biographic
intellectuelle, Paris, 1912, p. 24.
30. Comment on doit quitter la vie et tous ses maux,
Ce vous qui le savez, sublimes animaux!
A voir ce que Ton fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse,
Seul grand; tout le reste est faiblesse.
le silence est . . .
Ge*mir, pleurer, prier est 6galement lache.

Fais energiquement ta longue et lourde tache,
Dans la voie ou le Sort a volu t'appeler.
Puis apr&s, comme moi, souffre et meurs sans parler.
(La mort du loup).
NOTES 429
31. S'il est vrai qu'au Jardin sacre* des ficritures,

Le Fils de 1'homme ait dit ce qu'on voit rapport^;
Muet, aveuglc ct sourd au cri des creatures,
nous
Si le Ciel laissa comme une monde avorte*,
Le juste opposera le de*dain a Fabsence
Et ne re*pondra plus que par un froid silence
Au silence e*ternel de la Divinite.
32. Vivez, froide Nature, et revivez sans cesse
Sur nos pieds, sur nos fronts, puisque c'est votre loi;
Vivez, et dedaignez, vous 6tes d6esse,
si
L'Homme, humble passager, qui dut vous tre un Roi;

Plus que tout votre regne et que ses splendeurs vaines
J'aime la majeste* des souffrances humaines:
Vous ne recevrez pas un cri d'amour de moi.
(La maison du berger).
33. Journal, 1844.
34. Ibid., 1834.
35. Servitude et grandeur militaires, p. 200.
36. Ibid., p. 248; Journal, 1835, beginning.
38. Journal, 1836, near the beginning.
39. Stello, p. 426.
41. Journal, 1834, ad fin.
42. Loc. cit.
43. Ibid., 1830, ad fin.
44. MarcCitoleux, Alfred de Vigny, p. 1; cf. pp. 23, 63, 303 ff.
45. Cf. Journal, 1842.

46. Elle dit, en fondant chaque neuve cite*,
"Vous m'appelez la Loi, je suis la Libcrt6."

47. Le vrai Dieu, le Dieu fort est le Dieu des ide*es!
Sur nos fronts ou le germe est jete* par le sort,
Re*pandons le savoir en fe*condes onde*es,
Puis, recueillant le fruit tel que de 1'dme il sort,
Tout empreint du parf um des saintes solitudes,
Jetons Toeuvre a la mer, la mer des multitudes:
Dieu la prendra du doigt pour la conduire au port.
48. Du corps et non de Tame accusons 1'indigence.
Des organes mauvais servent Intelligence. . . .
En traducteurs grossiers de quelque auteur celeste

Ilsparlent. . . .
49. Tous sont morts en laissant son nom sans aureole,
Mais sur le Livre d'or voila qu'il est e*crit,
Disant: "Ici passaient deux races de la Gaule
Dont le dernier vivant monte au temple et s'inscrit,
Non sur Tobscur amas des vieux noms inutiles,
Des orgueilleux me*chants et des riches futiles,
Mais sur le pur tableau des titres de ['esprit.
50. XIX* Siecle, p. 133.
51. Journal, 1835.
52. Cf. Ernest Dupuy, Alfred de Vigny: Ses amities, son rdle litteraire,
Vol. pp. 300
I, ff.; Vol. II, pp. 36 ff.
53. Journal, 1862.

54. Esteve, Op. tit., p. 31.
55. Daphne, Delagrave edition, p. 10.
CHAPTER X. THE WARP OF SCHOPENHAUER

1. Translated by Susanna Winkworth, Golden Treasury Series, pp. 67,
73, 122.
2. Sdmmtliche Werke, edited by Paul Deussen, Vol. II, p. 693; Haldane
and Kemp's translation of The World as Will and Idea, 6. edition,
Vol. Ill, p. 423. (Cited hereafter as Werke and H.-K.).
3. Arthur Schopenhauer's handschriftlicher Nachlass, edited by Eduard
Grisebach, Vol. IV, p. 260.
4. Cf. P. J. Mobius, Ueber Schopenhauer, 1899, pp. 7 ff.
5. Arthur Schopenhauers Briefwechsel und andere Dokumente, edited
by Max Brahn, 1911, p. 7.
6. Wollust, o Holle,
O Sinne, o Liebe,
Nicht zu befriedgen
Und nicht zu besiegen!
Aus Hohen des Himmels
Hast du mich gezogen
Und hin mich geworfen
In Staub dieser Erde. . . .
(Briefwechsel, p. 8).
Was ware wtinschenswerter wohl,

Als ganz zu siegen
tJber das leere und so arme Leben,
NOTES 431
Was keinen Wunsch uns je erfullen kann,

Ob Sehnsucht gleich uns auch das Herz zersprengt.
Wie war es schon, mit leichtem leisen Schritte
Das wiiste Erdenleben zu durchwandeln,
Dass nirgends je der Fuss im Staube hafte,
Das Auge nicht vom Himmel ab sich wende.
(Briefwechsel, p. 9).
7. Briefwechsel, p. 19.
8. Schopenhauer's Gesprdche und Selbstgesprache edited by Eduard ,
Grisebach, 1902, p. 11.

9. W. Gwinner, Schopenhauer's Leben, 2. edition, p. 143.
10. Werke, Vol. XI, p. 46; translation quoted from Wallace, Life of
Arthur Schopenhauer, pp. 95 f.
11. Brief wechsel, p. 61.
12. Briefwechsel, p. 73.
13. Gwinner, op. cit., p. 283.
14. Geschichte der neueren Philosophic, 3. edition, Vol. II, p. 354.
15. Schopenhauer's Gesprdche und Selbstgesprache, pp. 133 f.
16. Kuno Fischer, Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre, 3. edition,
p. 133.
17. J. Fraucnstadfc, Memorabilien, Briefe ujid Nachlassstucke (published
together with E. O. Lindner's Arthur Schopenhauer. Von ihm.
Ueber ihn), 1863, p. 336.
18. Ibid., p. 510.
^.9. Siebentes Jahrbuch der Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft, 1918, p. 31.

