Albert Schweitzer[20] interprets the whole moral bankruptcy of Western civilization as a pessimistic reaction to the extravagant optimism of its traditional religions and philosophies. While other factors, such as the complexity and the impersonal nature of industrial society, have been contributory factors to the disillusionment of the age, it is probably true that men are inclined to expect too little of the world and of man mostly because too much has been claimed for them and extravagant hopes have been disappointed. A regeneration of the ethical life of Western society must depend, therefore, upon the revival of a religion in which the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of pure naturalism are avoided. While the Orient has a serenity which will contribute much to the art of living in a unified world civilization, there is no health for our sickness in its religious philosophies. Its pantheism cannot be maintained in the scientific atmosphere of the West, and if it could, as it is in rare instances, it would only present us with the impossible choice between the moral ennui of pessimism and the sentimentality of an unqualified optimism. The youthful exuberance of the Western mind invariably inclines it to the least defensible of these two bad alternatives, the optimistic one. When the West borrows religion from the East, as for instance in theosophy and Christian Science, it is used to support optimistic illusions so palpably absurd that they flourish only in those circles of society in which life is extremely comfortable and not too intelligent. The only fruitful alternative to a monism and pantheism which identifies God and the world, the real and the ideal, is a dualism which maintains some kind of distinction between them and does not lose one in the other. Dualistic solutions to the riddles of life are not new in the history of religious thought. They are in fact as numerous as pantheistic ones, but their metaphysical limitations have usually outweighed their moral advantages and shortened their life. In Zoroastrianism, the noblest of purely Aryan faiths, Ahirman the spirit of evil exists independently of Ormuzd the good spirit. The influence of this Persian dualism is seen in both Hebrew and Christian thought. The satanology of the Old Testament is partly derived from it; and Manichæism, through which Augustine passed before he embraced and elaborated Catholic orthodoxy, is a compound of Persian and Christian religion. Mythology is filled with efforts to do justice to the conflicts which the world reveals as obviously as its unities, as for instance in the myth of Prometheus and Zeus. Even Plato, from whom most Western pantheism has been indirectly derived, held that God’s perfect goodness was thwarted by the intractableness of the materials with which he worked.