What then is the Devil?

The Devil took, as I said in the beginning, his origin in our blinded
senses, in an undue preponderance of that which is material in us over
that which is intellectual. The moment we look the Evil Spirit in the
face, he vanishes as an _absolute_ being and becomes--

A portion of that power
Which wills the bad and works the good at every hour.

After having been exposed during several periods of generations to new
conditions, thus rendering a great amount of variation possible, the
Devil has developed from a monster into a monkey, and from a monkey into
a man endowed with the nature of a monkey and the propensities of a
monster. In the State and in the Church, in Arts and Sciences, the Devil
is the principle of injustice, hypocrisy, ugliness, and ignorance.
Goethe has annihilated the ideal poetical grandeur of Milton's Satan; he
has stripped Luther's Devil of his vulgar realism; Goethe has driven
Satan from an imaginary hell, where he preferred to rule instead of
worshipping and serving in heaven, and with the sponge of common sense
he wiped the horned monster, drawn by the imagination of dogmatists,
from the black board of ignorance. In banishing the Evil Spirit into the
dominion of myths, Goethe showed him in his real nature. Darwin
displaced man from the exalted pedestal of a special creation, and
endeavoured to trace him as the development of cosmical elements. Darwin
enabled us to look upon man as the completing link in the great chain of
the gradual evolution of the life-giving forces of the Universe, and he
rendered thus our position more comprehensible and natural. Goethe, in
proving that the Evil Spirit of ancient and Hebrew-Christian times was a
mere phantom of an ill-regulated fantasy, taught us to look for the real
origin of evil. What was a metaphysical incomprehensibility became an
intelligible reality. The Demon can be seen in "Faust" as in a mirror,
and in glancing into it we behold our Darwinian progenitor, the animal,
face to face. Before the times of Goethe, with very few exceptions, the
Evil Spirit was an entity with whom any one might become familiar--in
fact, the "spiritus familiaris" of old. The Devil spoke, roared,
whispered, could sign contracts. We were able to yield our soul to him;
and he could bodily enter our body. The Devil was a corporeal entity.
The rack, water, and fire were used to expel him from sorcerers and
witches, and to send him int