20. H. Frommann, Arthur Schopenhauer, 1872, p. 6.
CHAPTER XI. GROUNDS AND LIMITS OF SCHOPENHAUER'S

PESSIMISM
1. Op. cit., p. 338.
2. Schopenhauer-Briefe, edited by Ludwig Schemann, 1893, p. 198.
3. Werke, Vol. II, p. 196; H.-K., Vol. II, p. 381.
5. Werke, Vol. I, p. 126; H.-K., Vol. I, p. 137.
6. Werke, Vol. I, pp. 191, 192; H.-K., Vol. I, p. 210.
7. Werke, Vol. XI, p. 530.
fi. Werke, Vol. V, pp. 317 f.
9. La philosophic de Schopenhauer, 13. edition, p. 134.

12. Mille piacer' non vagliono un tormento.
(Sonetto 195) cf Werke, Vol. II, p. 659; H.-K., Vol. Ill, p. 386.
;
.
13. Mir deuchte doch, als trank' ich Wein.

(Werke, Vol. 571; H.-K., Vol. Ill, p. 297).
II, p.
14. Werke, Vol. Ill, p. 667; cf. p. 666; The Basis of Morality, translated
by A. B. Bullock, p. 152; cf. p. 151.
16. Werke, Vol. Ill, p. 664; Bas. of Mor., p. 147.
18. Werke, Vol. II, p. 405; H.-K., Vol. Ill, p. 112.
21. Werke, Vol. X, pp. 442 f.; cf. Werke, Vol. I, p. 383; H.-K., Vol. I,
p. 419.
22. Werke, Vol. V, p. 319.
26. Werke, Vol. IV, p. 529; Counsels and Maxims, translated by
T. Bailey Saunders, p. 130.
28. Werke, Vol. I, p. 300; H.-K., Vol. I, p. 328 (Calderon, Life Is a
Dream, Act I, Scene I).
30. Tu dois re*gner; le monde est fait pour les tyrans.
(Act V, Scene iv); cf. Kuno Fischer, op. tit., p. 381.
31. Werke, Vol. II, p. 678; H.-K., Vol. Ill, p. '406.
33. Er nennt's Vernunft, und braucht's allein
Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein.
(Faust, Prolog im Himmel); cf. Werke, Vol. XI, p. 41.
34. Werke, Vol. I, pp. 210 f.; H.-K., Vol. I, p. 231.
40. Werke, Vol. I, pp. 447 f.; H.-K., Vol. I, pp. 489 f.

42. Werke, Vol. Ill, pp. 742 f.; Bas. of Mor., p. 278.
43. Werke, Vol. XI, p. 504.
NOTES 433

45. Werke, Vol. I, p. 486; H.-K., Vol. I, pp. 530 f.
46. Werke, Vol. I, pp. 486, 487; H.-K., Vol. I, pp. 531, 532.
47. Op. Git., p. 140.
1
48. Schopenhauer s Briefe, edited by Grisebach, p. 93.
49. Cf. Paul Deussen, The Elements of Metaphysics, transl. by C. M.
Duff, 1894, p. 316.
51. Arthur Schopenhauer. Seine Personlichkeit, seine Lehre, sein Glaube,
4. edition, p. 279.
53. Schopenhauer, Hamlet, Mephistopheles, 3. edition, p. 53.
54. Schopenhauer, p. 84.
55. Werke, Vol. V, pp. 714 f.; cf. the Theologia Germanica, p. 96.
56. Richard Gebhard, "Schopenhauer und Tolstoi," in Erstes Jahrbuch
der Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft, p. 25; Kuno Fischer, op. cit.,
X
57.
P. 247.
Bernard Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 247.
61. Qualibus in tenebris vitae quantisque periclis
Degitur hoc aevi quodcumquest!
(De rerum natura, II, 15 sq.); cf. Werke, Vol. X, p. 583.
62. Werke, Vol. X, p. 584.
63. Schopenhauer's Briefe, edited by Grisebach, p. 357.
CHAPTER XII. HARTMANN'S PHILOSOPHY OF THE

UNCONSCIOUS
1. "Mem Entwicklungsgang," Gesammelte Studien und Aufsdtee
gemeinverstdndlichen Inhalts (cited hereafter as G. S. A.), 3. edition,
p. 30.
2. Otto Braun, Eduard von Hartmann, 1909, p. 22.
3. Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophic (in Kultur der Gegenwart),
2. edition, p. 577.
4. "Wer vieles bringt, wird manchem etwas bringen." Faust, "Vor-
spiel."
5. Hartmann undertakes to show that Kant, not Schopenhauer, was
the true father of modern pessimism, as resulting from an objec-
tive estimate of the world and of human life rather than springing
from personal depression or quietist-ascetic temper. Cf. Hart-
mann, Zur Geschichte und Begrundung des Pessimismus, 2. edi-
tion, Chapter IV; Philosophische Fragen der Gegenwart, 1885,
pp. 112 ff.).
6. Neukantianismus, Schopenhauerianismus und Hegelianismus, in
ihrer Stellung zu den philosophischen Aufgaben der Gegenwart,
3. edition, p. 25.
7. <?. S.A., p. 604.
8. G. S. A., pp. 575, 569 f.
9. Kritische Wanderungen durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart, 1890,
pp. 64 f.
10. Schelling, Werke,I: i: 401; I: vii: 350; quoted in G. S. A., p. 681.
11. Philosophische Fragen der Gegenwart, p. 51.

