there is a kind of progress and plan in history, and yet he regards history as, on the whole, an irrational process, the successive epochs of which are so many stages of illusion. In the first of these stages, that which is represented by childhood in the development of the individual, and antiquity in the development of the race,-man hopes to be able to find happiness in this world, in the pleasures and pursuits and honours of the earthly life; but this hope is at length found out to be deceptive. The soul learns the vanity of the earthly life and earthly things; learns that there is no rest or satisfaction for it in them. With Christianity a new stage of history, corresponding to adolescence in the individual, is entered on. Disappointed with this world, man looks for another and seeks to lay up for himself treasure in heaven. What he knows he cannot find in the present life he hopes may await him in a future life. the thoughts of men are widened, and as criticism, science, and speculation spread, that hope likewise is seen to have no rational warrant, and the individual is forced to acknowledge that he has nothing worth living for either in the present or the future. Hope, however, dies hard in the human breast. Hence when men no longer dare to look for anything for themselves as individuals, they still believe in a collective progress of their race. This is their hope in the age in which we live,—

But as

the manhood of humanity, the third stage of the world's history; but it also is an illusion. Wealth may be increased, mechanical inventions multiplied, and culture more widely diffused, but morality varies little, and the development of intellect diminishes happiness. The political changes which socialists demand will inevitably be realised, but those who suppose that men will be any the better when these changes have been effected will certainly be disappointed. The progress of history is not the growth of any positive good in history, but the growth of man's consciousness of the nothingness and vanity of human life.

The mere statement of views like those just indicated should be sufficient to render the believer in a God of wisdom and of love profoundly grateful that his faith saves him from assenting to dogmas so false and so terrible. It is only through the possession of a well-grounded faith in the perfections of God that we can be warranted in entertaining a cheerful view of the destinies of mankind. To be "without God" is, in the estimate of reason, equivalent to being "without hope in the world." This does not imply, however, that grave exaggerations may not be detected in the reasonings and calculations on which Schopenhauer and Hartmann have based their conclusions. On the contrary, the most manifest exaggerations abound. The pessimists are plainly not impartial

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seekers after truth, but the zealous pleaders of a special cause; they are good advocates and bad judges; they make more than is warranted of whatever seems to be in favour of the view which they have espoused, and they depreciate or distort whatever appears to be inconsistent with it.

The main reason which Schopenhauer alleges in proof of the essential wretchedness of life is a badly executed psychological analysis-one vitiated by a metaphysical hypothesis. The principle that pleasure is merely negative, and that pain alone is positive, is derived by him from the more general principle that all is will-that the essence of all things is an effort, a striving, identical with that which, when manifested in ourselves under the light of consciousness, is called will. But all effort, he holds, springs from want, which is pain so long as unsatisfied, and which is no sooner satisfied than a new want, a new pain, is engendered. Willing is essentially suffering, and therefore life as essentially willing is essentially suffering. The more elevated the being, the fuller the life, the more the suffering. The lowest animals suffer least. The man of genius is of all men the most miserable. Pleasures are only the momentary alleviations of pain; happiness is but an evanescent illusion.

There is manifest error and morbid exaggeration in such a view as this. Life implies desire, and desire in a derivative being implies want, but

if the want is always supplied there need be little or no suffering. The prospect of enjoyment, not the experience of suffering, may be, and in many cases is, the stimulus to activity. Where feelings of unrest and disquiet are the causes or occasions of exertion, there may be in the exertion and in the result attained by it far more pleasure than pain. It is pleasure which springs from the fulfilment of the natural conditions of life; it is pain which flows from their non-fulfilment; and hence, as a general rule, happiness doubtless preponderates over misery in the animal world. All that can be legitimately inferred from the mere existence of want, is that the being which is conscious of want is a dependent being. Pain is not inherent in want, but is the consequence of want unsupplied. A consciousness of want is the root of all spiritual strength and perfection. The life of complete human blessedness is a life which is realised not to be inherent in self, but to flow from an infinite source for the continuous supply of every want. Want easily passes into pain, but in itself it is simply an expression of finiteness, of limitation. All sufferings which are needed to bring men to a sense of their wants are amply justified, because what they lead to is not evil, but a something purely good, if there be an adequate and appropriate supply of these wants.

Then the stages of illusion described by Hart

mann are mainly illusions of his own. Even in antiquity, in the Greco-Roman world,-it was only the foolish who hoped to find happiness in the pleasures and pursuits and honours of earthly life; and the foolish hope so still. The majority of men, and especially of thoughtful men, in Greece and Rome, never cherished any illusion of the kind. It is possible for men, even in the savage state, to see the stupidity of such a hope; while atheist philosophers, even in the nineteenth century, are apt to believe in its reasonableness, because they have no other hope. On the other hand, that hope in a future life is an illusion-that wise men have discovered it to be without solid foundation,-is an assertion which atheists have made ever since atheism existed, but which is as unproved at present as on the first day it was uttered. As to faith in human progress, it is obviously not only reconcilable with faith in God and immortality, but more dependent on it than on anything else. Faith in God is the chief support and source of faith in progress. If the former be rejected the latter will not long be retained. In a word, Von Hartmann's conception of the course of history is very superficial and erroneous-one devised to serve the requirements of his general theory of existence, with extremely little regard to the really relevant facts.

It is easy to show that Hartmann has under