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or irrational, but for better or for worse it is made the basis of action. We may or may not formulate a satisfactory ideal. But be it dogmatic or tentative, we stake our chances upon it. In the absence of determining considerations, it is obviously rational once more to employ the empirical method.* Although we may not see the ultimate goal of the divine activity, we at least perceive certain definite immanent tendencies. Tentatively we may put before the mind the relative ideal which the facts suggest, then test that ideal by the actual results of conduct. For all practical purposes this is enough.

Naturally, people differ very widely in the values which they assign to experience. Suffering means much or little to us according to the degree of actual benefit we have been able to derive from it. It may mean nothing at all, if our theory of life is constituted of borrowed opinions about pain and evil. It would be absurd to insist that suffering has the same value for all. The mere use of the term "progress," as applied to the facts of suffering, is confessedly the acceptance of an optimistic ideal. To indulge in such language is by no means to deny the pain, or to overlook the physiological aspects of it. But when all this has been admitted, when one has

*That is, one should take the clues of individual experience as guides. Life means to each of us what we make out of it.