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ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY

interested reader to the form of them presented in my sixth essay.

(4) The hope of the real and lasting improvement of this present world by our moral endeavour. With lack of this, there would be moral discouragement, and the chief use of this life would be merely to find the means of departing out of it; righteousness could only be “in heaven,” — in “the hereafter.” This added essential to moral effort Personal Idealism supplies, with assurance of hope, in its indivisible union of the eternal and the temporal worlds; a union in which the eternal is the unitary and governing whole, and the temporal the potentially governed part. More than this, indeed much more, and of higher interest, might be said; but more I must here for lack of room forbear to say, and must again refer readers to the fuller exposition in my first and seventh essays.

(5) The validity of the belief in the solvability of the enigma of Evil. We can have no hope in moral endeavour in a world whose Source and Controller we cannot clear of the suspicion of intending or causing evil, or of being in collusion with it, or even of conniving at it. We have seen, above, how all the systems that work from a single Efficient Cause hopelessly fail to attain this clearance of the Cause. I have already hinted at the contrasted success of the new Pluralism. Its God has no part whatever in the causation of evil, but the whole of evil, both natural and moral, falls into the causation, either natural or moral, that belongs to the minds other than God. They alone carry in their being the world of sense, wherein alone evil occurs or wrong-doing can be made real. This evil pertaining to the non-divine is moreover capable of cure, through the immanence of each being’s eternal principle of good and the presence to it of the divine Friend and Saviour. So we pass to the concluding condition.

(6) The validity of the belief in God. That is, the belief