“The patch was cut off from the rest by a wall; within the area thus protected the native vegetation was, as far as possible, extirpated, while a colony of strange plants was imported and set down in its place.  In short, it was made into a garden.  This artificially treated area presents an aspect extraordinarily different from that of so much of the land as still remains in the state of nature outside the wall.  Trees, shrubs and herbs, many of them appertaining to the state of nature in remote parts of the globe, abound and flourish.  Moreover, considerable quantities of vegetables, fruit, and flowers are produced, of kinds which neither now exist nor have ever existed except under conditions such as obtain in the garden and which therefore are as much works of the art of man as the frames and glass-houses in which some of them are raised.  That the ‘state of art’ thus created in the state of nature by man, is sustained by and dependent on him, would at once become apparent if the watchful supervision of the gardener were withdrawn, and the antagonistic influences of the general cosmic process were no longer sedulously warded off, or counteracted.”

He proceeds to describe how, under such circumstances, the artificial barriers would decay, and the delicate inhabitants of the garden would perish under the assaults of animal and vegetable foes.  External forces would reassert themselves and wild nature would resume its sway.  While, in a sense, he had strenuously advocated the unity of all nature, he found in it two rivals:  the artificial products of sentient man and the forces and products of wild nature.  These two he believed to be in inevitable opposition and to represent the good and the evil forces of the world.

In the dim ages of the past, the forces that have gone to the making of man have been part of the cosmic process.  In the endless and wonderful series of kaleidoscopic changes by which, under the operation of natural laws, the body, habits, and the character of man have been elaborated slowly from the natal dust, there is the widest field for the operation of the most acute intelligence to study and trace the stages in the process.  But if intellectual delight in studying the process be left out of account, a serious question at once appears.  In the higher stages of evolution the cosmic forces, ceasing to act merely on insentient matter, have operated on sentient beings, and in so doing have given rise to the mystery of pain and suffering.  When the less fit of chemical combinations or even of the lower forms of life perished in the struggle, we may regard the process with the unemotional eye of pure intelligence.  But “pain, the baleful product of evolution, increases in quantity and in intensity with advancing stages of animal organisation, until it attains its highest level in man.”  And so it comes about that the cosmic process produces evil, sorrow, and suffering.  Consideration of the cosmic process leads up against the mystery of evil.