all the universe; and we do not know how much there may be which we cannot observe. And hence everywhere an indefinite supplement from the unknown is possible. Now might there not be conditions, invisible to us, which throughout our experience modify the action of pleasure and pain? In this way what seems to be essential to pain may actually not be so. It may really come from unseen conditions which are but accidental. And so pain, after all, might be compatible with harmony and system. Against this it may be contended that pain itself, on such a hypothesis, would be neutralised, and that its painfulness also would now be gone. Again it may be urged that what is accidental on a certain scale has become essential, essential not less effectively because indirectly. But, though these contentions have force, I do not find them conclusive. The idea of a painful universe, in the end, seems to be neither quite meaningless nor yet visibly self-contradictory. And I am compelled to allow that, speaking strictly, we must call it possible.
But such a possibility, on the other side, possesses almost no value. It of course rests, so far as it goes, on positive knowledge. We know that the world’s character, within certain limits, admits of indefinite supplementation. And the supplementation, here proposed, seems in accordance with this general nature of known reality. That is all it has in its favour, an abstract compliance with a general character of things; and beyond this there seems to be not one shred of particular evidence. But against it there is everything which in particular we know about the subject. And the possibility is thus left with a value too small to be estimated. We can only say that it exists, and that it is hardly worth considering further.
But we have, with this, crossed the line which separates absolute from conditional knowledge.
