"Sure. They'll even be decent about doomsday. Blame somebody else as they perish, like flies, but perish heroically. A pity."
"You can't depress me!"
I laughed. "Bear in mind that you brought up that word 'depress.' I'm not depressed. I've had to learn how to get along in the certainty that all I was taught to live for is either rubbish or a dream of a future that lies ages beyond the public expectation. People don't know—won't know—can't know, in their present frame of mind. Take your little problem, for example."
Her face changed. Interest replaced antagonism. "So all right. Take my problem. Kick that around awhile!"
"You believe in evolution?"
"A person can still believe in evolution—and in God!"
"Certainly. Something exists in men which they've given the name of all their gods. That's fact. And evolution is a fact, too—a simple reality. A minority of the educated people in our land have accepted the fact that man's body evolved from the bodies of other animals. A still smaller per cent realize that man's mind—personality—spirit—also must have evolved from animals and the animal equivalent: instinct. The question is, How? Most of such people believe that it is the supreme function of the conscious human mind to repress instinct. That's their answer."
"But not yours!"
"I believe it's the function of consciousness to rediscover instinct, understand it, and pursue it—in the ways that it has to go. That it does go—people by the billions to the contrary notwithstanding. So far, people have made only blind efforts in that direction. Unconscious efforts. Their religions—according to the soundest hypothesis I've encountered—are the results of such attempts: expressions of animal instinct, as it appears in men—and in men wholly unaware of what they are expressing."