12. Philosophie des Unbewussten, 12. edition, Vol. II, p. 449; The Phi-
losophy of the Unconscious, transl. by Coupland, Vol. Ill, p. 186
(cited hereafter as Phil. Unbew, and Coupl)} G. S. A. p. 673. Cf. }
Ludwig Feuerbach, Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der

Leibniz'schen Philosophie (Werke, Vol. IV), p. 116: "Mit dem
Willen ist die Existenz gegeben, mit der Vernunft das Wesen."
13. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 454; Coupl, Vol. Ill, p. 191.
14. G. S. A., p. 705.
15. G. S. A., pp. 723 Schopenhauer, Werke, Vol. II, p. 736; H.-K.,
f.; cf.
Vol. Ill, p. 470: "The
inner being in itself of things is nothing
that knows, no intellect, but an unconscious. ." . .
16. Regarding Hartmann's estimates of his predecessors, see also his

Geschichte der Metaphysik, in Ausgewdhlte Werke, Vols. XI-XII,
1899-1900, especially Part II, pp. 89-128, 167-246, 289-305, and
also Phil. Unbew., Vol. I, pp. 13 ff.; Coupl, Vol. I, pp. 16 ff.
17. Phil. Unbew., Vol. I, p. 1; Coupl, Vol. I, p. 2.
18. Phil Unbew., Vol. I, p. 43; Coupl, Vol. I, p. 51.
21. Phil. Unbew., Vol. I, p. 228; Coupl.,Vol. I, p. 263.
22. Phil Unbew., Vol. I, p. 320; Coupl, Vol. I, p. 371.
23. Phil Unbew., Vol. I, Coupl, Vol. II, p. 12.
p. 331;
24. Phil Unbew., Vol. II, p. 33; Coupl, Vol. II, p. 83.
26. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 34; Coupl, Vol. II, p. 84.
28. PhUUnbew., Vol. II, p. 273; Coupl,Vo\. II, p. 356.
29. Thus Drews regards Hartmann as combining in one formula the
NOTES 435
optimism of Leibniz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer (Eduard

von Hartmanns philosophisches System im Grundriss, p. 332).
). "Erkenntniswert, Schonheitswert, Sittlichkeitswert, Erlosungswert,
Entwickelungswert, Zweckmassigkeitswert, Willenswert, Lust-
wert." This part of the exposition of Hartmann follows in the
main his Grundriss der Axiologie oder Wertwagungslehre (System
der Philosophic im Grundriss, Vol. V) and the Philosophy of the
Unconscious.
[. Grundr. d. AxioL, p. 31.
J.
Ibid., p. 59.
\. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 296; Coupl., Vol. Ill, p. 13.
L Phil Unbew., Vol. II, p. 295; Coupl., Vol. Ill, p. 12.
5. Zur Gesch. u. Begr. des Pessimismus, p. 255.
J. Grundr. d. AxioL, pp. 64 ff.
r. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 376; Coupl, Vol. Ill, p. 103.

5. Zur Gesch. u. Begr. des Pessimismus, p. 253.
). Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 389; Coupl, Vol. Ill, pp. 117 f.
). Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 398; Coupl., Vol. Ill, p. 128.

1. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 399; Coupl., Vol. Ill, p. 129.
5. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 399; Coupl., Vol. Ill, p. 129.
5. Das sittliche Bewusstsein t in Ausgewdhlte Werke, Vol. II, 2. edition,
p. 51.
[. Volkelt,Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus, 1873, p. 266.
>. Die Philosophic der Erldsung, 2. edition, Vol. II, pp. 640 f.
i. G. S. A., p. 39.
'. Phil Unbew., Vol. II, p. 561.
1. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 408; Coupl, Vol. Ill, p. 139.
).
Cf.sKategorienlehre, 1896, p 495, Note; cf. also Note of 1904 to
Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 571.
). Das sittliche Bewusstsein, p. 684.
L. Wahrheit und Dichtung in den Hauptlehren Eduard von Hartmann' s,
1894, p. 24.
1. Die Religion des Geistes, 3. edition, p. 185.
S. Cf. Das Christenthum des Neuen Testaments, 1905, p. 86.
L. Die Religion des Geistes, p. 192.
>. Ibid., p. 189.
3. Das sittliche Bewusstsein, p. 591.
r. Cf. Zur Gesch. u. Begr. d. Pess., pp. 327 ff., 359 ff., 370: "Die Bedeu-
tung des Leides."
S. Die Religion des Geistes, p. 259; Das religiose Bewusstsein der Mensch-
heit, 2. edition, (Ausgewahlte Werke, Vol. V), p. 615.
59. Grundr. d. Reliffionsphilosophie, p. 79.
60. Die Religion des Geistes, p. 267.
61. Das Bewusstsein, p. 688.
sittliche
62. Das Bewusstsein der Menschheit, p. 625.

religiose
63. Phil. Vnbew. y Vol. II, p. 577.
6. Cf. Hugo Sommer, Die Religion des Pessimismus, 1884, p. 21.
65. Das sittliche Bewusstsein, p. 246.
66. Der Pessimismus und die Sittenlehre, 2. edition, p. 125.
67. Braun, op. tit., pp. 149 f.
68. Die Religion des Geistes, pp. 247 f., Note; cf. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II,
pp. 438 f.; Coupl., Vol. Ill, pp. 172 f,; Grundriss der Metaphysik,
p. 102.
69. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 439; Coupl. Vol. Ill, p. 173.
70. Der Pessimismus und die Sittenlehre, pp. 180 f.
71. Luke, xvii:33; Das sittliche Bewusstsein, p. 477.

72. Grundr. d. Axiol, p. 162; cf. pp. 141, 148.
73. Pp. 110 ff.
74. Sommer, Die Religion des Pessimismus, p. 14.
75. Eduard von Hartmanns Religionsphilosophie des Unbewussten, 1921,
p. 550.
76. Das sittliche Bewusstsein, p. 474; cf. Bahnsen, Der Widerspruch im
Wissen und Wesen der Welt, Vol. I, pp. 177 f . :
Etwas fiirchten und hoffen und sorgen

Muss der Mensch fur den kommenden ftôrgen,
Dass er die Schwere des Daseins ertrage
Und das ermiidende Gleichmass der Tage.
(Die Braut von Messina, Act I).
77. Grundr. d. Axiol, p. 194; cf. pp. 166, 167, 181.
78. Cf. Kritische Wanderungen durch die Philosophic der Gegenwart t
pp. 64 f.
CHAPTER XIII. A GERMAN SLOUGH OF DESPOND

1. Hartmann, PhUosophische Fragen der Gegenwart, p. 39; cf. pp.
38-57: "Die Schopenhauer'sche Schule."
2. Cf. in this connection his Studien und Kritiken zur Theologie und
Philosophic, a work of his pre-Schopenhauerian days.
3. Neue Briefe uber die Schopenhauer'sche Philosophic, quoted here
from Hartmann, Neukantianismus, Schopenhauerianismus und
Hegelianismus, 3. edition, p. 119.
4. Neukantianiamus, p. 120; cf. Hartmann's critique of Frauenst&dt,
ibid., pp. 28 ff., 115-165.
NOTES 437
5. The Philosophy of Mysticism, II:ii:6; transl. by Massey, Vol. II,

pp. 308, 309.
"{ Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner, pp. 122, 132.
7. Philosophische Fragen der Geyenwart, pp. 52 f .
8. Pessimism, 1877, p. 109.

