science—Penalties incident to thought and reflection—Mental depression and sense of powerlessness, etc.—2. Is pessimism curable?—Possible remedies—The labour problem and the future of society—Illusions involved in pessimism—Inexactitude of its estimate of pleasures and pains—Quotation from Leopardi—Criticism of the practical results of pessimism—Nirvâna—An experiment in Nirvâna—Will pessimistic pantheism be the religion of the future? 452
CHAPTER V.
IDEALISM, MATERIALISM, MONISM.
Review of the Principal Metaphysical Hypotheses which will Replace Dogma.—Concluded.
I. Idealism—Different forms of idealism: subjective idealism, objective idealism: The whole of existence resolved into a mode of mental existence—Value of idealism considered from point of view of the religious sentiment—Most specious of contemporary idealisms: Possibility of universal progress in the hypothesis of radical spontaneity and of “freedom”—Reconciliation between determinism and the conception of freedom—Moral idealism as a possible substitute for religious sentiment: Dependence of the universe on the principle of goodness.
II. Materialism—Difficulty in defining absolute materialism: Matter—The atom—Nebular hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity of supplementing materialism by some theory of the origin of life—The latest conception of materialism: Conception of infinite divisibility and infinite extensibility.
III. Monism and the fate of worlds—Current of contemporary systems toward monism—Scientific interpretation of monism—The world conceived monistically as a becoming and as a life—Scientific formulæ for life—Progress consists in the gradual confusion of these two formulæ—That the rise of morality and religion can be accounted for without the presupposition of any final cause—Metaphysical and moral expectations in regard to the destiny of the world and of humanity, it may be, founded on scientific monism—Facts which appear to be inconsistent with these expectations—Pessimistic conception of dissolution that is complementary to the conception of evolution—Is the immanence of dissolution demonstrable?—Natural devices for the perpetuation of the “fittest”—Rôle of intelligence, of numbers, etc.—Calculation of probabilities—Is eternity a parte post a ground of discouragement or of hope—Probable existence of thinking beings in other worlds: the planets, possibility of the existence of beings superior to man—Survival of the conception of gods—Hypothesis of intercosmic consciousness and of a universal society.
IV. Destiny of the human race—The hypothesis of immortality from the point of view of monism—Two possible conceptions of immortality—Eternal or untemporal existence and continuation of life in some superior forms—I. Hypothesis of eternal life—its function in antique religions, in Platonism, and in the systems of Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer—Eternal life and the subsistence of the individual—Distinction made by Schopenhauer and various other philosophers between individuality and personality—Eternal life problematical and transcendent—Aristocratic tendency of the theory of eternal life—Hypothesis of conditional immortality—Criticism of the hypothesis of conditional immortality; incompatibility of this notion with that of divine goodness—II. Hypothesis of a continuation of the present life and its evolution into some superior form—What sort of immortality the theory of evolution permits us to hope for—Immortality of one’s labours and conduct—True conception of such immortality—Its relation to the
