There is, he

scales and But why is

pleasure and pain are homogeneous quantities of the same. denomination, distinguished by plus and minus signs. (Pleasure is indirect and exhausts the nervous energy, pain in itself giving rise to consciousness.) admits, considerable difficulty in holding the determining the balance of pleasure and pain. this? Because, to vary the figure, the subject sitting as commissioner for valuation is liable to serious error from many causes-such as, for example, the inaccurate witness given by memory, and the personal prejudice of the adjudicator himself, resulting from unconscious bias or feeling. Love, we know, is blind, and there is no such blind infatuation as the love of life. Therefore it is that humanity is subject to illusion, the hallucination that happiness is attainable. Of this illusion there are three stages.

The first makes bright the infancy of the individual and the race by a hope and trust that in this life satisfaction is to be found; the second supplies middle age with the consolation that the joy unattainable here on earth is reserved for heaven and a future life; the third, that of increased intelligence and the modern world, whispers the suggestion that with the advance of wisdom will increase the value of life, and that in the future, as in a far country, whither in the person of the race we press across the intervening desert, the wells of water are of a satisfying sweetness. We have already seen that Hartmann rejects the view which regards pleasure as negative, while he insists that an observation of human life will leave us without doubt that it is productive of more pain than pleasure. Rejecting the subjective test, the judgment of the individual in his own case, because he is the victim of illusion, Hartmann proceeds to draw conclusions from a general survey of human life from the spectator's point of view. He does not seem to regard the selection of the impartial spectator as at all a difficulty. We can anticipate the conclusions he reaches. Is it to be wondered at that he finds human life exactly what he has previously determined to find it-painful rather than pleasurable? Or can there be conceived a more determinedly unphilosophical, a more ludicrously unscientific, method of procedure? Without any principle of classification we find jumbled together a number of the usual circumstances accompanying mortal existence arbitrarily disposed in groups, and after a detailed and careful setting forth of the pains of life, and a similarly studious belittling or ignoring of its pleasures, the conclusion is drawn that unhappiness reigns 1 The idea is borrowed by Hartmann from the Italian poet Leopardi.

supreme over all creation, that love itself brings more pain than pleasure, that sympathy is an evil, that work is merely undertaken to escape ennui, and that the enjoyment of friendship is nothing more than a kind of satisfaction setting free from the pain of loneliness.

We have already endeavoured to state succinctly the objections to any attempted balancing of life's ledger in the matter of pains and pleasures. It is unnecessary to estimate the value of Hartmann's 'observations' (as, in default of any philosophic dignity, they must be named). Their introduction into a professedly scientific work, except as a light interlude, or what Milton calls 'an intermingling of comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity,' is inexplicable. It might pertinently enough be inquired in this connexion, What is meant by illusion? The attempt on the part of the Pessimist to prove to a happy man that on à priori principles he was unhappy was no more satisfactory than the à posteriori proof just offered.

Hartmann has not, then, sustained his attack, at the most only effective against Hedonism, and has failed to prove with any appearance of conclusiveness that mankind has suffered, or does now suffer, from an illusion in thinking that happiness has been actually attained at the present stage of the development of the world, and is therefore attainable by the individual in his earthly life to-day.'

We may, then, describe the engagement between the Pessimist and the Hedonist as a drawn battle, for both sides claim the victory. To the impartial onlooker it must appear a defeat, or rather a repulse, for the attacking forces of Pessimism; and for this reason simply, that they have failed to carry the position.

Let us suppose, now, that some student of life has found its pages but melancholy reading, and thinks with Schopenhauer that the proper form of address should be, 'not Monsieur, Sir, Mein Herr, but My fellow-sufferer, Soci malorum, Compagnon de misères !' one who feels that he has indeed been the victim of a delusion-that life upon earth is worth living and pleasurable-what hope is there for him? dare he put his trust in the 'larger hope,' in the consolations of Christianity, in the belief in a life beyond the grave? 'Beware!'' replies Von Hartmann, 'of the second stage of the illusion, which makes happiness attainable in this transcendental life, for there is none such; it is unthinkable, and science not only knows 1 The first stage of the Illusion, ii. 295, Die P. d. U.

2 Vol. ii. p. 355, Die P. d. U.

nothing of it, but she proves its impossibility.' If this be so, life is indeed a 'tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.'

The verdict of 'science' in every sphere of thought is awaited in our days with intense and breathless attention, not altogether warranted by experience of her assertions in the past. But although the subject is vastly too wide a one to enter upon here as a side issue, an issue of such magnitude cannot be altogether overlooked. Physical science when questioned as to a future life either refuses to answer altogether or replies in an almost contemptuous negative. The Pessimist bases his denial upon the alleged à priori impossibility of the creation of a future better than the present by the unconscious deity, and his argument stands or falls with his Weltprincip. We may therefore pass it by without further notice. But the appeal is made to science, and to science therefore we must go.