9. Die Philosophie der Erlosung, Vol. II, 2. edition, p. 84; cf. pp. 191 ff.
LO. Phil. d. ErL, Vol. II, p. 89.
LI. Ich weiss dass ohne mich Gott nicht ein Nu kann leben:
Werd' ich zu nicht, er muss von Noth den Geist aufgeben.
(Cherubinischer Wandersmanri).
L2. Phil Erl, Vol. I, 3. edition, p. 108;
d. cf. H. A. Giles, Religions of
Ancient China, 1918, p. 8.

L3. Phil. d. ErL, Vol. I, pp. 242, 261; Vol. II, p. 251.
L4. Phil. d. ErL, Vol. I, pp. 189 ff., 196 ff., 218.
L5. PhU. d. II, p. 448; cf. Vol. I, pp. 209 f., 219
ErL, Vol. f.
16. Ich danke, Gotter,

Dass ihr mich ohne Kinder auszurotten
Beschlossen habt. Und lass dir rathen habe
Die Sonne nicht zu lieb und nicht die Sterne.
KomnV, folge mir ins dunkle Reich hinab. . . .
Komm' kinderlos und schuldlos mit hinab!

(Iphigenia auf Tauris, Act III, Scene I) cf PhU. ;
. d. ErL,
Vol. I, p. 317.
L7. Frauenminne muss verschworen
Wer zur Gralsschaar will gehoren.
Cf. PhU. d. ErL, Vol. II, pp. 268, 254, 427 ff.
18. PhU. d. ErL, Vol. I, p. 221.
19. Phil. d. ErL, Vol. I, p. 335; cf. Vol. II, p. 333.

20. Phil. d. ErL, Vol. II, pp. 202, 203.
21. Phil. d. ErL, Vol. I, p. 315; cf. Vol. I, p. 312; Vol. II, p. 205.
22. Das sittliche Bewusstscin, p. 549.
23. Geschichte der Metaphysik, Vol. II, p. 530.
24. PhU. d. Erl., Vol. II, p. 341.
25. PhU. d. ErL, Vol. II, p. 630.
26. Cf. Bahnsen's correspondence with Schopenhauer, in Ludwig
Schemann's edition of Schopenhauer-Brie}e, 1893, pp. 347-362,
and also pp. 449-454 for biographical and bibliographical details.
27. Cf. Zur Philosophie der Geschichte; Hartmann, Neukantianismus,
pp. 10 ff., 166
Geschichte der Metaphysik, Vol. II, pp. 510 ff.;
ff.;
Philosophische Fragen, pp. 261 ff ; O. PlUmacher, Der Kampf urns

.
Unbeurusste, pp. 9 ff.

28. Troilus and Cressida, Act V, Scene ii.
29. Das Tragische als Weltgesetz und der Humor als dsthetische Gestalt
des Metaphysischen, 1877, p. 28; cf. Der Widerspruch im Wissen
und Wesen der Welt, 188O-1882, Vol. I, p. 204; Vol. II, p. 331.
30. Cf O. Plumacher, Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart,
.
2. edition, p. 163.
31. Hartmann,Geschichte der Metaphysik, Vol. II, p. 511.
32. Widerspruch, Vol. I, p. 51.
33. Mosaiken und Silhouetten, 1877, p. 7; cf. Beitrdge zur Charakterologie,
Vol.pp. 105 f., 340.
I,
"
34. Widerspruch, Vol. II, p. 206; cf. Vol. I, p. 50: Widerspruchsver-
wirklichung begleitet jedes Wesen vom Augenblick des Erzeugt-
werdens bis zu dem des Sterbens."
35. Wie ich wurde, edited by R. Louis, 1905, p. 41.
36. Ibid., p. 127.
37. Cf. Hartmann, Philosophische Fragen, pp. 295 ff. ;
Gesch. d. Metaphy-
sik, Vol. II, pp. 521 ff.
38. Wie ich wurde, pp. xxxvii, 161; cf. Widerspruch, Vol. II, p. 454.
39. Der Pessimismus, p. 80.
40. Wie ich wurde, p. 199.
41. Das Tragische als Weltgesetz, p. 13.
42. Cf. A. Burdeau in the Revue philosophique, Vol. V, 1878, p. 588.
CHAPTER XIV. A GRADATIONAL VIEW OF THE NATURE

OF EVIL
1. "Is Life Worth Living?" in The Will to Believe, p. 61.
2. Loc. cit.
3. Ibid., p. 56.
4. S. Alexander, "Naturalism and Value," in The Personalist, October,
1928, p. 246.
5. Sir Henry Jones, A Faith that Enquires, p. 44, criticizing absolut-
ism.
6. Edited by H. W. Dresser, New York, Crowell, 1921.
7. Science and Health, p. 120.
8. The Quimby Manuscripts, Appended facsimile letter, p. i.
9. Cf. G. G. Atkins, Modern Religious Cults and Movements, pp. 157 ff,
10. A System of Ethics, transl. by Frank Thilly, pp. 289 f.
11. Miile piacer' non vagliono un tormento.
(Sonetto 195; cf. Schopenhauer's Werke, Deussen edition,
Vol. II, p. 659).
NOTES 439
12. Browning, "Confessions," in Dramatis Personae.

