Buddha raised pessimism to the rank of a doctrine. All life seemed to him sorrow. “Birth is sorrow, old age is sorrow, disease is sorrow, union with one whom we do not love is sorrow, separation from one whom we love is sorrow, not to gratify desire is sorrow, in short, our five bonds with the things of the earth are sorrow.”[174] This Buddhistic pessimism has been the source of most of the modern pessimistic theories. Pessimism arose in the East and was much in vogue in India even apart from Buddhism. In the poems known under the name of Bhartrihari, and dating from the beginning of the Christian era, human life has been commiserated in the following fashion. “One hundred years are the limit of the life of man; night takes half of them, half of the other half is childhood and old age, the rest is filled with diseases, with separations and the misfortunes that come from them, with working for others and with wasting one’s time. Where can happiness be found in an existence most like to the bubbles in broken water?” “Man’s health is destroyed by every kind of care and disease. When fortune comes to him, evil follows as if by an open door. Death takes all human beings, one after the other, and they can offer no resistance to their fate. What is there assured amongst all that the mighty Brahma has created?”[175] Pessimistic theories spread from the Asiatic East to Egypt and Europe. Three centuries before the Christian era, there arose the philosophy of Hegesias, which maintained that experience was generally deceptive and that enjoyment was quickly followed by satiety and disgust. According to him, the sum of pain surpassed the sum of pleasure in life, so that happiness was unattainable, and in reality never existed. It was vain to seek pleasure and happiness, as these could not be realised. It was better to try to be indifferent, dulling feeling and desire. In fact, life was no better than death, and it was often preferable to end it by suicide. Hegesias was called _Pisithanatos_, the adviser of death. “Listeners thronged around him, his doctrine spread rapidly, and his disciples, persuaded by his voice, gave themselves to death. Ptolemy was perturbed by it, and fearing that the dislike of life would become contagious, closed the school of Hegesias and exiled its master.”[176] The pessimistic tendency sometimes appears in the writings of many Greek and Latin philosophers and poets. Seneca wrote: “The spectacle of human life is lamentable. New misfortunes overwhelm you before you have freed yourself from the old ones.”[177] It is in modern days, however, that there has been the greatest spread of pessimism. Besides the philosophical theories of the last century, those of Schopenhauer, von Hartmann and Mailaender, which I discussed sufficiently in _The Nature of Man_, poets have formulated a pessimistic view of life. Even Voltaire was a pessimist in the following lines: