So it is that comprehensive setting of the universe presents itself to
the modern mind. It is altogether outside good and evil and love and
hate. It is outside God, who is love and goodness. And coming out
of this veiled being, proceeding out of it in a manner altogether
inconceivable, is another lesser being, an impulse thrusting through
matter and clothing itself in continually changing material forms,
the maker of our world, Life, the Will to Be. It comes out of that
inscrutable being as a wave comes rolling to us from beyond the horizon.
It is as it were a great wave rushing through matter and possessed by
a spirit. It is a breeding, fighting thing; it pants through the jungle
track as the tiger and lifts itself towards heaven as the tree; it is
the rabbit bolting for its life and the dove calling to her mate; it
crawls, it flies, it dives, it lusts and devours, it pursues and eats
itself in order to live still more eagerly and hastily; it is every
living thing, of it are our passions and desires and fears. And it
is aware of itself not as a whole, but dispersedly as individual
self-consciousness, starting out dispersedly from every one of the
sentient creatures it has called into being. They look out for their
little moments, red-eyed and fierce, full of greed, full of the passions
of acquisition and assimilation and reproduction, submitting only to
brief fellowships of defence or aggression. They are beings of strain
and conflict and competition. They are living substance still mingled
painfully with the dust. The forms in which this being clothes itself
bear thorns and fangs and claws, are soaked with poison and bright with
threats or allurements, prey slyly or openly on one another, hold their
own for a little while, breed savagely and resentfully, and pass. . . .
This second Being men have called the Life Force, the Will to Live, the
Struggle for Existence. They have figured it too as Mother Nature. We
may speculate whether it is not what the wiser among the Gnostics meant
by the Demiurge, but since the Christians destroyed all the Gnostic
books that must remain a mere curious guess. We may speculate whether
this heat and haste and wrath of life about us is the Dark God of the
Manichees, the evil spirit of the sun worshippers. But in contemporary
thought there is no conviction apparent that this Demiurge is either
good or evil; it is conceived of as both good and evil. If it gives all
the pain and conflict of life, it gives also the joy of the sunshine,
the delight and hope of youth, the pleasures. If it has elaborated a
hundred thousand sorts of parasite, it has also moulded the beautiful
limbs of man and woman; it has shaped the slug and the flower. And
in it, as part of it, taking its rewards, responding to its goads,
struggling against the final abandonment to death, do we all live,
as the beasts live, glad, angry, sorry, revengeful, hopeful, weary,
disgusted, forgetful, lustful, happy, excited, bored, in pain, mood
after mood but always fearing death, with no certainty and no coherence
within us, until we find God. And God comes to us neither out of the
stars nor out of the pride of life, but as a still small voice within.