Note 1 — SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAYS. (continued 2)

The above was written before Mr. Mill's essay on Theism was published. Lest, therefore, my refutation may be deemed too curt, I supplement it with Mr. Mill's remarks upon the same subject. "It may still be maintained that the feelings of morality make the existence of God eminently desirable. No doubt they do, and that is the great reason why we find that good men and women cling to the belief, and are pained by its being questioned. But, surely, it is not legitimate to assume that, in the order of the universe, whatever is desirable is true. Optimism, even when a God is already believed in, is a thorny doctrine to maintain, and had to be taken by Leibnitz in the limited sense, that the universe being made by a good being, is the best universe possible, not the best absolutely: that the Divine power, in short, was not equal to making it more free from imperfections than it is. But optimism, prior to belief in a God, and as the ground of that belief, seems one of the oddest of all speculative delusions. Nothing, however, I believe, contributes more to keep up the belief in the general mind of humanity than the feeling of its desirableness, which, when clothed, as it very often is, in the form of an argument, is a naive expression of the tendency of the human mind to believe whatever is agreeable to it. Positive value the argument of course has none." For Mill's remarks on the version of the argument dealt with in § 5, see his "Three Essays," p. 204.