Such is indeed the only present word for us finite minds about many of the shadows of seeming evil that we have to behold in the world of the appar¬ ently external facts. Such however is not the last word for us about the only evil that has any imme¬ diate moral significance, namely, the evil that we see, not as an external, shadowy mist, but as a present fact, experienced in us. Here it is that the objector just mentioned seems really formidable to us. But just here it is that we find the answer to him. For in the world of our own acts we have a wondrous ex¬ perience. We realize evil, we fight it,, and, at the same time, we realize our fragment of the perfect divine life in the moment itself of struggling with the evil. And in this wondrous experience lies the whole solution of the ancient problem of the existence of moral evil. For instance, I find in myself a self¬ ish impulse, trying to destroy the moral insight. Now of this evil impulse I do not say, looking at it objectively: “ It is somehow a part of the universal good; ” but, in the moment of moral action I make it, even in the very moment of its sinfulness, a part of my good consciousness, in overcoming it. The moral insight condemns the evil that it experiences; and in condemning and conquering this evil it forms and is, together with the evil, the organic total that constitutes the good will. Only through this inner victory over the evil that is experienced as a con¬ quered tendency does the good will have its being. Now since the perfect life of God must have the ab¬ solutely good will, therefore it also must be conscious of such a victory. Thus the solution of our diffi¬ culty begins to appear. And thus we reap a new religious fruit from our ethical doctrine, to whose main principles we must once more here refer the reader.
When I experience the victory of the moral insight over the bad will, I experience in one indivis¬ ible moment both the partial evil of the selfish im¬ pulse (which in itself as a separate fact would be wholly bad) and the universal good of the1 moral victory, which has its existence only in the over¬ whelming of the evil. So, in the good act, I experi¬ ence the good as my evil lost in goodness, as a rebel¬ lion against the good conquered in the moment of its birth, as a peace that arises in the midst of this tri¬ umphant conflict, as a satisfaction that lives in this restless activity of inner warfare. This child of inner strife is the good, and the only moral good, we know.
What I here have present in me when I do a good act is an element of God’s life. I here directly ex¬ perience how the partial moral evil is universal good; for so it is a relatively universal good in me when, overcoming myself, I choose the universal will. The bad impulse is still in me, but is defeated. In the choice against evil is the very life of goodness, which would be a pale, stupid abstraction otherwise. Even so, to take another view, in the overcoming of our separateness as individuals lies, as we saw in the previous book, our sense of the worth of the univer¬ sal life. And what we here experience in the single moment of time, and in the narrowness of our finite lives, God must experience, and eternally. In our single good acts we have thus the specimen of the eternal realization of goodness.
But now how simple becomes the answer to that terrible suggestion of a moment since! How simple also the solution of the problem of evil! “ If I want to do evil, I cannot,” said the objector; u for God the perfect one includes me with the rest, and so cannot in his perfection be hurt by me. Let me do what I will, my act can only seem bad, and cannot be bad. All evil is illusion, hence there is no moral difference in action possible.”
“ Right indeed,” we answer, “ but also wrong, be¬ cause half the truth. The half kills, the whole gives life. Why canst thou not do any absolute evil? Be¬ cause thy evil intent, which, in its separateness, would be unmixed evil, thy selfish will, thy struggle against the moral insight, this evil will of thine is no lonesome fact in the world, but is an element in the organic life of God. In him, thy evil impulse forms part of a total good will, as the evil impulse of the good man forms an element in his realization of goodness. In God thy separateness is destroyed, and with it thy sin as evil. For good will in the in¬ finite is what the good man finds the good will to be in himself, namely, the organic total whose truth is the discovery of the evil. Therefore is God’s life perfect, because it includes not only the knowledge of thy finite wicked will, but the insight into its truth as a moment in the real universal will.
If then thou wert good, thou wouldst be good by including the evil impulse in a realization of its evil, and in an acceptance of the higher insight. If thou art evil, then in thyself, as separate being, thou art condemned, and just because thy separate evil is condemned, therefore is the total life of God, that includes thee with thy condemnation and with the triumph over thee, good.
