368 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



that every event proceeds from some combination of forces, 

 each of which is somewhere or some time necessary for the 

 fulfilment of the world-purpose. The evil that these 

 forces may work is the price that is paid for them, and that 

 this price has to be paid is the proof of the limitation of 

 purpose, not of its non-existence. This being under- 

 stood, the very fact of the callousness of nature is the best 

 testimony to the general account here offered of evil, that 

 it is the outcome of the blind operation of mechanical 

 forces. (2) In relation to moral evil it is sufficiently clear, 

 with regard to the mass of normal wrongdoing, that it is 

 the result of the pursuit of partial ends without regard to 

 the effect on others. Selfishness of the individual, or 

 selfishness of the family, class or society is at its root, and 

 the characteristic of all such selfishness is that while its end 

 may as an end be blameless and even laudable, it is its 

 limitation that makes it bad by impingement on the equally 

 just claims of other individuals or groups. Here again 

 evil is simply the result of the inorganic relation of human 

 beings or human societies. There remain the cases of 

 monstrosity, of cruelty, treachery and aggravated lust. 

 These, which seem to a simple and unreflective experience 

 to be clear evidences of a Satanic Mind, are more and more 

 clearly reducible by psychological investigation to patho- 

 logical growths, by which the normal mental structure 

 is obsessed or distorted. Impulses that are natural and 

 necessary acquire a morbid predominance, or take a per- 

 verse twist, and this again is due either to an unhappy 

 combination of hereditary tendencies in the constitution 

 of the individual, or to the destructive operation of 

 experiences to which the character has been unable to 

 adapt itself. It is only in melodrama that men are all- 

 round villains glorying in their villainy. The tragedy of 

 actual life is that under the stress of overwhelming tempta- 

 tion or mastering impulse men do vile things who in their 

 normal selves are sufficiently good members of society. 



8. Thus from two opposite starting-points we have 

 arrived at the conception of a conditioned purpose as consti- 

 tuting the core of the world-process. The analysis of 



