eiving us in order the better to enlighten us, and leaving
nothing undone to accentuate to our consciousness the yawning distance
of those opposite poles of good and evil between which creation swings.

We have thus clearly revealed to our view what may be called the
dilemma of determinism, so far as determinism pretends to think things
out at all. A merely mechanical determinism, it is true, rather
rejoices in not thinking them out. It is very sure that the universe
must satisfy its postulate of a physical continuity and coherence, but
it smiles at any one who comes forward with a postulate of moral
coherence as well. I may suppose, however, that the number of purely
mechanical or hard determinists among you this evening is small. The
determinism to whose seductions you are most exposed is what I have
called soft determinism,--the determinism which allows considerations
of good and bad to mingle with those of cause and effect in deciding
what sort of a universe this may rationally be held to be. The dilemma
of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right
horn is subjectivism. In other words, if determinism is to escape
pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a
simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in
themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and
ethical, in us.

To escape pessimism is, as we all know, no easy task. Your own studies
have sufficiently shown you the almost desperate difficulty of making
the notion that there is a single principle of things, and that
principle absolute perfection, rhyme together with {167} our daily
vision of the facts of life. If perfection be the principle, how comes
there any imperfection here? If God be good, how came he to
create--or, if he did not create, how comes he to permit--the devil?
The evil facts must be explained as seeming: the devil must be
whitewashed, the universe must be disinfected, if neither God's
goodness nor his unity and power are to remain impugned. And of all
the various ways of operating the disinfection, and making bad seem
less bad, the way of subjectivism appears by far the best.[6]

For, after all, is there not something rather absurd in our ordinary
notion of external things being good or bad in themselves? Can murders
and treacheries, considered as mere outward happenings, or motions of
matter, be bad without any one to feel their badness? And c