Page:Is Life Worth Living?.djvu/33

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IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?
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us that there is a spirit in things to which we owe allegiance and for whose sake we must keep up the serious mood, and so the inner fever and discord also are kept up–for Nature taken on her visible surface reveals no such spirit, and beyond the facts of Nature we are at the present stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look.

Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that this real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it the inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naïvely and simply taken. There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a “Moral and Intelligent Con-