202 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



injury. This justice is founded in pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfac- 

 tion in the expiation of a wicked deed. The Socinians and Hobbes objected to 

 this punitive justice, which is properly vindictive justice and which God has 

 reserved for himself at many junctures. ... It is always founded in the fitness 

 of things, and satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise lookers-on, even 

 as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture satisfies a well-constituted mind. 

 It is thus that the torments of the damned continue, even though they serve no 

 longer to turn any one away from sin, and that the rewards of the blest con- 

 tinue, even though they confirm no one in good ways. The damned draw to 

 themselves ever new penalties by their continuing sins, and the blest attract 

 ever fresh joys by their unceasing progress in good. Both facts are founded on 

 the principle of fitness, . . . for God has made all things harmonious in perfec- 

 tion as I have already said. 



Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment 

 from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of 

 a damned soul had ever entered his mind. Nor had it occurred to him 

 that the smaller is the number of l samples ' of the genus lost-soul 

 whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably 

 grounded is the glory of the blest. What he gives us is a cold literary 

 exercise, whose cheerful substance even hell-fire does not warm. 



And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist 

 philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The 

 optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact- 

 loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rational- 

 ism makes systems, and systems must be closed. Perfection for men 

 in practical life is something far off and still in process of achieve- 

 ment. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and 

 relative. The absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally 

 complete. 



I find a splendid example of revolt against the airy and shallow 

 optimism of current religious philosophy in a publication of that 

 valiant anarchistic writer Morison I. Swift. Mr. Swift's anarchism 

 goes a little farther than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize 

 a good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize heartily with his 

 dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue. He begins 

 his pamphlet on ' Human Submission ' with a series of city reporter's 

 items from newspapers (suicides, deaths from starvation and the like) 

 as specimens of our civilized regime. For instance: 



After trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other in 

 the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six children with- 

 out food and ordered to leave their home in an upper east-side tenement house 

 because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a clerk, to-day ended his life by 

 drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost his position three weeks ago through ill- 

 ness and during the period of idleness his scanty savings disappeared. Yester- 

 day he obtained work with a gang of city snowshovelers, but he was too weak 



