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According to Schopenhauer man is a crass egoist by nature, and egoism is bad, hence no good can come out of him. But man is not a crass egoist. Schopenhauer himself believes that we can free ourselves from our wicked wills, that we can negate the will, suppress our egoistic strivings, and lose ourselves in the contemplation of the objects of art, science, and religion; hence we cannot be so bad after all. And those who believe in the total depravity of man are likewise optimistic enough to believe that there is some way out of the difficulty, either through Christ or the groundless grace of God, so unwilling are they to concede the necessary loss of a single human soul.

It is much easier to show on a priori grounds that man is not radically bad than the opposite. Man is both egoistic and altruistic; he acts for his own good and that of others. Humanity could not exist and realize the ideals which have been realized if men were absolutely bad. The fact of their living together at all proves that obedience to the laws of morality is the rule and not the exception. If men were as immoral as the pessimist paints them, society would go to pieces. The fact that it takes unusually adroit men to succeed in spite of their dishonesty shows how hard it is to break the moral law and thrive. "The wages of sin is death." This is as profound a truth as was ever uttered.

But even if it were true, even if the world were a hotbed of corruption, why should we despair? Why

should we not make ourselves and the world better? Let us strive to improve it, and not sit idly by, weeping and moaning over its wickedness. Let us strike at wrong wherever it shows its head, let us enroll ourselves in the ranks of virtue and fight the great battle of the right against the wrong. The best way to grow strong in righteousness is to combat evil. And we can make no better beginning than by first improving ourselves. "Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye."

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(3) The attempt is also made to prove pessimism genetically by comparing the present with the past. Just as sorrow is increasing, vice is increasing; men are growing worse and worse; the times are out of joint. The world is degenerating. There was a time, says Rousseau, when things were better. his primitive days, man lived peacefully, virtuously, and happily, but with the progress of civilization and culture all this has been changed. We are. growing away from the sweet simplicity of the past, and our demands on life and the values we put upon things are changing. Social inequalities are multiplying, carrying in their train all the vices of an artificial mode of existence. We esteem knowledge, not for itself, but simply as we value diamonds and precious jewels, because it gives to its possessors something not enjoyed by others. Wealth and culture are the badges of classes, and valued merely as

such. The rich and cultured are becoming more lordly, haughty, supercilious, and unsympathetic, while the poor and ignorant are made more servile, cowardly, deceitful, and base by the artificial conditions of the times.

It is, however, not true that the world is getting worse, that the original state was a blissful moral state. This conception of a better past is common to many religions and peoples. The Greeks believed in a golden age, the Jews in Paradise. It is characteristic of old age to live in and glorify the past, largely perhaps because it is past. The evils of the present are distinctly before us; the evils of the past we are apt to forget, and to think only of its bright sides. Besides, old age has formed its habits, the habits of the past, and we all know how hard it is to accept new ways of thinking, feeling, and willing. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. The old man often feels out of place in the world with its new habits, and so comes to regard everything in it as wrong. He makes the same objections to the present which his parents made to his past, which was their present.

But is the present really worse than the past? Here again everything depends upon our conception of the better and the worse. If you do not believe in the progress of political and religious freedom, you will condemn the present. If you hate the rabble so called, and find that the plain man of the people is playing a greater rôle in the world than you are

willing he should play, you will find fault with the times. If you regard civilization with its culture and luxury as an absolute evil, you will hate the present. If you believe that men ought to live the lives of mediæval ascetics, that they should despise literature, science, and art, then you cannot contemplate our age with pleasure.

But if you believe with me that the ideal of mankind is to develop the physical and spiritual powers of the race in harmony with each other and in adaptation to the surroundings, to make men more rational and sympathetic, to give them control over themselves and nature, to bring the blessings of civilization within the reach of the humblest and most neglected, then you will have to admit that our times are better than the past. If civilization is better than savagery, then the present is better than the past. If a wider and deeper sympathy with living beings, justice, and truth, are better than hatred, cruelty, prejudice, and injustice, then civilization is better than savagery. The good old times solved their problems in their way; let us solve ours in our way. Let us

be thankful that the past is gone, and look with hope to a brighter and better future.1

1 See the excellent chapter on "The Moral Progress of the Race," in Williams, Review of Evolutional Ethics, pp. 466 ff.

CHAPTER XI

CHARACTER AND FREEDOM1

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1. Virtues and Vices. - We have found that such acts are right as tend to promote welfare, and that such are wrong as tend to do the reverse. We have also found that acts are the outward expressions of inner psychical states, that they are prompted by something on the inner side. Among these inner states we mentioned the so-called egoistic and altruistic impulses and feelings, and the so-called moral sentiments. Morality, therefore, or moral conduct, springs from the human heart; it represents the will of humanity. Moral conduct, like all conduct, is the outward expression of the human will. Men act morally or for the welfare of themselves and others because they desire or will that welfare.

1 Green, Prolegomena, Bk. I, chap. iii, Bk. II, chap. i; Stephen, The Science of Ethics, pp. 264-294; Münsterberg, Die Willenshandlung; Fouillée, La liberté et déterminisme; Sigwart, Der Begriff des Wollens und sein Verhältniss zum Begriff der Causalität; Wundt, Ethics, Part III, chap. i, 1, 2, 3; Paulsen, Ethics, Bk. II, chap. ix; Thilly, "The Freedom of the Will," Philosophical Review, Vol. III, pp. 385-411; Hyslop, Elements, chaps. iv, v; Mackenzie, Manual, chap. viii; Seth, Ethical Principles, Part III, chap. i. For history of the freewill question, see Penzig, Arthur Schopenhauer und die menschliche Willensfreiheit; A. Alexander, Theories of the Will.

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