o all sorts of unclean animals. Goethe, in
unmasking this phantom, introduced him not as something _without_, but
as an element _within_ us. The service rendered to humanity in showing
us the true nature of evil is as grand as the service rendered by Mr.
Darwin in assigning to man his place _in_ nature, and not _above_
nature. It is curious that those who have most of the incorrigible and
immovable animal nature in them should protest with the greatest
vehemence and clamour against this theory. They think by asserting their
superiority, based on a special creation, to become at once special and
superior beings, and prefer this position to trying, through a
progressive development in science and knowledge, in virtue and honesty,
to prove the existence of the higher faculties with which man has been
endowed through his gradual development from the lowest phases of living
creatures to the highest. In assuming the Devil to be something absolute
and positive, and not something relative and negative, man hoped to be
better able to grapple with him. Mephistopheles is nothing personal; he
can, like the Creator himself, be only traced in his works. The Devil
lurks beneath the venerable broadcloth of an intolerant and ignorant
priest; he uses the seducing smiles of a wicked beauty; he stirs the
blood of the covetous and grasping; he strides through the gilded halls
of ambitious emperors and ministers, who go with "light hearts" to kill
thousands of human beings with newly-invented infernal machines; he
works havoc in the brains of the vain. The Devil shuffles the cards for
the gambler, and destroys our peace whether he makes us win or lose on
the turf; he sits joyfully grinning on the tops of bottles and tankards
filled with alcoholic drinks; he entices us on Sundays to shut our
museums and open our gin-palaces; to neglect the education of the
masses; and then prompts us to accuse them with hypocritical
respectability of drunkenness and stupidity. It is the Devil who turns
us into friends of lapdogs and makes us enemies of the homeless. The
Devil is the greatest master in dogmatism; he creates sects who, in the
name of love and humility, foster hatred and pride; the Devil encloses
men in a magic circle on the barren heath of useless speculation; drives
them round and round like blinded horses in a mill, starting from one
point, and after miles and miles of travel and fatigue, leading us to
the point, sadder but not wiser, from whic