This onward motion is recognized in the pessimistic philosophy of Von
Hartmann, as a movement towards ever greater possibilities of pain. With
him life is "the supreme blunder of the blind unconscious force" which
created man and developed him as the prey of ever-increasing suffering.
But the power to enjoy has grown in like degree, and both joy and pain
are subordinated to the power to act. The human will, the power to do,
is the real end of the stress and struggle of the ages. However limited
its individual action, the will finds its place among the gigantic
factors in the evolution of life. It is not the present, but the
ultimate, which is truth. Not the unstable and temporary fact but the
boundless clashing forces which endlessly throw truths to the surface.
Another source of Pessimism is the reaction from unearned pleasures and
from spurious joys. It is the business of the senses to translate
realities, to tell the truth about us in terms of human experience.
Every real pleasure has its cost in some form of nervous activity. What
we get we must earn, if it is to be really ours. Long ago, in the
infancy of civilization, man learned that there were drugs in Nature,
cell products of the growth or transformation of "our brother organisms,
the plants," by whose agency pain was turned to pleasure. By the aid of
these outside influences he could clear "today of past regrets and
future fears," and strike out from the sad "calendar unborn tomorrow and
dead yesterday.
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