It would be hard to overestimate the weariness and cynicism and despair that have been caused in the world by its more recklessly hopeful men—the men who plump down happily anywhere and hope, the optimists who are merely slovenly in their minds about evil. But the optimism that consists in putting evil facts up into a kind of outdoors in our minds and in giving them room to exercise in our thoughts and feelings, the optimism that consists in having one's brain move vigorously through disagreeable facts—organize them into the other facts with which they belong and with which they work—is worthy of consideration. Many of us, who have tried optimism and pessimism both, have noticed certain things.

When one is being pessimistic, one almost always has the feeling of being rather clever. It is forced upon one a little, of course, having all those other people about one stodgily standing up for people and not really seeing through them!

So, though one ought not to, one does feel a little superior—even with the best intentions—when one is being discouraged.

But the trouble with pessimism is that it is only at the moment when one is having it that one really enjoys it, or feels in this way about it.

Perhaps I should not undertake to speak for others, and should only speak for myself; but I can only bear witness, for one, that every time in my life that I have broken through the surface a little, and seen through to the evil, and found myself suddenly and astutely discouraged, I have found afterward that all I had to do was to see the same thing a little farther over, set it in the light beyond it, and look at it in larger or more full relations, and I was no longer astutely discouraged.

So I have come to believe slowly and grimly that feeling discouraged about the world is not quite clever. I have noticed it, too, in watching other people—men I know. If I could take all the men I know who are living and acting as if they believed big things about people to-day, men who are daily taking for granted great things in human nature, and put them in one group by themselves all together, and if I could then take all the men I know who are taking little things for granted in one another and in human nature, I do not believe very many people would find it hard to tell which group would be more clever. Possibly the reason more of us do not spend more time in being hopeful about the world is that it takes more brains usually than we happen to have at the moment. Hope may be said to be an act of the brain in which it sees facts in relations large enough to see what they are for, an act in which it insists in a given case upon giving the facts room enough to turn around and to relate themselves to one another, and settle down where they belong in one's mind, the way they would in real time.

So now, at last, Gentle Reader, having looked back and having looked forward, I know the way I am going.

I am going to hope.

It is the only way to see through things. The only way to dare to see through ones' self; the only way to see through other people and to see past them, and to see with them and for them—is to hope.

So I am putting the challenge to the reader, in this book, as I have put it to myself.