Whether God is conceived as a creator of that reality, who administers it inexorably, or whether he is identified with reality and is conceived as the sum total of its laws, or whether, as in the language of modern science, the name of God is not employed at all, is a matter of metaphysical taste. The great divide lies between those who think their wishes are of more than human significance and those who do not. For these latter the problem of evil does not arise out of the difficulty of reconciling the existence of evil with their assumptions. They do not assume that reality must conform to human desire. The [p217] problem for them is wholly practical. It is the problem of how to remove evil and of how to bear the evil which cannot be removed. Thus from the attempt to explain the ways of God in the world as it now is, nature and human nature being what they are, the center of interest is shifted to an attempt to discover ways of equipping man to conquer evil. This displacement has in fact taken place in the modern world. In their actual practice men do not try to account for evil in order that they may accept it; they do not deny evil in order that they may not have to account for it; they explain it in order that they may deal with it. 2. _Superstition and Self-Consciousness_ This change of attitude toward evil is not, as at first perhaps it may seem, merely a new way of talking about the same thing. It alters radically the nature of evil itself. For evil is not a quality of things as such. It is a quality of our relation to them. A dissonance in music is unpleasant only to a musical ear. Pain is an evil only if someone suffers, and there are those to whom pain is pleasure and most men’s evil their good. For things are neutral and evil is a certain way of experiencing them. To realize this is to destroy the awfulness of evil. I use the word ‘awful’ in its exact sense, and I mean that in abandoning the notion that evil has to be reconciled with a theory of how the world is governed, we rob it of universal significance. We deflate it. The psychological consequences are enormous, for a very great part of all human suffering lies not in the pain itself, but in the [p218] anxiety contributed by the meaning which we attach to it. Lucretius understood this quite well, and in his superb argument against the fear of death he reasoned that death has no terror because nothing can be terrible to those who no longer exist. Before we were born, he says, “we felt no distress when the Poeni from all sides came together to do battle.... For he whom evil is to befall, must in his own person exist at the very time it comes, if the misery and suffering are haply to have any place at all.” St. Thomas defines superstition as the vice of excess in religion, and in this sense of the word it may be said that the effect of the modern approach is to take evils out of the context of superstition.