Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/39

Rh poorest, a wealth of material and intellectual pleasures, such as no monarch of former times was able to procure. The cause? It is identical with that which flooded the hearts of the later Romans with such utter disgust at the emptiness of life, that they sought refuge in self-destruction to escape from it. It is owing to the opposition between the world as it is, with all its phases of individual, social and civil life, and the way in which we now comprehend the significance of the universe. Every one of our actions contradicts our convictions, flouts them, gives them the lie. An impassible chasm separates that which we know to be truth, and the actual conditions of life under which we are compelled to live and carry on our individual and social existence.

Our view of the world, that accepted consciously or unconsciously by all cultivated minds of the present day, is from the standpoint of natural science. We look upon the universe as a vast aggregation of matter, possessing the attribute of motion which reveals itself to us under the form of various physical laws, some of which we have discovered, defined and proved, while we are as yet only on the track of the rest—these laws we accept as immutable and without possibility of exception. The problem of the beginning and final destiny of things we have given up as impossible to be solved with the means of our organism. As a matter of convenience we have accepted as a provisory conclusion for certain trains of thought, the hypothesis that matter is eternal. The acceptance of this theory, the only purely arbitrary one in our system, serves to explain to us all the various phenomena of nature, while it does not contradict our comprehension of physical laws. It excuses us from accepting any theory in regard to an eternal will or intelligence, or as man has always designated it, God, which