To the present writer, however, the recognition of this modicum of melancholy that must be found everywhere wedded to bodily and spiritual weariness, although important, does not seem sufficient to explain the universality of the present existence of secret low spirits. It seems to him that a deeper cause must be sought; for it has come to his own, as it must have come to other people’s notice, that the low spirits in question are to be found even where the harassing complications of life and the present high speed of life are least often and least severely felt. It is as if a sentiment, and not a material cause were the chief source of the pessimism that we are now considering. And, since this pessimism is everywhere rife, it must be supposed that the sentiment also is universal, and must have preceded the former in all men’s hearts. As to the precise nature of this supposed sentiment, there may be various and even conflicting opinions; the hypothesis favoured here, however, is the following:-- The sentiment that is now lodged in all European hearts, irrespective of class or country, and is responsible for the gloom that has descended upon all nations, is a compound of deep and bitter _disappointment_ on the one hand, with the _suspicion_ of having been _duped_ and left stranded on the other. There is a feeling that the leading ideals by which our fathers and grandfathers guided their lives, and to which we, who were born in the last century, also aspired, have proved false ideals. And, coupled with this [p158] feeling, there is, in the first place, the growing conviction that we should have done better, and shown ourselves more expert in managing our affairs, if, instead of trying to act up to those ideals, we had renounced them altogether; and secondly, that now that we see ourselves compelled to abandon these old ideals, we are stranded without any guiding principles whatsoever. The old ideals have proved worthless and even dangerous, and we are therefore abandoning them; but no new ideals have been created to take their place. It is this feeling that now constitutes the disease in all men’s hearts--the feeling of the enlightened child of besotted and degenerate parents, who, looking back upon them calmly and dispassionately in his maturity, is ashamed of the guileless filial passion he once felt for them in his childhood, and yet knows himself to be terribly cold and alone in his spiritual orphanage. “Progress,” that toughest among our grandfathers’ and fathers’ ideals, has been the last to perish; but with it perhaps went our stoutest hopes and our firmest beliefs. We have now buried it, to the accompaniment of the gravest doubts concerning not merely whether we are better, or better off, than the men of the 16th and 17th centuries, but also whether we are better, or better off even than the Cro-Magnon men who lived thirty thousand years before the present era.