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3 Is Life Worth Living? (1895) william james when mr. mallock’s1 book with this title appeared some fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that “it depends on the liver” had great currency in the newspapers. The answer which I propose to give tonight cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeare’s prologues, I come no more to make you laugh; things now, That bear a weighty and a serious brow, Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,2 must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know not what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life.Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find. With many men the question of life’s worth is answered by a temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing anything seriously evil can exist.Our dear old Walt Whitman’s works are the standing textbook of this kind of optimism.The mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitman ’s veins that it abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling: 03.Ch03.78-94/Capps 10/29/04, 10:14 AM 78 is life worth living? . 79 To breathe the air, how delicious! To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand! . . . To be this incredible God I am! . . . O amazement of things, even the least particle! O spirituality of things! I too carol the Sun, usher’d or at noon, or as now, setting; I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the growths of the earth . . . I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things, I say Nature continues—glory continues. I praise with electric voice, For I do not see one imperfection in the universe, And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last.3 So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his happiness to tell: “How, tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of felicity itself! I rose with the sun, and I was happy; I went to walk, and I was happy. [. . .] I rambled through the woods and over the vine-slopes, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I worked in the garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and happiness followed me everywhere. It was in no one assignable thing; it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant.”4 If moods like this could be made permanent, and constitutions like these universal,there would never be any occasion for such discourses as the present one.No philosopher would seek to prove articulately that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would vouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply. But we are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal;and alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to them a standing refutation. In what is called “circular insanity,” phases of melancholy succeed phases of mania,with no outward cause that we can discover ; and often enough to one and the same well person life will present incarnate radiance today and incarnate dreariness tomorrow,according to the fluctuations of what the older medical books used to call “the concoction of the humors.” In the words of the newspaper joke, “it depends on the liver.” 03.Ch03.78-94/Capps 10/29/04, 10:14 AM 79 [18.119.111.9] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10:15...

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