The views of life it includes may be classified in two ways. In the first place, they are either what we may call critical pessimisms or prospective pessimisms: of which the thesis of the first is that human life is essentially evil; and of the second, that whatever human life may be now, its tendency is to get worse instead of better. The one is the denial of human happiness; the other the denial of human hope. But there is a second classification to make, traversing this one, and far more important. Pessimism may be either absolute or hypothetical. The first of these maintains its theses as statements of actual facts; the second, which is, of its nature, prospective mainly, only maintains them as statements of what will be facts, in the event of certain possible though it may be remote contingencies.
Now, absolute pessimism, whether it be critical or prospective, can be nothing, in the present state of the world, but an exhibition of ill temper or folly. It is hard to imagine a greater waste of ingenuity than the attempts that have been made sometimes to deduce from the nature of pain and pleasure, that the balance in life must be always in favour of the former, and that life itself is necessarily and universally an evil. Let the arguments be never so elaborate, they are blown away like cobwebs by a breath of open-air experience. Equally useless are the attempts to predict the gloom of the future. Such predictions either mean nothing, or else they are mere loose conjectures, suggested by low spirits or disappointment. They are of no philosophic or scientific value; and though in some cases they may give literary expression to moods already existing, they will never produce conviction in minds that would else be unconvinced. The gift of prophecy as to general human history is not a gift that any philosophy can bestow. It could only be acquired through a superhuman inspiration which is denied to man or through a superhuman sagacity which is never attained by him.
The hypothetical pessimism that is contained in my arguments is a very different thing from this, and far humbler. It makes no foolish attempts to say anything general about the present, or anything absolute about the future. As to the future, it only takes the absolute things that have been said by others; and not professing any certainty about their truth, merely explains their meaning. It deals with a certain change in human beliefs, now confidently predicted; but it does not say that this prediction will be fulfilled. It says only that if it be, a change, not at present counted on, will be effected in human life. It says that human life will degenerate if the creed of positivism be ever generally accepted; but it not only does not say that it ever will be accepted by everybody: rather, it emphatically points out that as yet it has been accepted fully by nobody. The positive school say that their view of life is the only sound one. They boast that it is founded on the rock of fact, not on the sand-bank of sentiment; that it is the final philosophy, that will last as long as man lasts, and that very soon it will have seen the extinction of all the others. It is the positivists who are the prophets, not I. My aim has been not to confirm the prophecy, but to explain its meaning; and my arguments will be all the more opportune at the present moment, the more reason we have to think the prophecy false.