He who assiduously compares the profound and the commonplace will find
their difference to turn merely on the manner of their expression; a
profundity is a commonplace formulated in strange or otherwise obscure
and unintelligible terms. This must be my excuse for beginning with the
trite remark that the world we live in is not one which was made for us,
but one in which we happened and grew. I am much aware that there exists
a large and influential class of persons who do not think so; and I
offer this remark with all deference to devotees of idealism, and to
other such pietists who persist in arguing that the trouble which we do
encounter in this vale of tears springs from the inwardness of our own
natures and not from that of the world. I wish, indeed, that I could
agree with them, but unhappily their very arguments prevent me, since,
if the world were actually as they think it, they could not think it as
they do. In fact, they could not think. Thinking--worse luck!--came into
being as response to discomfort, to pain, to uncertainty, to problems,
such as could not exist in a world truly made for us; while from time
immemorial _pure_ as distinct from human consciousness has been
identified with absolute certainty, with self-absorption and
self-sufficiency; as a god, a goal to attain, not a fact to rest in. It
is notable that those who believe the world actually to have been made
for us devote most of their thinking to explaining away the experiences
which have made all men feel that the world was actually not made for
us. Their chief business, after proving the world to be all good, is
solving "the problem of evil." Yet, had there really been no evil, this
evil consequence could not have ensued: existence would have emerged as
beatitude and not as adjustment; thinking might in truth have been
self-absorbed contemplation, blissful intuition, not painful learning by
the method of trial and error.
Alas that what "might have been" cannot come into being by force of
discursive demonstration! If it could, goodness alone would have existed
and been real, and evil would have been non-existence, unreality, and
appearance--all by the force of the Word. As it is, the appearance of
evil is in so far forth no less an evil than its reality; in truth, it
is reality and its best witnesses are the historic attempts to explain
it away. For even as "appearance" it has a definite and inexpugnable
character of its own which cannot be destroyed by subsumption under the
"standpoint of the whole," "the absolute good," the "over-individual
values." Nor, since only sticks and stones break bones and names never
hurt, can it be abolished by the epithet "appearance." To deny reality
to evil is to multiply the evil. It is to make two "problems" grow where
only one grew before, to add to the "problem of evil" the "problem of
appearance" without serving any end toward the solution of the real
problem how evil can be effectively abolished.
I may then, in view of these reflections, hold myself safe in assuming
that the world we live in was not made for us; that, humanly speaking,
it is open to improvement in a great many directions. It will be
comparatively innocuous to assume also, as a corollary, that in so far
as the world was made for mind, it has been made so by man, that
civilization is the adaptation of nature to human nature. And as a
second corollary it may be safely assumed that the world does not stay
made; civilization has brought its own problems and peculiar evils.
I realize that, in the light of my title, much of what I have written
above must seem irrelevant, since the "problem of evil" has not, within
the philosophic tradition, been considered part of a "problem of values"
as such. If I dwell on it, I do so to indicate that the "problem of
evil" can perhaps be best understood in the light of another problem:
the problem, namely, of why men have created the "problem of evil." For
obviously, evil can be problematic only in an absolutely good world, and
the idea that the world is absolutely good is not a generalization
_upon_ experience, but a contradiction _of_ experience. If there exists
a metaphysical "problem of evil," hence, it arises out of this
generalization; it is secondary, not primary; and the primary problem
requires solution before the secondary one can be understood. And what
else, under the circumstances, can the primary one be than this: "Why do
men contradict their own experience?"