This difficulty
faces us in every form of philosophy in which the world appears
as one flawless unit of fact. Such a unit is an INDIVIDUAL, and
in it the worst parts must be as essential as the best, must be
as necessary to make the individual what he is; since if any part
whatever in an individual were to vanish or alter, it would no
longer be THAT individual at all. The philosophy of absolute
idealism, so vigorously represented both in Scotland and America
to-day, has to struggle with this difficulty quite as <130>
much as scholastic theism struggled in its time; and although it
would be premature to say that there is no speculative issue
whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there
is no clear or easy issue, and that the only OBVIOUS escape from
paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic assumption
altogether, and to allow the world to have existed from its
origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate or collection of
higher and lower things and principles, rather than an absolutely
unitary fact. For then evil would not need to be essential; it
might be, and may always have been, an independent portion that
had no rational or absolute right to live with the rest, and
which we might conceivably hope to see got rid of at last.
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