it is there a pure negation, intrinsically affirming nothing, of
the same character as "not-man" or "not-donkey," standing for a nature
altogether unspecific and indeterminable in the residual universe. By a
sort of obverse implication it does, however, possess, in the
philosophic tradition, a positive content which accrues to it by virtue
of what it denies. This content makes it a designation for the
persistence and perdurability of desiderated quality--from metaphysical
unity and spirituality to the happy hunting-grounds or a woman's
affection. At bottom it means the assurance that the contents of value
cannot and will not be altered or destroyed, that their natures and
their relations to man do not undergo change. There is no recorded
attempt to prove that evil is eternal: eternity is _eternity of the good
alone_.

Unity, spirituality, and eternity, then, are the forms which contents of
value receive under the shaping hands of the philosophic tradition, to
which they owe their metaphysical designation and of which the business
has so largely and uniquely been to _prove_ them the foundations and
ontological roots of universal nature. But "the problem of evil" does
not come to complete solution with these. Even in a single,
metaphysically spiritual and unchanging world, man himself may still be
less than a metaphysical absolute and his proper individuality doomed to
absorption, his wishes to obstruction and frustration. Of man,
therefore, the tradition posits _immortality_ and _freedom_, and even
the materialistic systems have sought to keep somehow room for some form
of these goods.

To turn first to immortality. Its source and matrix is less the love of
life than the fear of death--that fear which Lucretius, dour poet of
disillusion, so nobly deplored. That he had ever himself been possessed
of it is not clear, but it is perfectly clear that his altogether sound
arguments against it have not abolished its operation, nor its effect
upon human character, society, and imagination. Fear which made the
gods, made also the immortality of man, the denial of death. What the
fear's unmistakable traits may be has never been articulately said,
perhaps never can be said. Most of us never may undergo the fear of
death; we undergo comfort and discomfort, joy and sorrow, intoxication
and reaction, love and disgust; we aim to preserve the one and to
abolish the other, but we do not knowingly undergo the fear of death.
Indeed, it