choly Jacques of our ordinary experience either uses some narcotic
or stimulant to excess, or else has trouble with his liver or kidneys.
"Liver complaint," says Zangwill, "is the Prometheus myth done into
modern English." Already historical criticism has shown that the Bloody
Assizes had its origin in disease of the bladder, and most forms of vice
and cruelty resolve themselves into decay of the nerves. It is natural
that degeneration should bring discouragement and disgust. But whatever
the causes of Pessimism, whether arising in speculative philosophy in
nervous disease or in personal failure, it can never be wrought into
sound and helpful life. To live effectively implies the belief that life
is worth living, and no one who leads a worthy life has ever for a
moment doubted this.

Such an expression as "worth living" has in fact no real meaning. To act
and to love are the twin functions of the human body and soul. To refuse
these functions is to make one's self incapable of them. It is in a
sense to die while the body is still alive. To refuse these functions is
to make misery out of existence, and a life of ennui is doubtless not
"worth living."

The philosophy of life is its working hypothesis of action. To hold that
all effort is futile, that all knowledge is illusion, and that no result
of the human will is worth the pain of calling it into action, is to cut
the nerve of effectiveness. In proportion as one really believes this,
he becomes a cumberer of the ground. It was said of Oscar McCulloch, an
earnest student of human life, that "in whatever part of God's universe
he finds himself, he will be a hopeful man, looking forward and not
backward, looking upward and not downward, always ready to lend a
helping hand, and not afraid to die."

Of like spirit was Robert Louis Stevenson:

"Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will."

It is through men of this type that the work of civilization has been
accomplished, "men of present valor, stalwart, brave iconoclasts." They
were men who were content with the order of the universe as it is, and
seek only to place their own actions in harmony with this order. They
have no complaints to urge against "the goodness and severity of God,"
nor any futile wish "to remould it nearer to the heart's desire." The
"Fanaticism for Veracity" is satisfied with what is. Not the ultimate
truth which is God's alone, but the highest attainable truth, is the aim