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'92 CRITICAL NOTICES : purpose can only be realised in beings endowed with Free Will, and that the possession of Free Will renders the admission of wrongdoing inevitable. In regard to Freedom Sidgwick main- tains here the same balanced position as in the Methods of Ethics, but even if this argument be granted its full force, it only meets the question of moral evil wrong free choice and leaves the question of physical evil untouched. In regard to physical evil, he says, " I see no way of reconciling its existence with the goodness of God except by assuming that the Divine Will and Purpose work like human will and purpose under conditions. But in that case . . . the theological synthesis of ' what ought to be' with 'what is' seems to fail." Practical Philosophy itself requires the postulate of a Moral Order to reconcile the conflict between self-interest and duty. This postulate usually takes a theistic form, but we may believe in Moral Order without connecting it with personality, and, on the other hand, the chief abstract arguments used to prove Theism do not tend to prove moral order. " I myself regard Theism as a belief which, though borne in upon the living mind through life, and essential to normal life, is not self-evident or capable of being cogently demonstrated. It belongs, therefore, to a class of beliefs which I do not dispute the general reasonableness of accepting, but which I think have to be considered carefully and apart in estimating the grounds of their acceptance." Such beliefs among which he mentions the principle of causality may be called postulates ; and if any such assumption is confirmed by the test of consistency with other assumptions and cognitions, its certainty becomes practically in- distinguishable from other certainty. But in general " our accept- ance of such propositions must have a provisional character, as compared with those that are self-evident or demonstrated ". "" The serious difficulty begins when such assumptions are divergent and conflicting. So far as this is the case, we must infer error in some or all of them, though we may believe the error to be useful, i.e., better adapted than truth would be for the life of certain minds. But the postulates of A can have no validity for B, who does not feel the need of them ; on the other hand, B's recogni- tion of their necessity for A must lead him to philosophic doubt of the objective validity of similar postulates in his own case" (p. 243). One could have wished that this doctrine of postulates, admittedly open to abuse, yet so fruitful in modern philosophy, had been more fully treated. The above account tends perhaps to place the matter on too subjective a basis. There is a differ- ence, no doubt, between a postulate and a self-evident or demon- strated proposition. But if it can be shown that the coherence of experience as a whole or of some important aspect of experience is bound up with the validity of a certain postulate, it seems only in a technical sense that we can speak of the postulate as being less ' certain ' than some isolated piece of self-evident trutn. To return for a moment to the discussion of the Historical