Now, no one of any intelligence complains of these others, man’s inferiors, which serve to the adornment of the world ; it would be feeble indeed to complain of animals biting man, as if we were to pass our days asleep. No : the animal, too, exists of necessity, and is serviceable
in many ways, some obvious and many progressively discovered — so that not one lives without profit to itself and even to humanity. It is ridiculous, also, to complain that many of them are dangerous — there are dangerous men abroad as well — and if they distrust us, and in their distrust attack, is that anything to wonder at ?
But : if the evil in men is involuntary, if their own will has not made them what they are, how can we either blame wrong-doers or even reproach their victims with suffering through their own fault ?
If there is a Necessity, bringing about human wickedness either by force of the celestial movement or by a rigorous sequence set up by the First Cause, is not the evil a thing rooted in Nature ? And if thus the Reason- Principle of the universe is the creator of evil, surely all is injustice ?
No : Men are no doubt involuntary sinners in the sense that they do not actually desire to sin ; but this does not alter the fact that wrong- doers, of their own choice, are, themselves, the agents ; it is because they themselves act that the sin is in their own ; if they were not agents they could not sin.
The Necessity (held to underlie human wickedness) is not an outer force (actually compelling the individual), but exists only in the sense of a universal relationship.
Nor is the force of the celestial Movement such as to leave us power- less : if the universe were something outside and apart from us it would stand as its makers willed so that, once the gods had done their part, no man, however impious, could introduce anything contrary to their intention. But, as things are, efficient act does come from men : given the starting Principle, the secondary line, no doubt, is inevitably com- pleted ; but each and every principle contributes towards the sequence. Now Men are Principles, or, at least, they are moved by their characteristic nature towards all that is good, and that nature is a Principle, a freely acting cause.
Iii. 2. 12]
Are we, then, to conclude that particular things are determined by Necessities rooted in Nature and by the sequence of causes, and that everything is as good as anything can be ?
No : the Reason- Principle is the sovereign, making all : it wills things as they are and, in its reasonable act, it produces even what we know as evil : it cannot desire all to be good : an artist would not make an animal all eyes ; and in the same way, the Reason-Principle would not make all divine ; it makes Gods but also celestial spirits, the intermediate order, then men, then the animals ; all is graded succession, and this in no spirit of grudging but in the expression of a Reason teeming with intellectual variety.
We are like people ignorant of painting who complain that the colours are not beautiful ever3rwhere in the picture : but the Artist has laid on the appropriate tint to every spot. Or we are censuring a drama because the persons are not all heroes but include a servant and a rustic and some scurrilous clown ; yet take away the low characters and the power of the drama is gone ; these are part and parcel of it.
Suppose this Universe were the direct creation of the Reason-Prin- ciple appl3dng itself, quite unchanged, to Matter, retaining, that is, the hostiUty to partition which it derives from its Prior, the Intellectual Principle — then, this its product, so produced, would be of supreme and unparalleled excellence. But the Reason-Principle (if it is to be the author of a universe) could not be a thing of entire identity or even of closely compact diversity ; and the mode in which it is here manifested is no matter of censure since its function is to be all things, each single thing in some distinctive way.
But (it will be asked) has it not, besides itself entering Matter, brought other beings down ? Has it not for example brought Souls into Matter and, in adapting them to its creation, twisted them against their own nature and been the ruin of many of them ? And can this be right ?
The answer is that the Souls are, in a fair sense, members of this Reason-Principle and that it has not adapted them to the creation by perverting them, but has set them in the place here to which their quality entitles them.
And we must not despise the familiar observation that there is something more to be considered than the present. There are the periods of the past and, again, those in the future ; and these have everything to do with fixing worth of place.
Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made a slave because he abused his power and because the fall is to his future good. Those that have money will be made poor — and to the good poverty is no hindrance. Those that have unjustly killed, are killed in turn, unjustly as regards the murderer but justly as regards the victim, and those that are to suffer are thrown into the path of those that administer the merited treatment.
It is not an accident that makes a man a slave ; no one is a prisoner by chance ; every bodily outrage has its due cause. The man once did what he now suffers. A man that murders his mother will become a woman and be murdered by a son ; a man that wrongs a woman will become a woman, to be wronged.
Hence arises that awesome word Adrasteia (the Inevadable Retri- bution) ; for in very truth this ordinance is an Adrasteia, Justice itself and a wonderful wisdom.
