make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds of either class may, however, be intensely religious. They may equally desire atonement, harmony, reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and communion with the total Soul of Things. But the craving, when the mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as “Science” now reveals them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to an other and a better world.
That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease. The nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources, but its great reflective source in these days, and at all times, has been the contradiction between the phenomena of Nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind Nature there is a spirit whose expression
