B. Spinoza: Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book II ch. X. ↩
Martin Luther: Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 510–514 (abridged). ↩
Molinos: Spiritual Guide, Book II, chaps. XVII, XVIII (abridged). ↩
I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure writers; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be logically involved in the experiences of union with a higher Presence with which they connect themselves. The higher Presence, namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quite sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ideal part. ↩
Cf. J. Milsand: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884, passim. ↩
He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness: “Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits.” ↩
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of worth left over after our sins and errors have been told off—our capacity of acknowledging and regretting them is the germ of a better self in posse at least. But the world deals with us in actu and not in posse: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed at from without, it never takes account. Then we turn to the All-knower, who knows our bad, but knows this good in us also, and who is just. We cast ourselves with our repentance on his mercy: only by an All-knower can we finally be judged. So the need of a God very definitely emerges from this sort of experience of life. ↩
E.g., Homer: Iliad, XVII 446: “Nothing then is more wretched anywhere than man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth.” ↩
E.g., Theognis, 425–428:
“Best of all for all things upon earth is it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the Sun; next best to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades.”
See also the almost identical passage in Oedipus in Colonus, 1225.—The Anthology is full of pessimistic utterances:
“Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the ground—why then do I vainly toil when I see the end naked before me?”—
“How did I come to be? Whence am I? Wherefore did I come? To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know? Being naught I came to life: once more shall I be what I was. Nothing and nothingness is the whole race of mortals.”—
“For death we are all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly butchered.”
The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all the same was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic. ↩
For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post brings me some aphorisms from a worldly-wise old friend in Heidelberg which may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism:
“By the word ‘happiness’ every human being understands something different. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds. The wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more definite term contentment. What education should chiefly aim at is to save us from a discontented life. Health is one favoring condition, but by no means an indispensable one, of contentment. Woman’s heart and love are a shrewd device of Nature, a trap which she sets for the average man, to force him into working. But the wise man will always prefer work chosen by himself.”
Ribot: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54. ↩
A. Gratry: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119–121, abridged. Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any rate with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide supply such examples as the following:—
An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself, and leaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To her parents she writes:—
“Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than life, and that is death. So goodbye forever, my dear parents. It is nobody’s fault, but a strong desire of my own which I have longed to fulfill for three or four years. I have always had a hope that some day I might have an opportunity of fulfilling it, and now it has come. … It is a wonder I have put this off so long, but I thought
