pleteness; it is something other than being a part instead of a whole.[1] But if by the identification of evil with incompleteness one means rather that the sense of evil arises from our taking a part as if it were the whole, from our viewing it in isolation from the whole to which it belongs, this is simply going back to the doctrine that evil is an illusion. And we can reply to it, after the fashion of Dr. McTaggart, by urging that the fact that men view the part in isolation from the whole is itself an evil—is something other than incompleteness, is that which ought not to be.
There is still one more way in which we might try to reconcile the belief in the compensatory power of the later stages of life with the doctrine of the unreality of change. The character of the human individual, it might be urged, is something fixed and definite, which stands as an unchanging reality back of the process of our life in time. This changeless character the true self is manifested in different degrees of adequacy in the various stages of the life, but more fully in the later stages than the earlier, while the final stage is virtually a complete manifestation. The quality of the later stages is the more important because these reveal more fully what the life essentially is. This hypothesis may be regarded as an application to the individual life of Dr. McTaggart's attempt to reconcile the two doctrines of the unreality of time and the reality of progress.[2] We can refute it by the help of considerations that we have already used in attacking a slightly different argument.[3] If the time-process is unreal, all the less and more adequate representations of the changeless reality exist eternally. And the existence of the more adequate can in no sense do away with that of the less
- ↑ This conclusion cannot be avoided, I think, unless we are prepared to say that the concept of value is merely a derivative from the concept of completeness. And this is by no means certain. Certainly the burden of proof rests with those who ask us to believe that value is such a derivative, and no satisfactory proof of this thesis, I think, has ever been given. It is one thing to declare that only the whole is altogether good and that thus any part must be in some degree evil—though even this proposition seems to some of us to lack adequate proof—and it is quite another thing to say that excellence is nothing but completeness and evil nothing but incompleteness.
- ↑ Op. cit.
- ↑ See above, p. 31.