This is the ground for the solution of the problem. To go more into detail: Evil is for us of two classes: the external seeming evil, such as death, pain, or weakness of character; and internal evil, namely the bad will itself. Because we know so little, there¬ fore we can neVer tell whether those externally seen seeming evils are blessings in disguise, or expressions of some wicked diabolical will-power at work about us. Somehow then, we never know exactly how, these seeming great evils must be in God universal good. But with regard to the only evil that we know as an inward experience, and so as a certain reality, namely, the Evil Will, we know both the existence of that, and its true relation to universal goodness, be¬ cause and only because we experience both of them first through the moral insight, and then in the good act. Goodness having its very life in the insight and in its exercise, has as its elements the evil im¬ pulse and its correction. The evil will as such may either be conquered in our personal experience, and then we are ourselves good; or it may be conquered not in our thought considered as a separate thought, but in the total thought to which ours is so related, as our single evil and good thoughts are related to the whole of us. The wicked man is no example of God’s delight in wickedness, just as the evil impulse that is an element in the good man’s goodness, and a very real element too, is no proof that the good man delights in evil. As the evil impulse is to the good man, so is the evil will of the wicked man to the life of God, in which he is an element. And just because the evil will is the only evil that we are sure of, this explanation is enough.
Thus the distinction between good and evil re¬ mains as clear as ever. Our difficulty about the matter is removed, not by any barren external the¬ odicy, such as were the forms of guess-work that we criticised in a previous chapter, but by a plain refl.eetion on the moral experience itself. Goodness as a moral experience is for us the overcoming of experi¬ enced evil; and in the eternal life of God the reali¬ zation of goodness must have the same sort of or¬ ganic relation to evil as it has in us. Goodness is not mere innocence, but realized insight. To the wicked man we say: God is good because in think¬ ing thee he damns thy evil impulse and overwhelms it in a higher thought of which thou art a part. And in so far as thy will is truly evil, thou art in God just as the evil is in the good man; thou art known only to be condemned and overcome. That is thy blessed mission; and this mission of evil such as thine is indeed an eternal one. So that both things are true. The world is wholly good, and thou, such as thou individually art, mayest be damnably evil if so thou desirest.
We do not say then that evil must exist to set the good off by way of external contrast. That view we long since justly rejected. We say only that the evil will is a conquered element in the good will, and is as such necessary to goodness. Our conception of the absolute unity of God’s life, and that conception alone, enables us to apply this thought here. No form of dualistic Theism has any chance to apply this, the only satisfactory theodicy. If God were conceived as external to his creatures, as a power that made them beyond himself, the hopeless prob¬ lems and the unworthy subterfuges of the older theodicies would come back to torment us. As it is, the solution of the problem of evil is given us in the directest and yet in the most unexpected way.'
Let us compare this solution with others. Evil, said one thought, before expounded, is an illusion of the partial view, as the shapelessness of the frag¬ ment of a statue is no disproof of the real beauty of the whole. W e replied in a previous chapter to this notion, by saying that evil seems so positive an ele¬ ment in the world as to make very hard this concep¬ tion of the partial evil as good universally in the aesthetic sense in which shapelessness of parts may coexist with a total beauty of the statue. For the fragment of the statue is merely an indifferent bit of stone without character. But the evil in the world seems in positive crying opposition to all goodness. Yet now, in the moral experience, we have found a wholly different relation of evil part to good whole.
My good act is good just because of the evil that exists in it as conquered element. Without the evil moment actual in it, the total act could be at best innocent, not good. It is good by reason of its structure. That structure includes the evil will, but so includes it that the whole act is good. Even so, as we declare, God’s life includes, in the organic total of one conscious eternal instant, all life, and so all goodness and evil. To say that God is never¬ theless perfectly good is to say, not that God is innocent, knowing of no evil whatever, and includ¬ ing none; but that he so includes the evil will in the structure of his good will, as the good man, in one indivisible moment, includes his evil will in his good will; and that God is good only because he does so.