13. Pessimism, 1877, p. 279.
14. Willst du immer weiter schweifen?
Sieh, das Gute liegt so nah.
Lerne nur das Gliick crgreifen,
Denn das Gliick ist immer da.
(Erinnerung).
15. H. Crossley's translation, The Golden Sayings of Epictetus, p. 68.
16. II Peter, ii: 22.
17. The World and the Individual, Vol. II, p. 406.
18. Utilitarianism, Douglas' edition, The Ethics of John Stuart MM,
p. 97.
19. Paul Janet, Philosophic du bonheur, 1863, p. 19.
20. Theologia Germanica, transl. Susanna Winkworth, Golden Treasury
Series, pp. 73, 122; Pascal, Pensees, Oeuvres, Vol.
XIII, p. 385; cf.
Ernest Naville, Le probleme du mal, 1868, pp. 74, 204.
21. Non scribit, cujus carmina nemo legit.
(Martial, Epigr. Ill, ix; transl. by W. C. A. Ker, in the
Loeb Classical Library). The notice of this line I owe
to the interest of Mr. Donald Mugridge.
22. The Philosophy of Plotinus, Vol. I, p. 133.
23. Cf. Urban, Valuation, pp. 54, 63, and also Professor Urban's
articles on Value in the Journal of Philosophy, Vols. XIII, XIV;
Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God, pp. 54-131, 134, 498.
Cf. also A. P. Brogan, "The Implication of Meliorism concerning
the Relation between Value and Existence," in the Proceeding*
of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, pp. 308 ff .
24. Prolegomena to Ethics, Section 184.

25. E. S. Brightman, Religious Values, p. 135.
26. Cf. Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, pp. 63 ff.
27. Entretiens sur la bonne et mauvaise for tune, Paris, 1673, Vol. I, p. 6.
28. Moral Philosophy; The Critical View of Life, p. 268.
29. Considerate la vostra semenza,
Fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.
(Inferno, XXVI, 118ff.; Johnson's translation quoted in
the text).
30. De Civitate Dei, XII, section 6.
31. Ibid., XII; English translation of Augustine's Works, Vol. I, p. 491.
32. The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 208.
33. Merejkovsky The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci,
,
transl. by Herbert
Trench, Vol. I, p. 211. Cf. Carl Hilty, Happiness, transl. by F. G.
Peabody, 1903, p. 107: "My impression is that there is not one
of us who has ever, even for a single day, done his whole duty."
34. Matthew, xix: 16.
35. Cosmic Evolution, p. 45.
36. The Problem of Immortality, pp. 345 ff.
37. Literature and Dogma, Chapter I.

38. John, v: 17.
39. Merejkovsky, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, Book XIII,
Chap. x.
40. E. C. Wilm, The Problem of Religion, p. 172; cf. fimile Lasbax,
Le probleme du mat, 1919, p. 372.
Theaetetus, 176.
Quoted from McComb, The Future Life in the Light of Modern
Inquiry, p. 94.
INDEX
Absolutism and the problem of Beethoven, 395
evil, 370 ff. Beneke, 275
Ackermann, Richard, 189 Bentham, 376, 380
Aeschylus, 12, 13, 245 Berkeley, 139 f.
Alexander, S., 438 Beza, fheodor, 93
Alexander VII, Pope, 69, 115 Bible, The, quoted or referred to,
Al-Ghazzali, 80 12, 26, 29-36, 228, 300, 348, 353,
Altruism and egoism, conception 355, 378, 398, 399. See also
of moral value in terms of, criti- Israel; Job; Ecclesiastes; Paul,
cized, 379-387 St.
Anaxagoras, 101 Bickersteth, G. L., 219, 420, 421

Antologia, Vieusseux-Capponi Boileau, 162
circle, and Leopardi, 223 Bolin, W., 408
Aristippus, 18 Bolingbroke, 146, 147, 150; his
Aristotle, 11, 16, 19, 52 ff., 227, 417 discussion of evil, 122 ff.
Araauld, 67 Bonaventura, St., 47
Arnold, Matthew, 375 f., 399 Boodin, J. E., 398, 404
Atkins, G. G., 438 Bosanquet, Bernard, 391, 433, 439
Augustine, St., 16, 17, 52, 64 ff., Bourbon dynasty, and Alfred de
83, 102, 105, 129, 262, 263, 367, Vigny, 249
396 f., 422; his theodicy, 38-47; Boutroux, Emile, 407
Bayle's critique of, 90-96 Brahmanism, 8ff., 372. V8ee also
Aulard, F. A., 423 Upanishads
Braun, Otto, 432, 436
Bach, 395 Brehicr, fonile, 24
Bahnsen, Julius, 343, 344, 365, Brightman, E. S., 439
437, 438; his unqualified pessi- Brockcs, Barthold H., 132, 133
mism, 357-363 Brockhaus, German publisher, and
Baldensperger, F., 428 Schopenhauer, 272, 276, 279,
Barth61emy, J. J., 245 308
Bashkirtseff, Marie, 3 Brogan, A. P., 439
Basil, St., 93 f., 96 Browning, Robert, 377
Batten, L. W., 404 Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 247
Bayle, 17, 45, 100, 107, 134 f., 150, Bruno, Giordano, 57
159, 185, 408, 410, 422; his Bryan, W. J., 414
treatment of the problem of Buddhism, 9ff., 263, 282, 295 f.,
evil,89-99; his critique of St. 304, 328, 333, 348 f., 352, 353,
Augustine, 90-96 380
441
442 INDEX
Burdeau, A., 438 Demosthenes, 309
Burke, 122 Deussen, Paul, 271, 433
Butler, Bishop, 115f. Diderot, 153
Byron, 177, 194, 211, 246, 247, Diogenes the Cynic, 154
272 f., 290; his Cain, 184r-195 Dionysos Zagreus, myth of, 12
Dominicans, 65, 80. See also
Cabanis, 283 Thomas Aquinas, St.
Calderon, 291
Doss, Adam von, 272
Calvin, 43, 65, 367, 368
Dostoyevsky, 161, 173, 278, 394
Campbell, Lewis, 14
Drews, Arthur, 434 f .
Carducci, 233, 236, 242, 244, 420, Dualism and the problem of evil,
424
14 ff., 27 ff., 366 f.
Carlyle, 136
Duns Scotus, 54 f., 80 f., 89
Cassirer, Ernst, 100 Du Prel, Carl, 344
Catherine II, Empress of Russia,
146 Dupuy, Ernest, 430
Celestine III, Pope, 47, 48
Ecclesiastes, 34-36, 48, 50, 351,
Cesareo, G. A., 420 394
Charavay, fi., 427 J. P., 201
Eckermann,
Chateaubriand, 61 f., 242, 246, 272
Eckhart, Meister, 263
Chatterton, 250, 251
Eddy, Mrs. M. B. G., see Christian
Chenier, Andr6, 251 Science
Chevalier, Jacques, 407
S. C., Jr., 415
Edwards, Jonathan, 46
Chew,
Egoism and altruism, conception
Christ, Paul, 337 f.
of moral value in terms of, criti-
Christian Science, 372-374
cized, 379-387
Christian Theology and problem
Ellis, Havelock, 414
of evil, see Bible, The; Paul, St.;
Thomas Aquinas, Emergent Evolution, 26 f.
Augustine, St.;
St. ; Thomas a Kempis, Theologia
Emerson, 22, 401
Epictetus, 17, 72, 73, 74, 75, 378
Gerrnanica; Pascal; Bayle
Epicureanism, 16, 17 ff., 20, 22, 23,
Chrysostom, St. John, 242 295
90, 150,
Chuquet, Arthur, 413
Escobar, Antonio, 67 ff.
Cicero, 422
Esteve, Edmond, 427, 430
Citoleux, Marc, 428, 429
Euripides, 13, 14, 290
Clarke, Samuel, 123
Clement of Alexandria, 80
Faguet, fimile, 253, 259
Comte, Auguste, 259
Faust-saga, versions of, 201 ff. See
Cosimo dei Medici, 57
also Goethe
Creuzer, F., 216
Fermat, 71
Cyrenaics, 18
Fernow, 266, 269
Dante, 51, 178, 213, 242, 289, 290, Feuerbach, Ludwig, 98, 408, 409,
396 434
Darwinism, Hartmann's critique Fichte, 262, 269, 274, 275
of, 318 Fischer, Kuno, 277, 278, 282, 433
INDEX 443
Fite, Warner, 394 Gu6rard, A. L., 408, 415, 428

Flewelling, R. T., 404 Guion, Madame, 298
Foscolo, Ugo, 247 Gwinner, W., 272, 281, 431
Franz, Lucia, 281
Hagedorn, Friedrich, 134
Frauenstadt, Julius, 275, 279,
Hahl, Hjalmar, 421
343 f., 356, 357, 431
Haller, Albrecht von, 133 f.
Frederick the Great, 130, 148, 247,
248 Hamilton, William, 417
Hardy, Spence, 348
Frommann, H., 431
404 Harlander, Otto G., 427
Fuller, B. A. G.,
Hartley, David, hedonistic op-
timist, 116-119
Galileo, 69, 374
Garden of Eden story, 12, 29, 61, Hartmann, Eduard von, 7, 11,
343, 344, 346 355, 356, 357 f.,
f.,
173 f., 230
359, 360, 361, 365, 375, 377,
Gay, John, 116
404, 433 f., 434 f., 436, 437, 438;
Gebhard, Richard, 433 his Philosophy of the Uncon-
Gelli, Giovan Battista, Circe, 57-
scious, 308-341
60
Hazard, Paul, 420
Gentile, Giovanni, 426 Hedonism and the problem of
Genung, J. F., 404 18 f., 116 ff., 120 ff., 129 ff.,
evil,
Giani, Romualdo, 422 374-379. See also Schopenhauer,
Gibbon, 43 Hartmann.
Gilbert, A. H., 414
Hegel, 273, 274, 275, 284, 308,
Gilbert, N. J. L., 251 312 340, 342, 343, 357 f.
ff.,
Gilson, fi., 54, 406
Hegesias, 18 f., 130, 131
Giordani, Pietro, 215, 220, 221,
Heine, 247; his Doktor Faust, 204-
226
207
Giraud, V., 407
Heraclitus, 12
Gnosticism, 20 ff., 38 f.
Herbart, 274
Goethe, 136, 178, 189, 203, 204 f.,
Herder, 114
206, 211, 247, 270, 287, 292, 311,
Hobbes, 111, 134 f., 288, 380
349, 352 f., 353, 356, 377 f.; the
Hoffding, Harald, 159
conception of evil and moral
Homer, 11, 13, 207, 290, 292, 309
value in his Faust, 195-201
Huber, Johannes, 362, 403
Gozzi, 291
Huber, Richard, 427
Grabbe, Dietrich, his pessimistic
Humboldt, 352
poetry, 210-214
Hume, his critique of theodicy,
Graf, A., 242, 422 138-142
Gran, Gerhard, 152, 413, 414
Hutcheson, Francis, 114, 380
Greek dualism of God and Matter,
and problem of evil, 38 Infants, unbaptized, damnation of,
Green, T. H., 3, 382, 389 46 f.
Grillparzer, Franz, 204, 206 Inge, W. R,, 24, 387, 404, 417
Grimm, F. M., 157 Innocent III, Pope, see Lothario
Groener, Maria, 281 de' Conti
444 INDEX
Innocent X, Pope, 69 Lemaitre, Jules, 413
Israel, problem of evil in religion Lempp, Otto, 408, 409, 410, 411
of, 29-36. See also Bible, The; Lenau, Nikolaus, 211, 247, 394;
Garden of Eden story; Job; his pessimistic poetry, 207-210
Ecclesiastes Leonardo da Vinci, 398
Leopardi, 7, 177, 247, 256, 260,
Jacopssen, A., and Leopardi, 242, 272, 290, 309, 394; his lyrical
245 pessimism, 215-245
James, William, 3, 4, 403; his Leopardi family, 215 ff.
treatment of evil, 368 f. Lerrnontov's Demon, 194 f.
Janet, Paul, 439 Leasing, 124, 203 f., 411
Jansenism, 63 ff., 83 ff. Levi, Giulio, 236, 422, 426
Jarintzov, N., 415 Lcvy-Bruhl, Lucien, 407
Jesuits, 64 ff. Locke, 116, 139
Job, Book of, 31-34, 48, 127, 195, Lothario de' Conti, Cardinal, 56,
246, 250, 261, 367 f. 144; his treatise On the Con-
Johnson, Samuel, his Rasselas, tempt of the World, 47-51
137 f. Louis Philippe, and Alfred de
Jones, Sir Henry, 438 Vigny, 249
Julian the Apostate, 256 Lucretius, 306
Jurieu, Pierre, 90, 93 Lully, Raymond, 297
Justin Martyr, 39 Luther, 262
Juvenal, 281
McCabe, Joseph, 405
Kant, 73, 89, 128, 136, 140, 255, Machiavelli, 400
274, 282 ff., 300, 312, 342, 347, MacKenna, Stephen, 404
348, 353, 356, 359, 381, 433 f. Mai, Angelo, 222
Karma, 9 f., 348. See also Bud- Mainlander, Philipp, 7, 214, 330,
dhism 343, 344, 365; his Philosophy of
Keats, 391, 394 Redemption, 347-357
Kierkegaard, Soren, 176 Malebranche, 301
King, William, his Essay on the Mandeville's Fable of the Bees,
Origin of Evil, 107-110 134-136
Kurt, N., 331 Manicheanism, 38 ff., 64, 89 ff.,
100, 105, 110, 367
Lactantius, 90 f. Manzoni, Alessandro, 223
Lamartine, 246 Marat, 146
La Mothe Le Vayer, 97 Marcionitcs, 90, 94
Laporte, J., 407 Marcus Aurelius, 17
Lasbax, fimile, 440 Marlowe's Doctor Famtus, 202 f.
Leconte de Lisle's Qain, 193 f. Martensen, Hans, 209

