WHY do we disapprove equally of the incorrigible optimist and the man who is always afraid of the future—the former less than the latter, but both after all with the same disapproval? What more natural, what more unavoidable, than that a man who is living and working in this world should look ahead, the better to prepare himself for whatever may happen? And why therefore should he not rejoice if the prospects seem attractive, or evince his fears and misgivings if things look dark? Unless we hoped and feared, life would have no meaning for us. Apart from such commotions of our inner selves, there could be no living. They constitute the cosy warmth and the anguished fever of human existence, painful, distracting, but yet so dear to us that we often dream of living forever, caressing in the fancy an immortality in which that cosiness and that fever, or the fever tempered to cosiness, shall endure perpetually like the undying light of the alchemists, never burning out themselves, never exhausting the fuel in our souls.

But we may be sure that our disapproval, or our ridicule, or our opposition, does not bear upon the hope and the fear as such. What we censure in this connection is the disposition toward hope or toward fear. We blame the man who hopes and the man who fears. Hope and fear are precious parts of life and precious aids to living. But they lose their value, they become sources of weakness and embarrassment, when they are fixed as attitudes, habits, points of arrival. If anxiety lays hold on a man and comes to dominate his personality, he is paralysed; he is reduced to impotence. Losing confidence in himself, he finally thinks of himself as finished, as dead. And hopefulness operates in the same way. It blunts the acuteness of our vision; it saps the energy of our action, lulling us to repose in the fatuous confidence that things will turn out right anyway.

If we tend to be less severe toward the sanguine than toward the timorous individual, the reason probably is that the former is less depressing to most of us; though he will not fare any better at the hands of the truly wise. The proverbs of my own country have dealt extensively with the kill-joy, but they have by no means left the optimist unscathed. “Live on hope and you’ll die in the poor-house,” says the Italian of the South. “Live hoping, die singing,” says the Tuscan, somewhat less sharply. And this latter adage hints quite properly that the special kind of cheerfulness the hopeful man enjoys is better adapted to poetry and song than to efficient counsel of one’s self or of others. It may be further noted that of these two types of prognosticators each proves the other wrong. The timorous always have arguments to blast the hopes of the over-buoyant, and the optimist is ever ready with his cure for a fear.

But in the books of the philosophers and of the poets we may read that life is nothing else than hope and that hope goes with us from the cradle to the grave. The hope they speak of is something complete and absolute, threatened by no shadow of doubt or worry. As they describe and define it, such a hope would seem to be impossible in the light of the processes of hoping and fearing suggested above, where these two aspects of foresight are taken together as a “yes” and a “no.” What then is this hope that never fails us, that no misgiving can disconcert?

It is the intimate abandonment of a man to reality, the deep feeling he has that since things are they can be only for the best. It is not a speculation as to the favourable or unfavourable outcome of events, but a recognition that whatever is is favourable, that is to say, is rational and providential, logical in the progression of history. It is reverence before the wisdom of God.

Such a hope is not confidence in a probability, but security in a certainty. It is not fancy, but thought. As hope it is not relative and contingent: it is absolute. It is not hope at all, but surety and faith. In comparison with this hope, the hopes and fears that properly bear such names almost fade from view. They are not suppressed or inhibited. They become simple instruments or parts of life, tempered and restrained in the All in which they continue to fulfil their proper functions without abusing their prerogatives and without dispiriting the life they were called on to promote. Nec spe nec metu, it used to be said of the true sage, the truly superior man, who never exults in hope nor despairs in fear. Not because he is indifferent or insensitive and lives on a plane far above common emotions (not even stones are wholly numb, except in the metaphors of the poets); but because he has acquired the power of transcending his emotions, harmonising them in a feeling of supreme assurance.