Innumerable molecular aggregates were produced at random in the probiotic soup and, by prolonged trial and error, evolved to form the basis for life. People have at all times set the greatest value on ethics, as though they expected that it in particular would produce especially important results. And it does in fact deal with a subject which can easily be recognized as the sorest spot in every civilization. If I cannot accept the suggestion and find it in conflict with my inner self, the experience is one of negative empathy or pain. It is a feeling of constraint or compulsion. The reason we have to repent is to be able to forgive ourselves and to be able to get in harmony again with the principles and laws of good living. When we surrender ourselves to harmony and find it in accord with our natural inclinations and needs, we experience a feeling of freedom. Where this freedom is possible, the object is beautiful. Where we are incapable of encountering ourselves in the object, the form is experienced as ugly and the contemplation of it involves an inward sense of compulsion or hindrance. The laws that indicate the conditions under which a definite echo in the mind of the perceiver will occur are objective. The subject must be aesthetically educated to the necessary surrender to aesthetic experience, however. We do not have to repent to earn God’s love, even though some scriptures portray God as being very angry with the sinner. Others portray God as angry with sin, not the sinner. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

Sins do not trouble themselves enough about the fact of the mental constitution of human beings. Sins issue a command and do not ask whether it is possible to obey it. On the contrary, sin assumes that every person’s id is psychologically capable of anything that is required of it, and that the pleasure gained from sinning has unlimited mastery over the human will. To overcome sins of the past and restore free will is to make amends. People know when they have done wrong, but sometimes they are afraid to go to those whom they have wronged. They are too proud to admit their failures. However, when an individual has the courage to show remorse, one will find that a great reconciliation takes place. It is the offended person’s responsibility to react to one’s efforts to be reconciled. And when one cannot compensate a person for a wrong, when it is too late or impossible, then one can bless other people. We are brothers and sisters with the same Eternal Father; we belong to the same human community. Though one cannot repair the damage one may have done to some of God’s children, one has natural faculties or capacities to thin and to reason. We all have a desire for happiness and an aversion to misery, but these inclinations give one no knowledge or truth. However, there are eternal principles of morality, which people may come to know through the use of reason about experience. The past is only significant in terms of what it has made one become. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

We should be aggressive in our desire and effort to do what is right. Many people do wrong because they are fueled by their desires and demands and do not think about the laws of God, nor respect the rights of other human beings. They think they have a right to force themselves, their ways, and their views on to other people, regardless of what the law states or what the person wants. Some people are unprepared to live a righteous life because they do not define themselves, they are not honest about who they are, what they believe, or what values they hold. Particular people do not tell themselves why they believe in their values nor do they understand why they have become a part of them. Perceiving the operations of one’s own minds when one reflects, one is furnished with ideas of perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing and willing. All knowledge about what pain is to one who never felt it, all knowledge about the physics of light and color or sound refers back to what one perceives when one sees and hears it. It is in this sense, then, that people get all their ideas from sensation and reflection. Once the mind is furnished with ideas, it may perform various operations with them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

Principles are not innate, unless ideas be innate. If the ideas which make up the truth that people live by are not based on the doctrines and covenants of God, then it is likely these people do not have righteousness based in their soul. Therefore, they are corrupt and cannot know what it means to be good. “God comes in awesome majesty. The Almighty is beyond our reach and exalted in power; in his justice and great righteousness, he does not oppress,” reports Job 37.23. We must fall back upon the omnipotence and wisdom of God and the fact that our knowledge is suited to our purpose. Power is a necessary idea of reason, grounded in certain other experiences. Power is both passive and active. Whether or not matter has any active power, we have our idea of active power from the operation of the mind itself. We find it by direct observation that we have the power to begin, continue, or stop certain actions of our minds and motions of our bodies. This power we call will, and the actual exercise of this power, volition, or willing. Action is voluntary or involuntary insofar as it is or is not consequent upon the order or command of the mind. The idea of liberty is the idea of a power in any agent to do or forbear any particular action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferred to the other. Where this power is absent, a person is under necessity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

Freedom is one power of an agent and will is another; one power cannot be the power of another. As far as this power reaches, of acting or not acting, by the determination of one’s own thought preferring either, so far is a person free. Freedom is the absence of constraint. If we distinguish will from desire, we cannot make the mistake of thinking the will is free. What then determines the will with respect to action is some uneasiness in a person that may be called the uneasiness of desire. Good and evil work on the mind but do not determine the will to particular actions. The only thing that can overcome the uneasiness of one desire is the greater uneasiness of another. The removal of uneasiness is the first and necessary step to happiness. Since it is present desire that moves the will to action, good and evil contemplated and known in the mind can move us to action only when that knowledge is accompanied by a greater uneasiness than any other. Since we have many desires and can have knowledge of desired good in the future as well as feared evil, we can suspend the pursuit of any desire until we have judged it. Thus, government of our passions is possible whenever there is greater uneasiness in not doing so. This power is the ground on which we hold people responsible for their actions. Good and bad are nothing but pleasure or pain, present or future. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

Error in choice is usually due to the greater strength of present pleasure or pain in comparison with future pleasure and pain. A true knowledge of what contributes to our happiness can influence a choice only when to deviate from that choice would give greater uneasiness than would any other action. Thus it is possible to change the pleasantness and unpleasantness of various actions by considerations, practice, application, and custom. It would seem that the will is not actually free and thus a person’s actions are determined, but at the same time we can suspend the execution of any desire by our judgment. “Be careful that no one entices you by riches; do not let a large bribe turn you aside. Would your wealth or even all your mighty efforts sustain you so you would not be in distress? Do not long for the night, to drag people away from their homes. Beware of turning to evil, which you seem to prefer to affliction. God is exalted in his power. Who is a teacher like him? Who has prescribed his ways for him, or said to him, ‘You have done wrong?’ Remember to extol his work, which people have praised in song. All humankind has seen it; people gaze on it from afar. How great is God—beyond our understanding! The number of his years is past finding out,” reports Job 36.18-26. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

