From the Unconscious to the Conscious 



liberty are inseparable from our ideas of God, He loses 

 all excuse, for the Absolute depends on nothing, and 

 has no joint liability with anything; on the contrary, 

 everything depends on Him and has its reason in Him. 

 Therefore all culpability carries back to Him; His 

 work, by reason of the interdependence of its effects, 

 no longer appears to modern thought as anything but 

 a single act; and that act is amenable to moral 

 judgment, and by the same right we judge any other 

 act it is permissible to judge its author; the condition 

 of the world itself is for us the verdict on God. And 

 as, with the increase in moral perception, the evil and 

 immoral tendencies in the universe shock our sensibilities 

 more and more, it seems more and more clear that to 

 affirm a * Creator ' of the world, is, so to speak, to bring 

 all evil to a focus in Him, to centralise all this immorality 

 in one being, and to justify the paradox that * Evil is 

 God.' To affirm a Creator is, in fact to transfer evil 

 from the world to God as its primary source; it is to 

 absolve Man and the universe, and to lay the onus on 

 its author who in freedom of action created it.' l 



4. NEOMANICHEISM 



A last resource remains in order to absolve not only 

 man and the universe, but God also from responsibility: 

 it is to refuse to see in God an untrammeled Creator, and 

 to attribute the creation of the world to a demigod or an 

 evil daemon ; to see in the universe ' a dual principle, 

 good and evil struggling on an equality and victorious 

 by turns.' 



However complicated, absurd, and foolish, the 

 Manichean concept may appear to the philosophic mind, 

 it is not dead. It would seem to be still current in the 

 mystical sects which have inherited mediaeval teaching. 



1 Guyau : L'Irreliglon de I'Avenir. 

 154 



