For many thousands of years, on these hills and
plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same
air of sensual pleasure.
Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the
mind; they are felt as part of violent emotion; and the mind that
feels them is a different one from that which reasons; it is
thought of a different power and a different person. The first
serious consciousness of Nature's gesture -- her attitude towards
life -- took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of
force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses
collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating
in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding,
crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had
created and labored from eternity to perfect. Society became
fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanical motion; and
its so-called thought merged in the mere sense of life, and
pleasure in the sense. The usual anodynes of social medicine
became evident artifice. Stoicism was perhaps the best; religion
was the most human; but the idea that any personal deity could
find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident,
with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane
temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy,
it made pure atheism a comfort.
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