Granting, then, that it is the Great Law of Harmony or Karma which governs the Universe, and which is the Divine principle under one aspect manifested in Nature, then it is easy to understand that any action in violation of Nature’s laws will produce a deviation from the straight line of harmony; consequently the law of harmony will produce an adjusting effect. Now, who is to produce that effect? Nature, or the man who committed the action? Both, or rather, the latter under the influence of the former. The latter most certainly, unless man is to be regarded simply as a blind puppet. It is possible to compare the situation to that of a man whose progress is contingent upon an exact balance being preserved on a pair of scales in front of him. If his actions disturb the balance of those scales and add weight to one side or the other, it is necessary immediately to add a counter-balancing weight on the opposite side and so restore the balance or harmony. (Of course this is a physical illustration, and can hardly be carried very far on the moral plane.) That is to say that the one Divine principle is divided by man’s actions into two opposing forces of good and evil, and man’s progress depends on the exertion of his will to preserve harmony and prevent deviation to one side or the other. Evil only exists in contradistinction to good, and the preservation of such harmony as we have and the advance towards Universal Harmony—the abstract divinity—is what all right-minded persons theoretically aspire to. It has been thought that, in consequence of the attention paid to the classics in education, the word Nemesis would replace Karma with advantage. So perhaps it might have done, had the earliest traditions of Greek mythology been preserved. But the fatal tendency towards anthropomorphism set in very strongly even in the palmy days of Greece, and in consequence Nemesis only pourtrayed the personification of a human passion. Originally the balancing power, independent of Zeus and all the Olympian gods, who carried out her decrees, Nemesis became simply the avenging deity; so much was this the case that in a general sense she might have been called the tutelary deity of those envious of their neighbour’s happiness. Between these points Nemesis appears as the personification of the moral reverence for law, of the natural fear of committing a wrong action, and hence the personification of conscience. It was after this period that Nemesis was said to direct human affairs, with a view to restore the balance between happiness and unhappiness. But, in earlier times, the idea of Nemesis was divided into those of _Nemesis_ and _Adrasteia_ (or what Orientalists would call good and evil Karma), for even then the idea of evil was beginning to be attached to Nemesis.