To begin with, as will indeed readily appear, the offences of our moral judgments, which often, if not always, are largely influenced by religious or rather theological conceptions, are only a peculiar expression of the two-faced attitude towards causation, human persons or wills being the causes specially involved. In general the causes of the universe are of three sorts, those of natural force, those of supernatural agency, and those of human agency, and although toward them all essentially the same attitude is [p.045] assumed, it is worth our while to consider particularly the causation that is commonly adjudged to belong to the human will and the moral ideas that spring from it. For the purposes of the moral consciousness we translate the two conflicting powers of our world, or the spiritual reality and the material, into two agents of good and evil respectively, each having a power of doing whatever, true to its peculiar character, it may will to do, and then, as if in accord with this way of thinking, we find two distinct selves, a good self and an evil self, within each one of us, and we also divide the body social into two exclusive classes, the class of those who are identified with the righteous life and the class of those given to the unrighteous life, the sheep and the goats, the elect and the damned. But, to say nothing of the fact that these three ideas of the two powers, the two selves and the two classes, cannot be made really to accord with each other, although they possess an outward agreement, is it not clear that any attempt to take the good and the evil as two mutually exclusive things, be they spirits or selves or classes, is to destroy at once the real substance of virtue and the real value of the consciousness of evil? In practical life this means, what everybody knows so well, that an isolated, unduly holy righteousness, a sort of touch-me-not goodness, is bound to be empty, to be only ritualistic and aristocratic or pharisaical, and in any one of these respects it appears decidedly unrighteous; while an isolated unrighteousness, besides having at least the moral worth of a protest against its counterpart, is in itself exactly like the original [p.046] sinfulness of the theologian; being unavoidable, it is wholly without any warranted opprobrium. Indeed, it all but comes to this, that righteousness as a fixed thing, fixed to a part of the universe or to a part of the individual self or to a part of society, is really in just so far evil, and the direct opposite of such righteousness is proportionately good. Good and evil, then, may not mix well, but certain it is that contradiction results from the common attempt of men to regard either as untainted or untempered by the other.