[Footnote A:  La Saisiaz.]

And the world would not be such a probation-space did we once penetrate into its inmost secret, and know its phenomena as veritably either good or evil.  There is the need of playing something perilously like a trick on the human intellect if man is to strive and grow.

            “Here and there a touch
  Taught me, betimes, the artifice of things—­
  That all about, external to myself,
  Was meant to be suspected,—­not revealed
  Demonstrably a cheat—­but half seen through."[B]

[Footnote B:  A Bean-Stripe.]

To know objects as they veritably are, might reveal all things as locked together in a scheme of universal good, so that “white would rule unchecked along the line.”  But this would be the greatest of disasters; for, as moral agents, we cannot do without

            “the constant shade
  Cast on life’s shine,—­the tremor that intrudes
  When firmest seems my faith in white."[C]

[Footnote C:  Ibid.]

The intellectual insight that would penetrate through the vari-colour of events into the actual presence of the incandescent white of love, which glows, as hope tells us, in all things, would stultify itself, and lose its knowledge even of the good.

                                “Think! 
  Could I see plain, be somehow certified
  All was illusion—­evil far and wide
  Was good disguised,—­why, out with one huge wipe
  Goes knowledge from me.  Type needs antitype: 
  As night needs day, as shine needs shade, so good
  Needs evil:  how were pity understood
  Unless by pain? “[A]

[Footnote A:  Francis Furini.]

Good and evil are relative to each other, and each is known only through its contrary.

                                    “For me
  (Patience, beseech you!) Knowledge can but be
  Of good by knowledge of good’s opposite—­
  Evil."[B]

[Footnote B:  Ibid.]

The extinction of one of the terms would be the extinction of the other.  And, in a similar manner, clear knowledge that evil is illusion and that all things have their place in an infinite divine order would paralyze all moral effort, as well as stultify itself.

            “Make evident that pain
  Permissibly masks pleasure—­you abstain
  From out-stretch of the finger-tip that saves
  A drowning fly."[C]

[Footnote C:  Ibid.]

Certainty on either side, either that evil is evil for evermore, irredeemable and absolute, a drench of utter dark not illuminable by white; or that it is but mere show and semblance, which the good takes upon itself, would alike be ruinous to man.  For both alternatives would render all striving folly.  The right attitude for man is that of ignorance, complete uncertainty, the equipoise of conflicting alternatives.  He must take his stand on the contradiction.  Hope