WHATEVER IS IS EIGHT 25 



any wise man deny the disciplinary value of pain and 

 sorrow. But these considerations do not help us to 

 see why the immense multitude of irresponsible 

 sentient beings, which cannot profit by such dis- 

 cipline, should suffer ; nor why, among the endless 

 possibilities open to omnipotence that of sinless, 

 happy existence among the rest the actuality in 

 which sin and misery abound should be that selected. 

 Surely it is mere cheap rhetoric to call arguments which 

 have never yet been answered by even the meekest and 

 the least rational\)f Optimists, suggestions of the pride 

 of reason. As to the concluding aphorism, its fittest 

 place would be as an inscription in letters of mud over 

 the portal of some ' stye of Epicurus ' ( 14 ) ; for that is 

 where the logical application of it to practice would 

 land men, with every aspiration stifled and every 

 effort paralyzed. Why try to set right what is right 

 already ? Why strive to improve the best of all 

 possible worlds ? Let us eat and drink, for as to-day 

 all is right, so to-morrow all will be. 



.But the attempt of the Stoics to blind them- 

 selves to the reality of evil, as a necessary con- 

 comitant of the cosmic process, had less success 

 than that of the Indian philosophers to exclude 

 the reality of good from their purview. Unfor- 

 tunately, it is much easier to shut one's eyes to good 

 than to evil. Pain and sorrow knock at our doors 

 more loudly than pleasure and happiness ; and the 

 prints of their heavy footsteps are less easily effaced. 

 Before the grim realities of practical life the pleasant 

 fictions of optimism vanished. If this were the best of 