The mind is furnished with many simple ideas by the senses, and it observes by reflection that certain of them are constantly together. It then presumes that these belong to one thing and for convenience gives them one name. In this way the mind arrives at the complex idea of particular substances, such as gold, which we observe to be yellow and malleable, to dissolve in aqua regia, to melt, and not to be used up in fire. A substance so defined gives us only a nominal definition. Not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result; which therefore we call substance. This idea of a substratum is extremely vague, and it is a something we know not what. Our ideas do not reach, and we cannot have, a knowledge of the real essences of substances. Nonetheless, the real essences do exist, although our knowledge comes short of them. Our knowledge of corporeal substances consists of ideas of the primary and secondary qualities perceived by the senses and of the powers we observe in them to affect or be affected by other things. We have as clear an idea of spirit as of body, but we are not capable of knowing the real essence of either. We know little of how the parts of the body cohere as of how our spirits perceive ideas or move our bodies, since we know noting of either except our simple ideas of them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

If God wished, as far as we know, he could add to matter the power to think, just as easily as he could add to matter a separate substance with the power to think. Even our idea of God is based on simple ideas that are enlarged with the idea of infinity. God’s infinite essence is unknown to us. We can only know that he exists. “Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have known these things; but God has, by mouth of his holy Angel, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself,” reports Alma 36.6. Sometimes when a person asks whether life has any meaning, what he or she wants to know is whether there is a superhuman intelligence that fashioned human beings along with other objects in the World to serve some end—whether their role is perhaps analogous to the part of an instrument (or player) in a symphony. People who ask whether history has a meaning often use the word in the same sense. When Macbeth exclaimed that, “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he was answering this cosmic question in the negative. His point evidently was not that human life is part of a scheme designed by a superhuman idiot, but that it is not part of any design. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

We find ourselves in a dreadful situation in which there is scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance, in a cosmic sense. On the other hand, when we ask whether a particular person’s life has or had any meaning, we are usually considered not with cosmic issues but with the question whether certain purposes are to be fond in one’s life. Thus, most of us would say that without hesitation that a person’s life had meaning if we knew that one devoted oneself to a cause (such as the spread of Christianity or capitalism, or the reform of mental institutions), or we would at least be ready to say that it acquired meaning once one became sufficiently attached to one’s cause. Whether we approve of what they did or not, most of us would be ready to admit—to take some random examples—that Aaliyah, Dorothea Dix, Pasteur, Lenin, Margaret Sanger, Th Empress Dowager, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Moctezuma Ilhyicamina, Prince Shotoku, Tupac Shakur, William Wirt Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, and Boy Hilton led meaningful lives. We seem to mean two things in characterizing such lives as meaningful: we asset, first, that the life in question has some dominant, over-all goal or goals which gave direction to a great many of the individual’s actions and, second, that these actions and possibly others not immediately related to overriding goals or that would have not been present if there had been no goal in their lives. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

Let us assume that meetings between God and certain human beings do take place; let us also grant that activities commanded by God in these meetings acquire meaning by being or becoming means to the end of pleasing or obeying God. Granting all this, it does not follow that obedience of God is the only possible unifying goal. There have been devout people who were also attached to the advance of science, to the practice of medicine, or to social reform and who regarded these ends as worthy pursuing independently of any divine commandments. Occasionally it was suggested that humans were derived from special seeds or spores of life which always existed. It is well-known that the intense cold, ultraviolet radiation, and cosmic rays in outer space constitute a threat to all life. However, people still believe these germs of life came to Earth from outer space. These hypothetical germs (biospores, cosmozoa, astroplankton, panspermia) are assumed to have been carried either by meteorites or by bits of cosmic dust propelled by radiation pressure, light quanta, or other media. And we are virtually certain that the Earth has been able to support life for not more than the past three billion years. The Earth’s early atmosphere contained almost no oxygen, and there as no upper ozone layer to act as a shield against ultraviolet radiation. Hence, intense radiation reached the surface of the Earth, on which seas or pools of probiotic soup, rich in chemical elements, existed.  #RandolphHaris 10 of 11

Inorganic photochemical and other reactions were set up, as a result of which organic compounds, including amino acids, were formed. Once they appeared on a sufficient scale, chemical selection would set in, because of differential utilization of available energy. Over a prolonged period, biochemical complexity and efficiency would build up in a small number of surviving systems, the immediate precursors (so-called eobionts) of living things. When there were systems that exhibited metabolism and the capacity of self-reproduction, living things themselves appeared. At this stage morphological evolution began to supersede chemical evolution. The altered physical conditions on the planet, including the presence of an oxygenic atmosphere, no longer allowed organic compounds to be formed by purely inorganic synthesis. Some scientists have contended that the origin of life can only be explained by postulating the action of a supernatural creator, or God. A living thing possess a series of attributes which sever it from the inorganic by a chasm across which there is no bridge. Hence, to account for life we are compelled to admit that at some definite point in past time it was placed upon the planet by the operation of an extramundane cause. That cause must have been living, intelligent, personal. However, this can only have been God. Life may well exist at many stations in the cosmos and not just on Earth. #RandolphHarris 11 or 11