“And that mind, though recently formed, is developing hugely in the direction of the good. It may receive set-backs, but even in the hundred years since its birth, look at the beneficence displayed in its working, and look at the effect of that beneficence on the lives of the individual men it has taken into its great keeping.
“Since Man has arisen to take charge of the world, Justice and Mercy have marked his dealings with men. All things have improved, and ferocity and injustice have found themselves under the sway of a cruel tyrant who is turning them into the wilderness to keep company with the tigers and the remnants of a world that was once all ferocity and cruelty.
“Since Man has arisen, he has taken war in his hand; he is weighing it and finding it wanting. He has taken superstition and is pulling its vile wings off. He is taking the unjust magistrate by his shoulders and shewing him the door; and he has put his heel on the tyrant king. He is freeing the individual man from the odious idea that the individual man is made of mud, to be burnt forever in hell if there is a flaw in his making. And he has taught humanity at large that it is an infamous thing to hang a poor devil for the theft of a sheep.
“Man is only a hundred years old, and he has done all that since his birth.
“The world spirit has been only a hundred years on this new path of development. Can you doubt, then, seeing its progression during a billion years, and how it has spread over ever new fields, that it will continue so to progress and so to spread into fields newer still?”
“No. I am a man who is sick of philosophy, at least transcendental philosophy. I want matter under my feet all the time. Philosophers make me giddy, swinging like spiders on threads over abysms of nothing, and weaving words into webs to catch—words which they mistake for thoughts.
“I am sick of religious theories, doctrines and dogmas, and gods. I want Truth that a plain man can understand. I never could understand the Christian creed as distinct from the teachings of Christ, and, what is more, I believe no one else can. Mahommedanism revolts me. Buddhism attracts me, yet I feel it to be as unfeeding to the truth-craving part of my nature as a soap-bubble to a starving man. Materialism that denies a god revolts me.”