Chapter 68

If you really believe the consciousness of man is not an accidental product of nature, then you should feel a sense of awe and hold its importance in high regard. If you are prepared to genuinely believe that morality is not a mere illusion of rules passed down and borrowed from other minds; but rather that which is determinative and consequently able to point you to a Higher Power outside of yourself, then you are ready to make true, decisive intellectual progress. After all our tedious clearing out of the way competing theories against transcendent reality, if we are to avoid an outright metaphysical pestilence, we need to do a little more thinking. But for now, let’s move on…

I would like to now propose some new philosophical reflections which, as I have said from the outset that, from any strict theoretical point of view, may contain mysterious or unanswerable questions that face all of us. Have you ever chosen the weaker of two desires? Every new moment in life seems to bring necessities which must be satisfied at once. A want or a need causes a sensation and it is usually followed at once by a blundering effort to satisfy it. This, of course, then produces channels of habit which later on turns into a predisposition.

We are faced with a world in which we are occasionally forced to make judgments of regret. Hardly an hour passes in which we do not wish that something might have been otherwise, but does this necessarily imply that judgments of regret are bad? Calling a thing bad means that the thing ought not to be, and that something else ought to have been in its place. I see no escape whatever from the conclusion that some things, being what they were, could not have been any different in order to get us to the place where we are today.

In our world, no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to a mind possessed with the love of simplicity and unity at any cost, this fact will no doubt remain forever unacceptable. Though the universe contains a principle of evil, without such a principle in it, good could not be appreciated for what it is. A certain amount of evil requires a condition by which a higher form of goodness is brought about.

It is of no small account when good snatches the victory from evil. This is what gives a palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle with so strange and elaborate an excitement. It is breathtaking when we realize that our triumph is only possible when God works through us. And that, more than anything right now, makes me feel special.