who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants
to help the men.

The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods
and men, but that he does not love what he chastises--he has not
this primary and supernatural loyalty to things. What is the evil
of the man commonly called an optimist? Obviously, it is felt
that the optimist, wishing to defend the honour of this world,
will defend the indefensible. He is the jingo of the universe;
he will say, "My cosmos, right or wrong." He will be less inclined
to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of front-bench
official answer to all attacks, soothing every one with assurances.
He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world. All this
(which is true of a type of optimist) leads us to the one really
interesting point of psychology, which could not be explained
without it.

We say there must be a primal loyalty to life: the only
question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty?
If you like to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an
unreasonable loyalty? Now, the extraordinary thing is that the
bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak defence of everything)
comes in with the reasonable optimism. Rational optimism leads
to stagnation: it is irrational optimism that leads to reform.
Let me explain by using once more the parallel of patriotism.
The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly
the man who loves it with a reason. The man who will improve
the place is the man who loves it without a reason. If a man loves
some feature of Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may find himself
defending that feature against Pimlico itself. But if he simply loves