another country in the course of the world's history. But humanity rallies, it recovers itself, it takes warning from the past; the moral sentiment reacts on these corruptions; it strives and succeeds to keep the corrupting tendencies in check. Gradually moral capital is accumulated; is vested in public opinion, in memories, books, and institutions, and furnishes a guaranty against future dissolutions of the civil bond. For want of this capital ancient states, Assyria, Greece, and Rome, went down; by means of it modern states subsist, and have, so far as internal agencies are concerned, an indefinite lease of life. Evil is selflimited and self-destructive; the good in human nature is self-conserving and self-increasing. If modern society is more compact, and rests, as it evidently does, on a firmer basis than did society in ancient time, it is to be inferred that society is more moral now than then, and that increase of moral power affords a presumption of further increase from age to age. Von Hartmann insists that egoism, however it may change its face and methods, has lost nothing of its virus with the lapse of time. I maintain, on the contrary, and think it can be shown, that "altruism," or care for others, care for the common weal, is gradually making head against egoism. And herein I find a refutation of the pessimist view of human destiny.

For society, I repeat, subsists by moral force; and increase of that force in the shape of care for the commonweal guarantees, in the absence of any physical derangement of the globe, the growth of social well-being in all coming time.

Another consideration which suggests itself in opposition to the pessimist theory, is the fact of the timely appearance, at certain points in the world's history, of exceptional individuals, whose word and life have been a healing and reviving power in the world. I waive the idea of what is called divine interposition in such phenomena. Regarding them simply as historic facts, I see in them proofs of a self-renewing power in human nature, and the promise, as human need may require and social exigencies prompt, of similar revivals in time to come. Whatever opinion we may have formed of Christianity, its origin, its present status, its future prospects, no faithful student of history will deny that the Christian movement did impart to human society a moral leaven which served to regenerate the world by reinforcing those saving agencies of faith and love whose loss is disintegration and moral death. The same may be said of each successive reformation which has reproduced the Christian idea in subsequent time. The experience of the past seems to warrant the presumption that social and moral necessities will

always elicit a remedial power from the unexplored depths and incalculable forces of the human soul, and that when things are at the worst redemption is near.

Add to this that some of the worst evils which afflict society are accidental, not inherent in the nature of man or the nature of things, but superinduced by vicious custom, and are likely to find their remedy at last in a truer perception of their nature and law, and the application of social science to the sources whence they spring. For example, one of the greatest enemies to social well-being in this country at present is the abuse of alcoholic stimulants, drunkenness, which brutalizes its victim, poisons the springs of family life, and constitutes a source so prolific of pauperism and crime. Philanthropy has labored in vain to abolish this evil by legislative action forbidding the supply, instead of seeking, by discovery of its cause, to obviate the demand. So long as the demand continues, in spite of legislation, the supply will be found. I cannot believe that the mischief of intemperance, wide-spread and deep-seated as it is, is past correction, if once its nature be rightly understood, and scientific treatment invoked for its cure. And what a load of misery will be lifted from the world, what a melioration of the social climate, prophetic of better years and finer

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growths, will be achieved with the extirpation of this vice!

In fine, the pessimist view, though a natural accompaniment of atheism, is not a necessary fruit of even that dreary stock. Human nature itself, without the supposition of a God; human nature as manifest in history and interpreted by reason, pleads against it, and furnishes, I think, its sufficient refutation.

But whilst I am forced by these considerations to cast the horoscope of human life more auspiciously than our German pessimist draws it, I admit an element of truth in his philosophy which may temper the extravagance of superficial optimism, and tinge with soberer hues the vulgar vision of the "good time coming." Von Hartmann himself, in an essay subsequent to his main work, from which I have quoted, vindicates the doctrine of pessimism against the charge of presenting an altogether comfortless and discouraging view of life. He argues that self, as expressed in the will, is the source of all our woes; that since moral perfection, or the supreme good, consists in or requires the entire surrender of self, the pessimistic view, which promotes that surrender, by exposing the futility of all our wishes and the grief that is born of the private will, is stimulating, bracing, encouraging.

It is true that self is the source of the greater part of human misery; but equally true it is that the highest satisfaction has its origin there. Extinguish self, and we escape the pangs of disappointment, the unsatisfied longing, the frustrate effort, the misery of wounded pride, of ingratitude and neglect; but we also miss the stimulus of a noble and sanctified ambition. Moral elevation does not guarantee happiness in the vulgar sense of that word; but neither does material prosperity assure it. Suppose that prosperity consummated the world over for all men; make earth a paradise; drive want from the face of it, and ignorance and vice; let competence be secured to all; build palaces for hovels; let climate be attempered by art to perpetual blandness; let there be no forced tasks, no chiding of the laggard will, no painful bracing up of the dissolute mind, but only duties which invite, and work which is play, - fashion a world after your own heart; and know that a day in that world will have the same proportion of joy and pain that a day has in this. Our joys and our sorrows spring from the same root; in cultivating the one we cultivate the other also. There is a root of bitterness in human life which no change of circumstance and no improvement in the outward condition can eradicate. And perhaps if we rightly understood the constitution and the wants of man