And so with pantheism and atheism; loving everybody is loving nobody, and God everywhere is, practically, God nowhere. I once asked a man if he was a free-thinker; he replied that he did not think he was. And so, I have heard of a man exclaiming “I am an atheist, thank God!” Those who say there is a God are wrong unless they mean at the same time that there is no God, and vice versa. The difference is the same as that between plus nothing and minus nothing, and it is hard to say which we ought to admire and thank most—the first theist or the first atheist. Nevertheless, for many reasons, the plus nothing is to be preferred.
ii
To be poor is to be contemptible, to be very poor is worse still, and so on; but to be actually at the point of death through poverty is to be sublime. So “when weakness is utter, honour ceaseth.” [The Righteous Man, p. 390, post.]
iii
The meeting of extremes is never clearer than in the case of moral and intellectual strength and weakness. We may say with Hesiod “How much the half is greater than the whole!” or with S. Paul “My strength is made perfect in weakness”; they come to much the same thing. We all know strength so strong as to be weaker than weakness and weakness so great as to be stronger than strength.
iv
The Queen travels as the Countess of Balmoral and would probably be very glad, if she could, to travel as plain Mrs. Smith. There is a good deal of the Queen lurking in every Mrs. Smith and, conversely, a good deal of Mrs. Smith lurking in every queen.
Free-Will and Necessity
As I am tidying up, and the following beginning of a paper on the above subject has been littering about my table since December 1889, which is the date on the top of page i, I will shoot it on to this dust-heap and bury it out of my sight. It runs:
The difficulty has arisen from our forgetting that contradiction in terms lies at the foundation of all our thoughts as a condition and sine qua non of our being able to think at all. We imagine that we must either have all free-will and no necessity, or all necessity and no free-will, and, it being obvious that our free-will is often overridden by force of circumstances while the evidence that necessity is overridden by free-will is harder to find (if indeed it can be found, for I have not fully considered the matter), most people who theorise upon this question will deny in theory that there is any free-will at all, though in practice they take care to act as if there was. For if we admit that like causes are followed by like effects (and everything that we do is based upon this hypothesis), it follows that every combination of causes must have some one consequent which can alone follow it and which free-will cannot touch.