inspiration in it. Even its pessimism as it faces the cooling of the
sun and the return of the ice-caps does not degrade the pessimist: for
example, the Quincy Adamses, with their insistence on modern democratic
degradation as an inevitable result of solar shrinkage, are not
dehumanized as the vivisectionists are. Perhaps nobody is at heart fool
enough to believe that life is at the mercy of temperature: Dante was
not troubled by the objection that Brunetto could not have lived in the
fire nor Ugolino in the ice.

But the physicists found their intellectual vision of the world
incommunicable to those who were not born with it. It came to the public
simply as Materialism; and Materialism lost its peculiar purity and
dignity when it entered into the Darwinian reaction against Bible
fetichism. Between the two of them religion was knocked to pieces; and
where there had been a god, a cause, a faith that the universe was
ordered however inexplicable by us its order might be, and therefore a
sense of moral responsibility as part of that order, there was now an
utter void. Chaos had come again. The first effect was exhilarating:
we had the runaway child's sense of freedom before it gets hungry and
lonely and frightened. In this phase we did not desire our God back
again. We printed the verses in which William Blake, the most religious
of our great poets, called the anthropomorphic idol Old Nobodaddy, and
gibed at him in terms which the printer had to leave us to guess from
his blank spaces. We had heard the parson droning that God is not
mocked; and it was great fun to mock Him to our hearts' content and not
be a penny the worse. It did not occur to us that Old Nobodaddy, instead
of being a ridiculous fiction, might be only an impostor, and that the
exposure of this Koepenik Captain of the heavens, far from proving that
there was no real captain, rather proved the contrary: that, in short,
Nobodaddy could not have impersonated anybody if there had not been