The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays: 1909Bierce, Ambrose
Philosophy
The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays: 1909
Bierce, Ambrose
Essays
"I don't repudiate the presumptive arguments of school men. I merely
supplement them with something positive. For instance, if you assumed
the existence of God this argument of the scholastics is a good one. God
has implanted in all men the desire of perfect happiness. This desire
can not be satisfied in our lives here. If there were not another life
wherein to satisfy it then God would be a deceiver. _Voila tout_."
There is more: the desire of perfect happiness does not imply
immortality, even if there is a God, for:
( 1 ) God may not have implanted it, but merely suffers it to exist, as
He suffers sin to exist, the desire of wealth, the desire to live longer
than we do in this world. It is not held that God implanted all the
desires of the human heart. Then why hold that He implanted that of
perfect happiness?
(2) Even if He did--even if a divinely implanted desire entail its own
gratification--even if it can not be gratified in this life--that does
not imply immortality. It implies _only_ another life long enough for
its gratification just once. An eternity of gratification is not a
logical inference from it.
(3) Perhaps God _is_ "a deceiver" who knows that He is not? Assumption
of the existence of a God is one thing; assumption of the existence of
a God who is honorable and candid according to our finite conception of
honor and candor is another.
(4) There may be an honorable and candid God. He may have implanted
in us the desire of perfect happiness. It may be--it is--impossible to
gratify that desire in this life. Still, another life is not implied,
for God may not have intended us to draw the inference that He is going
to gratify it. If omniscient and omnipotent, God must be held to have
intended, whatever occurs, but no such God is assumed in M. Flammarion's
illustration, and it may be that God's knowledge and power are limited,
or that one of them is limited.
M. Flammarion is a learned, if somewhat "yellow" astronomer.
He has a tremendous imagination, which naturally is more at home in
the marvelous and catastrophic than in the orderly regions of familiar
phenomena. To him the heavens are an immense pyrotechnicon and he is the
master of the show and sets off the fireworks. But he knows nothing
of logic, which is the science of straight thinking, and his views of
things have therefore no value; they are nebulous.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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