eterminist is open always on the one hand
to the paralysing thought that if he should err he is resisting God, and
on the other to the equally deadly instigation of the thought that those
who resist him are God's enemies. To escape both snares he must turn
thorough pantheist=non-theist. And the upshot is that the theistic
determinist is never merciful, whereas the rational determinist is at
least under a logical compulsion to be so, however he may resist or
divagate. He is free to defend himself, and to defend society; but in so
far as he hates and hurts he is illogical, and in so far as he makes
punishment retaliation, or prevention punitive, he is either confounding
himself or setting lust against light.

Were there no other betterment from the substitution of the non-theistic
for the theistic relation to ultimate problems, this might be held to
outweigh all claims on the other side, to say nothing of the simple
rationality of the negative solution. But that is, of course, in itself
decisive. The logically strongest form of the theistic case as against
the non-theist is that, even as he lives and moves in gravitation
without any subjective consciousness of it, so he may be controlled in
every thought by a transcendent volition. But this argument, which
excludes M. Bergson's formula of our occasional 'freedom' of will,
equally shelters determinism from the contention that we are 'conscious'
of freedom of thought. Even as we are demonstrably conditioned by
gravitation while unconscious of its control, we are demonstrably
conditioned by our experience and structure as regards even our guesses.
Neither the ignorant nor the ungifted man makes the valid new
hypothesis.

There remain for use by the theist only the old reproaches that a
non-theistic philosophy is 'desolate,' 'negative,' 'materialistic,' and
incapable of explaining the universe. The last is a mere _ignoratio
elenchi_, for the very essence of the non-theistic challenge is that
every 'explanation of the universe' is an imposture, exposed as such
either by its self-contradictions or by its evasions. The normal theist
either bilks the problem of evil by avowing it to be a mystery--a thing
he cannot explain--or falls back on the alternative evasions that there
cannot be good without evil (that is to say, that good needs evil, which
is thus good) or that 'partial ill is universal good,' and that evil is
thus _non-ens_--which again is a denial of any moral problem.