Is Life Worth Living? eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 307 pages of information about Is Life Worth Living?.

Is Life Worth Living? eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 307 pages of information about Is Life Worth Living?.
be distinctly less intense.  It will, as we have seen already, be but a vapid consummation at its best; and the more vividly it is brought before us in imagination, the less likely shall we be to ’struggle, groan, and agonize,’ for the sake of hastening it in reality.  It will do nothing, at any rate, to increase the tendency to self-sacrifice that is now at work in the world; and this, though startling us now and then by some spasmodic manifestation, is not strong enough to have much general effect on the present; still less will it have more effect on the future.  Vicarious happiness as a rule is only possible when the object gained for another is enormously greater than the object lost by self; and it is not always possible even then:  whilst when the gains on either side are nearly equal, it ceases altogether.  And necessarily so.  If it did not, everything would be at a dead-lock.  Life would be a perpetual holding back, instead of a pushing forward.  Everyone would be waiting at the door, and saying to everyone else, ‘After you.’  But all these practical considerations are entirely forgotten by the positivists.  They live in a world of their own imagining, in which all the rules of this world are turned upside down.  There, the defeated candidate in an election would be radiant at his rival’s victory.  When a will was read, the anxiety of each relative would be that he or she should be excluded in favour of the others; or more probably still that they should be all excluded in favour of a hospital.  Two rivals, in love with the same woman, would be each anxious that his own suit might be thwarted.  And a man would gladly involve himself in any ludicrous misfortune, because he knew that the sight of his catastrophe would rejoice his whole circle of friends.  The course of human progress, in fact, would be one gigantic donkey-race, in which those were the winners who were farthest off from the prize.

We have but to state the matter in terms of common life, to see how impossible is the only condition of things that would make the positive system practicable.  The first wonder that suggests itself, is how so grotesque a conception could ever have originated.  But its genesis is not far to seek.  The positivists do not postulate any new elements in human nature, but the reduction of some, elimination of others, and the magnifying of others.  And they actually find cases where this process has been effected.  But they quite forget the circumstances that have made such an event possible.  They forget that in their very nature they have been altogether exceptional and transitory; and that it is impossible to construct a Utopia in which they shall exist at all.  We can, for instance, no doubt point to Leonidas and the three hundred as specimens of what human heroism can rise to; and we can point to the Stoics as specimens of human self-control.  But to make a new Thermopylae we want a new Barbarian; and before we can recoil from temptation as the Stoics

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Is Life Worth Living? from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.