Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/552

 538 CRITICAL NOTICES : violate the law of contradiction a limitation upon Omnipotence seems to be using words in a somewhat non-natural sense. One can hardly quarrel with those who say that inability to do what is essentially unmeaning is not a limitation. At all events it is a limitation which has always been admitted, and avowedly admitted, by those who stickle for " Omnipotence " admitted both by popular thought and by any Philosophers or Theologians of whom we take account. It is otherwise with regard to the limitations involved in the employment of means to an end : " We may go further than this. If a wise and good being has used means to an end, this is a positive proof that he is not omni- potent. For means are those things which have no worth in themselves, but which it is right to use because, without using them, some end which has worth in itself cannot be attained. Now there is nothing which an omnipotent God cannot do otherwise he would not be omnipotent. He could get the ends without the means, if he chose to do so. And therefore it would be inconsistent with his wisdom to use them, since they are of no value except to get an end which he could get as well without them. In so far, therefore, as the nature of any fact in the universe suggests that it owes its existence to its utility as means for a divine purpose, it suggests, with just the same force, that the divine designer of the universe is not omnipotent " (p. 201). Even here perhaps it is assuming too much to say that the use of means would necessarily imply a defect of wisdom, for the means may have a value, though they tend to produce something which has value too. Dr. McTaggart is on stronger ground when he contends that the means actually used in our Universe are plainly bad in themselves, and that we cannot doubt their badness without plunging ourselves into an abyss of scepticism, not only about Morality, but about everything else. Dr. McTaggart here definitely retracts a position which he himself formerly maintained : " The existence of evil is beyond doubt in the sense that no one denies the existence of pain and sin in experience, and that no one denies that pain and sin are, from the point of view of ordinary life, to be considered evil. But it has been asserted that the universe, -when looked at rightly, may be completely good. Sometimes the standard is challenged, and it is suggested that pain and sin are really good, though we think them evil. Sometimes our compre- hension of the facts is challenged ; it is admitted that pain and sin, if they existed, would be bad, but it is maintained that they do not really exist. " The first of these alternatives means complete ethical scepticism. There is no judgment about the good of whose truth we are more certain than the judgment that what is painful or sinful cannot be perfectly good. If we distrust this judgment we have no reason to put any trust in any judgment of good or evil. In that case we should have no right to call anything or anybody good, and there- fore it would be impossible to justify any belief in God, whose