Society Is Like The Air, Necessary To

Memory Itself Is An Internal Rumour; And When To This Hearsay Within The Mind We Add The Falsified Echoes That Reach Us From Others, We Have But A Shifting And Unseizable Basis To Build Upon. The Picture We Frame Of The Past Changes Continually And Grows Every Day Less Similar To The Original Experience Which It Purports To Describe.

The Fates, Like An Absent-minded Printer, Seldom Allow A Single Line To Stand Perfect And Unmarred.

Christianity Persecuted, Tortured, And Burned. Like A Hound It Tracked The Very Scent Of Heresy. It Kindled Wars, And Nursed Furious Hatreds And Ambitions. It Sanctified, Quite Like Mohammedism, Extermination And Tyranny. All This Would Have Been Impossible If, Like Buddhism, It Had Looked Only For Peace And The Liberation Of Souls. It Looked Beyond; It Dreamt Of Infinite Blisses And Crowns It Should Be Crowned With Before An Electrified Universe And An Applauding God... Buddhism Had Tried To Quiet A Sick World With Anesthetics; Christianity Sought To Purge It With Fire.

The Whole Machinery Of Our Intelligence, Our General Ideas And Laws, Fixed And External Objects, Principles, Persons, And Gods, Are So Many Symbolic, Algebraic Expressions. They Stand For Experience; Experience Which We Are Incapable Of Retaining And Surveying In Its Multitudinous Immediacy. We Should Flounder Hopelessly, Like The Animals, Did We Not Keep Ourselves Afloat And Direct Our Course By These Intellectual Devices. Theory Helps Us To Bear Our Ignorance Of Fact.

I Feel So Much The Continual Death Of Everything And Everybody, And Have So Learned To Reconcile Myself To It, That The Final And Official End Loses Most Of Its Impressiveness.