ferent from this Brockton
murder in it? That, of course, seems the natural and spontaneous thing
for us to do; and yet it is nothing short of deliberately espousing a
kind of pessimism. The judgment of regret calls the murder bad.
Calling a thing bad means, if it mean anything at all, that the thing
ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its stead.
Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead,
virtually defines the universe {162} as a place in which what ought to
be is impossible,--in other words, as an organism whose constitution is
afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw. The pessimism
of a Schopenhauer says no more than this,--that the murder is a
symptom; and that it is a vicious symptom because it belongs to a
vicious whole, which can express its nature no otherwise than by
bringing forth just such a symptom as that at this particular spot.
Regret for the murder must transform itself, if we are determinists and
wise, into a larger regret. It is absurd to regret the murder alone.
Other things being what they are, _it_ could not be different. What we
should regret is that whole frame of things of which the murder is one
member. I see no escape whatever from this pessimistic conclusion, if,
being determinists, our judgment of regret is to be allowed to stand at
all.

The only deterministic escape from pessimism is everywhere to abandon
the judgment of regret. That this can be done, history shows to be not
impossible. The devil, _quoad existentiam_, may be good. That is,
although he be a _principle_ of evil, yet the universe, with such a
principle in it, may practically be a better universe than it could
have been without. On every hand, in a small way, we find that a
certain amount of evil is a condition by which a higher form of good is
bought. There is nothing to prevent anybody from generalizing this
view, and trusting that if we could but see things in the largest of
all ways, even such matters as this Brockton murder would appear to be
paid for by the uses that follow in their train. An optimism _quand
meme_, a systematic and infatuated optimism like that ridiculed by
Voltaire in his Candide, is one of the possible {163} ideal ways in
which a man may train himself to look on life. Bereft of dogmatic
hardness and lit up with the expression of a tender and pathetic hope,
such an optimism has been the grace of some of the most religious
characters that eve