y has grown in like degree, and both joy and pain
are subordinated to the power to act. The human will, the power to do,
is the real end of the stress and struggle of the ages. However limited
its individual action, the will finds its place among the gigantic
factors in the evolution of life. It is not the present, but the
ultimate, which is truth. Not the unstable and temporary fact but the
boundless clashing forces which endlessly throw truths to the surface.

Another source of Pessimism is the reaction from unearned pleasures and
from spurious joys. It is the business of the senses to translate
realities, to tell the truth about us in terms of human experience.
Every real pleasure has its cost in some form of nervous activity. What
we get we must earn, if it is to be really ours. Long ago, in the
infancy of civilization, man learned that there were drugs in Nature,
cell products of the growth or transformation of "our brother organisms,
the plants," by whose agency pain was turned to pleasure. By the aid of
these outside influences he could clear "today of past regrets and
future fears," and strike out from the sad "calendar unborn tomorrow and
dead yesterday."

That the joys thus produced had no real objective existence, man was not
long in finding out, and it soon appeared that for each subjective
pleasure which had no foundation in action, there was a subjective
sorrow, likewise unrelated to external things.

But that the pains more than balanced the joys, and that the indulgence
in unearned deceptions destroyed sooner or later all capacity for
enjoyment, man learned more slowly.

The joys of wine, of opium, of tobacco and of all kindred drugs are mere
tricks upon the nervous system. In greater or less degree they destroy
its power to tell the truth, and in proportion as they have seemed to
bring subjective happiness, so do they bring at last subjective horror
and disgust. And this utter soul-weariness of drugs has found its way
into literature as the expression of Pessimism.

"The City of the Dreadful Night," for example, does not find its
inspiration in the misery of selfish, rushing, crowded London. It is the
effect of brandy on the sensitive mind of an exquisitive poet. Not the
world, but the poet, lies in the "dreadful night" of self-inflicted
insomnia. Wherever these subjective nerve influences find expression in
literature it is either in an infinite sadness, or in hopeless gloom.
James Thompson says i