manifestation of the perfect; just as a man who has an ear for
music realises the perfection of a song, while in fact he is only
listening to a succession of notes. Man has found out the great
paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits;
it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every
moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness;
finitude is not contradictory to infinity: they are but
completeness manifested in parts, infinity revealed within
bounds.

Pain, which is the feeling of our finiteness, is not a fixture in
our life. It is not an end in itself, as joy is. To meet with
it is to know that it has no part in the true permanence of
creation. It is what error is in our intellectual life. To go
through the history of the development of science is to go
through the maze of mistakes it made current at different times.
Yet no one really believes that science is the one perfect mode
of disseminating mistakes. The progressive ascertainment of
truth is the important thing to remember in the history of
science, not its innumerable mistakes. Error, by its nature,
cannot be stationary; it cannot remain with truth; like a tramp,
it must quit its lodging as soon as it fails to pay its score to
the full.

As in intellectual error, so in evil of any other form, its
essence is impermanence, for it cannot accord with the whole.
Every moment it is being corrected by the totality of things and
keeps changing its aspect. We exaggerate its importance by
imagining it as a standstill. Could we collect the statistics of
the immense amount of death and putrefaction happening every