He laughed with a boyish malice.
"Cosgrave doesn't need a god. He's got me. I'll look after him."
"You think you can? And then we ourselves. We're different, aren't
we? We've got our work. We're going to do big things. For whom?--for
what? For our fellow-creatures? But if we don't care for our
fellow-creatures? And we don't, do we? Not naturally. The
Brotherhood of Man is just dangerous nonsense. Naturally men loathe
one another in the mass. How can we pretend to love some of those
people we see every day in the wards with their terrible faces--their
terrible minds? But the idea of God does somehow translate them--it
gets underneath the ugliness--they do become in some mystic way my
brothers and my sisters."
He found it strangely difficult to answer calmly. It would have been
easier to have bludgeoned her into silence by a shouted "It's all
snivelling, wretched rot!" like an angry schoolboy. He did not know
why he was so angry. Perhaps Ricardo was right. It was something
vital. He could feel the old man's shadow at his side, his hand
plucking his sleeve, urging him on, claiming his loyalty. They were
allies fighting together against a poisonous miasma that sapped men's
brains--their intellectual integrity.
"Piling one fallacy on another isn't argument, Francey. We don't need
to like our fellow-creatures. It's a mistake to care. Emotion upsets
one's judgment. Scientists--the best men in the profession--try to
eliminate personal feeling altogether.
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