or less to force their conclusions. And if, leaving psychology, we betake ourselves to abstract metaphysics, I do not see how we are able to draw any conclusions at all about pleasure or pain. Still, in general, though in this matter we have no proof, up to a certain point we possess, I think, a very strong probability. The compatibility of a balance of pain with general peace and rest of mind seems to me so improbable that I am inclined to give it but very little weight. But, this being granted, the question is whether it helps us to go forward. For it will be said, ‘Admit that the Universe is such as not to be able to contradict itself in and for knowledge, yet why, none the less, should it not be loaded with a balance of misery and of practical unrest? Nay Hell itself, when once you have explained Hell, is for the intellect perfect, and itself is the intellect’s Heaven.’ But deferring for a moment the question about explanation, I make this reply. We can directly use the intellect pure, I believe, but indirectly the intellect I am sure is not pure, nor does any mere intellect exist. A merely intellectual harmony is an abstraction, and it is a legitimate abstraction, but if the harmony were merely intellectual it would be nothing at all. And, by an alteration in conditions which are not directly intellectual, you may thus indirectly ruin the intellectual world. Now this I take to be the case with our alleged possible surplus of pain. That surplus must, I consider, indirectly produce, and appear in the intellect as, a self-contradiction.
We can hardly suppose that in the Whole this balance of pain and unrest could go on quite unperceived, shut off from the intellect in some by-world of mere feeling or sensation. And, if it were so, the intellect itself would by this have been made imperfect. For, failing to be all-inclusive, it would have become limited from the outside and so defective, and so by consequence also internally discordant. The pain therefore must be taken to enter into the world of perception and thought; and, if so, we must assume it to show itself in some form of dislike, aversion, longing or regret, or in short as a mode of unsatisfied desire. But unsatisfied desire involves, and it must involve, an idea which at once qualifies a sensation and is discordant with it. The reader will find this explained above in the Note to pp. 96-100, as well as in Mind, No. 49. The apple, for instance, which you want to eat and which you cannot reach, is a presentation together with an ideal adjective logically contrary thereto; and if you could, by a distinction in the subject of the inconsistent adjectives, remove this logical contradiction,[1] the desire so far also would be gone. Now in a total Universe which owns a balance of pain and of unsatisfied desire, I do not see that the contradiction inherent in this unsatisfied desire could possibly
- ↑ See Note A.
