Natural evil

“ And let me tell you this: our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness if we encountered it.'
'But shouldn't we experience a certain horror—a terror such as you hinted we would experience if a rose tree sang—in the mere presence of an evil man?'
'We should if we were natural: children and women feel this horror you speak of, even animals experience it. ”

“ The spirits of evil in whom they believed were localized in the objects of nature and to their presence all natural phenomena were due. Nature was therefore lawless and hostile. But these demons have all been cast out by the presence and power of God in nature. ”

“ Animal Criticism.—I fear the animals regard man as a being like themselves, very seriously endangered by a loss of sound animal understanding;—they regard him perhaps as the absurd animal, the laughing animal, the crying animal, the unfortunate animal.
225. The Natural.—"Evil has always had the great effect! And Nature is evil! Let us therefore be natural!"—so reason secretly the great aspirants after effect, who are too often counted among great men. ”

“ The first circumstance which introduces evil, is that contrivance or economy of the animal creation, by which pains, as well as pleasures, are employed to excite all creatures to action, and make them vigilant in the great work of self-preservation. ”

“ Is it possible, do you think, for it to exist, and in the virulent condition we find it, and not poison the blood of our whole community? Moral and spiritual laws are as unvarying in their action, out of natural sight though they be, as physical laws. Evil and good are as positive entities as fire, and destroy or consume as surely. ”

“ In the natural world nothing is positively evil per se. All things are good and useful in their proper places. The ordure from our barns and stables, the filth and refuse of our filthiest cities, the droppings of wild or domestic fowls, and even the dead and decomposing bodies of animals—offensive and hateful as all such things are when out of place, in our parlors or libraries—are excellent in the field or garden ”

“ Now, who will dare assert that man's natural impulse to wreak just vengeance is essentially evil? Nothing in Nature is essentially evil. The methods suggested by passion or an exasperating paralysis of justice may be unlawful, but the impulse that gave rise to the movement is natural and as such is good. ”

“ BOOK I God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another's fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees in his garden. ”

“ It does not mean that there is no mixture of evil in the operations of nature, but only that good decidedly overbalances the evil. And by the operations of nature I mean those processes resulting from natural laws, which are uninfluenced by the perverseness of man. ”

“ In truth, none seem to have any title to assert human nature to be necessarily and universally evil, but those whose own minds afford them one instance of this natural depravity; ”

“ The worst evil which they can conceive of is the natural death of their ruler, whether he succumb to sickness or old age, for in the opinion of his followers such a death would entail the most disastrous consequences on themselves and their possessions; fatal epidemics would sweep away man and beast, the earth would refuse her increase, nay, the very frame of nature itself might be dissolved. ”

“ Besides these, he is insulted by the stings of insects, poisonous bites of serpents, and teased with many other unclean, troublesome, and useless creatures, that seem only to exist to form a shade between good and evil, and to make man comprehend how little respectable his fall has made him. ”

“ The irrational people, instead of amusing themselves with expiations for their pretended crimes, seeking to render themselves acceptable to imaginary powers; should they not rather have sought in a more healthy administration, the true means of avoiding those scourges, to which they were the victims? Natural evils demand natural remedies: ought not experience then long since to have convinced mortals of the inefficacy of supernatural remedies, of expiatory sacrifices, of fastings, of processions, &c. ”

“ Nor, again, do they involve that monstrous paradox of all ascetic systems, that human nature is radically evil and that only that is good in us which contradicts our natural appetites and instincts. Evil and sin are recognized, just as fevers and serpents are recognized ”

“ Here the enlightened and the unenlightened are so strongly persuaded of the influence of supernatural evil agency, that if any one is afflicted with fits, it is affirmed by the lookers on, of whatever degree, that the sick person is possessed by an unclean spirit. ”

“ You produce a bunch of gassy bounders who—since hellishness is everywhere but since they've discarded hell—confuse the goodness of the species with goods, good health, prosperity, long life—things that may be possible devils for the species. They lose sight of the inwardness of the nongood and see evil as a material fact, entirely. ”

“ Grant it; but why should good things in nature be used as types of evil things in the mind? If the thorn and the brier be good and a part of the original and beautiful order of creation, with what propriety can they be taken as emblems of what is evil and disorderly in the mind of man? ”

“ Good and evil nature.—At first men grafted their own personalities on nature, seeing everywhere them-selves and their kin—namely their own evil and capricious minds—hidden, as it were, among the clouds, thunder-storms, wild beasts, trees and herbs: it was at this stage that they invented "evil nature." ”

“ This is the mode in which the human heart has become perverted; here is the genuine source of moral evil; the hot-bed of that epidemical depravity, the cause of that hereditary corruption, the fountain of that inveterate delinquency, which pervaded the earth; rendering the abundance of nature nothing better than a curse; blasting the fairest prospects of humanity; degrading man below the beast of the forest; sinking his intellectual faculties in the most savage barbarity ”

“ For we have had meantime to allow that millennial dreams of a liberation of Nature from the thraldom of so-called physical evil are as fanciful as the legends of this subjection as a consequence of moral evil. ”

“ That the good Creator could not have been the originator of these destructive, evil, and abominable things in nature, such as furious and corpse-eating hyænas, filthy vermin, and devastating locusts, in the animal kingdom, nor of the useless and poisonous things in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms,—may be concluded on the same ground as that He could not have been the author of moral evil,—namely, that it implies a contradiction. ”

“ I well know, there is nothing evil but within us, the rest is either natural or accidental.” ”

