THE GOOD DEVILS 



it so, — if we choose to revert to the conception of 

 an earlier age, — yes, Nature, as we see her from our 

 limited human point of view, is more or less of the 

 Devil — half god and half demon, we may say; di- 

 vine in some of her manifestations and diabolical in 

 others, divine when she favors us and diabolical 

 when she is against us. But what we do not so read- 

 ily see is that in the long run the Devil is on our 

 side also, that he is the divine wearing a mask. The 

 Devil is the absence of something; he is a negative 

 quantity that stimulates the positive and sets and 

 keeps the currents going. Our breathing is the result 

 of a perpetual tendency to a vacuum in our lungs; 

 the growth of our bodies is the result of a coopera- 

 tion and agreement between the integrating and 

 disintegrating forces. 



We control the Devil and make him our friend 

 when we control most of the forces of nature — the 

 fire, the wind, the waters, electricity, magnetism, 

 gravity, chemical affinity, and so on. If our hold 

 upon them slips, they destroy us. If we are not 

 watchful in our laboratories, the same chemistry 

 that builds up our bodies will blow our bodies to 

 atoms. The tornado, the earthquake, the volcano, 

 the thunderbolt, have all helped to make the earth 

 what we behold it. The floods have helped, the ava- 

 lanches have helped, frost and wind and snow, tropic 

 heat and arctic cold, have helped. These devils are 

 the hod-carriers that serve the divine mason — the 



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