EPILOGUE
I would not wish man rid of the dragon as death; partly, no doubt, because I know it to be impossible (“This business of death is a plain case and admits no controversy”); partly because death is such a satisfactory thing: it is always something to look forward to. Death is perhaps the oldest of the dragons, long since domesticated and become the friend of man through familiarity.
But there remains that dragon of which we spoke in the beginning, compounded of respectability and bigotry and cant; or rather these things are the evidence that the dragon still exists, for they are all the effectsof terror: terror of truth and knowledge and hard fact, the old terror of man “a stranger and afraid, in a world he never made.” This monster dwells not in the desert places of the earth, but in the hearth and home of every man. Its appetite is enormous and its destructive powers are equalled only by its fertility. Like all the other dragons, it is begotten by dogma out of ignorance.
It would be a mistake to suppose (as some have done) that religion is altogether a bad thing because it has fostered many errors, or altogether a fraud because it is profitable to priests. Every science under the sun has fostered innumerable errors, and every doctor on earth practises pious frauds daily, seldom solely for his private ends. Mankind as a whole has had a hand in these imaginings for half-a-hundred centuries; our certain knowledge ofour surroundings is to this day infinitesimal; and “it is part of our human make-up to bridge the gaps in our experience with rumours, with conjectures, and with soothing traditions.”
Not many months ago there came to these shores a Chinese game, Mah Jongg, so perfected in the course of centuries that not even a Chinaman can cheat at it. Is it too much to hope that, with the general increase of knowledge and the general recognition of the limits to which our knowledge can attain, this old world may yet produce some saint or hero who will finally rescue Andromeda from the dragon?
Transcriber’s Notes:Printer’s, punctuation, and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Printer’s, punctuation, and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.