ve 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
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