perceive that, from the very nature of this particular case, our
wherefore is deprived of the rational meaning which it had in all the
previous cases, where the possibility of a corresponding therefore was
presupposed. And failing fully to perceive this truth, our organised habit
of expecting an answer to our question asserts itself, and we experience
the same sense of intellectual unrest in the presence of this wholly
meaningless and absurd question, as we experience in the presence of
questions significant and rational.

THE END.

* * * * *

Notes

[1] The above was written before Mr. Mill's essay on Theism was published.
Lest, therefore, my refutation may be deemed too curt, I supplement it with
Mr. Mill's remarks upon the same subject. "It may still be maintained that
the feelings of morality make the existence of God eminently desirable. No
doubt they do, and that is the great reason why we find that good men and
women cling to the belief, and are pained by its being questioned. But,
surely, it is not legitimate to assume that, in the order of the universe,
whatever is desirable is true. Optimism, even when a God is already
believed in, is a thorny doctrine to maintain, and had to be taken by
Leibnitz in the limited sense, that the universe being made by a good
being, is the best universe possible, not the best absolutely: that the
Divine power, in short, was not equal to making it more free from
imperfections than it is. But optimism, prior to belief in a God, and as
the ground of that belief, seems one of the oddest of all speculative
delusions. Nothing, however, I believe, contributes more to keep up the
belief in the general mind of humanity than the feeling of its
desirableness, which, when clothed, as it very often is, in the form of an
argument, is a _naive_ expression of the tendency of the human mind to
believe whatever is agreeable to it. Positive value the argument of course
has none." For Mill's remarks on the version of the argument dealt with in
Sec. 5, see his "Three Essays," p. 204.

[2] The words "or not conceivable," are here used in the sense of "not
relatively conceivable," as explained in Chap. vi.

[3] For the full discussion from which the above is an extract, see _System
of Logic_, vol. i. pp. 409-426 (8th ed.). But, substituting "psychical" for
"volitional," see also, for some mitigation of the severity of the above
statement, the closing paragraphs of