THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
of escape and rest, of submission and security, of solitude and quiet are no
doubt negative, because the instincts that impel us to them are essentially
negative forms of flight and fear: but shall we say the same of the
pleasures that conic when positive instincts are in command instincts of
acquisition and po^c>blon, of pugnacity and mastery, of action and play,
of association and love? Is the joy of laughter negative, or the romping of
the child, or the song of the mating bird, or the crow of Chanticleer, or
the creative ecstasy of art? Life itself is a positive force, and every normal
function of it holds some delight.
It remains true, no doubt, that death is terrible. Much of its terror disappears
if one has lived a normal life; one must have lived well in order
to die well. And would deathlessness delight us? Who envies the fate of
AhasucruSj to whom immorta 1 life was sent as the heaviest punishment
that could be inflicted upon man? And why is death terrible if not because
life is sweet? Vv'e need not say with Napoleon that all who fear death are
atheists at heart; but we may surely say that a man who lives to threescore
years and ten has survived his pessimism. No man, said Goethe, is a
pessimist after thirty. And hardly before twenty; pessimism is a luxury of
^!f-conscious and self-important youth; youth that comes out of the
tfarm bosom of the communistic family into the cold atmosphere of
individualistic competition arid greed, and then yearns back to its
mother's breast; youth that hurls itself madly against the windmills and
evils of the world, and sadly sheds Utopias and ideals with every year. But
before twenty is the joy of the body, and after thirty is the joy of the
mind; before twenty is the pleasure of protection and security; and after
and home.
thirty, the joy of parentage
How should a man avoid pessimism who has lived almost all his life
in a boarding-house? And who abandoned his only child to illegitimate
anonymity ? loa At the bottom of Schopenhauer's unhappiness was his rejection
of the normal life, his rejection of women and marriage and
children. He finds in parentage the greatest of evils, where a healthy man
finds in it the greatest of life's satisfactions. He thinks that the stealthiness
of love is due to shame in continuing the race could anything be more
pedantically absurd? He sees in love only the sacrifice of the individual to
the race, and ignores the delights with which the instinct repays the
sacrifice, delights so great that they have inspired most of the poetry of
the world. 104 He knows woman only as shrew and as sinner, and he
imagines that there are no other types. He thinks that the man who undertakes
to support a wife is a fool; 165 but apparently such, men are not much
I-a Finot? The Science of Happinessf New York, 1914, p. 70.
lw Cf., again, Schopenhauer himself: "It is just this not seeking of one's own
things (which is everywhere the stamp of greatness) that gives to passionate love
tne touch of sublimity." III, 368.
MB Essay on Women, p. 75*