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CONTRADICTION AND REALITY. 11 organic point of view. The question cannot surely be how many moments of pain you have experienced, and whether you have had enough moments of pleasure to outweigh them, but whether the experience has done its work and returned you to yourself a complete or at least a completer being. So, it would seem, the problem should be stated about the universe. Not, if we could reckon up moments of equal pleasure and pain, which of them would be found to outnumber the others ? but rather, is there reason for think- ing that pain and finiteness are elements playing a definite part in the whole, such that its completeness depends upon containing them ? Broadly speaking, I suppose, experience suggests to us that a soul which has never known pain, like a nation that has never known war, has no depth of being and is not a personality at all. Of course this way of looking at the matter does not by itself dispose of the suggestion that the cost even of perfecting a soul may be too high ; but the conviction that there is and essentially must be a certain cost, corresponds to our best insight in the sphere of every- day experience. And so, in the end, if such a question as that of pleasure or pain in the Absolute has reality for us at all, it seems important where we look for the suggestions from which we are to start. We ought not surely to start from common- place experiences, but only from those in which self-expres- sion is at its fullest, rare moments such as those to which Aristotle alludes in the discussion of the Theoretic life. It may be noteworthy that Aristotle consents while Plato refuses to ascribe the feeling of pleasure to the Divine nature ; and this may be connected with Aristotle's apparent omission of negativity from his conception of ideal experience. In his distinction, however, between the enjoyment of self-realisa- tion and the enjoyment of recreation he throws out a hint which we might do well to follow. And for him as for us, apparently, the activities primarily devoted to sheer enjoy- ment and delight, are wrested by the very structure of man's soul to severer forms of self-expression ; so that the completest of all the creations in which as yet man has freely and spon- taneously sought what he most enjoys, is, I presume, for us, as for Aristotle, that of poetical tragedy. This does seem to be a paradox worth noting, and it might be driven home by all sorts of considerations. I am only using it to set the question of optimism in a certain light ; that is to say, to state it not by looking for pain to be as it were quantitatively submerged or neutralised by pleasure, but by looking for a completeness in which souls have found themselves, or