nd I must treat of them in turn. The second stage is
the more complete and joyous, and it corresponds to the freer exercise
of religious {40} trust and fancy. There are, as is well known,
persons who are naturally very free in this regard, others who are not
at all so. There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging to
their heart's content in prospects of immortality; and there are others
who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem
real to themselves at all. These latter persons are tied to their
senses, restricted to their natural experience; and many of them,
moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call 'hard
facts,' which is positively shocked by the easy excursions into the
unseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds of
either class may, however, be intensely religious. They may equally
desire atonement and 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 another 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 has at all times 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 nature is. What philosophers
call 'natural theology' has been one way of appeasing this craving;
that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has
been another way. Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two
classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its
{41} facts 'hard;' suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving
for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to
construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or
poetically,--and what result can there be but inner discord and
contradiction? Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can be
relieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the facts
religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or,
supplementary facts may be discovered or believed-in, which permit the
religious reading to go on. These two ways of relief are the two