“Yes,” he said, “that is my notion.”

“And so, for example, to apply the idea in detail, in the region which you yourself selected, all that we regret, or hate, or fear in our social system—­poverty, disease, starvation and the rest—­is not really evil at all, does not in fact exist, but is merely what appears to us?  There is, in fact, no social evil?”

“No,” he replied, “in the sense I have explained there is none.”

“Well then,” I continued, “how is it with all our social and other ideals?  Our desire to make our own lives and other people’s lives happier?  Our efforts to subdue nature, to conquer disease, to introduce order and harmony where there appears to be discord and confusion?  How is it with those finer and less directly practical impulses by which you yourself are mainly pre-occupied—­the quest of knowledge or of beauty for their own sake, the mere putting of ourselves into right relations with the universe, apart from any attempt to modify it?  Are all these desires and activities mere illusions of ours, or worse than illusions, errors and even vices, impious misapprehensions of the absolutely Good, frivolous attempts to adapt the Perfect to our own imperfections?”

“No,” he replied, “I would not put it so.  Some meaning, I apprehend, there must be in time and change, and some meaning also in our efforts, though not, I believe, the meaning which we imagine.  The divine life, as I conceive it, is a process; only a process that is somehow eternal, circular, so to speak, not rectilinear, much as Milton appears to imagine it when he describes the blessed spirits ‘progressing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity’; and of this eternal process our activity, which we suppose to be moving towards an end, is somehow or other an essential element.  So that, in this way, it is necessary and right that we should strive after ideals; only, when we are thinking philosophically, we ought to make clear to ourselves that in truth the Ideal is eternally fulfilled, its fulfilment consisting precisely In that process which we are apt to regard as a mere means to its realization.  This, as Hegel has it, is the ‘cunning’ of the Absolute Reason, which deludes us into the belief that there is a purpose to be attained, and by the help of that delusion preserves that energy of action which all the time is really itself the End.”

I looked up at him as he finished, to see whether he was quite serious; and as he appeared to be so, and as Leslie still kept silence, I took up the argument as follows.

“I understand,” I said, “in a sort of way what you mean; but still the same difficulty recurs which Audubon has already put forward.  On your hypothesis there seems to be an impassable gulf between God’s conception of Good and ours.  To God, as it seems, the world is eternally good; and in its goodness is included that illusion by which it appears to us so bad, that we are continually employed