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Updated: May 29, 2025
See, e.g., Ellen Key, Mutter und Kind, p. 21. The necessity for the combination of greater freedom of sexual relationships with greater stringency of parental relationships was clearly realized at an earlier period by another able woman writer, Miss J.H. Clapperton, in her notable book, Scientific Meliorism, published in 1885.
Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible.
It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become. It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism. Some conditions of the world's salvation are actually extant, and she cannot possibly close her eyes to this fact: and should the residual conditions come, salvation would become an accomplished reality.
Hunger; the pressure of surplus population; the inrush of new hordes of invaders, drove them on. Ambition; the love of adventure; the lure of new opportunities in new lands, called them further. Meliorism, the desire to better the conditions of life for themselves and for their children animated them. In later years the necessity of disposing of surplus wealth impelled them.
Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this world's outcome. Be they false or be they true, the meaning of them is this meliorism. I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called 'total reflexion' in optics as a good symbol of the relation between abstract ideas and concrete realities, as pragmatism conceives it.
In this State we find members of the Assembly anxious to try effective voting on the Legislative Council, Federal members on the State House, and vice versa. Westlake, and Sir John Hall, of New Zealand. A few days were spent with Miss Jane Hume Clapperton, author of "Scientific Meliorism," and we had an interesting time visiting George Eliot's haunts and friends.
The ironical pessimism of Thomas Hardy is as false as the sentimental optimism of Walter Besant or the miso-androus meliorism of Sarah Grand. What Hall Caine happily calls "the scenic view of life" of Dickens is no more true than the philosophic view of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Each is existence viewing itself through a single medium.
As an inevitable result of all the influences that constitute his world he finds himself yearning for meliorism as the crownpiece. Drinking from the fount of inspiration that gushes forth at the behest of all these wholesome influences, he longs for betterment. Good as he finds the things about him, he feels that they are not yet good enough.
He has the pen of a ready and sometimes very impressive writer; he has a fair training in science; he has a fertile and inventive brain; his works of fiction have won for him a great public, both in Europe and America; yet he feels that his social philosophy, his ardent and enlightened meliorism, makes no more impression than the buzzing of a gnat in the ear of a drowsy mastodon.
For, after all, we must never shut our eyes to the actual; and in the world as it is, meliorism, not optimism, is the true opposite of pessimism.
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