Esquirol observed the case of a very intelligent magistrate.... Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested neither perversion nor violence, but a complete absence of emotional reaction. If he went to the theater, which he did out of habit, he could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his home, of his wife, and of his absent children, moved him as little, he said, as a theorem of Euclid.[1]
[Footnote 1: Ribot: Psychology of the Emotions, p. 54.]
The sense of futility, of the flatness, staleness, and unprofitableness of the world, which is felt in such extreme forms by pronounced melancholiacs, is experienced sometimes, though to a lesser degree, by every sensitive mind that reflects much upon life. Such an attitude, it is true, arises principally during moments of fatigue and low vitality, and is undoubtedly organic in its origins, as for that matter is optimism. Again such a sense of world-weariness comes often in moments of personal disappointment and disillusion, when friends have proved false, ambitions empty, efforts wasted. At such times even the normal man echoes Swinburne's beautiful melancholy:
"We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure,
To-day will die to-morrow,
Time stoops to no man's lure;
And love grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful,
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful,
Weeps that no loves endure.
"From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives, forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river,
Winds somewhere safe to sea."[1]
[Footnote 1: From A Garden of Proserpine.]
Even the eager and exuberant, if sufficiently philosophical and generous-minded, may come, despite their own success, to a deep realization of the utter futility, meaninglessness, and stupidity of life, of the essential blindnesses, cruelties, and insecurities which seem to characterize the nature of things. Unless against this dark insight some reassuring faith arises, life may become almost unbearable. In extreme cases it has driven men to suicide. Take, for example, the picture of the universe as modern materialism presents it:
Purposeless... and void of meaning is the world which science reveals for our belief.... That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving, that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave, that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievements must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: Philosophical Essays, pp. 60-61 ("The Free Man's Worship").]
Such a prospect to the serious-minded and sensitive-spirited cannot but provoke the profoundest melancholy. There is, even for the most healthy-minded of us, sufficient ground for pessimism, bitterness, insecurity. Even if we personally—largely through the accidents of circumstance—happen to be successful, "our joy is a vulgar glee, not unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success." The utter futility and evanescence of earthly goods, beauties, and achievements is sensed at least sometimes by normally complacent souls. And so patent and ubiquitous are the evidences of decay, disease, and death at our disposal, that they may easily be erected into a thoroughgoing philosophy of life: