r lived.

"Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west."

Even cruelty and treachery may be among the absolutely blessed fruits
of time, and to quarrel with any of their details may be blasphemy.
The only real blasphemy, in short, may be that pessimistic temper of
the soul which lets it give way to such things as regrets, remorse, and
grief.

Thus, our deterministic pessimism may become a deterministic optimism
at the price of extinguishing our judgments of regret.

But does not this immediately bring us into a curious logical
predicament? Our determinism leads us to call our judgments of regret
wrong, because they are pessimistic in implying that what is impossible
yet ought to be. But how then about the judgments of regret
themselves? If they are wrong, other judgments, judgments of approval
presumably, ought to be in their place. But as they are necessitated,
nothing else _can_ be in their place; and the universe is just what it
was before,--namely, a place in which what ought to be appears
impossible. We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog, but the
other one sinks all the deeper. We have rescued our actions from the
bonds of evil, but our judgments are now held fast. When murders and
treacheries cease to be sins, regrets are theoretic absurdities and
errors. The theoretic and the active life thus play a kind of {164}
see-saw with each other on the ground of evil. The rise of either
sends the other down. Murder and treachery cannot be good without
regret being bad: regret cannot be good without treachery and murder
being bad. Both, however, are supposed to have been foredoomed; so
something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world.
It must be a place of which either sin or error forms a necessary part.
From this dilemma there seems at first sight no escape. Are we then so
soon to fall back into the pessimism from which we thought we had
emerged? And is there no possible way by which we may, with good
intellectual consciences, call the cruelties and the treacheries, the
reluctances and the regrets, _all_ good together?

Certainly there is such a way, and you are probably most of you ready
to formulate it yourselves. But, before doing so, remark how
inevitably the question of determinism and indeterminism slides us into
the question of optimism and pessimism, or, as our fathers called it,
'the question of evil.' The theological f