The question, “How far is Pessimism _true_, and how far does the actual state of the world justify us in pronouncing life to be an evil?” is far too vast and too solemn to be treated in this brief paper. One remark only must be made in abatement of the wide-sweeping denunciations of the present order of things in which Pessimists habitually indulge. If we take count of their arguments, we shall find that at least one-third are built on the assumption (which nothing in genuine philosophy warrants) that the “hypothesis of a God” involves the attribution to him not only of supreme but of _absolute_ power, and generally of a power which includes self-contradictions. We should sweep away no inconsiderable number of difficulties, if we could get fairly out of reach of this ever-recurring fallacy, and hear no more that God ought to make every creature absolutely happy, and also absolutely virtuous; and illume the martyr’s glory, while invariably extinguishing the martyr’s pile. And, again, another third of the arguments of Pessimists rests on the yet more egregious and fundamental mistake that suffering is always to be accounted an evil, and may be lawfully weighed by them as such in holding the scales of the world. The truth that it is “good to have been afflicted,” that out of pain and grief and disappointment arise the purest virtues, the tenderest sympathies, the loftiest courage, the divinest faith,--this thrice-blessed truth, the very alphabet of spiritual experience, is, as a rule, quite overlooked by great philosophers of the order of Schopenhauer.