of life the very name of which is enough to condemn it. The popular
mind, however, overlooks one important point. Pessimism is a vague word.
It does not represent one philosophy, but several; and before we, in any
case, reject its claims on our attention, we should take care to see
what its exact meaning is.

The views of life it includes may be classified in two ways. In the
first place, they are either what we may call critical pessimisms or
prospective pessimisms: of which the thesis of the first is that human
life is essentially evil; and of the second, that whatever human life
may be now, its tendency is to get worse instead of better. The one is
the denial of human happiness; the other the denial of human hope. But
there is a second classification to make, traversing this one, and far
more important. Pessimism may be either absolute or hypothetical. The
first of these maintains its theses as statements of actual facts; the
second, which is, of its nature, prospective mainly, only maintains them
as statements of what will be facts, in the event of certain possible
though it may be remote contingencies.

Now, absolute pessimism, whether it be critical or prospective, can be
nothing, in the present state of the world, but an exhibition of ill
temper or folly. It is hard to imagine a greater waste of ingenuity than
the attempts that have been made sometimes to deduce from the nature of
pain and pleasure, that the balance in life must be always in favour of
the former, and that life itself is necessarily and universally an evil.
Let the arguments be never so elaborate, they are blown away like
cobwebs by a breath of open-air experience. Equally useless are the
attempts to predict the gloom of the future. Such predictions either
mean nothing, or else they are mere loose conjectures, suggested by low
spirits or disappointment. They are of no philosophic or scientific