"I daresay that is the case, and it would account for the fact that the Boches' shells haven't been nearly so devastating lately, because beyond doubt the Boches are a good deal depressed. There is a marked sluggishness stealing into their explosives. If you want to do a good day's work on Thursday, by far the best preparation you can make for it is to have a howling, jolly time on Wednesday evening. Pleasure gives you energy, and pleasure is every bit as real as pain, and cheerfulness as depression. I know you will say that it is the fogs that make people depressed, but it is more likely, as someone suggested, that the depressed people make the fogs. If so, I don't wonder at the impenetrable state of affairs outside."
He pointed at the window, which, as far as purposes of illumination went, was about as useful as the wall. Since dawn no light had broken through that opaque cloud of brown vapour; a moonless night was not darker than this beleaguered noonday. It had penetrated into the house and veiled the corners of the room in obscurity, and filled eyes and nose with smarting ill-smelling stuff.
"Yes, decidedly it's the depressed people who make the fog," said he. "They are the same thing on two different planes, for they both refuse to admit the sunshine."
"But, good heavens, aren't you ever depressed?" I asked.
"Not inside. I don't count surface depression, which can be easily produced by an aching tooth, though, indeed, I haven't got much experience of that. But I am never fundamentally depressed; I never doubt that behind the clouds is the sun still shining, as that odious school-marm Longfellow tells us. Often things are immensely tiresome, but tiresome things, painful things, have no root. They don't penetrate down to the central reality. But all happiness springs from it. Even mere pleasure is as real as pain, as I said just now; but joy, happiness, is infinitely more real than either. But somehow—I don't quite understand this, though I know it's true—somehow happiness casts a shadow, like a tree growing in the sunshine. Thomas à Kempis, as usual, is quite right when he says, 'Without sorrow none liveth in love.' But that sorrow is a thing that passes; it wheels with the sun; it is not steadfast; it is not everlasting. But it's the devil to try to describe that which from its very nature is indescribable. Only there are so many excellent folk who think that the shadow is more real than the object which causes it."
He came and sat on the hearth-rug, where presently he stretched himself at length.
"And yet some of the best people who have ever lived," he said, "have experienced what they call the darkness of the soul. The whole of their belief in God and in love, all that has made them far the happiest creatures on the earth, suddenly leaves them. Their naked souls are left in outer darkness; they are convinced in their own minds—minds, I say—that there is nothing in the world except darkness. And their souls must remain perfectly steadfast, clinging in this freezing blindness to the conviction that it can't be so, that all their senses and their reasoning powers are wrong. Nothing can help them except their own unaided faith, from which all support seems withdrawn. Job had it pretty badly. It must be beastly, for you can't guess at the time what is the matter with you. Your mind simply tells you that it has become a reasoned and convinced atheist. It's a sort of possession; the devil, for some inscrutable reason, is allowed to enter into you, and he's an awful sort of tenant. He's so plausible too, so convincing. He gets hold of your mind and says, 'Just chuck overboard all that you once blindly believed, and now clear-sightedly know to be false. You needn't bother yourself to curse God and die, because there isn't such a thing as God. And instead of dying live and thoroughly enjoy yourself.' That sounds ridiculous to you and me, whose minds the devil doesn't entirely possess, but imagine what it would be if your mind had his spell cast on it, if all you had ever believed drifted away from you, and left you in the outer darkness. It would sound excellent advice then. Your mind would tell you that there was nothing beyond the mere material pleasures of the world. It would seem very foolish not to make the most of them, regardless of everything else, if there was nothing else."
"But all atheists are not unbridled hedonists," said I.
"More fools they. At least, from my point of view, the only possible bridle on one's carnal and material desires is the fact that one is not an atheist. What does the progress of mankind amount to considered by itself? A few scientific inventions, a little less small-pox. Is it for that that unnumbered generations have lived and suffered and enjoyed?"
"But can't atheists believe in and work for the progress of the world?" I asked.