- Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that
- His origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that
- No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that
- All the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that
- The whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins...
all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that
- no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built." - Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship
A strange mystery it is that
Nature,
omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space,
has brought forth at last a child
subject still to her power
but
gifted with sight,
with knowledge of good and evil,
with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother.
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
In "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday" ("Postscript" in his Autobiography), Russell wrote: "I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken".