We cannot but recognise from what we observe in this universe that some such principle of order prevails throughout the entire of existence — the minutest of things a tributary to the vast total ; the marvellous art shown not merely in the mightiest works and sublimest members of the All, but even amid such littleness as one would think Providence must disdain : the varied workmanship of wonder in any and every animal form ; the world of vegetation, too ; the grace of fruits and even of leaves, the lavishness, the delicacy, the diversity of exquisite bloom : and all this not issuing once, and then to die out.
Iii. 2. 14]
but made ever and ever anew as the Transcendent Beings move variously over this earth.
In all the changing, there is no change by chance : there is no taking of new forms but to desirable ends and in ways worthy of Divine Powers. All that is Divine executes the Act of its quality ; its quality is the ex- pression of its essential Being : and this essential Being in the Divine is the Being whose activities produce as one thing the desirable and the just — for if the good and the just are not produced, there, where, then, have they their being ?
The ordinance of the Kosmos, then, is in keeping with the Intel- lectual Principle. True, no reasoning went to its creation, but it so stands that the keenest reasoning must wonder — since no reasoning could be able to make it otherwise — at the spectacle before it, a product which, even in the Kinds of the partial and particular Sphere, displays the Divine Intelligence to a degree in which no arranging by reason could express it. Every one of the ceaselessly recurrent types of being manifests a creating Reason-Principle above all censure. No fault is to be found unless on the assumption that everything ought to come into being with all the perfection of those that have never known such a coming, the Eternals. In that case, things of the Intellectual realm and things of the realm of sense must remain one unbroken identity for ever.
In this demand for more good than exists, there is implied a failure to recognise that the form allotted to each entity is sufficient in itself ; it is like complaining because one kind of animal lacks horns. We ought to understand both that the Reason-Principle must extend to every possible existent and, at the same time, that every greater must include lesser things, that to every whole belong its parts, and that all cannot be equality unless all part is to be absent.
This is why in the Over-World each entity is all, while here, below, the single thing is not all (is not the Universe but a “ Self ”). Thus too, a man, an individual, in so far as he is a part, is not Humanity complete : but wheresoever there is associated with the parts something that is no
part (but a Divine, an Intellectual Being), this makes a whole of that in which it dwells. Man, man as partial thing, cannot be required to have attained to the very summit of goodness : if he had, he would have ceased to be of the partial order. Not that there is any grudging in the whole towards the part that grows in goodness and dignity ; such an increase in value is a gain to the beauty of the whole ; the lesser grows by being made over in the likeness of the greater, by being admitted, as it were, to something of that greatness, by sharing in that rank, and thus even from this place of man, from man’s own self, something gleams forth, as the stars shine in the divine firmament, so that all appears one great and lovely figure — living or wrought in the furnaces of craftsman- ship— with stars radiant not only in the ears and on the brow but on the breasts too, and wherever else they may be displayed in beauty.
These considerations apply very well to things considered as standing alone : but there is a stumbling-block, a new problem, when we think of all these forms, permanent and ceaselessly produced, in mutual relationship.
The animals devour each other : men attack each other : all is war without rest, without truce : this gives new force to the question how Reason can be author of the plan and how all can be declared well done.
This new difficulty is not met by the former answer ; that all stands as well as the nature of things allows ; that the blame for their condition falls on Matter dragging them down ; that, given the plan as we know it, evil cannot be eliminated and should not be ; that the Matter making its presence felt is stiU not supreme but remains an element taken in from outside to contribute to a definite total, or rather to be itself brought to order by Reason.
The Divine Reason is the beginning and the end ; aU that comes into being must be rational and fall at its coming into an ordered scheme reasonable at every point. Where, then, is the necessity of this bandit war of man and beast ?
This devouring of Kind by Kind is necessary as the means to the
Iii. 2. 15]
transmutation of living things which could not keep form for ever even though no other killed them : what grievance is it that when they must go their despatch is so planned as to be serviceable to others ?
Still more, what does it matter when they are devoured only to return in some new form ? It comes to no more than the murder of one of the personages in a play ; the actor alters his make-up and enters in a new role. The actor, of course, was not really killed ; but if dying is but changing a body as the actor changes a costume, or even an exit from the body like the exit of the actor from the boards when he has no more to say or do, what is there so very dreadful in this transformation of living beings one into another ?
Surely it is much better so than if they had never existed : that way would mean the bleak quenching of life, precluded from passing outside itself ; as the plan holds, life is poured copiously throughout a Universe, engendering the universal things and weaving variety into their being, never at rest from producing an endless sequence of come- liness and shapeliness, a living pastime.