Just as in the evolution of art, violent coloration has yielded to the low tones of Puvis de Chavannes, as views of fields and meadows are preferred to those of mountains and lakes; just as in literature, tragic and romantic studies have been successfully replaced by scenes of daily life, so the psychical development of my friend displayed a similar change. Instead of taking his pleasure in mountains or in places famed for their picturesqueness, he was content to watch the budding of the leaves of the trees of his garden, or a snail overcoming its fears and putting out its horns. The simplest occurrences, such as the lisping or the smile of a baby or the first words of a child, became sources of real delight to this elderly man of science. What was the meaning of these changes which took so many years to be accomplished? It was the growth of his sense of life. The instinct of life is little developed in youth. Just as a young woman gets more pain than pleasure from the earlier part of her married life, just as a new-born baby cries, so the impressions from life, especially when they are very keenly felt, bring more pain than pleasure during a long period of human life. The sensations and feelings are not stable; they undergo evolution, and when that takes place more or less normally, it brings about a state of psychical equilibrium.
And thus my friend, formerly so entrenched in pessimism, came to share my optimistic view of life. The discussions that we had had for so many years ended in complete agreement. “However,” said he, “to understand the value of life, one must have lived long; otherwise one is in the position of a man blind from his birth to whom are recounted the beauties of colours.” In a word, my friend towards the end of his life changed from abject pessimism to complete optimism.
Such a transformation or evolution cannot be regarded as unusual. In _The Nature of Man_, I showed that most of the great pessimistic writers had been young men. Such were Buddha, Byron, Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Mailaender, and there might be added many other names of less well known men.
The question has often been asked why Schopenhauer, who was certainly sincere in his philosophy and who extolled Nirvana as the perfect state, came to have a strong attachment to life, instead of putting it to a premature end as was done later on by Mailaender. The reason was that the philosopher of Frankfort lived long enough to acquire a strong instinct of life. M. Moebius,[184] a well-known authority on madness, has made a close investigation of Schopenhauer’s biography, and has established the fact that towards the end of his life his views were tinged with optimistic colours. On his seventieth anniversary, he took pleasure in the consoling idea of the Hindoo Oupanischad and of Flourens that the span of man’s life might reach a century. As Moebius put it, “Schopenhauer as an old man enjoyed life and was no longer a pessimist” (p. 94). Not long before his death he still hoped to survive yet another twenty years. It is true that Schopenhauer never recanted his early pessimistic writings, but that was probably because he did not fully realise his own mental evolution.