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you would not do this intentionally if you were bent on going to Benares, but from want of knowledge ; but, in fact, tliis turning aside would be only evil, because it was not in the right di- rection; the wrong-doing would consist in missing the mark, and this would come from the absence of knowledge, or from the absence of that which I have all along argued it requires mind to entertain, and supreme Mind or Deity to support. I cannot therefore see, in your suffering from the want of knowledge, that the whole system should be arraigned as having any sign of positive evil. Again, in any plan so large as to contain many things for many diflferent uses, there must I suppose be the pos- sibility of accident, or, as I said before, of one wave falling on one pebble and another on another according to chance ; and especially if part of the plan imply dependence upon the facul- ties of any living beings, that they will do wliat they are intended to do, particular units amidst the mass may possibly injure themselves by not complying or not attending. I do not suppose, for example, it proves any positive evil in a bath, if a man who is careless gets drowned in it, for it may be his own fault: or it is such an accident as has its possibility implied in the fact of there being water to bathe in. K I was talking to a person less considerate than you, I should be afraid of his ridi- culing these remarks as all very simple ; yet if you please to change the scene from a journey to Benares into any other action of human life, you will find there is hardly any mischance or calamity such as we call evil, but it may be resolved either into shortcoming, or backsliding, or perversion of some good capacity, or, lastly, accident. We may have difficulty in realising any plan ; yet the strain may help us somewhat forward. We may even fall back altogether from the object we aim at, yet the hindrances which thwarted us may have been for broader ends beneficial. We may, again, pervert, or suffer from the per- version of, what in themselves may be capacities of great good ; but of course power in one direction implies power in another, if it is to be in any sense a living one, not to talk here of mental EVIL OF THINGS NEGATIVE — GOOD POSITIVE. 195 choice. Nor lastly could even the most consummate guide or general we can ourselves conceive, exclude the operation of chance among units, if not only the bodies handled were nume- rous, but the manifold bearings and relations of their parts in every possible aspect were innumerable. Hence, whether there appear to be much or little of chance in the world, it seems to me rather a condition of all action, or a necessary accompani- ment of circumstance, than a reason for denying supreme agency. But you are well aware that the more even our knowledge of causes is enlarged, the less and less any effect appears properly chance ; so that perhaps I have allowed too much for it, because our limited minds consider it a necessary accident to essential stability in the recurrence of phenomena on a large scale. You would not yourself expect day and night to have their duration altered because to some particular person's harvest it might be convenient; nor, again, some winter's cold which arrested cholera to be softened for some delicate invalid ; nor similarly, the storm which purifies the elements into health to halt over a crazy fishing-boat. Out of wisdom comes law, and to law belongs either uniformity or something like it, and hence must arise the appearance to us at least of chance. But in all such things as I have mentioned there has been yet no sign of positive evil, or none at least of any which could be charged on the Ruler of the Universe as entering probably into His primary design. Partly the things we call evil are accompanying conditions, and partly the negation or abortion of something which the Divine Wisdom seems bent upon bringing to birth more fully from time to time. You do not blame an architect because the window which is opened for the air may admit the rain ; nor can you accuse him of building your house positively dark, because the shutters may be occasionally for some reason closed against the light ; nor do I know that evil can be better explained than by asking what is darkness? Some may say of a dark closet, there is darkness in it ; but you readily understand that to mean there is a want of light there ; so of many things which happen otherwise 13—2 196 CARNIVOROUS CREATION. than we would wish, it may be said there is a falling short in them of that good which is desirable rather than positive evil. In short, it seems verily to me, as if everything everywhere was blank, imtil those attributes of Intelligence which we have traced to Mind as a creative principle, supply or hold under the elements of good in any of its possible forms ; then, by the wisdom of God good comes about, and evil is the want of something we might wish, or the imperfect realisation of something we might fancy the Supreme Mind to design, rather than anything positive such as could alone bear to be made an argument against a Creator. Very often indeed it means only the necessary condition of circumstance by which all actions as we conceive them must be limited. I do not mean to say such conditions need not be considered by the conceiver of any design, but only to distinguish them from that which seems to be aimed at. " You may here say, that this apology cannot comprehend the destruction of life by living things, which you appeared to regard as a kind of cannibalism. I grant it does not, for such a mode of shortening life in some forms and sustaining it in others, seems to be part of the original plan of the world, being in- wrought (one may say) into the very constitution of nature. But then, will you let me ask, did you expect that insects and beasts should live for ever? Or, is any wrong done them because they receive a gift for a time, and are then expected to restore it? You would hardly expect, I suppose, a perpetual miracle to prolong existence for such creatures beyond the date when the weakness of their fabric, and the whole conditions of its tenure, would make it a burden to them. But probably you object to the mode in which their life is liable to end. Yet as you seem by a kind of dramatic instinct to enjoy what you term the spectacle in nature, I should have expected you to observe that many ends of combination and opposition and mutual stimulus may be gained by the plan we find actually adopted. Perhaps you could not have the strength and activity of the tiger, which, in some of your heroic poems, is made a complimentary epithet of character, CONJECTURES* 197 unless you had also the shrinking speed of the hare and the deer. Perhaps again the passion of fear, though we justly account it despicable when it makes men shrink from their duty, may yet be the instinct out of which the virtue of prudence is trained, and may in many other ways be needed to stimulate the forces of life. It seems to me probable that a system in which fear did not exist as a motive to vigilance or action, might be in many ways less perfect, and in particular less so morally, than we now have. Then again if you made a world, and deter- mined to people it with mortal creatures, I suppose you would have some method of cleansing it from their carcases. For if the bodies of all things that live and die, were to lie rotting around us, I am afraid the fevers and pestilences which would arise might shorten rather the days of the survivors, even if the stench and disease did not render the world iminhabitable. Nor do I think exposing bodies to the Ganges the most prudent or rea- sonable mode of getting rid of them. In what mode then, pray, would you dispose of the bodies of creatures whose kind have not reason enough to bury them ? Fire, you see, would not be self-governing. Nor can I imagine any mode, so well calculated to renew the earth for successive generation, as the provision by which brute creatures act unintentionally as scavengers for the world.