world and on man.

The need of an optimism is one of the penalties which reflection brings.
Natural life takes the goodness of things for granted; but reflection
disturbs the placid contentment and sets man at variance with his world.
The fruit of the tree of knowledge always reveals his nakedness to man;
he is turned out of the paradise of unconsciousness and doomed to force
Nature, now conceived as a step-dame, to satisfy needs which are now
first felt. Optimism is the expression of man's new reconciliation with
his world; as the opposite doctrine of pessimism is the consciousness of
an unresolved contradiction. Both are a judgment passed upon the world,
from the point of view of its adequacy or inadequacy to meet demands,
arising from needs which the individual has discovered in himself.

Now, as I have tried to show, one of the main characteristics of the
opening years of the present era was its deeper intuition of the
significance of human life, and, therefore, by implication, of its wants
and claims. The spiritual nature of man, lost sight of during the
preceding age, was re-discovered; and the first and immediate
consequence was that man, as man, attained infinite worth. "Man was born
free," cried Rousseau, with a conviction which swept all before it; "he
has original, inalienable, and supreme rights against all things which
can set themselves against him." And Rousseau's countrymen believed him.
There was not a _Sans-culotte_ amongst them all but held his head high,
being creation's lord; and history can scarcely show a parallel to their
great burst of joy and hope, as they ran riot in their new-found
inheritance, from which they had so long been excluded. They flung
themselves upon the world, as if they would "glut their sense" upon it.

"Expend
Eternity upon its shows,
Flung them as freely as one rose
Out of a summer's opulence."[A]

[Footnote A:_Easter Day_.]

But the very discovery that man is spirit, which is the source of all
his rights, is also an implicit discovery that he has outgrown the
resources of the natural world. The infinite hunger of a soul cannot be
satisfied with the things of sense. The natural world is too limited
even for Carlyle's shoe-black; nor is it surprising that Byron should
find it a waste, and dolefully proclaim his disappointment to
much-admiring mankind. Now, both Carlyle and Browning apprehended the
cause of the discontent, and both endured the By