spectacle of futility, fills me with a passionate desire to end waste,
to create order. (p. 99.)

But why, we ask, should Mr. Wells feel this passionate desire, if all
the failures and uglinesses of life are "necessary and important"?
How, on this assumption, are existing social ills to be remedied--nay,
why _should_ they be remedied, why should they be stigmatised as ills,
seeing that "everything is right"? Let {59} Mr. Wells once take his
principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as
social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that
of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form
which deprecates discontent with things as they are as a mark of
"unbelief."

Mr. Wells, however, while his influence is a very considerable one,
utters his teaching from outside the Christian Church, and very
properly disavows the Christian name; what must give us pause is to
find the monistic ethics being preached and taught by official
exponents of the Christian religion. What, _e.g._, can we think of a
statement like the following, which we quote from the columns of a
religious journal?

There are people who think it is an evidence of superior Culture to
show themselves pained by certain things; but it is not really that;
they are pained because they are not cultured enough, or in the right
way. . .

Nothing is good or ill
But thinking makes it so.

They think it desirable to dislike things because they dislike them; if
they thought it desirable not to dislike them, they would not dislike
them.

Again, no one will accuse this writer of want of frankness; according
to him, there is simply no such thing as objective evil--acts and
individuals have no moral qualities or characters, but are such as we
think them, and our business is so to think of them that they will not
pain us. {60} If we only knew aright, we should not regard anything as
bad. If we are pained by the thought of fifty thousand hungry children
in London elementary schools, or by the condition of Regent Street at
night, it is because we are not "cultured" enough--we have not the
right _gnosis_. When we reflect that anyone who consistently believes
that "nothing is good or ill, but thinking makes it so," will
inevitably, first or last, apply that comforting maxim to his own acts,
we can see in what direction the ethics of Monism--in reality a return
to the ultra-subjectivism of the Sophis