stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I
made allusion a moment ago, and which the sequel will, I trust, make
more clear.

III.

Starting then with nature, we naturally tend, if we have the religious
craving, to say with Marcus Aurelius, "O Universe! what thou wishest I
wish." Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made
heaven and earth, and, looking on them, saw that they were good. Yet,
on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth
refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every
phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some
contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the
mind. Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep
house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals
over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of
an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things {42}
together meaninglessly to a common doom. This is an uncanny, a
sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar _unheimlichkeit_,
or poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together
which cannot possibly agree,--in our clinging, on the one hand, to the
demand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole; and, on the
other, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a spirit's
adequate manifestation and expression. It is in the contradiction
between the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us,
and with which we ought to have some communion, and the character of
such a spirit as revealed by the visible world's course, that this
particular death-in-life paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzle
reside, Carlyle expresses the result in that chapter of his immortal
'Sartor Resartus' entitled 'The Everlasting No.' "I lived," writes
poor Teufelsdroeckh, "in a continual, indefinite, pining fear;
tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as
if all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me;
as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring
monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured."

This is the first stage of speculative melancholy. No brute can have
this sort of melancholy; no man who is irreligious can become its prey.
It is the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not the
mere neces