discipline in a world where there is real suffering, real disappointment, real temptation.  To us, therefore, there seems to be no contradiction between the existence of God and the presence in a world made by God of the evils needed for the development of these virtues.  And this will include some of the worst of all the evils we know of.  Few things are more ghastly than some of the cruelties which have been practised in the late War and are still being practised in the distracted country of Russia.  Yet we know how revulsion from these horrors has made many a man who seemed to be sunk in sloth or greed or carnality into a Bayard or a Galahad.  It may well be that this moral re-birth would never have been effected if the evils which provoked it had been less monstrous.  Here, then, we seem to discern a principle which may be adequate to explain what all the ills of human life are ‘good for’.

I must not deny that all such explanation, in my judgement, involves the postulate that the ennoblement of character and deepening of insight brought about by suffering are permanent—­in fact, that it requires the postulates of the existence of God and the reality of everlasting life.  Mr. Russell, I imagine, would regard this as a confession that I am sunk in what he airily dismisses as ‘theological superstitions’.  I should reply that the ‘superstition’ is on his side; to dismiss God and the eternal soul, without serious inquiry, as ‘superstitions’ is just the most superficial of all the superstitions.  It is, of course, incumbent on anyone who holds the Platonic view to show that its postulates are not inconsistent with any known truth, and I would add that he ought also to show that there are at any rate known facts which seem to demand just this kind of explanation.  Both these points, as I hold, can be established, but I do not in the least wish to suggest that any philosopher will ever find it an easy task to ’justify the ways of God to man’.  As Timaeus says in Plato, ’to find the father and fashioner of the Universe is not easy’, and I want rather to lay stress on the magnitude of the task than to extenuate it.  But I am concerned to urge that the doctrine which accounts for what is by what ought to be is the only philosophical theory on which it ceases to be an unintelligible mystery that we should have—­as I maintain we certainly have—­the same kind of assurance about values that we have about facts.  The chief complaint I have to make about the mental attitude of Mr. Russell and some of his friends is that, in their zeal for the unification of science, they seem inclined to assume that the larger problem of the co-ordination of Science with Life does not exist, or, at any rate, need not occupy our minds.  This is what I should call mere atheistic superstition.  On this point they might, I believe, learn much which it imports them to know from the works of some of the notable living philosophers of Italy, in particular