one proposition in ethics, the proposition that knowledge of scientific truth is better than ignorance of it.  The admission of this single truth of value is enough to raise all the time-honoured problems of ethics and theodicy.  If knowledge of truth is better than ignorance of it, the actual present state of the world, in which so much truth is yet to seek, is by no means wholly good, and there really is at least one way in which it is our duty to make it more like what it ought to be.

If then we cannot get rid of the apparent conflict between Is and Ought by saying that Ought is an illusion, can we get rid of it, in the only other possible way, by holding that what ought to be is the lasting and primary reality and that the ‘facts’ which are so far from being what they ought to be are by comparison only half-real, much what shadows are to the solid things which throw them?  This was the doctrine of Plato, who makes Socrates say in the Phaedo that it is the ‘Good’ which holds the Universe together, and that in the end the true reason for each particular arrangement in the world, whether we can see it or not, is that it is ‘best’ that this arrangement, and no other, should exist.  It is also the foundation of Kant’s well-known contention that, however barren speculative theology and psychology may be, the reality of the moral order and the unconditionality of moral obligation compel us to make the existence of God, the immortality of our souls, and the moral government of the world postulates of practical philosophy.  More generally, it is just this conviction that ‘what is’ has its source and explanation in what ‘ought to be’, which is the central thought of all philosophical Theism.  If we can accept such a faith, we shall not, of course, be enabled to eliminate mystery from things.  We shall, for instance, be still quite in the dark about the way in which evil comes to be in a world of God’s making.  We shall neither be able to say how any particular thing comes to be other than it ought to be, nor how in the end good is ‘brought out of evil’.  But if we are to have a right to hold a view of the Platonic or Theistic type, we must be able, not indeed to say how evil comes about or how it is to be finally got rid of, but to say, in a general way, what it is ‘good for’.  Thus, if there are certain goods of the highest value which could not exist at all except on the condition of the existence of less important evils, this consideration will remove, so far as those goods and evils are concerned, the time-honoured puzzle how evil can exist at all if God is.  To take a specific example.  To many of us it appears directly certain that such qualities of character as fortitude, patience, superiority to carnal lusts, magnanimity, are goods of the highest value.  We think also that we see that these qualities are not primitive psychological endowments but require for their development the experience of struggle and