“They have singular traditions. I remember when a deliberation was held in our council as to whether they were pernicious or harmless; it was decided that they were harmless and little likely to spread.” “I have talked a good deal with them since I have lived amongst them, and have come to the conclusion that in what they believe a great deal is true.” “Indeed! you cannot surely believe that our pleasure is distasteful to any being outside us.” “No; but I go back to the old notion of which you have heard, that there is a being who calls us into being, and who is over us; and I believe that this being takes pain, and so makes life pleasurable to us. You know that some sensation is passing away, and you know that there must be more pain that passes away than pleasure.” “How can I know that?” “We know that there is not such a very great excess of pleasure over pain. Now if in all the course of time that has been, the sensation that has been passing away was pleasure, there would by this time have been left an excess of pain, and before now we should all have sunk into apathy. So it is either pleasure and pain mixed which passes away, or pain alone. I conceive that it is pain alone. These strange doctrines are true, only curiously expressed. The being over us is continually bearing pain and so making existence pleasant to us, thus causing us to move and live. So the pain of our life is that remaining pain which he does not take.” “This seems to me a very dismal doctrine. I can imagine some poetry in the idea of a being of infinite power, strong and glorious, but none in the idea of a suffering being.” “When you were a child you thought your father could do everything; but as you grew up and found that he too had his difficulties, was your regard for him lessened, or your thankfulness for that which he did for you?” “No. And you mean that if we do not regard this being in the same way, granting his existence, still we should feel gratitude towards him.” “Certainly we should feel gratitude to him; and, considering the attitude we have taken towards him, this feeling of gratitude comes over us with a kind of revulsion. But besides gratitude I do not see why we must lose any other feeling such as you seem to miss. Do you not remember how, in the course of the studies we have all been through, we were told that there were two parts in knowledge—one corresponding to reality, one introduced by the action of our own minds—so that certain characteristics which we at first think to be due to the nature of things in themselves we find out on reflection are only our apprehension of our own mental action?” “Yes; we do not perceive the reality absolutely, we apprehend it subject to the mind’s mode of perceiving.”