GOOD AND EVIL RELATIVE TO WILL

and to you as an individual who are constantly growing and changing. The determining factor, then, in the question of good and evil is net something inhérent in the thjibgs themselves, but something in you who enter Jnto relations with them. Things are^ good .or Wl only in relation to your wiU. '

There are those who say'that evil is altogether unreal and illusory ; tfaat. there is no need to fight against it, ail that is necessary /heing to convince one's self that one is mistaken when one thinks one sees it. Others give it just a shadow of reality, or the reaUty of a shadow ; " it is the sihadow where the light should be." Others, likeRobert Browning, urge that the opposition between good and>evil grounds in that uncertai^y which characterizes ail our knowledge; vc^ Ho not apprdxend at once, he says, the true j^^e of anything, and are therefore perpetually ^^ubject to doubt ; but predsely this doubt makes the moral life possible, since our choiœs are con* ditioned by the real risk of making mistakes, and so acquire a neœssary élément of venture. Others, using the analogy of travellers in a railway train who see outside objects rushing in the opposite direction, or of the ascending balloonist who sees the earth f alling swif tly downwards beneath him, interpret evil as the illusory backwardness of things which is due only to the forwardness of the main life-movement, and is an index of it.

In contrast with the subtlety of thèse explana*

INWARD ÏIASTERY 165

tions of the dual phenomenon of good and evil, Carpenter brings us back to the demental thing — the hùman wiU acting in the midst of the worldorder. It is for him a question of inward mastery. There is no real duahsm, only a practical dualism on the moral plane. There are not good things And evil things for us to choose between, Uke a man might choose between healthy and unhealthy food. Nature is non-moral, and ail possible objects of désire take their moral quality only in relation to the will.

For (over and over agaia) there is notfaing that is evil except because a man has not mastery over it; and there is no good thing that is not evil il it hâve mastery over a man ;

And there is no passion or power, or pleasnie or pain, or created thing whatsoever, which is not ultimatèly for man and for his use— or which he need be afraid of, or ashamed at.

The ascetics and the seLf-indulgent divide things into good and evil — as it were to throw avay the evil ;

But things cannot be divided into good and evil, bat ail are good so soon as they are brought into subjection.^

This theory is so sound as to be almost indisputable; expérience supports it through and through. There are énergies quick and potent within human nature which, if they hâve the mastery, drag a man back into the pit ; which, on the other hand, according as they are mastered and controUed by the central will, are Uke glorious