182 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 a priori philosophers 

 were daunted by the factious opposition 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 perfected, 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 thing as evil ; 

 secondly, that if there is, it is the necessary correlate of good ; and 

 moreover, that it is either due to our own fault or inflicted for 

 our benefit. Theodicies have been very popular in their time, 

 and I believe that a numerous, though somewhat dwarfed, proge- 

 ny of them still survives. So far as I know, they are all varia- 

 tions of the theme set forth in those famous six lines of the Essay 

 on Man, in which Pope sums up Bolingbroke's reminiscences of 

 stoical and other speculations of this kind : 



" All nature is but art, unknown to thee; 

 All chance, direction which thou canst not see; 

 All discord, harmony not understood ; 

 All partial evil, universal good ; 

 And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, 

 One truth is clear: whatever is is right." 



Yet surely, if there are few more important truths than those 

 enunciated in the first triad, the second is open to very grave ob- 

 jections. That there is a " soul of good in things evil " is unques- 

 tionable ; nor will 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 

 can not profit by such discipline 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 



MoreWs translation], which again is a Latin version of the old Stoical doctrine, es airca> rov 

 K&ff^ov fiepo? Si^Kfi 6 vovs, icaQdirep a</>' i)/j.S>i> fi tyvx'fl- 



So far as testimony for the universality of what ordinary people call " evil " goes, there 

 is nothing better than the writings of the Stoics themselves. They might serve as a store- 

 house for the epigrams of the ultra-pessimists. Heracleitus (circa 500 B. c.) says just as 

 hard things about ordinary humanity as his disciples centuries later ; and there really seems 

 no need to seek for the causes of this dark view of life in the circumstances of the time of 

 Alexander's successors or of the early emperors of Rome. To the man with an ethical 

 ideal, the world, including himself, will always seem full of evil. 



