"
Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to
JUDGE any of these attitudes. I am only describing their
variety. The securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of
which the twice-born make report has as an historic matter of
fact been through a more radical pessimism than anything that we
have yet considered. We have seen how the lustre and enchantment
may be rubbed off from the goods of nature. But there is a pitch
of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature may be entirely
forgotten, and all sentiment of their existence vanish from the
mental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached,
something more is needed than observation of life and reflection
upon death. The individual must in his own person become the
prey of a pathological melancholy. As the healthy-minded
enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil's very existence, so the
subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himself to ignore
that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the
least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental
pain is a rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is
entirely normal; one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even
where he is the victim of the most atrocious cruelties of outward
fortune.
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