ncluded in
your position. According to you, as I understand, what requires to be
brought about, if ever Good is to be realized, is not any change in
the actual stuff, so to speak, of the world, in the structure, as it
were, of our experience, but only a change in our attitude towards all
this--a change in the subject, as they say, and not in the object.
Our aim should be not to abolish what we call evil, by successive
modifications of physical and social conditions, but rather, all these
remaining essentially the same, to come to see that what appears to be
evil is not really so."
"Yes," he said, "that is the view I would suggest."
"So that, for example, though we might still experience a toothache,
we should no longer regard it as an evil; and so with all the host
of things we are in the habit of calling bad: they would continue
unchanged 'in themselves,' as you Hegelians say, only to us they would
appear no longer bad, but good?"
"Yes; as I said at first, all reality is good, and all Evil,
so-called, is merely illusion."
I was about to reply when I was forestalled by Bartlett. For some time
past the discussion had been left pretty much to Dennis and myself,
with an occasional incursion from Audubon and Leslie. Ellis had gone
indoors; Parry and Wilson were talking together about something else;
and Bartlett appeared to be still absorbed in the _Chronicle_. I
noticed, however, that for the last few moments he had been getting
restless, and I suspected that he was listening, behind his newspaper,
to what we were saying. I was not therefore altogether surprised when,
upon Dennis' last remark, he suddenly broke into our debate with the
exclamation;
"Would it be' in order' to introduce a concrete example? There is a
curiously apt one here in the _Chronicle_."
And upon our assenting, he read us a long extract about
phosphorus-poisoning, the details of which I now forget, but at any
rate it brought before us, very vividly, a tale of cruel suffering and
oppression.
"Now," he said, as he finished, "is that, may I ask, the kind of thing
that it amuses you to call mere illusion?"
"Yes," replied Dennis stoutly, "that will do very well for an
example."
"Well," he rejoined, "I do not propose to dispute about words; but for
my own part I should have thought that, if anything is real, that
is; and so, I think, you would find it, if you yourself were the
sufferer."
"But," objected Dennis, "do you think that it
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