The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn
sightseeing bus tourAnd once in, it is hard to trace its lawful bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness,bent on self-protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor,
but higher inner ideals have weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can bemore base and unworthy than the
pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills itmay have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out ofthe
difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the totalevil of the situation. At all costs, then, we
mba programought to reduce the
sway of that mood; we ought toscout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is impossible to carry on thisdiscipline in the subjective sphere
without zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing thedarker aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution not toindulge
in misery, small point within ourselves, may not stop until ithas brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception
optimistic enough to becongenial with its needs.
In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion that the total frame of thingsabsolutely must be good. Such mystical persuasion plays an enormous
part in the history of thereligious consciousness, and we must look at it later with some care. But we need not go so far atpresent. More ordinary non-mystical
conditions of rapture suffice for my immediate contention.
All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms make one feelingless to evil in somedirection. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot, the usual
prudences are flung by thelover to the winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided itbe for the ideal cause, death may lose
its sting, the grave its victory. In these states, the ordinarycontrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an
kanger evod pro omnipotentexcitement
which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowningexperience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in the heroic
opportunity andadventure.
PR
