vi DEVELOPMENT AND HARMONY 367 



have no better method of grouping the legitimate results 

 of reasoning and experience into a single term, but we 

 must be exceeding chary of clothing the conception further 

 with attributes drawn from the soul as consciousness 

 reveals it within us. We shall do better to devise fresh 

 terms clear of old associations and better fitted to express a 

 more complex experience, and we shall perhaps do best by 

 seeking the further expansion and interrogation of our 

 empirical synthesis, wherein in proportion as it expands 

 new categories, more elastic, more general, less inadequate, 

 evolve themselves as the result of the wider and more 

 articulate correlation of data. 



One negative limitation indeed is clear. The Mind 

 that we are led to contemplate must neither be confused 

 with the whole of things nor with an Omnipotent Creator 

 of things. It is not the whole, for mechanism the anti- 

 thesis of purpose runs through the structure of the whole, 

 and in dependence on mechanism, discord and evil. It is 

 not, therefore, to be confounded with ' the Absolute or 

 Unconditioned of Metaphysics. If these terms have 

 meaning, they possess it only as applied to the whole, and 

 in the whole Mind is only a factor. It is conditioned as 

 its Purpose is conditioned. For the same reason the Mind 

 to which our argument points is not the Omnipotent 

 Providence of a more elementary religious theory working 

 at its will in a void or on a material of perfect plasticity. 

 The reality of evil must be recognised as something very 

 different from a mere privation of good. It is the positive 

 result of the clash of processes, and of purposive processes, 

 too, that are not organised. Its extent is the measure of 

 the incompleteness of the order actually achieved by Mind 

 in the world. 



7. It may be reasonably asked whether even this state- 

 ment is exhaustive. Can the catastrophes of earthquakes 

 and floods, the more loathsome diseases, or the extremes of 

 moral turpitude be reconciled with a plan in which every- 

 thing at bottom is to serve some purpose in the harmony 

 of the whole? On this point it may be remarked (i) that 

 it is not here suggested that every event is good, but only 



