Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/718

686 PESSIMISM ception of this fact to cause, still less to perpetuate, a feel ing of melancholy. It only urges him to have compassion on his suffering brothers, and to look forward joyously to the goal of release which he has set before himself. For further details reference may be made to the article on BUDDHISM. It is enough to say here that the chief point of Buddhist theory is to see in all apparent being only a process of becoming : events happen, nothing is ; the only permanence can be but the law of their occurrence. The cosmic philosophy of Buddha is like that of Heraclitus. " All things flow ; nothing abides " ; only this flux of everything serves to emphasize the fact that the happiness of man is thereby rendered vain. The end which Buddha seeks is the redemption of man from this toilsome world of birth and death. It is not absorption in the unity of Brahma, not felicity in a higher and better world. It is, to cast off the conditions which trammel existence, the consciousness which leads to desire and action, the body and all its appurtenances ; it is, to attain death in life, to have so mortified flesh and spirit that the individual can no longer be in the ordinary sense said to exist. He has attained, when so perfected, what is called Nirvana, " the land of peace where transitoriness finds rest." Religious Before discussing the development of this pessimistic recon- ethics in modern days, it remains to notice a fourth issue illation. from the eyil that ig Jn the wor ^ > Thig y j ew of life &nd of the universe is specially connected with Hebrew mono theism and its later developments in Mohammedan as well as Christian doctrine under the potent stimulus of Greek philosophy. It is in the belief of a moral God a good and wise creator and governor of the universe that the opti mistic problem and theory finds its chief origin. Vhen the idea of God has been purged of its naturalism and identified with the ideal of wisdom, goodness, and justice, there soon arises for thinking minds the necessity of a " theodicee," a justification of providence. Can the evil and misery found upon earth, the disproportion between merit and recompense, be explained on the hypothesis of a wise and beneficent ruler in heaven ? One of the most familiar and typical instances of such a feeling is given by the book of Job. In the later times of Israel, when the vigour of creative faith was undermined by a critical spirit, born of bitter fates and foreign influences, voices were heard, like those of the writer of Ecclesiastes, giving utter ance to pessimistic doubt. The story of Job is another and more edifying presentation of the same theme. How, it is asked, can the misfortunes of the just man be har monized with the idea of a righteous God ? Is suffering the penalty of sin, and must virtue be always paid its wages in pleasure 1 ? The difficulty, it is evident, arises with the perception of the antagonism between the natural and the moral, and implies a desire to bridge over the gulf between them. With the gradually deepening conviction that the central principle of the universe is a moral principle, the need is felt for explaining the immorality (so to speak) of the natural laws, for reconciling the unconditional imperative of the word of duty with the indifference to right and wrong displayed in the facts of life. Sometimes we are referred for answer to another world, which shall compen sate for the mistakes of the present. At other times it is suggested that physical evil has the function of a moral discipline, that suffering teaches nobility, that misfortunes are blessings in disguise. Leib- The optimism of Leibnitz is of a different cast, and goes nitz s op- more boldly to face the real difficulty of the situation. It timism. ^g^g against the common estimate of moral and physical evil, and seeks to reduce them both to little more than privations of good, to mere absence of good, to a defect rather than a blemish, to what is called metaphysical evil. The world, it is admitted, is far from perfect, but it is as good as it could be made if all the good which it contains was to be realized. Like everything else, it is not free from the defects of its qualities. It is, Ave may be sure, the best of possible worlds. But this is far from saying that it is a good world. Ignorant as we are of the limits of what is possible, it is not for us to say that the quality of the best, under the given circumstances, is at all distin guishable from what is really very bad. The defence of theism which Leibnitz thus undertook against the sceptical suggestions of Bayle is only the common argument that the work must be judged as a whole, that it is unfair to pronounce judgment on an isolated event or thing apart from the question how it is affected by its interdepend ence. But, unfortunately, in the case before us, in the problem of the universe, we do not know the whole, and can only grope our way tentatively from point to point, feebly endeavouring to forecast the plan of the total structure. But Leibnitz goes farther than this assertion of inter connexion or adaptation. It is the ultimate assumption of his argument that the forces of the universe are in the hands of a perfectly wise intelligence, that, as in man there is a rational power of initiation and guidance, so in the world as a macrocosm there is a primal reason which governs its movements and co-ordinates them to a desirable end. The actual phases of existence only carry out in palpable shape and successive or simultaneous manifesta tions an ideal or rational plan, which is their original and sufficient reason. The world at large is somewhat of a machine, or a congeries of machines, which run down according to their own internal and innate conditions of existence ; but these machines are wound up by one supreme machinist, who has predetermined the aim and object of their combined movements. Thus the doctrine of the pre-established harmony, while on the one hand it is an apotheosis of logic by the emphasis it lays on the necessary causal interdependence of the several partial movements, is on the other hand, by its principle of suffi cient reason the principe du meilleur or de convenance a doctrine of teleology, whereby an ideal principle of de sign interpolates the contingent and subordinates necessity to freedom. The world is not a mere group of causes and effects governed by the logic of contradiction and identity ; over and above the necessitarian logic is a mind which looks behind and before, and combines all events, not reck lessly or necessarily, but in the bands of reciprocal subser vience to the greatest good of which they admit. In this argument Leibnitz is open to the criticism of Kant, that he has passed from a legitimate conception presiding over the synthesis of phenomena to the illegiti mate idea of a self-subsistent and personal principle, which, far from being a mere ideal of complete synthesis, itself creates and predetermines that synthesis. To the logical scientist the phenomena are merely connected by a formal unity ; to the theist like Leibnitz this unity is identified with a cosmical mind, an intelligent power which regulates the evolution of things and subordinates them all to the fulfilment of its original plan. Leibnitz thus manipulates two ideas, the logical and the religious, as if they were interchangeable, though in reality they lie in different planes. The reason which at one time is treated as an abstract principle of self-consistency is at another time clothed in the concrete mental life associated with it under its human aspects. Mere reason, says Aristotle, can initiate no change ; it neither chooses nor commands, but simply asserts. But human reason is always in the long- run wrapped up with some aim, is always (in the technical sense) practical, and only for moments of abstraction ever merely theoretical. Thus the reason in the universe was