Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/96

90 ourselves sometimes painting the principles represented in their extremest colors. Eating of the tree of knowledge, like all other spiritual habits, is a thing that comes gradually, and becomes a habit only by a slow process. The world at that early age did not change in a day, nor in a year, perhaps not in a hundred years. The serpent's voice, feeble at first, grew strong as time rolled on. Listened to at the beginning but feebly, the attention of the race became more fixed and their inclination to obey more strong as listening became a habit. Constant dallying with the subject on the part of man, gradually made the serpent more bold. The woman—the affection for the selfhood—was first approached. It was only by slow degrees she began to see that this fruit of the tree of knowledge was "good for food," or began to consider sense and science as things in themselves good. Yielding to this, they became also "pleasant to the eyes," in other words, agreeable to the understanding. And finally they were seen by the selfhood to be things "to be desired to make one wise;" that is, that they were really desirable, because they gratified the pride of self-intelligence, and made the man eminently wise in his own eyes.

And thus—so runs the narrative—when the woman saw these things "she took of the fruit