It is where pessimism is at work in this anonymous fashion, that it is most dangerous to civilization. It attacks then the most valuable ideas belonging to life-affirmation, leaving the less valuable ones untouched. Like some concealed source of magnetic power it disturbs the world-view’s compass, so that it takes, without suspecting it, a wrong course. Thus the unavowed mixture of optimism and pessimism in our thought has the result that we continue to approve the external blessings given us by civilization, things which to thinking pessimism are a matter of indifference, while we abandon that which alone it holds to be valuable, the pursuit of inner perfection. The desire for progress which is directed to objects of sense, goes on functioning because it is nourished by actuality, while that which reaches after the spiritual becomes exhausted, because it is thrown back upon the inner stimulus which comes from the thinking will-to-live. As the tide ebbs, objects which reach deep down are left stranded, while what is just on the surface remains afloat. Our degeneration, then, traced back to our world-view and what resulted from it, consists in true optimism having, without our noticing it, disappeared from among us. We are by no means a race weakened and decadent through excessive enjoyment of life, and needing to pull ourselves together to show vigour and idealism amid the thunderstorms of history. Although we have retained our vigour in most departments of the direct activities of life, we are spiritually stunted. Our conception of life with all that depends on it has been lowered both for individuals and for the community. The higher forces of volition and [pg 016] influence are impotent in us, because the optimism from which they ought to draw their strength has become imperceptibly permeated with pessimism. A characteristic feature of the presence at the same time of optimism and pessimism as lodgers in “Thoughtless House” is that each goes about in the other’s clothes, so that what is really pessimism gives itself out among us as being optimism, and _vice versâ_. What passes for optimism with the mass of people is the natural or acquired faculty of seeing things in the best possible light. This illumination of them is the result of a lowered conception of what ought to be now and in the future. A person ill with consumption is brought by the poison of the disease into the condition which is called Euphoria, so that he experiences an imaginary feeling of health and strength. Similarly there is an external optimism present in individuals and in society just in proportion as they are, without realizing it, infected with pessimism.