in trying to make it better.  The maintenance of this illusion is essential to the nature of the world; to us, evil always must appear.  But, as we know by experience, the evil that appears is just as terrible and just as hateful as it would be if it really were.  A toothache, as Audubon put it, is no less a pain to us because it is a pleasure to God.  We cannot, if we would, adopt His point of view; and clearly it would be impious to try, since we should be endeavouring to defeat His ingenious plan to keep the world going by hoodwinking us.  We therefore are chained and bound to the whirling wheel of appearance; to us what seems good is good, and what seems bad, bad; and your contention that all existence is somehow eternally good is for us simply irrelevant; it belongs to the point of view of God to which we have no access.”

“Yes,” cried Audubon, “and what a God to call God at all!  Why not just as much the devil?  What are we to think of the Being who is responsible for a world of whose economy our evil is not merely an accident, a mistake, but positively an essential, inseparable condition!”

“What, indeed!” exclaimed Leslie.  “Call Him God, by all means, if you like, but such a God as Zeus was to Prometheus, omnipotent, indeed, and able to exact with infallible precision His daily and hourly toll of blood and tears, but powerless at least to chain the mind He has created free, or to exact allegiance and homage from spirits greater, though weaker, than Himself.”

This was the sort of talk, I knew, that rather annoyed Dennis.  I did not therefore, for the moment, leave him time to reply, but proceeded to a somewhat different point: 

“Even putting aside,” I said, “the moral character of God, as it appears in your scheme of the universe, must we not perhaps accuse Him of a slight lapse of intelligence?  For, as I understand the matter, it was essential to the success of the Absolute’s plan that we should never discover the deception that is being played upon us.  But, it seems, we do discover it.  Hegel, for example, by your own confession, has not only detected but exposed it.  Well then, what is to be done?  Do you suppose that we could, even if we would, continue to lend ourselves to the imposition?  Must not our aims and purposes cease to have any interest for us, once we are clear that they are not true ends?  And that which, according to the hypothesis, is the true end, the ‘dateless and irrevoluble circle’ of activity, that, surely, we at least cannot sanction or approve, seeing that it involves and perpetuates the very misery and pain whose destruction was our only motive for acting at all.  For, whatever may be the case with God, we, you will surely admit, are forbidden by all that in us is highest and best, to approve or even to acquiesce in the deliberate perpetuation of a world of whose existence all that we call evil is an essential and eternal constituent So that, as I said at first, it looks as if the Absolute Reason had not been, after all, quite as cunning as it thought, since it has allowed us to discover and expose the very imposition it had invented to cheat us into concurrence with its plans.”