The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 131jmizing evil, if you please so to call it, based on the persuasien that the evil aspects of our hfe are of its veryessence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart. We have now to address ourselves to this more morbid way of looking at the situation.

But as I closed our last hour with a general philosophical reflection on the healthy-minded way of taking life, I should like at this point to make another philosophical reflection upon it before turning to that heavier task. You will excuse the brief delay.

If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctance to let God be anything less than All-in- All.

In other words, philosoj)hic theism has always shown a tendency to become pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of absolute fact ; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are subordinate.

In this latter case God is not necessarily responsible for the existence of evil ; he would only be responsible if it were not finally overcome. But on the monistic or pantheistic_yiew, evil, like everything else, must have its foundation in God ; and the difficulty is to see how this can possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. This difficulty faces us in every form of philosophy in which the world appears as one flawless unit of fact. Such a unit is an Indwidual, 2p. 132and in it the worst parts must be as essential as the best, must be as necessary to make the individual what he is ; since if any part whatever in an individual were to vanish or alter, it would no longer be that individual at all.

The i«OL ' w. philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously represented ■^cvw-LU-'"^ both in Scotland and America to-day, has to struggle I with this difficulty quite as much as scholastic theism struggled in its time ; and although it would be premature to say that there is no speculative issue whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there is no clear or easy issue, and that the only obvious escape / from paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic , , assumption altogether, and to allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggre- ■ h^ Q S^*® ^^ collection of higher and lower things and princi- ' '/^* (■ *''D P^^^' rather than an absolutely unitary fact.

For then evil would not need to be essential ; it might be, and may U<i^-. always have been, an independent portion that had no rational or absolute right to live with the rest, and which we might conceivably hope to see got rid of at last. Now the gospel of healthy-mindedness, as we have described it, casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view.

Whereas the monistic philosopher finds himself .,,s^ more or less bound to say, as Hegel said, that everything actual is rational, and that evil, as an element dialectically required, must be pinned in and kept and consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say anything of the sort.^ Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational, ^ I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure writers ; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be logically involved in the experiences of union with a higher Presence with which they connect themselves.

The higher Presence, namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quite sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ideal part.