Is Life Worth Living?

With many men the question of life’s worth is answered by a temperamental optimism that makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whitman’s works are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism; the mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitman’s veins that it abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling...

So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his happiness to tell: “How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of felicity itself. I rose with the sun and I was happy; I went to walk and I was happy; I saw ‘Maman’ and I was happy; I left her and I was happy. I rambled through the woods and over the vine-slopes, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I worked in the garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and happiness followed me everywhere; it was in no one assignable thing; it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant.”

If moods like this could be made permanent and constitutions like these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses as the present one. No philosopher would seek to prove articulately that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would vouch for itself and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply.