The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

By Paul Carus

His world OF ours is a world of opposites. There is light and shade, there is heat and cold, there is good and evil, there is God and the Devil. The dualistic conception of nature has been a neces sary phase in the evolution of human thought. We find the same views of good and evil spirits prevailing among all the peoples of the earth at the very beginning of that stage of their development which, in the phraseology of Tylor, is commonly called Animism. But the principle of unity dominates the development of thought. Man tries to unify his conceptions in a consistent and barmo nions Monism. Accordingly, while the belief in good spirits tended towards the formation Of the doctrine of Monotheism, the belief in evil spirits led naturally to the acceptance of a single supreme evil deity, conceived as embodying all that is bad, destructive, and immoral.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Forgotten Books
• Release date: Nov 6, 2017

Paul Carus

Paul Carus (1852-1919) was a German American author, scholar, and philosopher. Born in Ilsenburg, Germany, he studied at the universities of Strassburg and Tübingen, earning his PhD in 1876. After a stint in the army and as a teacher, Carus left Imperial Germany for the United States, settling in LaSalle, Illinois. There, he married engineer Mary Hegeler, with who he would raise seven children at the Hegeler Carus Mansion. As the managing editor of the Open Court Publishing Company, he wrote and published countless books and articles on history, politics, philosophy, religion, and science. Referring to himself as “an atheist who loved God,” Carus gained a reputation as a leading scholar of interfaith studies, introducing Buddhism to an American audience and promoting the ideals of Spinoza. Throughout his life, he corresponded with Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Booker T. Washington, and countless other leaders and intellectuals. A committed Monist, he rejected the Western concept of dualism, which separated the material and spiritual worlds. In his writing, he sought to propose a middle path between metaphysics and materialism, which led to his dismissal by many of the leading philosophers of his time.