timable and exactly consonant with human impulses, yet it lacks one of the chief qualifications of an idea which is to supply a direction to voluntary action.

It follows, then, that, the bearing of our problem on the whole conception of practice is an exceedingly important one. The establishment of pessimism would, without doubt, lead to the rejection of hedonism and to new attempts to ground a theory of life on some other basis, as, for example, the supreme value of moral training and development.

PESSIMISM AND METAPHYSICS.

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CHAPTER VII.

THE METAPHYSICAL BASIS OF PESSIMISM.

OUR problem is now, perhaps, defined with sufficient accuracy, and we may at once proceed to the question whether it is susceptible of exact solution. In considering this point we may most appropriately set out with the particular answer to the problem given by modern pessimism. The fact that it is the prominent form of the question just now justifies to some extent this method of procedure. More than this, modern pessimism plumes itself on supplying the most elaborately reasoned answer which has ever been given to the question: What is the worth of the world?' It thus blocks the way, so to speak, to our inquiry, and must first be dealt with before the final solution, if attainable at all, can be reached.

In modern pessimism, as I have already remarked, science, or quasi-science, and metaphysics are curiously interwoven and blended into one collective system of thought. The authors are careful to tell us that they go to work scientifically, making use of well-verified truths and appealing to the facts of experience. Yet, for all this, they seek to transcend experience, and to base experience on an underlying structure of ontological conceptions. These conceptions, moreover, penetrate far into all their seemingly scientific reasonings, and even into their practical conclusions. It is

hardly possible, therefore, to give a critical estimate of pessimism without going somewhat into this ontological sub-structure. To point out some of the main difficulties in these metaphysical doctrines will be the object of the present chapter.

Before dealing, however, with the deficiencies of metaphysical pessimism, it may be worth while to say a few words on the drawbacks which necessarily attend any kind. of interpretation of the good or evil of the world by means of ideas which transcend experience.

A very little reflection on the various world-principles which have done duty as the ontological foundations of a hopeful or despondent view of life will, I think, serve to show that they can effect nothing of any consequence in clearing up the mystery of evil. The utmost that these attempts can hope to do is to make certain aspects of the known universe of things a little more intelligible. How far any of them have succeeded even in this respect may, indeed, be well doubted. Still, it is their one raison d'être. In this very statement, however, we seem to discover their essential futility as expressions of the ultimate reality. For what is to make a thing intelligible? To bring it into agreement with the laws and habits of our minds. But our minds have received their structure in connection with this very order of things which is to be accounted for.1 Consequently, all ontological deduction of the world has to be carried out by help of conceptions drawn from this very world itself. In other words, we are trying to account for

1 It does not matter for my present purpose whether mind be regarded as a product of the universe or force, or as simply correlated with it. In either case its development proceeds in harmony with that of the world.

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experience by itself, or, rather, to deduce the whole of the world from one of its parts. In truth, the very idea of explanation, whether it take the form of a final or of an efficient cause, is itself an idea of experience, so that to try to account for the contents of our experience must mean to remain all the while within this very region.1

If we glance back for a moment at the principal ontological hypotheses put forward as adequate explanations of the goodness or badness of the world, we see at once that they are mere projections of certain elements or functions. of the conscious individual mind. The reason of this is obvious. We know things only in relation to our minds, and when we try to get beyond, to the Ding an sich, we are forced to carry an analogue of this conscious mind along with us. Whether we choose to call this analogue intelligence, thought, reason, or, on the other side, force, will, or yearning impulse, the process of inference is the same. Thought seems to account for things, because the very term thought includes within itself both subject and object, that is to say, the fundamental relation of all experience. Not only so, thought is controlled by will, is consequently active, and thus becomes the conceivable cause of change of movement. Can it be surprising that when we have thus once the semblance of our experience to start with, we should be able to reach this experience as a goal? The projection of will is more difficult, no doubt, since there is in this case no

1 Schopenhauer learnt this from Kant, and goes far beyond his teacher in his contempt for the search after an absolute or first cause. To him the ultimate reality is immediately given in experience as the substance seen under the phenomenal veil. But this idea of seeing something in experience which is at the same time outside and independent of it, lands him in the worst confusion. Nor does he at all succeed in consistently regarding this principle as different from force or cause.

analogue for the cognitive, though there is for the active. and creative, side of mind. Consequently with Schopenhauer the world-principle is something never distinctly conceived as to its nature, and stands in no discoverable relation to the universe. Consequently, further, from his point of view, the origin of the world of consciousness is an insoluble problem. Consequently, in fine, Hartmann is driven to make good the mischief caused by his predecessor's violent divorce of the abstract entity, Will, from its proper concrete belongings, and to fill up the emptiness of this phantasm with the more substantial body of the Vorstellung.

6

In truth, in glancing back at the successive world-principles which have seemed to offer a solution of the problem of existence, we are met by the very curious fact that ontology has exhausted psychology, that all the main activities of the human mind have, one after another, been objectified and erected into principles of being. Not only intellect and will-feeling itself has been put in requisition. In point of fact, feeling, as we shall see presently, is involved in the will' of the German pessimists. But, apart from this. we find that to one ancient contemplator of the world, the principles of love and hate seemed to be the deep springs of all visible existence.1 Is there, in verity, any essential difference between this hypostatising of separate activities of mind and the lower forms of anthropological interpretation of nature as tenanted and inspired by an integral conscious mind? Are they not all at bottom the same method in various stages of refinement? Again,

1 Since this was written a rumour has reached my ear of a new philosophic work bearing the title Phantasie als Welt-princip.' It seems, then, that I was premature in supposing that ontology had exhausted psychological distinctions.