Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/43

Rh, fills us with disgust and contempt of our own conduct and of everything around us. We assume at every opportunity a costume that looks to our own eyes like a fool's jacket but which we wear with apparent satisfaction and a thousand airs and graces; we counterfeit out-ward reverence for certain persons and things, which appear to our innermost hearts, as absurd in the highest degree, and we cling like cowards, to certain conventionalities, whose utter incongruity we feel with every fibre of our being.

This perpetual conflict between the existing conditions of the world and our secret convictions, has a most tragic reaction upon the inner life of the individual. We seem to ourselves like clowns, who set others to laughing by the jokes, which to them are so flat and stale. Ignorance is easily combined with a kind of animal sense of comfort, and we can live happy and contented, if we accept all our surroundings as necessary and right. The Inquisition, in rooting out doubt with the sword and the stake, intended to benefit humanity in its own way, by saving to man his pleasure in existence. But as soon as we recognize the fact that the hitherto cherished institutions have lost their vitality and are all out of date, that they are empty, foolish phantoms, partly scarecrows, partly theatre properties, we experience the horror and longing for escape, the discouragement and disgust, which would fill the mind and heart of a living man locked in a vault with the dead, or of a sane man imprisoned with lunatics, obliged to humor their vagaries, to escape physical violence.

This perpetual conflict between our ideas, and all forms of our civilization, this necessity for carrying on our existence in the midst of institutions which we consider to be lies—these are the causes of our pessimism and