WORKS BY WILLIAM JAMES, M. D., ETC.,
Professor of Psychology in Harvard University.
Psychology. Briefer Course. 12mo. Ibid., 1892. $1.60.
By
PHILADELPHIA
S. BURNS WESTON, 1305 ARCH ST.
1896
PUBLISHER’S NOTE.
The address contained in this book was originally given before the Young Men’s Christian Association of Harvard University, in May, 1895. It was afterwards repeated before the Society for Ethical Culture of Philadelphia and the School of Applied Ethics at Plymouth. It was printed in the International Journal of Ethics for October, 1895, and, the demand for it having been so great, we are glad to have the permission of the author and of the management of the Journal to republish it in more convenient form.
The author desires us to add that he owes his application of the quotation with which the address closes, to Mr. W. M. Salter, who used it in a similar way in an article in the Index for August 24, 1882.
When Mr. Mallock’s book with this title appeared some fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that “it depends on the liver” had great currency in the newspapers. The answer that I propose to give to-night cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeare’s prologues,
“I come no more to make you laugh; things now,
That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,”
must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly, and I know not what such an Association as yours intends nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of existence and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find.
I.
With many men the question of life’s worth is answered by a temperamental optimism that makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whitman’s works are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism; the mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitman’s veins that it abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling.
“To breathe the air, how delicious!
To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand!…
To be this incredible God I am!…
O amazement of things, even the least particle!
spirituality of things!…
I too carol the Sun, usher’d or at noon, or as now, setting,
I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the growths of the earth….
I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old,
I sing the endless finales of things,
I say Nature continue– glory continues,
I praise with electric voice,
For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last.”
So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his happiness to tell:
If moods like this could be made permanent and constitutions like these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses as the present one. No philosopher would seek to prove articulately that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would vouch for itself and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply. But we are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist and oppose to them a standing