Again, to pass to another explanation, it has been said that evil exists in the world as a means to good¬ ness. We objected to this that it puts the evil and the good first in separate beings, in separate acts or moments, and then makes the attainment of the good result dependent on the prior attainment of the sep¬ arate and independently present evil. Now all that explanation could only explain and justify the acts of a finite Power, which, not yet possessing a given good thing, seeks it through the mediation of some evil. In no wise can this explanation apply to God as infinite. He is no finite Power, nor does he make or get things external to himself. Hence he cannot be said to use means for the attainment of ends. But our explanation does not make evil a means to get the separate end, goodness. W e say that the con¬ nection is one of organic part with organic whole; that goodness has its life only in the instant of the discovery and inner overcoming of the evil will; and that therefore any life is good in which the evil will is present only as overcome, and so as lost in the good will. We appeal to the moral experience to il¬ lustrate how, when we do good, the evil will is pres¬ ent as a real fact in us, which yet does not make us as a whole bad, but just because it is present as an overcome element, is, even for that very reason, nec¬ essary to make us good. And we go on to say that even so in God the evil will of all who sin is pres¬ ent, a real fact in the Divine Life, no illusion in so far as one sees that it exists in God and nowhere else, but for that very reason an element, and a nec¬ essary element, in the total goodness of the.Univer¬ sal Will, which, realized in God, is related to the wills of the sinners as the wills of the good men are related to their evil impulses.
The explanation that evil is needed to contrast with goodness has already been mentioned.
Evil therefore, as a supposed real fact, separate from goodness, and a totally independent entity, is and must be an illusion. The objections to this view that we previously urged in Chapter VIII. were all applicable to the world of powers, which we viewed and had to view externally. God’s life, viewed internally, as philosophy must view it, is not subject to these criticisms. And the moral experi¬ ence has taught us how we are to explain the exist¬ ence of the only partial evil that we clearly know to be even a partial evil, namely, the evil will. The ex¬ planation is that the good act has its existence and life in the transcending of experienced present evil. This evil must not be an external evil, beyond the good will, but must be experienced in the same indi¬ visible moment in which it is transcended. That this wondrous union is possible, we simply find as fact in the moral experience. No genuine moral good¬ ness is possible save in the midst of such inner war¬ fare. The absence of the evil impulse leaves naught but innocence or instinct, morally insipid and color¬ less. Goodness is this organism of struggling ele¬ ments. Now, as we declare, in the infinite and united thought of God this unity of goodness is eternally present. God’s life is this infinite rest, not apart from but in the endless strife, as in substance Hera¬ clitus so well and originally taught.
The problem of the existence of evil thus treated as our limits allow, we must return to a study of the visible world. That we formerly refused to find re¬ ligious comfort in that world, depended upon our previous manner of approaching it. It was, so approached, the world of doubt; but now it may prove no longer disheartening, so that we may be able to get in it a concrete hold of useful truth. W e must briefly sketch the process of return. Our Infi¬ nite, once known, is known not as an abstraction, but as an immediately actual object of knowledge. His then is this visible world; and, knowing the fact, we return cheerfully and courageously among the facts that before seemed dead externalities, to find his truth in them. For our general belief in the infinite rationality of things is useless to supersede any jot or tittle of careful scientific study of the com¬ mon world of experience. Be this aspect of the mat¬ ter well understood. Some older forms of idealism have looked coldly on experience. Ours does not. To us, if you want to realize your ideal you must know the means, you must study applied ethics as well as the ideal itself; and only from science, from hard, dry, careful collection and collaboration of facts, from cautious generalizations, from endless ex¬ periments, observations, calculations, can mankind hope to learn the means of realizing their ideals.
Yet more, only from exact science can you get the best concrete examples of that unity of conception, that mastery of complex details, that exhaustive perfection of insight, that we must attribute in an infinitely complete form to our all - embracing Ideal Thought, now that we have got it before us as our Ideal. That all facts and relations of facts should appear in one moment of insight to the all-knowing thought is our postulate, and, as we have shown, it is no mere postulate, but a necessary and absolute prin¬ ciple of philosophy. We must go to exact science to find illustrations of how all this can be in particular cases realized. As the equation of a curve expresses in one thought all the properties of the curve, as the law of a physical process includes all the cases of that process under any of the supposed conditions, as a function of a variable may be the sum of a long series of quantities, each one of which is a derived function of the first multiplied by a particular coeffi¬ cient, so that the one function is the united expres¬ sion of the numerous separate functions: even in such wise must the Infinite thought comprehend in some supreme highest unity all the facts and rela¬ tions of facts that are in the world of truth. For us then the highest achievements of science are the dim shadow of the perfection of the infinite thought.
