y higher aspirations, he argues with a
sarcastic smile on his lips, he is ironical with sophisticated
sharpness. Satan has unconsciously gigantic ideas, he is ready to
wrestle with God for the dominion of heaven. Mephistopheles is perfectly
conscious of his littleness as opposed to our better intellectual
nature, and does evil for evil's sake. Satan is sublime through the
grandeur of his primitive elements, pride and ambition. Mephistopheles
is only grave in his pettiness; he does not refuse an orgie with
drunken students, indulges in jokes with monkeys, works miracles in the
witch's kitchen, delights in the witch's "one-time-one;" distributes
little tracts "to stir up the witch's heart with special fire." Satan
has nothing vulgar in him: he is capable of melancholy feelings, he can
be pathetic and eloquent. Mephistopheles laughs at the stupidity of the
world, and at his own. Satan believes in God and in himself, whilst
Mephistopheles is the "Spirit that denies;" he believes neither in God
nor in heaven nor in hell; he does not believe in his own entity--he is
no supernatural, fantastic being, but man incarnate: he is the evil part
of a good whole, which loses its entity when once seen and recognised in
its real nature; for Mephistopheles in reality is our own ignorant,
besotted, animal nature, cultivated and developed at the expense of our
intellectual part.

Luther's devil is the outgrowth of humanity in long-clothes. Man,
ignorant of the forces of the Cosmos, blinded by theological dialectics
and metaphysical subtleties, incapable of understanding the real essence
of our moral and intellectual nature, philosophically untrained to
observe that evil is but a sequence of the disturbed balance between our
double nature--spirit and matter--attributed all mischief in the
intellectual as well as in our social spheres to an absolute powerful
being who continually tormented him.

Milton's Satan is the poetical conception of man developed from an
infant in long-clothes into a boisterous but dreamy youth, ascribing to
every incomprehensible effect an arbitrary, poetical cause. Goethe's
Mephistopheles, lastly is the truthful conception of evil as it really
exists in a thousand forms, evolved from our own misunderstood and
artificially and dogmatically distorted nature.

Goethe in destroying the Devil as such, consigned him to the primeval
myths and legends of ignorance and fear, and has shown us the real
nature of the evil.