Page:Is Life Worth Living?.djvu/25

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IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?
17

dies; and it is of the melancholy and Weltschmerz bred of reflection that I now proceed to speak.

Let me say immediately that my final appeal is to nothing more recondite than religious faith. So far as my argument is to be destructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away of certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive it will consist in holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let loose these springs in a normal, natural way. Pessimism is essentially a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no normal religious reply.

Now there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different levels upon