of real suffering serves in the way it ministers to man's moral growth, his secular knowledge, and his spiritual advancement? The sensitiveness of animals to pain is far less than it has often been pessimistically pictured, and the real pain experienced by man is chiefly due to his being a personality, capable of looking before, after, and upward. It is time to note how suffering really leads man to a knowledge of the way in which God cosmically manifests Himself; to recall how the evils of our world-system are such simply as possibilities, the actual result resting with man himself; and to heed the poet's word "Doubt no longer that the Highest is the wisest and the best; Let not all that saddens Nature blight thy hope or break thy rest." Even a Rousseau was able clearly to perceive how little these physical evils would mean for us but for our moral evils and shortcomings. It is very possible that theistic philosophy may have sometimes seemed insufficiently to reckon with the suffering and pain of the world; but, even if this casual effect be not disallowed, it must still be undoubtedly held that recent theistic thought has made noteworthy advance towards a sounder adjustment of modern modes of viewing the conflicting moral attributes involved. A gratifying result of the way in which in man's narrow "circle of experience burns The central truth, Power, Wisdom, Goodness-God." MODERN PESSIMISM. 131 It has, too, in the outlook on the progressiveness of nature which, amid the pain and suffering of the world, evolution has given it, more clearly seen that the difficulties which seem to exist in creation are being gradually surmounted "For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless god This is quite compatible with our contention that the philosophy of theism to-day perfectly appreciates the difficulties of reconciling such a world as ours with the fact of a Perfect Being for its Creator, and of maintaining our freedom from the world-woe (Welt-Schmerz) whose melancholy contagion has caught and clouded so many noble spirits of our time. Yes, it would be strange if it had been otherwise—if, that is to say, it had not so entered into the divine meaning of the German poet's lines "Wie nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass, Wie nie die kummervollen Nächte Auf seinem Bette weinend sass, Der kennt Euch nicht, Ihr himmlischen Mächte." For though Pessimism may not provide our restingplace, it is impossible in this world of mania and monstrosity, of frustration and fatuity, of misery and microbe, not to see how much of the truth it carries with it. And we, for our part, do not think the pessimistic factors grow less or fewer as one deepens his study of men and of institutions of every sort. We do not believe that, when we have, with Dr E. Pfleiderer, charged home the pessimistic trends of thought on the indolent eudæmonism of the age, we have done anything like full justice to the facts, or said all that is to be said. However, we pass from that. Though we cannot forget that the physical universe “has fixed, unaltering laws, we cannot help seeing God's hand in events. Whatever happens, we think of as His mercies, His kindness; or His visitations and His chastisements; everything comes to us from His love." We believe that a patient study of all that can be philosophically advanced in its favour will tend to modify our view of what might otherwise seem the extravagant optimism in which rested that most distinguished Italian thinker, Rosmini, who in his 'Teodicea' maintains that this world is the sole one worthy of the goodness of God (degno della somma bontà and il solo possibile are his expressions, § 651). And yet it would be a hard thing to agree to Rosmini's restrictions on the Divine possibilities and freedom. It is in the love which is in God that the springs of possibility for objective reality must be taken to lie. Precisely in the lack of such altruistic power is the shortcoming of pantheism seen. Theistic philosophy has been content to claim the working of the world, on the melioristic theory of an "increasing purpose," as good in relation to the end for which it has been destined. It forgets not that, imperfect our world may be, and yet be thoroughly suited to THE TRUE OPTIMISM. the purposes for which it has been ordered. 133 No more does it forget the saying of Strauss that a true philosophy must naturally be optimistic, or it cuts away the branch on which it sits. The last word is yet very far from having been spoken by philosophy as to why a world, grounded in the Absolute, is not perfect; but at least it has given a less uncertain sound as to the unsatisfactoriness of Hegelianism in its mode of dealing with the opposite of Absolute Being, and its making opposites pass-as in this system they do—into each other. Christian theism has been satisfied with such tranquillity of soul as Christianity brings as its gift in virtue of its chastened optimism, which does not tend to an always greater flatness, but sees all things work together for good only through suffering being turned into sacred joy, loss into spiritual gain, misery into interior happiness, pain into priceless power. This it is which has averted for it the otherwise inevitable seeming that earth is "darkness at the core And dust and ashes all that is," even while it has felt the impossibility of theoretic demonstration of its optimism. Yes, for, however it may be with the theist, it is impossible for the Christian theist to find rest in pessimism. That mental disorder is, according to Max Nordau, one of the philosophic forms of ego-mania, and certainly the pessimist is prone to project his own dark shadow on the world. We are not, for our part, disposed to admit that the religious mind in its best outgoing will be content to rest in the equally real ego-mania of any shallow, visionary, airy optimism. It is the glory of Schopenhauer to have made any Leibnitzian, happy-go-lucky optimism impossible for us. His also has been the folly to set the entry of reason and order so late in the world's day as to reduce earth to a reign of irrationality and caprice, and his the mistake to confound being with evil. We admit the service he has done in laying stress on the individual or finite existence as part of the will to live, even while we share neither his apotheosis of selfishness nor his hostility to a really rational religion. Such disciples of his as Bahnsen and Deussen have not failed, with certain divergences, to maintain the dark hues of their master, as has also Frauenstädt, who has affinities with Hartmann likewise. Nor has anything been lacking to the thoroughness of the unreasoned Pessimism of the Italian poet Leopardi, who has told us— "Our life is valueless; for it consists Of nought but ennui, bitterness, and pain. There never were stronger temptations than in this time for men to cry, as Shakespeare's sonnet has it "Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry." |