There remain for use by the theist only the old reproaches that a non-theistic philosophy is 'desolate,' 'negative,' 'materialistic,' and incapable of explaining the universe. The last is a mere _ignoratio elenchi_, for the very essence of the non-theistic challenge is that every 'explanation of the universe' is an imposture, exposed as such either by its self-contradictions or by its evasions. The normal theist either bilks the problem of evil by avowing it to be a mystery--a thing he cannot explain--or falls back on the alternative evasions that there cannot be good without evil (that is to say, that good needs evil, which is thus good) or that 'partial ill is universal good,' and that evil is thus _non-ens_--which again is a denial of any moral problem. To complain of 'negation' as such while making such negations as these is to be more entertaining than impressive. And to be told that, in putting aside these logomachies, he is depriving himself of intellectual and moral comfort, is for the rationalist no perturbing experience. He is what he is because he knows the utter inanity of the theistic declamation about his putting in place of the 'Immeasurable Divine Eye' a 'vast bottomless Eye-Socket'; knows that for the vast mass of mankind the imagined Eye has been a menace of all their myriad ills, that its levin slays them like flies, that the iron has entered uncounted millions of souls who daily prayed for divine succour. The prate of his 'negation' is as childish as the complaint of the avowal that we cannot reach the planet Jupiter, not to say the constellation Hercules: he does but affirm the incontrovertible truth that an infinite universe cannot be compassed by our thought, and that to assert its permeation by 'mind'--a finite process of perception and discrimination, verbally defined as transcending both--is to pay ourselves with words. To the Berkeleyan formula that existence is only as perceived, and that without perception there can be no existence, he answers, similarly, that the first proposition means only that we perceive what we perceive, and that the second is mere intellectual nullity, a verbal pretence to unthinkable knowledge. The further Zenonian frivolity of the denial of an 'external world' needs from him no further comment than this, that in the terms of the argument 'external' has no meaning, and the proposition, therefore, none either. It may be left to the denier of existence 'outside consciousness' to tell us _where_ consciousness is. The inquiry may perhaps lead him to the discovery that he, the professed foe of materialism, has been limiting consciousness to the compass of the skull.