This, however, is perhaps very much a matter of temperament. Greater minds than mine have seen things differently and inclined to pessimism. Buddhism, and almost all Oriental religions and philosophies, are based upon it, and look to Nirvana or annihilation of personal identity as the supreme bliss. Pauline Christianity assumes that all mankind, except a few chosen vessels, are so hopelessly bad as to be predestined to eternal damnation. And even more remarkable, Shakespeare, the universal genius, who one would say had as happy a temperament and led as successful a life as any man, had his moods of despondency in which he could say:—
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone bemoan my outcast state;
Wearying deaf heaven with my fruitless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate.
Or declare with Hamlet that no one would bear the ills of life if
He himself could his quietus make
With a bare bodkin.
With instances like these, and the disgust of life manifested in so many modern societies by the increase of suicides, and the spread of pessimistic theories like those of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, who can deny that the great magnet of modern civilisation has a south as well as a north pole, and that progress is not all towards perfection?
The attempts of theologians to reconcile the existence of evil with the goodness of an almighty Creator, by relegating the adjustment to a future life, only make the fact of this fundamental polarity more apparent, for their conceptions of a heaven and a hell obviously do not reconcile, but only intensify, the opposite polarities. The good are better, the bad worse, the happy happier, and the wretched more miserable, in all these attempts to define the undefinable and to reconcile divine justice with divine mercy. All that remains really clear to each individual is that by his efforts in this life he can do something to keep the balance of polarities somewhat more on the side of good, both in his own individual existence, and in that of the aggregate of units, of which he is one, which is called society or humanity.