To-day we can begin to realize how much was implied in this prophetic hint of Aristotle's, for we are forced to admit that whatever may be the function of evil in this world, it is unquestionably an indispensable function, and not something interpolated from without. Whatever exists is part of the dramatic whole, and this can quickly be proved. The goodness in the world--all that we love and praise and emulate--we are ready enough to admit into our scheme of things, and to rest upon it our belief in God. The misery, the pain, the wickedness, we would fain leave out. But if there were no such thing as evil, how could there be such a thing as goodness? Or to put it somewhat differently, if we had never known anything but goodness, how could we ever distinguish it from evil? How could we recognize it as good? How would its quality of goodness in any wise interest or concern us? This question goes down to the bottom of things, for it appeals to the fundamental conditions according to which conscious intelligence exists at all. Its answer will therefore be likely to help us. It will not enable us to solve the problem of evil, enshrouded as it is in a mystery impenetrable by finite intelligence, but it will help us to state the problem correctly; and surely this is no small help. In the mere work of purifying our intellectual vision there is that which heals and soothes us. To learn to see things without distortion is to prepare one's self for taking the world in the right mood, and in this we find strength and consolation. [Illustration] V _What Conscious Life is made of_ To return to our question, how could we have good without evil, we must pause for a moment and inquire into the constitution of the human mind. What we call the soul, the mind, the conscious self, is something strange and wonderful. In our ordinary efforts to conceive it, invisible and impalpable as it is, we are apt to try so strenuously to divorce it from the notion of substance that it seems ethereal, unreal, ghostlike. Yet of all realities the soul is the most solid, sound, and undeniable. Thoughts and feelings are the fundamental facts from which there is no escaping. Our whole universe, from the sands on the seashore to the flaming suns that throng the Milky Way, is built up of sights and sounds, of tastes and odours, of pleasures and pains, of sensations of motion and resistance either felt directly or inferred. This is no ghostly universe, but all intensely real as it exists in that intensest of realities, the human soul! Consciousness, the soul's fundamental fact, is the most fundamental of facts. But a truly marvellous affair is consciousness! The most general truth that we can assert with regard to it is this, that it exists only by virtue of incessant change. A state of consciousness that should continue through an appreciable interval of time without undergoing change would not be a state of consciousness. It would be unconsciousness.