This chapter, taken from Josiah Royce's Gifford Lectures of 1899, argues that any rational decision as between a pessimistic and an optimistic view of the world, any account of the relations between God and Man, any view of the sense in which the evils and imperfections of the Universe can be comprehended or justified, any account of our ethical consciousness in terms reconcilable with our Idealism must turn in part upon a distinction between the Temporal and the Eternal, and upon an insight into their unity in the midst of their contrast. The problem at issue is one of the most delicate and, at the same time, one of the simplest of the great issues of philosophy. The chapter deals with it at first in a purely theoretical fashion and then proceeds to its practical applications.