They are masks in
the carnival of phenomena, to be observed without conviction, and secretly
dismissed as ironical by those who have laid up their treasure in the
infinite.
This mathematical dissolution of particulars is reinforced by moral
considerations which are more familiar. Existence--any specific fact
asserting itself in any particular place or moment--is inevitably
contingent, arbitrary, gratuitous, and insecure. A sense of insecurity is
likely to be the first wedge by which repentance penetrates into the
animal heart. If a man did not foresee death and fear it, he might never
come at all to the unnatural thought of renouncing life. In fact, he does
not often remember death: yet his whole gay world is secretly afraid of
being found out, of being foiled in the systematic bluff by which it lives
as if its life were immortal; and far more than the brave young man fears
death in his own person, the whole life of the world fears to be exorcised
by self-knowledge, and lost in air. And with good reason: because, whether
we stop to notice this circumstance or not, every fact, every laborious
beloved achievement of man or of nature, has come to exist against
infinite odds. In the dark grab-bag of Being, this chosen fact was
surrounded by innumerable possible variations or contradictions of it; and
each of those possibilities, happening not to be realised here and now,
yet possesses intrinsically exactly the same aptitude or claim to
existence.
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