To have recourse to those, ambiguous words, “optimism” and “pessimism,” does not assist us in any way, for frequently they express the very contrary of what those who use them mean to express.  To ticket a doctrine with the label of pessimism is not to impugn its validity, and the so-called optimists are not the most efficient in action.  I believe, on the contrary, that many of the greatest heroes, perhaps the greatest of all, have been men of despair and that by despair they have accomplished their mighty works.  Apart from this, however, and accepting in all their ambiguity these denominations of optimism and pessimism, that there exists a certain transcendental pessimism which may be the begetter of a temporal and terrestrial optimism, is a matter that I propose to develop in the following part of this treatise.

Very different, well I know, is the attitude of our progressives, the partisans of “the central current of contemporary European thought”; but I cannot bring myself to believe that these individuals do not voluntarily close their eyes to the grand problem of existence and that, in endeavouring to stifle this feeling of the tragedy of life, they themselves are not living a lie.

The foregoing reflections are a kind of practical summary of the criticism developed in the first six chapters of this treatise, a kind of definition of the practical position to which such a criticism is capable of leading whosoever will not renounce life and will not renounce reason and who is compelled to live and act between these upper and nether millstones which grind upon the soul.  The reader who follows me further is now aware that I am about to carry him into the region of the imagination, of imagination not destitute of reason, for without reason nothing subsists, but of imagination founded on feeling.  And as regards its truth, the real truth, that which is independent of ourselves, beyond the reach of our logic and of our heart—­of this truth who knows aught?

FOOTNOTES: 

[31] See Troeltsch, Systematische christliche Religion, in Die Kultur der Gegenwart series.

[32] Die Analyse der Empfindigungen und das Verhaeltniss des Physischen zum Psychischen, i., Sec. 12, note.

[33] I have left the original expression here, almost without translating it—­Existents-Consequents.  It means the existential or practical, not the purely rational or logical, consequence. (Author’s note.)

[34] Albrecht Ritschl:  Geschichte des Pietismus, ii., Abt. i., Bonn, 1884, p. 251.

[35] Thou art the cause of my suffering, O non-existing God, for if Thou didst exist, then should I also really exist.

VII

LOVE, SUFFERING, PITY, AND PERSONALITY

    CAIN:  Let me, or happy or unhappy, learn
          To anticipate my immortality.