Leibniz, 17, 72, 89, 109, 110, 111, Martial, 385
129, 131, 134, 147, 158, 159, 361, Martin, Jules, 404, 405
370, 409, 435; his theodicy, 99- Martineau, James, 398
107 Masson, David, 415
INDEX 445
Materialism, 2 f., 16, 17 f., 20, 364 in the eighteenth century, 1 1 1 ff ; .
Matter, regarded as principle or in German didactic poetry,

vehicle of evil in the world, 131 ff.
14 ff., 27 ff., 30, 38 ff. Orphic cult, 12, 176

Maude, Aylmer, 414
Maupassant, 374 Pan Ku, Chinese myth of, 350
Maupertuis, hedonistic pessimist, Pandiabolism, 7
129-131 Pandora, myth of, 12
Menander, 11 Parzival, 353
Mendelssohn, Moses, 128, 411 Pascal, 17, 45, 57, 107, 147, 150,
Me-rc, A. G., 72 167, 240, 242, 246, 247, 252 f.,
Merejkowsky, Dmitri, 439, 440 259, 260, 304, 380, 394, 426, 439;
Mestica, Giovanni, 206, 420, 421, his despair of reason, 61-87; his
422 'wager,' 76 ff.
Mill, J. S., 332, 379, 381 Paul, St., 80, 81, 86, 366; his view
Milton, 289; his conception of evil, of evil,37 f.
177-184 Paulicians, 89 ff.
Mobius, P. J., 430 Paulsen, Friedrich, 198, 304, 376
Mole, L. M., and Alfred de Vigny, Pclagianism, 38, 40 ff., 46, 64, 66,
250 68
Molina, Luis, 65 ff., 83 Pessimism, definitions of, 1, 6; its
Montaigne, 57, 72, 73, 74, 75, 259 source, 4 f ; its varieties, 6 f ;
. .
Monte*gut, Emile, 427 pandiabolism, 7; oriental, 8ff.;

Montesquieu, 114 hedonistic, 18 f., 129 ff.; Gnos-
Morley, John, 158, 413 tic, 20, 39 f.; Manichean, 39 ff.;
Musset, Alfred de, 246 medieval, 47 ff.; eighteenth cen-

tury reaction against theodicy,
Napoleon, Alfred de Vigny and, 134 ff.; 145 ff.; cultural, 145-
249 175. See also under names of
Naville, Ernest, 439 individual pessimists
Neoplatonism, 20 ff. Petrarch, 242, 287, 376, 394, 413
Neopythagoreanism, 20, 24 Pfleiderer, Otto, 29, 44 f .
Newman, Cardinal, 75 Philo of Alexandria, 20, 24

Newton, 116 Piat, Clodius, 409
Niccolini, G. B., 226 Pine-Gordon, C. H. C., 406
Nichol, John, 186 Pistorius, Hermann, 119f.
Nicole, Pierre, 67 Platen, 226
Nicbuhr, 222 Plato, 14 ff., 19, 52, 59 f., 71, 101,
Nietzsche, 277, 360, 382 150, 282, 293, 297 f., 309, 342,
Nirvana, 9. See also Buddhism 394, 401
Nourrisson, J. F., 409 Pliny, 11
Plotinus, the theodicy of, 20-27;
Optimism, definitions of, 1, 6; ex- his conception of matter, 24 f .
treme varieties, 3 f Whitman's,

.
; Pliimacher, O., 405, 437, 438
4, 23; hedonistic, 116 ff., 120 ff.; Plutarch, 11
446 INDEX
Pope, Alexander, 137, 146, 147, Schopenhauer family, 264 ff.
150, 158, 159; his Essay on Man, Schopenhauer's disciples, 279, 300,
122-127, 131 ff. 307, 342-363
Port Royal, see Jansenism; Pascal Schulze, "Aenesidemus," 269
PreVost-Paradol, 408 Schumann, 394
Promethean myths, 12, 29, 173 Leon, 252, 427
Se"ch<5,
Protagoras, 230 Senancour's Obermann, 246 f.
Pushkin, 194, 211 Seneca, 11

