104 ONE THOUSAND FAMOUS THINGS
Pessimism
MAN, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no
longer the final cause of the Universe, the Heaven-descended
heir of ail the ages. His very existence is an accident, Ms story a
brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of
the planets.
Of the combination of causes which first converted a dead organic
compound into the living progenitors of humanity Science indeed as
yet knows nothing. It is enough that from sueh beginnings famine,
disease, arid mutual slaughter, lit nurses of the future lords of creation,
have gradually evolved a race with conscience enough to fed that it is
vile and intelligence enough to know thai it is insignificant.
We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears,
of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty
aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period,
long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared
with the divisions of time open to our in vest lotion, the energies of
our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the
earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for
a moment disturbed its solitude.
Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish,
The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a
brief space broken the contented silence of the Universe will be at
rest. Matter will know itself no longer. Imperishable monuments
and immortal deeds, death itself and love stronger than death, will
be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be
better or be worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and
suffering of the man have striven through countless generations
to effect. Lord Half our on what Science
without Pailh has to teach us
The Infinite and Eternal Energy
BUT one truth must grow ever clearer—the truth that there is an
Inscrutable Existence everywhere manifested, to which we can
neither find nor conceive beginning or end. Amid the mysteries
which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about,
there will remain the one absolute certainty that we are ever in
the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all
things proceed. Herbert Spencer
The Awful Mystery
I THINK it is one of the most awful of mysteries that we have lives
apart from those we love most, that we can go on living after the
connection, which seems to be life itself, is snapped. Certainly
something, some vital part in us, does die then,
Sir J. M. Barrie