Destruction of living beings by one another.

The destruction of living beings is, among the laws of Nature, one of those that, at first sight, seems least to be reconciled with the goodness of God. One asks why He created in them the necessity of mutually destroying one another, in order to nourish themselves at one another's expense.

For whoever sees only matter and restricts his vision to the present life, this must indeed seem an imperfection in the divine work; hence the conclusion the unbelievers draw, that, since God is not perfect, there is no God. The fact is that, in general, men appraise the perfection of God from the human point of view; measuring His wisdom by the judgment they form of it, they do not think that God could not do a better thing than they themselves would do. Not allowing the short vision they possess to appraise the whole, they do not understand that a real good can proceed from an apparent evil. Only the knowledge of the spiritual principle, considered in its true essence, and that of the great law of unity, which constitutes the harmony of Creation, can give man the key to this mystery and show him the providential wisdom and the harmony, precisely where he sees only an anomaly and a contradiction. With this truth it happens as with an immensity of others; man is not apt to sound certain depths except when his Spirit reaches a sufficient degree of maturity. The true life, both of the animal and of man, is not in the corporeal envelope, just as it is not in the clothing. It is in the intelligent principle that preexists and survives the body. This principle needs the body in order to develop itself through the work it must perform upon brute matter. The body wears out in this work, but the Spirit does not wear away; on the contrary, it comes out of it ever stronger, more lucid, and more apt. What does it matter, then, that the Spirit changes its envelope more or less frequently?! It does not thereby cease to be a Spirit. It is precisely as if a man changed his garments a hundred times a year. He would not thereby cease to be a man. By means of the incessant spectacle of destruction, God teaches men how little importance they should attach to the material envelope and arouses in them the idea of the spiritual life, making them desire it as a compensation.

It will be objected: could God not have reached the same result by other means, without compelling living beings to destroy one another? Very bold is he who would presume to penetrate the designs of God! Since in His work all is wisdom, we must suppose that it will exist no less in one point than in others; if we do not understand it thus, we must attribute it to our lack of advancement. Nevertheless, we must try to seek its reason, taking as our compass this principle: God must be infinitely just and wise. Let us therefore seek, in everything, His justice and His wisdom. A first usefulness presented by such destruction, a usefulness without doubt purely physical, is this: organic bodies are preserved only with the aid of organic matter, matter which alone contains the nutritive elements necessary for their transformation. As instruments of action for the intelligent principle, since bodies need to be constantly renewed, Providence makes them serve for their mutual maintenance. This is why beings nourish themselves on one another. But then, it is the body that nourishes itself on the body, without the Spirit being annihilated or altered. It is merely stripped of its envelope. There are also moral considerations of an elevated order.

Struggle is necessary for the development of the Spirit. It is in struggle that it exercises its faculties. That which attacks in search of food and that which defends itself to preserve its life make use of skill and intelligence, increasing, in consequence, their intellectual forces. One of the two succumbs; but, in reality, what did the stronger or the more skillful take from the weaker? The garment of flesh, nothing more; later, the Spirit, which did not die, will take another. In the inferior beings of Creation, in those that still lack the moral sense, in which intelligence has not yet replaced instinct, struggle can have no motive other than the satisfaction of a material need. Now, one of the most imperious of these needs is that of nourishment. They therefore struggle solely to live, that is, to make or defend a prey, since no higher motive could stimulate them. It is in this first period that the soul elaborates itself and rehearses for life. n When the soul has attained the degree of maturity necessary for its transformation, it receives from God new faculties: free will and the moral sense, in a word the divine spark, which give a new course to its ideas and endow it with new aptitudes and perceptions. But the new moral faculties with which it is endowed develop only gradually, for nothing is abrupt in Nature.

In man, there is a period of transition in which he is barely distinguished from the brute. In the earliest ages, animal instinct dominates and struggle still has as its motive the satisfaction of material needs. Later, animal instinct and the moral sentiment counterbalance one another; man then struggles, no longer to nourish himself, but to satisfy his ambition, his pride, the need he experiences to dominate. For this, he must still destroy. Nevertheless, as the moral sense preponderates, sensibility develops, the need to destroy diminishes, and even ends by disappearing, by becoming odious. Man comes to abhor blood. Nevertheless, struggle is always necessary for the development of the Spirit, for, even reaching that point which seems culminating, it is still far from being perfect. Only at the cost of much activity does it acquire knowledge, experience, and strip itself of the last vestiges of animality. But, on this occasion, the struggle, from the bloody and brutal thing it was, becomes purely intellectual. Man struggles against difficulties, no longer against his fellow men. Note. – As one sees, this explanation is connected to the grave question of the future of animals. We will treat it shortly and in depth, because it seems to us sufficiently elaborated and we believe that one may, from now on, consider it as resolved in principle, by the concordance of the teaching.

[1] Translator's Note: See Genesis, by Allan Kardec, chapter III, items 20 to 24.

[2]

[“measuring His wisdom by the judgment they form of it”. We think that the translation of this last sentence, which in French is: “leur propre jugement est la mesure de sa sagesse” should be: their own judgment is the measure of His wisdom.]

[3] [The principle of reincarnation, which prevails among all living beings, makes manifest the equitable justice of God in Creation, for today's predator will be, or already was, tomorrow's prey, and thus no being will be at a loss in traversing the long evolutionary path, until, at last, it no longer has need to reincarnate.]