What Optimism hopes, Theosophy foresees. Its philosophy is the warrant of Optimism. A book which deserves more reading than it gets thus sums up the keynotes of this philosophy:
"There are three truths which are absolute, and which cannot be lost, but yet remain silent for lack of speech.
"The soul of man is immortal, and its future is the future of a thing whose growth and splendor have no limit.
"The principle which gives life dwells in us, and without us; is undying and eternally beneficent; is not seen, or heard, or smelt; but is perceived by the man who desires perception.
"Every man is his own absolute lawgiver, the dispenser of glory or gloom to himself; the decreer of his life, his reward, his punishment."
Whoever takes those three truths fully into his life must necessarily be an optimist by their warrant. The pessimist has partly or wholly failed to comprehend them, and so is without that illumination which he might have — is not in touch with facts.
Perhaps the pessimist is always a man whose mind has run away with him. It has either wrested, or reasoned, away from him his human-divine power of knowing such truths as the above; or it has frightened him out of use of that power by making gloomy pictures of his own past or future, or of the Universe. It is either fear, or the rank weedy overgrowth of ratiocination, that makes the pessimist.
How does the soul know that it is immortal, not reachable by death?
As the sun is above the clouds, sees the clouds rise, veil him from the earth, and in time dissolve in the clear air, himself remaining unaffected; so the soul — itself beyond and above death — upon death, and that which is the prey and domain of death, looks down untouched. It surely may claim to know that it cannot be subject to that which arises, reigns and disappears in regions altogether below it.
As soon as a man recognizes himself as a soul, he is of necessity a Theosophist and an optimist, for he now knows his destiny and can confidently preach the "three Truths." To understand the first two of these three requires almost no thought; whoever will do so may begin to feel that they are true; whoever will let this feeling grow within him will in time so thoroughly get hold of the joy in them that he will be able to look straight into the eyes of another man, of however lowly intellect, and say them with such conviction as to inspire in that other a portion of his own now clear and undislodgable knowledge. One burning match can ignite a boxful of others.
"These truths, which are as great as is life itself, are simple as the simplest mind of man. Feed the hungry with them."
"Life itself has speech and is never silent. And its utterance is not, as you that are deaf may suppose, a cry; it is a song.
"Look for it and listen to it first in your own heart."
Perhaps men will go on "dispensing gloom" to themselves till they learn that they need not, and that a little attempt daily to feel the actuality of the first two "Truths" constitutes a self-dispensation of "glory."