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 experience has taught us how we are to explain the existence of the only partial evil that we clearly know to be even a partial evil, namely, the evil will. The explanation 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 indivisible moment in which it is transcended. That this wondrous union is possible, we simply find as fact in the moral experience. No genuine moral goodness is possible save in the midst of such inner warfare. The absence of the evil impulse leaves naught but innocence or instinct, morally insipid and colorless. Goodness is this organism of struggling elements. 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 Heraclitus so well and originally taught. IV. 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 religious 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. We must briefly sketch the process of return. Our Infinite, 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 common world of experience. Be this aspect of the matter 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 experiments, 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 principle 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 coefficient, so that the one function is the united expression of the numerous separate functions: even in such wise must the Infinite thought comprehend in some supreme highest unity all the facts and relations 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 mistress 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 discovery of particular laws, science is almighty. To doubt her capacity as highest 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, experience 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 postulate of science amounts to this, that the real connections among facts must be such as would be rationally comprehensible if they were known. But we have found in fact that all facts not only must be rationally comprehensible, but are rationally comprehended, 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 expressible 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 reduced 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 discovered by us is only our attempt to imitate the Divine 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 distinction 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 vis |