That famous interrogation, "Is life worth living?" may be viewed to-day from a different angle. Mr. Mallock acknowledged that the question must be answered in the terms of the individual only. Here we encounter a new crux. What is the individual? The family is the unit of society, not the individual. And the autonomous "I" exists no longer, except as a unit in the colony of cells which are "We." Man is a being afloat in an ocean of vibrations. Society demands the co-operation of its component cells, else relegates to solitude the individual who cannot adapt himself to play a humble part in the cosmical orchestra. That protean theory Socialism has changed its chameleonic hues many times since Mr. Mallock wrote Is Life Worth Living? His idea is worked out with great clearness in the apprehension of details, but with little feeling for their relations to each other. Sadly considered, we may take it for granted that life has a definite aim. We live, as a modern thinker puts it, because we stand like the rest of cognisable nature under the universal law of causality; this idea is founded not on a metaphysical but a biological basis. Metaphysics is a pleasing diversion, though it doesn't get us to finalities. Happiness is an absolute. Therefore it has no existence. There never was, there never will be an earthly paradise, no matter what the socialists say. Content is the summum bonum of mankind; the content that comes with sound health and a clear conscience. The wrangling over Free Will is now considered a sign of ghost-worship.
Schopenhauer and his mystic Will-to-Live are both rather amusing survivals of antique animism. The problem is not whether we can do what we want to do, but whether we can will what we want to will. But the illusion of individual freedom of will is the last illusion to be dissipated in this most deterministic of worlds and most pluralistic of universes. It's a poor conception of eternity that doesn't work both ways. As there will be no end to things, there never was a beginning. Eternity is now. Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott wrote in his brilliant refutation of Bergson that "the feeling we have of a necessity for such an explanation [the attempt to explain the universe] arises from the conformation of our brains, which think by associating disjoined ideas; ... no last explanation is possible or perhaps even exists," which will please the relativists and pain the absolutists. But deprive mankind of its dreams and it is like the naughty child in Hans Christian Andersen's fable. A fairy punished this child by giving him dreamless slumber. Without vision, old as well as young limp through life.