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 view, 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 INDIVIDUAL,
and 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 philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously
represented both in Scotland and America to-day, has to struggle with
this difficulty quite as {130} 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 aggregate or collection of higher and lower
things and principles, rather than an absolutely unitary fact. For
then evil would not need to be essential; it might be, and may 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 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.[69] Evil, it
says, is emphatically irrational, and NOT to be pinned in, or
preserved, or co