From the Unconscious to the Conscious 



great cosmic catastrophes, etc. . . . have nothing to do 

 with human liberty. 



Finally, ' original sin ' has been alleged. This dogma 

 does not absolve Providence from responsibility. Guyau 

 has put this in a masterly way in his Irreligion de 



' The great resource of Christianity and of most 

 religions is the idea of a Fall. But this explanation 

 of evil by a primitive failure comes to explaining 

 evil by itself; necessarily there must, before the 

 fall, have been some defect in the supposed freedom 

 of the will or in the circumstances which caused it 

 to weaken; no fault is really primal. A man who 

 is perfect and walks under God's eye does not fall 

 when there are no stones on the road. There can 

 be no sin without temptation, and thus we come back 

 to the idea that God was the first tempter; it is 

 God himself who fails morally in a failure which He 

 Himself has willed. To explain the primal fall 

 the source of all others the sin of Lucifer, theolo- 

 gians have imagined a sin of the intelligence instead 

 of a sin of the flesh; it is by pride that the angels 

 fell from their first estate, and that sin arises in the 

 deepest element of being. But Pride, that sin of 

 the mind, arises in fact from short-sightedness; the 

 highest and most complete knowledge is that which 

 best knows its own limitations. Pride, therefore, 

 involves to restricted knowledge, and the pride of 

 angels can only proceed from God. Evil is desired 

 and wrought only because of reasons for it, but 

 there are no reasons against reason itself. If, 

 according to the apologists of Free Will, human 

 intelligence by its interior pride and perversity can 

 create and arouse motives for ill-doing, it can at 

 least only do that when its knowledge is limited, 

 doubtful, and uncertain. There is hesitation only 



149 M 



