CHAPTER VIII.

THE PRACTICAL PROSPECT.

_Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck....
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell._

Shakespeare, _Sonnet XIV_.


The prospects I have been just describing as the goal of positive
progress will seem, no doubt, to many to be quite impossible in its
cheerlessness. If the future glory of our race was a dream, not worth
dwelling on, much more so, they will say, is such a future abasement of
it as this. They will say that optimism may at times have perhaps been
over-sanguine, but that this was simply the exuberance of health;
whereas pessimism is, in its very nature, the gloom and languor of a
disease.

Now with much of this view of the matter I entirely agree. I admit that
the prospect I have described may be an impossible one; personally, I
believe it is so. I admit also that pessimism is the consciousness of
disease, confessing itself. But the significance of these admissions is
the very opposite of what it is commonly supposed to be. They do not
make the pessimism I have been arguing one whit less worthy of
attention; on the contrary, they make it more worthy. This is the point
on which I may most readily be misunderstood. I will therefore try to
make my meaning as clear as possible.

Pessimism, then, represents, to the popular mind, a philosophy or view