The story does not close with the expulsion from Paradise. We are
further told, God said, 'Behold Adam is become as one of us, to
know good and evil.' Knowledge is now spoken of as divine, and not,
as before, as something wrong and forbidden. Such words contain a
confutation of the idle talk that philosophy pertains only to the
finitude of the mind. Philosophy is knowledge, and it is through
knowledge that man first realises his original vocation, to be the
image of God. When the record adds that God drove men out of the Garden
of Eden to prevent their eating of the tree of life, it only means
that on his natural side certainly man is finite and mortal, but in
knowledge infinite.
We all know the theological dogma that man's nature is evil, tainted
with what is called Original Sin. Now while we accept the dogma, we
must give up the setting of incident which represents original sin as
consequent upon an accidental act of the first man. For the very notion
of spirit is enough to show that man is evil by nature, and it is an
error to imagine that he could ever be otherwise. To such extent as man
is and acts like a creature of nature, his whole behaviour is what it
ought not to be. For the spirit it is a duty to be free, and to realise
itself by its own act. Nature is for man only the starting-point which
he has to transform. The theological doctrine of original sin is a
profound truth; but modern enlightenment prefers to believe that man is
naturally good, and that he acts right so long as he continues true to
nature.
The hour when man leaves the path of mere natural being marks the
difference between him, a self-conscious agent, and the natural world.
But this schism, though it forms a necessary element in the very notion
of spirit, is not the final goal of man. It is to this state of inward
breach that the whole finite action of thought and will belongs.
In that finite sphere man pursues ends of his own and draws from
himself the material of his conduct. While he pursues these aims to
the uttermost, while his knowledge and his will seek himself, his own
narrow self apart from the universal, he is evil; and his evil is to be
subjective.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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