In fact, the good and evil resulting from the higher evolution of society are so equally balanced that it depends very much on place, time, and temperament whether we are optimists or pessimists. If my liver acts properly I am an optimist; if it is out of order, a pessimist. Personally I incline to optimism—that is, I think that this world, if not exactly ‘the best of all possible worlds,’ is yet on the whole a very tolerable world, and that life to the majority, and on the average, is worth living. I think also that progress is certainly towards higher, and very probably towards happier, conditions. It seems to me that in the most advanced English-speaking communities, the condition of at least one half—viz. the female half—of the population is distinctly better, and that the working class, who form the majority of the male half, though many are worse off than formerly, are, on the whole, better fed, better clothed, better educated, and better behaved. This, however, is perhaps very much a matter of temperament. Greater minds than mine have seen things differently and inclined to pessimism. Buddhism, and almost all Oriental religions and philosophies, are based upon it, and look to Nirvana or annihilation of personal identity as the supreme bliss. Pauline Christianity assumes that all mankind, except a few chosen vessels, are so hopelessly bad as to be predestined to eternal damnation. And even more remarkable, Shakespeare, the universal genius, who one would say had as happy a temperament and led as successful a life as any man, had his moods of despondency in which he could say:— When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone bemoan my outcast state; Wearying deaf heaven with my fruitless cries, And look upon myself, and _curse my fate_. Or declare with Hamlet that no one would bear the ills of life if He himself could his quietus make With a bare bodkin. With instances like these, and the disgust of life manifested in so many modern societies by the increase of suicides, and the spread of pessimistic theories like those of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, who can deny that the great magnet of modern civilisation has a south as well as a north pole, and that progress is not all towards perfection?