Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/395

376 its own positive characters, as a fact that in our human experience appears at a point of time, in certain relations in space, and with numerous other positively definable features, all of which the thought of any historian or any student of science who describes the fact, may define as the object of his own ideas. In addition to these, its own relatively internal and positive features, the unwelcome fact also appears as involving the present temporal defeat of a purpose which, but for this fact, might here have been won. Now these two aspects of the unwelcome fact were long ago distinguished by the ancient as well as by the mediaeval students of the problem of evil. “Every evil,” said such students, “has, as a positive fact in the world of Being, its own internal perfections. Its evil character is due to its relations to other facts that coexist with it in the same world. Even Satan,” said such views, “is an angel; and even as a fallen angel he has extraordinary perfections of nature, which so far constitute a good. His diabolical quality is due to the misuse of precisely these perfections. The best in wrong setting becomes the worst.” Upon such bases these older accounts of evil undertook to make the presence of evil in the world consistent with the well known thesis, Omne Ens est bonum, — a thesis whose historical relation to our own conception of Being I am far from attempting to deny.

Now I indeed have no doubt that these ancient and mediseval students of the problem of evil often made their own task far too light. Nor am I here concerned to accept their special solutions of the problem as to the place of ill in a divinely ordered world. But it does concern us here to point out that an unwelcome fact of human