In the very moment that its
impenetrability is grasped the imagination begins attacking it with pale
beams of false light. All religions, I daresay, are thus projected from
the questioning soul of man, and not only all religious, but also all
great agnosticisms. Nietzsche, shrinking from the horror of that abyss
of negation, revived the Pythagorean concept of _der ewigen
Wiederkunft_--a vain and blood-curdling sort of comfort. To it, after a
while, he added explanations almost Christian--a whole repertoire of
whys and wherefores, aims and goals, aspirations and significances. The
late Mark Twain, in an unpublished work, toyed with an equally daring
idea: that men are to some unimaginably vast and incomprehensible Being
what the unicellular organisms of his body are to man, and so on _ad
infinitum_. Dreiser occasionally inclines to much the same hypothesis;
he likens the endless reactions going on in the world we know, the
myriadal creation, collision and destruction of entities, to the slow
accumulation and organization of cells _in utero_.
Pages:
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103