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 only in moral experience, and that experience in its essence is full of inconsistency. For morality desires unconsciously, with the suppression of evil, to become wholly non-moral. It certainly would shrink from this end, but it thus unknowingly desires the existence and perpetuity of evil. I shall have to return later to this subject (Chapter xxv.), and for the present we need keep hold merely of this one point. Morality itself, which makes evil, desires in evil to remove a condition of its own being. It labours essentially to pass into a super-moral and therefore a non-moral sphere.

But, if we will follow it and will frankly adopt this tendency, we may dispose of our difficulty. For the content, willed as evil and in opposition to the good, can enter as an element into a wider arrangement. Evil, as we say (usually without meaning it), is overruled and subserves. It is enlisted and it plays a part in a higher good end, and in this sense, unknowingly is good. Whether and how far it is as good as the will which is moral, is a question later to be discussed. All that we need understand here is that “Heaven’s design,” if we may speak so, can realize itself as effectively in “Catiline or Borgia” as in the scrupulous or innocent. For the higher end is super-moral, and our moral end here has been confined, and is therefore incomplete. As before with physical evil, the discord as such disappears, if the harmony is made wide enough.

But it will be said truly that in moral evil we have something additional. We have not the mere fact of incomplete ends and their isolation, but we have in addition a positive felt collision in the self. And this cannot be explained away, for it has to fall within the Absolute, and it makes there a discord which remains unresolved. But our old principle may still serve to remove this objection. The collision and the strife may be an element in some fuller realization. Just as in a machine the