with the pessimism of
inertia and the pessimism of dyspepsia. Intellectually, we have been
living too high the last hundred years or so. In this is the secret of
our difference. You insist upon cheapening life for yourself because it
has become evident to you that the phenomenon is common, and I, on the
other hand, shout its glory because it is universal. To myself I am
breathless with wonder, but to you and in my work I needs must shout it.

Here let me be clear. I take it that you are under the sway of a
contemporary mood, that your position is an accidental phase of
to-day's materialism. Broadly, our quarrel is that of pessimism and
optimism, only your pessimism is unconscious, which makes it the more
dangerous to yourself. You are too sad to know that you are not happy or
to care. Does my diagnosis surprise you? Analyze the argument of your
last letter. You trace the growth of the emotion of love from protoplasm
to man. You follow the progress of the force which is stronger than
hunger and cold and swifter and more final than death, from its
potential state in the unicellular stage where life goes on by division,
up through the multifarious forms of instinctive animal mating, till you
reach the love of the sexes in the human world. And the exploring leads
you to the belief that nothing has been reserved for the human worth his
cherishing, to the conviction that the plan of life is simple and
unvaried and therefore unacceptable.

You raise the wail of Ecclesiastes, "All is vanity and a striving after
wind, and there is no profit under the sun." The Preacher and Omar and
Swinburne are pathetically human, and we who are also human respond to
their finality, to their quizzical indifference and their stinging
resentment. We also say, "Vanity of vanities," and bow our heads
murmuring "Ilicet," and stretch out our hands to "turn down an empty
glass," but all this in twilight moods when a dimness as of dying rests
upon the soul. There are a few with whom it is always morning, and
others who remember something of the radiance of the young day even in
the heart of midnight. These disprove the postulates of sameness and
satiety, these are not smitten by the seen fact as are you of the
microscopic retina, these "see life steadily and see it whole."

We need not fear the label of an idea. When I say that your position is
that of the pessimist, it is not more of an accusation than if I said it
was that of the optimist. The thi