And to science, accordingly, we must go, not for the invention, but for the intellectual illustration of our ideal. And science we must treat as absolute mis¬ tress of her own domain. Of the world as a whole, of the eternal as such, of infinite past time, of the inner truth of things, science pretends to tell and can tell nothing. Nor does science invent, nor yet can she prove, her own postulates, as we previously defined them. But in the application of her postulates to the facts, in the discoyery of particular laws, science is almighty. To doubt her capacity as high¬ est judge in this field is flagrant contempt of court. Science is just the Infinite Thought as far as it is yet by us realized in the facts of nature. A 'priori we can realize nothing about finite facts, save that they must be capable of rational comprehension. We know that the Infinite thinks them, and this is all that we know about them. What they are, ex¬ perience must tell us.
Such then are some of the restrictions imposed upon our thought. We must now consider more carefully how we must treat the scientific postulates that were our only comfort in studying reality before we reached our present insight.
When we postulated that the world must in the best sense satisfy our fundamental intellectual needs, we assumed what is necessary for science, but what science itself does not satisfactorily explain. Have we now reached any foundation for this theoretical postulate? We have in fact reached one. The pos¬ tulate of science amounts to this, that the real con¬ nections among facts must be such as would be ra¬ tionally comprehensible if they were known. But we have found in fact that all facts not only must be rationally comprehensible, but are rationally com¬ prehended, in and by the one Divine Mind. The postulate of science expresses therefore in part and as a mere assumption, what we now know as a whole, and as a result of demonstration. The unity of the Divine Thought implies that all facts, if we knew them well enough, would appear rationally interdependent, reducible to unity, a total of realities ex¬ pressible as one truth. Just as in the one concept of the nature of number is implied all the infinite series of properties that a complete Theory of Numbers would develop, so in the one concept of the universe, which constitutes the Divine Mind, all the facts of all possible experience are comprehended and are re¬ duced to perfect unity. There must be then in fact a universal formula. What this formula is we do not see, and just because we do not see it, we have to look here and there in experience for any traces of the unity and rational connection of facts. Nor can we ever be sure that a connection surmised by us is the really rational connection of things. A law dis¬ covered by us is only our attempt to imitate the Di¬ vine Thought. Our attempt may in a given case fail; our induction may be mistaken. But the foundation of our inductive processes is the thought that, since the real world is a perfectly rational and united body of truth, that hypothesis which reduces to relatively rational unity the greatest number of facts is more apt to represent the truth of things than any hypothesis of less scope, and of less rational significance. Just because this natural dualism with © which we set out is a blunder, just because in fact the world is not rent in twain by our arbitrary dis¬ tinction of object and subject, but is in deepest truth one united world, a single thought; therefore it is that when we consider those facts which we have from moment to moment to regard as external, we can be assured that there is a certain and not an arbitrary basis for our views about them. The visible world becomes again hard reality, which we ex¬ perience and try to comprehend, just because we know that in itself this world is once for all compre¬ hended.
Practically then, in dealing with the world of con¬ crete facts, we must be realistic. It is our duty, for humanity’s sake, to study and to believe in this ex¬ ternal world, to have faith in the great postulates of common sense, to use all the things of the world. But the basis of this faith common sense can never find. And we have found it in the Absolute.
y.
y.
