ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



evil, ignorance, superstition, false judgment, and so 

 on, the schools and colleges help us to avoid; re- 

 ligious evil, economic evil, political evil, all have 

 their safeguards and guides. 



Why could not a world have been made in which 

 there was no evil? In asking such a question we 

 misapprehend the nature of the world; we are think- 

 ing of something made and a maker external to it; 

 we are trying the universe by the standards of our 

 human experience. The world was not made, man 

 was not created in any sense paralleled by our hu- 

 man experience with tangible bodies. The world and 

 all there is in it is the result of evolution, or an end- 

 less process of creation, an everlasting becoming, in 

 which the nature of things beyond which we can 

 take no step plays the principal part. A world on 

 any other terms would not be the world to which we 

 are adjusted, and out of whose conflicting forces our 

 lives came. 



There will be times when the light will blind the 

 eye; other times when the darkness will heal and 

 restore it; when the heat will burn the hand, when 

 the food will poison the stomach, when the friend 

 will weary you, when home is a prison, when books 

 are a bore. Our relations to things make them good 

 or bad: our momentary and accidental relations 

 may make the good things bad, but our permanent 

 natural relations make the good good, the bad bad. 



In a world without the gravity which so often 



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