that is to say, the recognition of two antagonistic principles,
and so requiring a knowledge of the relations between them to
enable us to continually make the needful adjustments to keep
ourselves going. Now, in appearance this is exceedingly specious.
It looks so entirely reasonable that we do not see its ultimate
destructiveness; and so we are told that Eve ate the fruit
because she "saw that the tree was pleasant to the eyes." But
careful consideration will show us in what the destructive nature
of this principle consists. It is based on the fallacy that good
is limited by evil, and that you cannot receive any good except
through eliminating the corresponding evil by realizing it and
beating it back. In this view life becomes a continual combat
against every imaginable form of evil, and after we have racked
our brains to devise precautions against all possible evil
happenings, there remains the chance, and much more than the
chance, that we have by no means exhausted the category of
negative possibilities, and that others may arise which no amount
of foresight on our part could have imagined. The more we see
into this position the more intolerable it becomes, because from
this stand-point we can never attain any certain basis of action,
and the forces of possible evil multiply as we contemplate them.
To set forth to out-wit all evil by our own knowledge of its
nature is to attempt a task the hopelessness of which becomes
apparent when we see it in its true light.

The mistake is in supposing that Life can be generated in
ourselves by an intellectual process; but, as we have seen in the
preceding lectures, Life is the primary movement of the Spirit,
whether in the cosmos or in the individual. In its proper order
intellectual knowledge is exceedingly important and useful, but