Page:Is Life Worth Living?.djvu/29

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IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?
21

on. And these two ways of relief are the two stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I made allusion a moment ago, and which what follows will, I trust, make more clear.

III.

Starting then with Nature, we naturally tend, if we have the religious craving, to say with Marcus Aurelius, O Universe, what thou wishest I wish. Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made heaven and earth, and looking on them saw that they were good. Yet, on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every phenomena that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some