Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/290

Rh accept them. Only from a higher point of view shall we in fact be able to apply them. In the world of the Powers they find no resting-place.

How can a partial evil be an universal good? Only in certain cases. The notion plainly is that the evil in the external world of popular thought is, as known to us, only a part of the whole, and the whole, it is said, may be in character opposed to the part. This must indeed be the case, if the world as a whole is to be the work of an Infinite Reason. For if so, the evil must be, not merely a bad lesser part that is overbalanced by the goodness of the larger half of the world, but non-existent, save as a separate aspect of reality, so that it would vanish if we knew more about the truth. This is what the saying asserts: not that evil is overbalanced by good (for that would leave the irrational still real), but that evil is only a deceitful appearance, whose true nature, if seen in its entirety, would turn out to be good. One could not say of a rotting apple, however small the rotten spot as yet is, that the partial rottenness is the universal soundness of the apple. If I have but one slight disorder in but one of my organs, still you cannot say that my partial disorder must be universal health. The old optimists did not mean anything so contradictory as that. They meant that there is no real evil at all; that what seems to me to be evil, say toothaches, and broken households, and pestilences, and treasons, and wars, all that together is but a grand illusion of my partial view. As one looking over the surface of a statue with a microscope, and finding nothing but a stony surface,