THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

26o THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
He advises a quiet, monotonous, hermit life; he fears society, and has no
sense of the values or joys of human association. 159 But happiness dies
when it is not shared.
There is, of course, a large element of egotism in : pessimism the world
is not good enough for us, and we turn up our philosophic noses to it. Bui
this is to forget Spinoza's lesson, that our terms of moral censure and
approbation are merely human judgments, mostly irrelevant when applied
to the cosmos as a whole. Perhaps our supercilious disgust with existence
is a cover for a secret disgust with ourselves: we have botched and
bungled our lives, and we cast the blame upon the "environment," or the
"world," which have no tongues to utter a defense. The mature man
accepts the natural limitations of life; he does not expect Providence to
be prejudiced in his favor; he does not ask for loaded dice with which to
play the game of life. He knows, with Carlyle, that there is no sense irj
vilifying the sun because it will not light our cigars. And perhaps, if we
are clever enough to help it, the sun will do even that; and this vast
neutral cosmos may turn out to be a pleasant place enough if wre bring a
little sunshine of our own to help it out. In truth the world is neither with
us nor against us; it is but raw material in our hands, and can be heaven
or hell according to what we are.
Part of the cause of pessimism, in Schopenhauer and his contem-
poraries, lay in their romantic attitudes and expectations. Youth expects
too much of the world; pessimism is the morning after optimism, just as
1815 had to pay for 1789. The romantic exaltation and liberation of feel-
ing, instinct and will, and the romantic contempt for intellect, restraint,
and order, brought their natural penalties; for "the world," as Horace
Walpole said, e
'is a comedy for those who think, but a tragedy for those
who feel.*' "Perhaps no movement has been so prolific of melancholy as
emotional romanticism. . . . ^Vhen the romanticist discovers that his
ideal of happiness works out into actual unhappiness, he does not blame
his ideal. He simply assumes that the world is unworthy of a being so
exquisitely organized as himself?*180 How could a capricious universe ever
satisfy a capricious soul?
The spectacle of Napoleon's rise to empire, Rousseau's denunciation ^
and Kant's critique of the intellect, and his own passionate temperament
and experiences, conspired to suggest to Schopenhauer the primacy
and ultimacy of the will Perhaps, too, Waterloo and St. Helena helped
to develop a pessimism born, no doubt, of bitter personal contact with
the stings and penalties of life. Here was the most dynamic individual
will in all history, imperiously commanding continents; and yet its doom
was as certain and ignominious as that of the insect to which the day
of its birth brings inenviable death. It never occurred to Schopenhauer
that it was better to have fought and lost than never to have fought at
**Ibid., pp. 24, 37. **Babbit^ Roxssea* and Romanticism, p. 208.