nowhere condemned in Scripture; on the contrary, it is repeatedly stated to be the foundation of all progress. "Wisdom is a Tree of Life to them that lay hold upon her", says the Book of Proverbs; "salvation is of the Jews because we know what we worship", says Jesus; and so on throughout the Bible.

Our Mistake

But what is deadly to the soul of Man is the conception that Evil is a subject of Knowledge as well as Good --- for this reason: that by thinking of Evil as a subject to be studied, we thereby attribute to it a substantive existence of its own; in other words, we look upon it as something having a self-originating power which, as we advance in our studies, we shall find more and more clearly is not the case. And so, by the Law of the creative working of Thought, we bring the Evil into existence. We have not yet penetrated the great secret of the difference between causes and conditions

(as explained in my
Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science).

But this knowledge of our thought-action is not reached in the earlier history of the race or of the individual, for the simple reason that all evolution takes place by Growth; and consequently the history of Adam and Eve in realisation --- that is, the external life of humanity as distinguished from our simultaneous existence on the supreme plane of Spirit ---