We are confirmed optimists and sow optimism broadcast. We have
optimistic clubs and mental scientists and Christian scientists,—all
afflicted with incurable ophthalmia to surrounding evil and misery. We
are scientific, we are evolutionists, we have faith in the sort of
optimism taught by Leibnitz in his famous Theodicea. We are the Candides
of our oracles, the Panglosses. You may possibly remember what Voltaire
writes of Professor Pangloss. “Pangloss used to teach the science of
metaphysico-theologo-cosmologo-noodleology. He demonstrated to
admiration that there is no effect without a cause and that this is the
best of all possible worlds. It has been proved, said Pangloss, that
things cannot be otherwise than they are; for everything, the end for
which everything is made, is necessarily the best end. Observe how noses
are made to carry spectacles, and spectacles we have accordingly.
Everything that is, is the best that could possibly be.” It is such
shallow optimism that now gains currency.
Verily, we are afflicted with mental cataract. “If we should bring
clearly to a man’s sight,” says Schopenhauer, “the terrible sufferings
and miseries to which his life is constantly exposed, he would be seized
with horror, and if we were to conduct the confirmed optimist through
the hospitals, infirmaries, and surgical operating-rooms, through
prisons, asylums, torture-chambers and slave-kennels, over battlefields
and places of execution; if we were to open to him all the dark abodes
of misery, where it hides itself from the glance of cold curiosity, he
would understand at last the nature of this _best of possible worlds_.”
Schopenhauer is metaphysical, pessimistic, but he is certainly not
blinded by a shallow optimism to the realities of life. Drunk with the
spirit of optimism, we do not realize the degradation, the misery and
poverty of our life. Meanwhile the human genius, the genius which all of
us possess, languishes, famishes, and perishes, while the brute alone
emerges in triumph. We are so overcome by the faith in the transcendent,
optimistic evolution of the good, that through the misty, heavenly,
angelic visions, we do not discern the cloven hoof of the devil.
Professor James in a recent address told the Radcliffe graduates that
the aim of a college-education is “_to recognize the good man_,” when
you see him. This advice may be good for Radcliffe young ladies; but,
fathers and mothers, _the true education of life is the recognition of
evil wherever it is met_.
The Bible begins the story of man in a paradise of ignorance and
finishes it with his tasting of the fruits of the forbidden tree of
knowledge of good and evil. “And the eyes of them both were opened and
they knew that they were naked. And the Lord God said,—Behold, the man
is become as one of us to know good and evil, and now, lest he put forth
his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live for ever.
Therefore, the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden. So he
drove out the man.” We prefer the sinful, mortal, but godlike man with
his knowledge of evil to the brutish philistine in the bliss of Elysium.