ages, have been at times inclined to doubt it. And these times have not
seemed to them times of blindness; but on the contrary, of specially
clear insight. Scales, as it were, have fallen from their eyes for a
moment or two, and the beauty and worth of existence has appeared to
them as but a deceiving show. An entire book of the Hebrew Scriptures is
devoted to a deliberate exposition of this philosophy. In '_the most
high and palmy state_' of Athens it was expressed fitfully also as the
deepest wisdom of her most triumphant dramatist.[1] And in Shakspeare it
appears so constantly, that it must evidently have had for him some
directly personal meaning.

This view, however, even by most of those who have held it, has been
felt to be really only a half-view in the guise of a whole one. To
Shakspeare, for instance, it was full of a profound terror. It crushed,
and appalled, and touched him; and there was not only implied in it that
for us life does mean little, but that by some possibility it might have
meant much. Or else, if the pessimism has been more complete than this,
it has probably been adopted as a kind of solemn affectation, or has
else been lamented as a form of diseased melancholy. It is a view that
healthy intellects have hitherto declined to entertain. Its advocates
have been met with neglect, contempt, or castigation, not with
arguments. They have been pitied as insane, avoided as cynical, or
passed over as frivolous. And yet, but for one reason, to that whole
European world whose progress we are now inheriting, this view would
have seemed not only not untenable, but even obvious. The emptiness of
the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest
pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has
been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with
saints and sages. The conception that anything in this life could of
itself be of any great moment to us, was considered as much a puerility