e their gratitude for 'their creation,
preservation, and all the blessings of this life.' The blessings!
What are they? Money? Success? Reputation? I don't profess, myself,
to be anything better than a man of the world; but that those things
should be valued as they are by men of the world is a thing that passes
my understanding. 'Well, but,' says the moralist, 'there's always duty
and work.' But what is the value of work if there's nothing worth
working for? 'Ah, but,' says the poet, 'there's beauty and love.' But
the beauty and love he seeks is something he never finds. What he
grasps is the shadow, not the thing. And even the shadow flits past
and eludes him on the stream of time.

"And just there is the final demonstration of the malignity of the
scheme of things. Time itself works against us. The moments that are
evil it eternalizes; the moments that might be good it hurries to
annihilation. All that is most precious is most precarious. Vainly do
we cry to the moment: 'Verweile doch, du bist so schoen!' Only the
heavy hours are heavy-footed. The winged Psyche, even at the moment of
birth, is sick with the pangs of dissolution.

"These, surely, are facts, not imaginations. Why, then, is it that men
refuse to look them in the face? Or, if they do, turn at once away to
construct some other kind of world? For that is the most extraordinary
thing of all, that men invent systems, and that those systems are
optimistic. It is as though they said: 'Things must be good. But as
they obviously are not good, they must really be other than they are.'
And hence these extraordinary doctrines, so pitiful, so pathetic, so
absurd, of the eternal good God who made this bad world, of the
Absolute whose only manifestation is the Relative, of the Real which
has so much less reality than the Phenomenal. Or, if all that be
rejected, we transfer our heaven from eternity to time, and project
into the future the perfection we miss in the present or in the past.
'True,' we say, 'a bad world! but then how good it will be!' And with
that illusion generation after generation take up their burden and
march, because beyond the wilderness there must be a Promised Land into
which some day some creatures unknown will enter. As though the evil
of the past could be redeemed by any achievement of the future, or the
perfection of one make up for the irremediable failure of another!

"Such ideas have only to be stated for their a