To come immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose is
to imagine ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on such
terms with life that the only comfort left him is to brood on the
assurance, "You may end it when you will." What reasons can we plead
that may render such a brother (or sister) willing to take up the
burden again? Ordinary Christians, reasoning with would-be suicides,
have little to offer them beyond the usual negative, "Thou shalt not."
God alone is master of life and death, they say, and it is a
blasphemous act to anticipate his absolving hand. But can _we_ find
nothing richer or more positive than this, no reflections to urge
whereby the suicide may actually see, and in all sad seriousness feel,
that in spite of adverse appearances even for him life is still worth
living? There are suicides and suicides (in the United States about
three thousand of them every year), and I must frankly confess that
with perhaps the majority of these my suggestions are impotent to deal.
Where suicide is the result of insanity or sudden frenzied impulse,
reflection is impotent to arrest its headway; and cases like these
belong to the ultimate mystery of evil, concerning which I can only
offer considerations tending toward religious patience at the end of
this hour. My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my
words are to deal only with that metaphysical _tedium vitae_ which is
peculiar to {39} reflecting men. Most of you are devoted, for good or
ill, to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy,
and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unreality
that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed.
This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career.
Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost
as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the
bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of
life. But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further
reflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the melancholy
and _Weltschmerz_ bred of reflection that I now proceed to speak.
Let me say, immediately, that my final appeal is to nothing more
recondite than religious faith. So far as my argument is to be
destructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away of
certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith
compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive, it will consist in
holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let
loose these springs in a normal, natural way. Pessimism is essentially
a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable,
it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no
normal religious reply.
Now, there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different
levels upon which one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylight
view of things, and I must treat of them in turn. The second stage is
the more complete and joyous, and it corresponds to the freer exercise
of religious {40} trust and fancy. There are, as is well known,
persons who are naturally very free in this regard, others who are not
at all so. There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging to
their heart's content in prospects of immortality; and there are others
who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem
real to themselves at all. These latter persons are tied to their
senses, restricted to their natural experience; and many of them,
moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call 'hard
facts,' which is positively shocked by the easy excursions into the
unseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds of
either class may, however, be intensely religious. They may equally
desire atonement and reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and
communion with the total soul of things. But the craving, when the
mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as science now reveals
them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when
it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to another and
a better world.
That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease. The
nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources; but its great
reflective source has at all times been the contradiction between the
phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind
nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is. What philosophers
call 'natural theology' has been one way of appeasing this craving;
that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has
been another way. Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two
classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its
{41} facts 'hard;' suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving
for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to
construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or
poetically,--and what result can there be but inner discord and
contradiction? Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can be
relieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the facts
religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or,
supplementary facts may be discovered or believed-in, which permit the
religious reading to go on. These two ways of relief are the two
stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I
made allusion a moment ago, and which the sequel will, I trust, make
more clear.