ably interwoven with it, was
his belief in his own identity and personality. That was perhaps the
only thing of which he was ultimately assured. But his experience of
the world was that it was peopled by similar personalities, each of
whom seemed equally conscious of a separate existence, who were swayed
by motives similar in kind, though differing in detail, from the
motives which swayed himself; beyond these personalities, lay whole
ranges of sentient beings, which sank at last, by slow and minute
gradations, into matter which seemed to him to be inanimate; but even
all this was permeated by certain forces, themselves unseen, but the
symptoms of which were apparent in all directions, such as heat,
motion, attraction, electricity. He believed it possible that all
these might be different manifestations and specimens of the same
central force; but it was nothing more than a vague possibility.

He was next confronted with a mysterious fact. In every day and hour
of his own life he was brought face to face with a double experience.
At moments he felt himself full of life, health, and joy; at other
moments he felt himself equally subject to torpor, _malaise_, and
suffering. What it was that made these two classes of experience clear
to him he could not tell; but there was no questioning the fact that at
times he was the subject of experience of a pleasant kind, which he
would have prolonged if he could; while at times he was equally
conscious of experiences which his only desire was to terminate as
speedily as possible.

This mystery, which no philosopher had ever explained, seemed to him to
run equally through the whole of nature. He asked himself whether he
was in the presence of two warring forces. Would the Will, whatever it
was, which produced happiness, have made that happiness permanent, if
it could? was it thwarted by some other power, perhaps equally
strong--though it seemed to Hugh that the happiness of most sentient
beings decidedly and largely predominated over their unhappiness--a
power which was deliberately inimical to joy and peace, health and
well-being?

It seemed to him, however, that the two were so inextricably
intermingled, and so closely ministered, the one to the other, that
there was an essential unity of Will at work; and that both joyful and
painful experiences were the work of the same mind. He therefore
rejected at the outset the belief that what was commonly called evil
could be a