What is the sum of the argument, then, denying a future life? It is almost wholly negative. The proof may be summed up thus: no evidence whatever is obtainable. Investigation of organic life and a study of its history discover nothing, save that as it came into being so it departs. The beginning and the end are alike of its very essence; birth is a prophecy of death, existence is proof of non-existence. Whether we trace the testimony of physiological facts, or approach the problem from the theological or metaphysical side, we reach the same result, an insurmountable absence of evidence, a forbidding and chilling reticence in universal nature. Moreover, the more carefully the facts are collated the more clearly appears the baselessness of the assumption, and, although sore unwilling, we are irresistibly driven to a knowledge that man, 'noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in form and moving express and admirable, in action like an angel, in apprehension like a god,' is, when all is said and done, this quintessence of dust.' Thought and consciousness are proved to be dependent on the brain and nervous system: in health when these latter are in health, disordered with them, and destroyed with their destruction. Astronomy proves the insignificance of man, psychology that his cerebral surface is only a trifle more creased and furrowed than that of the gorilla, and geology that he is a recent appearance in a universe which existed millions of years before the trivial accident of his advent, and which will exist for millions after

his departure from the stage where he fancies himself so important a personage.

Against all this what is to be set? Little and much. Quite apart from the assurance of revelation, before we accept the terrible alternative- Vernichtung-it behoves us to consider. Despite the best efforts of science and philosophy, around and about our little life lies an encircling sea of mystery, limitless and unfathomable. To speak with the accent of assurance regarding human destiny is to proclaim aloud our folly in the streets; to presume to measure the moral or spiritual immensities and possibilities of the universe with the line and plummet of our earthly experience is to exalt our ignorance to the supreme seat of Deity-'to take upon us the mystery of things as if we were God's spies.' No sane man can accept as final a dictum, the fruit of knowledge it may be said, but knowledge so imperfect and insignificant in the midst of immeasurable ignorance. A negative presumption is not created by the absence of proof in cases where in the nature of things proof is inaccessible.' If the negative argument cannot be said to establish the scientific case, the positive goes far to disprove it. If the evolution hypothesis brings to light man's relationship to the catarrhine family of apes, and suggests that the bellum omnium contra omnes,' of which Darwin tells us, resulted in the production and preservation of man, the fittest vertebrate mammal, it does not fail to suggest more.1

Here is an order of things under a reign of law making for a higher development. Evolution has given birth to consciousness a high miracle—to marvellous powers of sympathy, and even self-abnegation, to moral and spiritual emotions so remote in character from those of sense that it is one of the chief difficulties of the evolutionist philosophy to give any credible explanation of their genesis. It has prepared us, by the very magnificence of its achievement, for a further advance, and a still vaster and nobler prospect. Unless we are to be put to 'permanent intellectual confusion' we must believe that what has been reached is but promise of what is still to come,

1 The struggle for life' is often appealed to by the Pessimist, and sympathy indulged in and asked for the losers in the strife. To which Dr. Martineau happily replies: "This very complaint is in itself a homage to the worth of life, and no Pessimist could urge it without answering himself. Is it a cruel feature in the competition for existence that the halt and feeble lose their footing on the world, and are exiled from life? Is it an evil which they thus incur? Then the life which they miss must be a good. . . . If animal existence be not worth having, why invite our compassion for those that lose it?' (Study of Religion, ii. 83).

and that this march of a supreme principle of progress can never be arrested.1

Another physical law, established beyond possibility of refutation, assures us that nature, although no miser, is no prodigal, and that in the whole circle of her domain waste is unknown. Change, metamorphosis, everywhere, but nowhere loss, annihilation. If death be indeed the end, while the various component elements of the body are dissipated, but still in some other form serve a cosmic end, what of consciousness, what of thought which bent to its desires the forces which keep the universe alive and made them its ministers ? Beyond mortal ken, but not annihilated nor dead, for there is no death nor annihilation, only unending movement and unwearying change. The surrounding mystery, then, forbids the dogmatism of negation. The wide sweep of two such laws as the law of progress and the law of the indestructibility of energy are powerfully and positively suggestive that there is no final or fixed goal, but that towards an infinite perfection the individual must ever move, and that with such husbandry as that of nature we need have no fear, while she preserves and makes use of every atom and force released from its duty in the body at death, that the paramount force, the master energy, will not be saved for fitting and noble service.

These considerations are merely suggestive of the argument that may be built up from the facts supplied by science herself. They touch only the fringe of the subject, but may be taken as indicative of a vastly wider scheme of reasoning. The Pessimist's appeal to science, then, to support his dogma, on the second stage of the illusion, is inconclusive. Though willing to aid him, she can lend but equivocal help, and the answers of the oracle are ambiguous. Here, then, even by the loser in the race of life, Pessimism may be met with a good courage, and by a believer in Christianity with full certainty of victory. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.'

As Von Hartmann proceeds in the promulgation of his philosophy, whether from weariness or a confidence that he has already proved all that is necessary or of importance, he becomes more and more careless in the attempt to substantiate 1 Fiske, Man's Destiny.

2

It cannot be said that thought is a mere 'function' or a 'secretion' of the brain, for Professor Tyndall tells us that 'the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable,' and all modern physiologists admit that though the brain process and the thought process are synchronous they cannot be proved interdependent, nor can the brain be proved the cause of consciousness.

VOL. XXXVI.—NO. LXXI.

K