these. Whatever they mean, they involve not fulfilment, but defeat, of purpose. And that is what you yourself experience whenever you lose what is dear, and face the insoluble mysteries of experience.”
The practical weight of such objections can escape no one. They constitute in one aspect the well-known problem of evil. With the positive solution of this problem for its own sake we are not yet directly concerned. That belongs later in these discussions. Our concern at the moment is less with the pathetic than with the purely logical aspect of such objections. What they point out is that, empirically, there are countless, if essentially fragmentary, empirical facts to be recognized, which do not at present come to us human beings as the embodiment of certain specified purposes. These facts appear as involving the temporal defeat of these very purposes in just these passing instants of wavering search for Being wherein we now are. We call these facts, — such facts as storms, as war, as defeat and despair, as north winds and sleepless nights, — facts belonging somehow to the realm of Being. Yet they are facts that, when spoken of as ills, are so far defined with reference to the ideas which they just now temporally defeat. How do they stand with reference to our definition of Being?
I reply, for the first, by distinguishing two aspects of any unwelcome facts, such as the empirical observer of human destiny may find to be present in the world. These two aspects are indeed not to be sundered, and are here distinguished only for the sake of present convenience. Yet we shall profit by taking care not blindly to confuse them. Any unwelcome empirical fact has, namely,
