Vedanta Philosophy: Philosophy of Good and Evil

This is one of a series of lectures given by Swami Abhedananda. This particular one was delivered under the auspices of The Vedanta Society, at Tuxedo Hall, New York, November 19th, 1899. Whosoever has made a careful study of the phenomena of the universe, has noticed that nature is bisected, as it were, by the inevitable dualism of her opposing forces. The world of phenomena bears testimony to the constant fight of these two sets of contrasting forces, which have a multitude of designations, such as: good and evil, virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, heat and cold, attraction and repulsion, love and hatred, pleasure and pain, health and disease, life and death. On the one side, we see about us the signs of goodness, virtue, knowledge, love, self-sacrifice, health and all that makes life sweet and worth living; on the other side we find the expressions of evil, vice, ignorance, hatred, selfishness, murder, pestilence, disease, plague, earthquake, and all that makes life bitter, unhappy and miserable.