II EVOLUTION AND ETHICS /I 



dental theism which had come into vogue. The 

 restless, fiery energy, operating according to law, 

 out of which all things emerge and into which 

 they return, in the endless successive cycles of 

 the great year ; which creates and destroys worlds 

 as a wanton child builds up, and anon levels, sand 

 castles on the seashore ; was metamorphosed into 

 a material world-soul and decked out with all the 

 attributes of ideal Divinity ; not merely with in 

 finite power and transcendent wisdom, but with 

 absolute goodness. 



The consequences of this step were momentous. 

 For if the cosmos is the effect of an immanent, 

 omnipotent, and infinitely beneficent cause, the ex 

 istence in it of real evil, still less of necessarily 

 inherent evil, is plainly inadmissible. 13 Yet the 

 universal experience of mankind testified then, as 

 now, that, whether we look within us or without 

 us, evil stares us in the face on all sides ; that if 

 anything is real, pain and sorrow and wrong are 

 realities. 



It would be a new thing in history if d priori 

 philosophers were daunted by the factious oppo 

 sition of experience ; and the Stoics were the last 

 men to allow themselves to be beaten by mere 

 facts. Give me a doctrine and I will find the 

 reasons for it, said Chrysippus. So they per 

 fected, if they did not invent, that ingenious and 

 plausible form of pleading, the Theodicy ; for the 

 purpose of showing firstly, that there is no such 



