For nature there is no good and evil. The animal which tears and devours its prey is no worse than the swollen stream, that uproots the trees in its course. With consciousness, intention awakes; yet in the brute this is only secondary; the brute distinguishes between pain and pleasure, but not between these as the result of its own action in distinction from that of nature outside itself. Only the self-consciousness of the human being knows good and evil; nature does not know evil, for she does not know the opposition on which it is based. There is wisdom in the story of Genesis, which sees in the beginning of knowledge, the commencement of evil. The awakening of self-feeling is the beginning of a chasm, through the full development of which the individual is at length separated from nature. With self-consciousness and the feeling of boundless isolation that therein comes over him, man begins his ethical development. But the ethical does not begin with the human being known to us by natural history; even yet there are races of man which stand lower than many species of animals; and the early development of moral activity was of necessity much more of the nature of that which we call evil than of that which we call good. The mind is a sort of light; and as warmth is indivisible from the motion which we call light, and the first warmth of the sun could only burn, so the motion which we call mind could at first only have destroyed; self-consciousness, in its earliest stages, can have produced only the intense feelings which lie nearer pain than pleasure. As man came to have intention, and gained new wants in development, he could regard the intentions of his fellow-men only with distrust. Envy, hatred, dislike, were developed long before the family, and, later, the tribe furnished opportunity for love. Self-consciousness could, at first, interpret good and evil only as having reference to self, just as it also conceived its freedom as that of its own caprice. The desire for happiness and endeavor to attain it is the primary incentive to all human undertakings. It is erroneous to suppose that man is nearer to the brutes by this impulse; the animal does not possess it, has only the impulse to self-preservation.