I hope that, in view of all this, you
will not regret my having pressed it upon your attention at such
length.
Let us now say good-by for a while to all this way of thinking,
and turn towards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off
the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally
fated to suffer from its presence. Just as we saw that in
healthy-mindedness there are shallower and profounder levels,
happiness like that of the mere animal, and more regenerate sorts
of happiness, so also are there different levels of the morbid
mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other. There
are people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with THINGS,
a wrong correspondence of one's life with the environment. Such
evil as this is curable, in principle at least, upon the
natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self or the
things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and
all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there are others for
whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer
things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or
vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the
environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self,
can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy.
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