Pythagoreanism, 12 Serban, N., 427
Sertillanges, A.-D., 406
Quimby, Dr., and Mrs. Eddy, Shaftesbury, 123, 124, 134, 150,
372 f. 380; his theodicy, 111-114
Shakespeare, 26, 145, 196, 247,
Ranee", Abb6, 281 250, 290, 291, 292, 353, 358 f.,
Ranieri, Antonio, 225 360, 362, 374, 396
Raphael, 295 Shelley, 176, 189
Reimarus, 128, 411 Sichel, Walter, 411
Renaissance views of the nature of Sidgwick, H., 381
evil, 55, 57-60 Silesius, Angelus, 348 f.
Ribot, Th., 286, 299 f. Silva, Jos6 Asuncion, 351
Richter, Jean Paul, 274, 417 Sinner, L. de, 224, 226, 236
Robespierre, 146, 251 Smith, Adam, 114f.
Rousseau, 145, 146, 166 f., 171 ff., Socrates, 14, 101, 398
227, 229, 257; his attack on civi- Sommer, Hugo, 436
lization, 151-163 Sophie Charlotte, Queen of
Royce, Josiah, 174, 379 Prussia, 99
Russell, Bertrand, 106, 409 Sophocles, 11, 13, 14, 290, 309
Ruyssen, Theodore, 304 Sorley, W. R., 439
Spencer, Herbert, 382
St. Cyran, Abb6, 63 Spinoza, 181, 315, 318, 322, 371,
St. Evremont, 97 391,397
Sainte-Beuve, 67, 73, 236, 424 Stanislas, King, and Rousseau,
Saisset, 84 .,
155
Sanctis, Francesco de, 245, 423 Steffes, J. P., 338
Schelling, 274, 312, 314 ff. Stendhal, 214
Schemann, Ludwig, 437 Stephen, Leslie, 114, 119, 176,
Schiller, 247, 339 411
Schopenhauer, 7, 11, 134, 142, 214, Stoicism, 16 ff., 19, 20, 23, 42, 72,
247, 308, 309, 310, 312 ff., 318, 131, 236, 237, 246, 254, 261, 352.
324, 325 f., 328, 335, 340, 341, See also Epictetus
342 ff., 346, 347, 351, 352, 353, Strauss, David, 411
356, 357 f., 359, 360, 361, 365, Strowski, Fortunat, 70, 407
375, 382, 433, 434, 435; his life Sully, James, 347, 410
and character, 262-281; his pes- Sully-Prudhomme, 407
simistic philosophy, 282-307 Swift's pessimism, 136 f.
INDEX 447
Taubert, Agnes, 311; her defense Urban, W. M., 439

of pessimism, 344-347 Uz, J. P., 134
Tertullian, 39, 80, 96
Vigny, Alfred de, 7, 138, 176, 188;
Theognis, 11 his pessimistic poetry, 246-261
Theologia Germanica, 262 f., 304,
380 Volkelt, Johannes, 278, 302, 435
305 f.,
Thomas a Kempis, view Voltaire, 89, 90, 95, 98, 124, 137,
47, 70; his
of evil, 55-57 145, 157 ff., 163, 291; his treat-
ment of evil, 146-151
Thomas Aquinas, St., 47, 65 ff., 80,
89; his treatment of evil, 52- Walch, J. G., 128 f.
55 Wallace, W., 431
Thomson, James, poet of The City Wedel, T. O., 412, 422
of Dreadful Night, 7, 351 f., 362, Whitman, Walt, 4, 23
408 Whittaker, Thomas, 404
Thucydides, 309 Wieland, 134, 270
Tolstoy, 2, 146, 171 f!., 302, 305, Wilm, E. C., 440
378; his critique of civilization, Windelband, Wilhelm, 19, 274
163-170 Wolff, Christian, 129, 131
Tucker, Abraham, hedonistic op-
Young's Night Thoughts, 142-144
timist, 120-122
Zeller,Eduard, 24
Unamuno, Miguel de, 397 f. Zoroastrianism, 27 f., 38, 105,
Upanishads, 8 ff., 282, 297, 348 366 f ., 369

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THE BOOK WAS

THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY:

Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1931

SET UP AND ELECTBOTYPED BY T. MOREY A SON

MY FATHER AND MOTHER

prochement between the two. On the other hand is the in-

and his ambitions, or at any rate to sober his self-esteem. It

the Rice Institute Pamphlet and the Philosophical Review.

operative volume on Contemporary Tendencies in American

What makes evil a problem? Temperamental complacency

CHAPTER II. THE CHRISTIAN-MEDIEVAL TRADI-

CHAPTER III. PASCAL'S DESPAIR OF REASON . 61

CHAPTER IV. SCEPTICISM AND THEODICY . . 88

of the whole field of human activity and of all available values,

CHAPTER VII. THE DEVIL IN MODERN POETRY . 176

CHAPTER VIII. LEOPARDI'S LYRICAL PESSIMISM 215

transfigured by the very condemnation of it: thus life- weari-

ness overcomes itself.

CHAPTER IX. ARISTOCRACY WITHOUT ILLUSIONS:

CHAPTER X. THE WARP OF SCHOPENHAUER . 262

agreements with his mother and sister. His fiasco as a lec-

CHAPTER XL GROUNDS AND LIMITS OF SCHOPEN-

CHAPTER XIII. A GERMAN SLOUGH OF DESPOND 342

CHAPTER XIV. A GRADATIONAL VIEW OF THE

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IN THE GREAT

A precise definition of Pessimism cannot be offered at the

appear the variety of views which are styled pessimistic.

possible worlds, the sentence, eulogistic in some systems, is

way of distinction,follow a contemporary and define a

drilled choir chant, but like the thousand- voiced tumult of a

impersonal and therefore cannot comprehend the meaning of

analysis and causal explanation of conditions and events,

blameworthy? That the materialist himself, like the rest of

The critique of materialistic philosophy is not a part of our

problem of evil, the judgment of anything as good or bad,

'Everlasting Yea/ But what indeed is the meaning of the

willed because it demands and feeds on enthusiastic reassur-

makes a man and pain, it rouses in

remediable, that frustration is the primal and the final fact

of life. This conviction,

pessimistic philosophy, which may go to such an extreme

confronting it a problem of good If in theological optimism

it is difficult to show why there should be any need of salvation

in God's own world, the extreme pessimist's perplexity is no

disdain of it, to wit, pessimistic philosophy? This is the

and fundamental and will somehow be final in the universe.

willy-nilly tendency from the two extremes towards the

pessimism to refer to estimates of the world and of human life

The fundamental available alternatives are suggested by

sponsible for the experience of evil, whether owing to our

knowledge which enslaves us to illusion, or to our hazardously

That evil as rooted and dominant in the very heart

of ultimate reality can be the claim only of a pandiabolism,

Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?

I think myself; yet I would rather be

The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou

That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,

Of having made such men in such a world. '

repeatedly his return here to earth? ... In this cycle of