To these and similar utterances the answer is plain. They are criticisms, reflections on life; and not the spontaneous verdict of life itself, the verdict which a healthy nature pronounces on life as it passes. I oppose to them the testimony of competent witnesses; I cite expressions of abounding joy in being. This from Emerson, yet unknown to fame, with scant means and a doubtful future: "Almost I fear to think how glad I am. Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous."

This from Charles Lamb, who had had his full share of mortal woe:

"I am in love with this green earth, the face of town and country, the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities and jests."

English literature has no soberer poet than Wordsworth, a man whose temperament inclined to melancholy; but what a witness to the value of life who knew

"that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 't is her privilege
Through all the years of this our life to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e'er prevail against us or disturb

Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings."

All this the pessimist pronounces a delusion. Be it so. All reality, so far as the individual is. concerned, is subjective. The value of life for me is what I find in it. If it yields to my consciousness a preponderance of good, I am justified in my optimism. We may be deceived as to the ground of our joy in life, but the joy itself is no delusion. I concede to the pessimist that pleasure is superficial. Enjoyment plays on the surface of life. Disturb that surface, mar it at any point, and straightway the underlying pain obtrudes. And by what insignificant trifles the surface-joy is disturbed! In the midst of a happy day let the smallest, scarcely discernible mote lodge itself in the eye, let the nerve of a tooth be exposed, and immediately the day is "o'ercast," enjoyment turns to pain. I concede to the pessimist that the substance of life is labor and hardness; joy is but the sheen which in normal states it assumes in our consciousness. But observe that life by a law of its own takes on that sheen. Call it delusion, it is never

theless a stated condition, a habit of mind, our nature's dower. Observe, too, that suicide is by common consent charged to insanity. In this consent is implied the prevailing conviction that the good of life exceeds the evil thereof.

Your pessimists, who exhaust their ingenuity in showing that existence is a failure, creation a mistake, and not-to-be the supreme good, have been swift to secure their portion of the goods of life, and to all appearance have extracted as much satisfaction therefrom as life is capable of yielding. Schopenhauer, who maintained so stoutly that true wisdom consists in abnegation of the will to live, exhibited a quite inordinate disinclination to dying; he clung to the life he reviled like the limpet to the rock.

I return to Von Hartmann. His first alleged stage of illusion, the hope of happiness in this present world, concerns, as we have seen, the lot of the individual. So does the second, the hope of happiness hereafter in some transmundane state. This involves the whole question of a future life, the discussion of which would far exceed the scope of this essay. I pass at once to the third illusion, which respects the future of the human race on this earth. It consists in supposing that a better lot awaits mankind in the consummation of the world's history, when the evils which now afflict

Von

society shall one by one be done away. Hartmann believes in no such result. He maintains that vice and misery, so far from abating, are on the increase, and will continue to increase. Theft and fraud and false dealing, in spite of the penalties attached to them, are becoming ever more frequent. The basest selfishness rends asunder the holiest bonds of family and friendship whenever it comes in collision with them; and only the severer punishments decreed by the state repress the more atrocious crimes of ruder ages. These too immediately break forth, revealing the innate brutality of human nature, wherever the bands of law and order are relaxed, as in the Polish revolution and in the closing year of the American civil war. He anticipates a time when theft and illegal fraud will be despised as vulgar and clumsy devices by the more adroit rogues, who will know how to bring their crimes against property into harmony with the letter of the law; and so on to the end.

On the other hand, he endeavors to show that the agencies at work for the melioration of the social condition, science, art, discoveries and inventions, improved agriculture, increased facilities of communication, steam, railroad, telegraph, inasmuch as they create as many wants as they satisfy, leave the net result of human weal unchanged. Medical

art advances, but cannot keep pace with the swifter progress of chronic disease. Agricultural and mechanical improvements, as fast as they increase the means of support, promote the growth of population, which, on the Malthusian principle, is forever outstripping them. With the growth of population come all the inevitable ills which excess of population entails. Political science can yield but negative results. Suppose the perfect state were realized, the political problem solved, we should have only the frame, not the filling. Men do not live to govern themselves, but govern themselves to live. Looking in other directions for possible compensation, he foresees that the satisfactions of intellect and taste derived from science and art will diminish with the necessary, inevitable, and evergrowing degradation of science and art which must ensue from the dilettantism which is everywhere supplanting genius. And as for the consolations of religion, what will become of them when belief in the truths of religion, as must inevitably happen with the progress of intellectual culture, has died out? In fine, as with the progress of human development, riches and luxury increase, there will be a corresponding increase in the sensibility of the nervous system, and thence of necessity an excess of sensible pain over sensible pleasure. With the dying-out of the old illusions there will