"Oh, if you're going to take Howard as an example—" he interrupted.
"—and Rufus Cosgrave," she added.
He laughed with a boyish malice.
"Cosgrave doesn't need a god. He's got me. I'll look after him."
"You think you can? And then we ourselves. We're different, aren't we? We've got our work. We're going to do big things. For whom?—for what? For our fellow-creatures? But if we don't care for our fellow-creatures? And we don't, do we? Not naturally. The Brotherhood of Man is just dangerous nonsense. Naturally men loathe one another in the mass. How can we pretend to love some of those people we see every day in the wards with their terrible faces—their terrible minds? But the idea of God does somehow translate them—it gets underneath the ugliness—they do become in some mystic way my brothers and my sisters."
He found it strangely difficult to answer calmly. It would have been easier to have bludgeoned her into silence by a shouted "It's all snivelling, wretched rot!" like an angry schoolboy. He did not know why he was so angry. Perhaps Ricardo was right. It was something vital. He could feel the old man's shadow at his side, his hand plucking his sleeve, urging him on, claiming his loyalty. They were allies fighting together against a poisonous miasma that sapped men's brains—their intellectual integrity.
"Piling one fallacy on another isn't argument, Francey. We don't need to like our fellow-creatures. It's a mistake to care. Emotion upsets one's judgment. Scientists—the best men in the profession—try to eliminate personal feeling altogether. They're out for knowledge for its own sake. That's good enough for them."
"And the end of that—organized, scientific beastliness, like modern war. Knowledge perverted to every sort of deviltry. Huge swollen heads and miserable withered hearts. One of these days we'll blow ourselves to pieces——"
They were both breathless and more than a little incoherent. They had entered into a playful tussle, and now they were fighting one another with set teeth.
"I don't believe you believe a word you're saying," he stammered. "You know as well as I do that it's only since we began to throw off superstition that we've begun to move. Or perhaps you don't want to move—don't believe in progress."