Have we then discovered that something of infi¬ nite religious worth of which we went in quest? Or can we say that our life is in vain in such a world? Truly our religious longing has met with a genuine response, but it was not such a response as we at first expected, nor such as most systems appear to desire. Personal needs and hopes apart, most men who make systems to satisfy the impersonal religious longing, seek to prove that the world as a whole progresses towards goodness, so that, in the great consummation of this progress, evil shall certainly and finally disappear, leaving the world as innocent and insipid as in the days of Eden. Now we have found a thought that makes this concept of progress not only wholly inapplicable to the world of the in¬ finite life, but wholly superfluous. If, as we insisted above, moral goodness is not the absence, but the or¬ ganic subordination, of the evil will, its overthrow in the good will, in which it is still actually present as subdued, then, whenever the world contains any moral goodness, it also, and for that very reason, contains, in its organic unity, moral evil. The world is morally good in spite of the evil will, and yet because of the evil will, since, as every moral ex¬ perience shows us, the good will is just this trium¬ phant rest in strife above the evil will. Therefore we have no sympathy with those who expect the fu¬ ture “ salvation ” of the world as a whole in time through any all - pervading process. The only de¬ struction of moral evil that ever takes place or can take place is the transcendence of the evil will by the good will in the very moment of the life of the evil will. If moral evil were to be, as the older systems often expect, absolutely destroyed, and the world so freed therefrom that the evil will was totally forgotten, then what remained would be no moral good any more, only the laziness of an infinitely va¬ cant life. Not indeed to set off the good by any ex¬ ternal contrast, but to constitute a moment in the or¬ ganic unity of the good act, is this evil in the world.
And the whole vast trouble about understanding its presence arises because we usually separate it from the very unity with goodness in which we find it whenever we consciously do right ourselves. Then when so separated, as we separated it in a former chapter, moral evil, viewed as an external opaque fact, is inexplicable, disheartening, horrible. Only when we do right ourselves do we practically get the solution of the problem. Only the moral man knows how and why evil exists. For in him the evil will is an essential element of his goodness. The conflicts of morality are and must be eternal.
Our present explanation of evil in the world is, we have seen, the only one that can both give us the absolute religious comfort, and save us from the terrible moral paralysis involved in destroying, for the Infinite, the distinction between good and evil. The moral experience itself contains the miracle of this solution in the simplest and clearest shape. And it relieves us of any need to long for an abso¬ lute peace. For in it the distinction of good and evil is the sharpest, the significance of the strife is the most vivid, at the very instant when, in the strife, the evil will, present and real still, is yet conquered by the good will, and so lost in the universal good¬ ness of the total good act. The distinction of good will and evil will becomes thus the greatest possible; and yet only through the reality of this distinction in the unity of the moral life is goodness present and triumphant. Progress in this world as a whole is therefore simply not needed. The good is eternally gained even in and through the evil. How far the actual process of evolution may in our part of the universe extend is a matter for empirical science.
But our own ideal of human life as a “ progres¬ sive realization of the good,” — what of that? The answer is obvious. The good will that is in us as a temporal fact, not being yet fully realized or trium¬ phant in us as ice are in ourselves as mere finite be¬ ings, must aim at complete expression of itself in time and in us, and through us in those whom we seem to influence. For only in so seeking to' perfeet us in whom it exists, is this good will in us good at all. In so far as we, viewed abstractly, in our separateness from God, are good, we then do indeed try to realize that life of God in which we are all the time an element. For us this is progress. This progress is the form taken temporarily in us by the good will. But for God this is no real progress. Therefore is it indeed true that the moral insight in us must lead us to aim at progress in goodness, just as, on the other side, the rational element in us leads us to aim at progress in knowledge. But, meanwhile, our moral progress and our rational progress, mere minor facts happening at a moment of time, are but insignificant elements in the infinite life in which, as a whole, there is and can be no progress, but only an infinite variety of the forms of the good will and of the higher knowledge.
And so consciousness has given us in concrete form solutions of our two deepest philosophic prob¬ lems. The possibility of error, necessitating an in¬ clusive thought, is illustrated for us by our own con¬ scious thought, which can include true and false ele¬ ments in the unity of one clear and true thought at any moment. And the possibility and necessity of moral evil, demanding a real distinction between good and evil, a hateful opposition that seems at first sight fatal to our religious need for the supremacy of goodness in the united world, is illustrated for us in a way that solves this whole trouble, namely, in the unity of the conscious moral act. There at the one moment are good and evil, warring, implacable, yet united in the present momentary triumph of the good will. A world in which this strife, this vic¬ tory, this absolute rest above the real strife and in the midst of the real strife, is the supreme fact, is the perfect world that religion needs. It is a world of the true Life of God.
VI.