/lit/ - Literature

>>18848190
My man Clive is always right. As long as you mix your more "childish" interests with productive, serious work, the latter will give steam to the former.

But all civilisations pass away and, even while they
remain, inflict peculiar sufferings of their own probably
sufficient to outweigh what alleviations they may have
brought to the normal pains of man. That our own civilisation
has done so, no one will dispute; that it will pass
away like all its predecessors is surely probable. Even if it
should not, what then? The race is doomed. Every race
that comes into being in any part of the universe is
doomed; for the universe, they tell us, is running down,
and will sometime be a uniform infinity of homogeneous
matter at a low temperature. All stories will come to
nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a
transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face
of infinite matter. If you ask me to believe that this is the
work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that
all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Either
there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent
to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.’
There was one question which I never dreamed of raising.
I never noticed that the very strength and facility of
the pessimists’ case at once poses us a problem. If the universe
is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did
human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a
wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but
hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black
to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless
work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. The
introductory
3
spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can
never have been the ground of religion: it must always
have been something in spite of which religion, acquired
from a different source, was held.