ly have
no existence. Good and Evil, in our sense, are mere appearances; and
Good, in the absolute sense, is identical with the Absolute or with
God?"

"Yes," he said, "that is my notion."

"And so, for example, to apply the idea in detail, in the region which
you yourself selected, all that we regret, or hate, or fear in our
social system--poverty, disease, starvation and the rest--is not
really evil at all, does not in fact exist, but is merely what appears
to us? There is, in fact, no social evil?"

"No," he replied, "in the sense I have explained there is none."

"Well then," I continued, "how is it with all our social and other
ideals? Our desire to make our own lives and other people's lives
happier? Our efforts to subdue nature, to conquer disease, to
introduce order and harmony where there appears to be discord and
confusion? How is it with those finer and less directly practical
impulses by which you yourself are mainly pre-occupied--the quest
of knowledge or of beauty for their own sake, the mere putting of
ourselves into right relations with the universe, apart from any
attempt to modify it? Are all these desires and activities mere
illusions of ours, or worse than illusions, errors and even vices,
impious misapprehensions of the absolutely Good, frivolous attempts to
adapt the Perfect to our own imperfections?"

"No," he replied, "I would not put it so. Some meaning, I apprehend,
there must be in time and change, and some meaning also in our
efforts, though not, I believe, the meaning which we imagine. The
divine life, as I conceive it, is a process; only a process that
is somehow eternal, circular, so to speak, not rectilinear, much as
Milton appears to imagine it when he describes the blessed spirits
'progressing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity'; and
of this eternal process our activity, which we suppose to be moving
towards an end, is somehow or other an essential element. So that,
in this way, it is necessary and right that we should strive after
ideals; only, when we are thinking philosophically, we ought to make
clear to ourselves that in truth the Ideal is eternally fulfilled, its
fulfilment consisting precisely In that process which we are apt to
regard as a mere means to its realization. This, as Hegel has it, is
the 'cunning' of the Absolute Reason, which deludes us into the
belief that there is a purpose to be attained, and by the help of that
delusion preserves that energy