Chapter 8.—Evil is Not a Substance, But a Disagreement Hostile to Substance. 11.  For what other answer will you give to the question, What is evil? but either that it is against nature, or that it is hurtful, or that it is corruption, or something similar?  But I have shown that in these replies you make shipwreck of your cause, unless, indeed, you will answer in the childish way in which you generally speak to children, that evil is fire, poison, a wild beast, and so on.  For one of the leaders of this heresy, whose instructions we attended with great familiarity and frequency, used to say with reference to a person who held that evil was not a substance, "I should like to put a scorpion in the man’s hand, and see whether he would not withdraw his hand; and in so doing he would get a proof, not in words but in the thing itself, that evil is a substance, for he would not deny that the animal is a substance."  He said this not in the presence of the person, but to us, when we repeated to him the remark which had troubled us, giving, as I said, a childish answer to children.  For who with the least tincture of learning or science does not see that these things hurt by disagreement with the bodily temperament, while at other times they agree with it, so as not only not to hurt, but to produce the best effects?  For if this poison were evil in itself, the scorpion itself would suffer first and most.  In fact, if the poison were quite taken from the animal, it would die.  So for its body it is evil to lose what it is evil for our body to receive; and it is good for it to have what it is good for us to want.  Is the same thing then both good and evil?  By no means; but evil is what is against nature, for this is evil both to the animal and to us.  This evil is the disagreement, which certainly is not a substance, but hostile to substance.  Whence then is it?  See what it leads to, and you will learn, if any inner light lives in you.  It leads all that it destroys to non-existence.  Now God is the author of existence; and there is no existence which, as far as it is existing, leads to non-existence:  Thus we learn whence disagreement is not; as to whence it is, nothing can be said. 12.  We read in history of a female criminal in Athens, who succeeded in drinking the quantity of poison allotted as a fatal draught for the condemned with little or no injury to her health, by taking it at intervals.  So being condemned, she took the poison in the pre- scribed quantity like the rest, but rendered it powerless by accustoming herself to it, and did not die like the rest.  And as this excited great wonder, she was banished.  If poison is an evil, are we to think that she made it to be no evil to her?  What could be more absurd than this?  But because disagreement is an evil, what she did was to make the poisonous matter agree with her own body by a process of habituation.  For how could she by any 73 amount of cunning have brought it about that disagreement should not hurt her?  Why so?  Because what is truly and properly an evil is hurtful both always and to all.  Oil is beneficial to our bodies, but very much the opposite to many six-footed animals.  And is not hellebore sometimes food, sometimes medicine, and sometimes poison.  Does not every one maintain that salt taken in excess is poisonous?  And yet the benefits to the body from salt are innu- merable and most important.  Sea-water is injurious when drunk by land animals, but it is Evil is Not a Substance, But a Disagreement Hostile to Substance. 122 Evil is Not a Substance, But a Disagreement Hostile to Substance.