“ For example, a species whose members are always in pain will either cease to exist, or lose the delicacy of perception which results in that pain, or develop a finer and more subtle relationship among its bodily parts.
Thus evil promotes its own elimination by destruction, or degradation, or by elevation. ”

“ Organic Evil—Disease.—But there is a more dreadful form of evil than that which results from external physical nature—an evil far more subtle and difficult to understand, and therefore to conquer. I mean368 internal organic evil—disease in its diversified forms and with its attendant weakness and suffering, inscrutable often in its causes, insidious in its approaches, contagious, infectious, spreading from house to house, carrying suffering and death in its course, and leaving sorrow and desolation behind. ”

“ Section XXIII But, neither are the demons evil by nature; for, if they are evil by nature, neither are they from the Good, nor amongst things existing; nor, in fact, did they change from good, being by nature, and always, evil. Then, are they evil to themselves or to others? If to themselves, they also destroy themselves; but if to others, how destroying, or what destroying?----Essence, or power, or energy? If indeed Essence, in the first place, it is not contrary to nature; for they do not destroy things indestructible by nature, but things receptive of destruction. ”

“ I answer, It is cruelty to kill a snake or a toad in cold blood, but the poison of their nature makes it a charity to our neighbours, to destroy those creatures! not for any personal injury received, but for prevention; not for the evil they have done, but the evil they may do! Serpents, toads, vipers, &c., are noxious to the body, and poison the sensitive life: these poison the soul! corrupt our posterity! ensnare our children! destroy the vitals of our happiness, our future felicity! ”

“ Thee knows it is so. Human nature is like the earth: the deeper the plough goes into the soil unploughed before, the more evil substance is turned up—evil that becomes alive as soon as the sun and the air fall upon it. ”

“ Yet, when you breathe the poisoned air, laden with everything noxious to health, and have the physical and moral senses alike met with everything that can disgust and offend, it ceases to be a matter of wonder that the fair tender plant of beautiful childhood refuses to grow in such a vitiated atmosphere. Here all distinctions between good and evil are speedily lost, if they were ever known; and men, women, and children become unnatural in vice, in irreligion, in manners and appearance. ”

“ Thus evil, in fact, is a perversion of the mental faculties—distortion, so to speak, of the spiritual substances and forms, which constitute the mind. These ugly and fierce mental existences flowing forth into nature, and putting on correspondent material forms, presented to view those noxious and hateful things, animal and vegetable, and mineral also, which astonish and shock us, when beheld in the midst of God's beautiful creation. ”

“ Side by side with the evil which this superstition produces, on the one hand by inspiring men with baseless terrors, and on the other by leading them to neglect effectual remedies for real evils, we must recognise the benefit which it incidentally confers on society by causing people to clear away and destroy the refuse of their food and other rubbish, which if suffered to accumulate about their dwellings might, by polluting the atmosphere, prove a real, not an imaginary source of disease. ”

“ In a yet larger and sadder sense, the knowledge of the evil of the world, of the baseness, pollution, cruelty, which have stained the earth from the earliest age till this hour, is truly a knowledge fraught with dread and woe. ”

“ Ordained to go to hell, they sink in the order of being. Indeed, they sink into the hell of (birth in) the brute creation. They become immobile entities, or animals, or beasts of burden; or carnivorous creatures, or snakes, or worms, insects, and birds; or creatures of the oviparous order, or quadrupeds of diverse species; or lunatics, or deaf or dumb human beings, or men that are afflicted by dreadful maladies and regarded as unclean. These men of evil conduct, always exhibiting the indications of their acts, sink in Darkness. Their course (of migrations) is always downwards. ”

“ I carry in my heart countless cities and illimitable deserts. And evil — evil and death — spread over this immensity, cover them all, as night covers the earth. I am, in myself alone, a universe of evil thoughts. ”

“ The cultivation of what in us is lonely and unique creates of necessity a perpetual series of shocks and jars. The unruffled nerves of the lower animals become enviable, and we fall into moods of malicious reaction and vindictive recoil. And yet,—for Nature makes use even of what is named evil to pursue her cherished ends—the very betrayal of our outraged feelings produces no unpleasant effect upon the minds of others. ”

“ Your novels have interested me for this reason: you are aware of the baneful influences which surround us, which so often sway or actuate us. I have followed the working of these agencies even in chemical reactions, in the growth and decay of trees, flowers, minerals. I feel that the processes of physical decomposition, as well as the similar mental and moral processes, are due entirely to them.
"In brief, I have postulated a monistic evil, which is the source of all death, deterioration, imperfection, pain, sorrow, madness and disease. ”

“ But what a strange anomaly it is, when an evil nature can throw off its corroding fetters—its whirlwind passions, debasing influences, and slumber like untainted childhood—that even the most depraved can for a time change the entire current of their lives, and, touched by the leaden wand, become oblivious of their own wickedness. ”

“ They disregard evil thoughts because they are such trifling things—like flies, so easily brushed away; like flies, so light and volatile; like flies, so little. And yet they utterly degrade and corrupt the heart. "The land was corrupted by reason of the swarm of flies." ”

“ No! we. hold the conviction—and it is a view sustained, we think, both by Revelation and reason, and uncontradicted by science—that noxious, destructive, and malignant things in nature, whether in the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdom, were not created in the beginning, but are effects consequent upon, and derived from, the existence of moral evil in man. How,—it will now be asked—could such effects be produced? It is not impossible to see how they might be produced, if we go back to first principles. What in fact Is the material world, but an outbirth from the spiritual world? ”