" "The sad kings," in
Watson's phrase, can only pile up fuel for their own destruction, and
the failure of force will release the unholy brood which force has
caused to develop. The winds of freedom are tainted by sulphurous
exhalations. In all our merry-making we find with Ibsen that "there is a
corpse on board." The mask is falling only to show the Death's head
there concealed. Aristocracy, Democracy, Anarchy, Empire, the history of
politics, is the eternal round of the Dance of Death.
When we look at human nature in detail we find more of animal than of
angel, and the "veracity of thought and action," which is the choicest
gift of Science, is lost in the happy-go-lucky movement of the human
mob. "To see things as they really are" is the purpose of the philosophy
of Pessimism in the hands of its worthiest exponents. But we know what
is, and that alone, even were such knowledge possible, is not to know
the truth. The higher wisdom seeks to find the forces at work to produce
that which now is. The present time is the meeting time of forces; the
present fact their temporary product. To the philosophy of Evolution,
"every meanest day is the conflux of two eternities." Each meanest fact
is the product of the world-forces that lie behind it; each meanest man
the resultant of the vast powers, alive in human nature, struggling
since life began. And these forces, omnipotent and eternal, will never
cease their work.
To the philosophy of Pessimism, the child is a mere human larva, weak,
perverse, disagreeable, the heir of mortality, with all manner of
"defects of doubt and taints of blood," gathered in the long experience
of its wretched parentage.
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