The so-called problem of evil is, then, tolerably easy to a thorough-going evolutionist. All developments, all perversions which are self-destructive rather than self-conservative to the individual, have received their original stimulus from other antagonistic individuals to whose interest it is to promote these evils to the utmost. What is an evil to me is first so much of a good to him whose interest lies in defeating and destroying me, and he will take advantage of all my weaknesses to his own profit. Competition and struggle involve the existence of evils to individuals who are conquered and maltreated in the battle of life. Disease and death itself is necessary to evolution on a finite sphere. As long as the good and desirable is limited as compared with the number of those who want, competition must exist, and this competition must be by both cultivating advantageous variations in ourselves, and also by cultivating the disadvantageous variations latent in our enemies. Thus, evil sown in others that our own good may be advanced is the general law of all life. To injure as much as possible all those who oppose, and to get as many as possible well affected towards us, and to be subservient to our ends, this is the meaning of psychical evolution in all its earlier, and most of its later, course. On any scheme of evolution by struggle, evil to particular individuals is a necessary fact. We throw, then, the problem back to how and why life arose and developed through this competition mode; and all science at present can say is that it is the “nature of things,” an expression which covers ignorance and is really metaphysical.