eat remorseless
mechanism the ethical ideals that governed the conduct of man to man.
Religion, like art, focussed the universe round man, an unimportant
by-product: it was bad science turned into good art. And it was his
own race that had started the delusion! "And Abraham said unto God:
'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'" Formerly the gods
had meant might, but man's soul had come to crave for right. From the
welter of human existence man had abstracted the idea of goodness and
made a god of it, and then foolishly turned round and asked why it
permitted the bad without which the idea of it could never have been
formed. And because God was goodness, therefore He was oneness--he
remembered the acute analysis of Kuenen. No, the moral law was no more
the central secret of the universe than color or music. Religion was
made for man, not man for religion. Even justice was a meaningless
concept in the last analysis: What was, was. The artist's view of
life was the only true one: the artist who believes in everything and
in nothing.

The religions unconsciously distorted everything. Life itself was
simple enough: a biological phenomenon that had its growth, its
maturity, its decay. Death was no mystery, pain no punishment, nor sin
anything but the survival of lower attributes from a prior phase of
evolution, or not infrequently the legitimate protest of the natural
self against artificial social ethics. It was the creeds that tortured
things out of their elemental simplicity. But for him the old craving
persisted. That alone would do. God, God--he was God-intoxicated,
without Spinoza's calm or Spinoza's certainty. Justice, Pity,
Love--something that understood. He knew it was sheer blind heredity
that spoilt his life for him--oh, the irony of it--and that, if he
could forget his sense of futility, he could live beautifully unto
himself. The wheels of chance had ground well for him. But his soul
rejected all the solutions and self-equations of his friends--the
all-sufficiency of science, of art, of pleasure, of the human
spectacle; saw with inexorable insight through the phantasmal
optimisms, refused to blind itself with Platonisms and Hegelisms,
refused the positions of aesthetes and artists and self-satisfied
German savants, equally with the positions of conventional preachers,
demanded justice for the individual down to the sparrow, two of which
were sold in the market-place for a farthing, and a significance