founded in the fitness of things, and satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise lookers-on, even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture satisfies a well-constituted mind.  It is thus that the torments of the damned continue, even tho they serve no longer to turn anyone away from sin, and that the rewards of the blest continue, even tho they confirm no one in good ways.  The damned draw to themselves ever new penalties by their continuing sins, and the blest attract ever fresh joys by their unceasing progress in good.  Both facts are founded on the principle of fitness, ... for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as I have already said.”

Leibnitz’s feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me.  It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind.  Nor had it occurred to him that the smaller is the number of ‘samples’ of the genus ‘lost-soul’ whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably grounded is the glory of the blest.  What he gives us is a cold literary exercise, whose cheerful substance even hell-fire does not warm.

And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age.  The optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind.  The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed.  For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement.  This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative:  the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally complete.

I find a fine example of revolt against the airy and shallow optimism of current religious philosophy in a publication of that valiant anarchistic writer Morrison I. Swift.  Mr. Swift’s anarchism goes a little farther than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize heartily with his dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue.  He begins his pamphlet on ‘Human Submission’ with a series of city reporter’s items from newspapers (suicides, deaths from starvation and the like) as specimens of our civilized regime.  For instance: 

“’After trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other in the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six children without food and ordered to leave their home in an upper east side tenement house because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a clerk, to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid.  Corcoran lost his position three weeks ago through illness, and during the period of idleness his scanty savings disappeared.  Yesterday he obtained work with a gang of city snow shovelers, but he was too weak from illness and was forced to quit after an hour’s trial with the shovel.  Then the weary task of looking for employment was again resumed.  Thoroughly discouraged, Corcoran returned to his home late last night to find his wife and children without food and the notice of dispossession on the door.’  On the following morning he drank the poison.