82 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



about us, and back over its history. In doing so it will be all 

 in vain for us to attempt to shut our eyes to the manifold 

 miseries and bitternesses of human life. Nor does it assist us 

 to tell us, as Hegel does, that all this exists merely that the 

 Absolute Spirit may become conscious of himself. Eather, the 

 heart rebels at the suggestion that human misery should have 

 been devised for the attainment of an end that cannot be 

 represented as either noble or unselfish. There is nothing in 

 self-consciousness that is, in itself, admirable or attractive : 

 as Goethe profoundly remarks, humility, the sweetest of 

 womanly virtues, can never know anything of its own exist- 

 ence, it is idle, too, to tell us, in any phraseology, that evil 

 is negation — that it is something that does not really exist. 

 He who uses such phraseology does not alter the facts, he 

 merely confuses for himself the connotation of such words as 

 "reality," "existence," and "evil." Shutting our eyes to 

 nothing, we may, however, still ask ourselves the question, 

 Does it not, in spite of everything, seem clear that "the real 

 tendency of things is good"? This much, at any rate, was 

 the intense conviction of one who was even more alive than 

 most of us are to the darker side of human things. Without 

 prejudging the question whether it is a conclusion capable of 

 being scientifically established, it may be said that, if it can, 

 we cannot, I think, escape from the further conclusion that 

 there is an ideal which the Universal Mind is endeavouring to 

 realise in the world — that this ideal is nothing else but the 

 amelioration of its condition. 



The question, at aiiy rate, of any belief in God which is 

 more than a formal and unmeaning one appears to be bound 

 up with that other question whether or not the real tendency 

 of things is good — that is to say, whether or not there 

 is, in spite of all fluctuations, a progress, steady on the 

 whole, towards a higher and better state of things per- 

 ceptible in mundane affairs, and whether such tendency is 

 not the necessary outcome of the laws of life and develop- 

 ment. 



Though Hegel, in his abstract formalisation of his doctrine, 

 places the goal of existence in the realisation of itself in con- 

 sciousness by the Absolute Spirit — a conception which, what- 

 ever aspect of the truth it may present, does not in any way 

 commend itself to human love and admiration — when he 

 comes to show us his principle at work on the stage of the 

 world's history, vv'e find that what it seems to mean is that 

 there is some intelligent principle behind human affairs, or 

 innnanent in them, which converts the fall of empires, the de- 

 cadence of civilisations, the inroads of barbarism — everything, 

 in short, that seems at first merely evil and disastrous — into 

 the starting-point for the development of new eras, charac- 



