THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

i?2
THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
plaining the disaster as a punishment for the sins of the people of Lisbon,
He broke forth in a passionate poem in which he gave vigorous expression
to the old dileir.ma: Either God can prevent evil and he will not; or
he wishes to prevent it and he cannot. He was not satisfied with Spinoza's
answer that good and evil are human terms,, inapplicable to the universe,
and that our tragedies are trivial things in the perspective of eternity.
/ am a puny part of the great whole. 22
Yes; but ell animals condemned to live,
All sentient things, born by the same stern law.
Suffer like me, and like me also die.
The culture fastens on his timid prey,
And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs:
All's ic ell, it seerns, for it. But in a while
An &ltt tears the vulture into shreds;
T l i? eagle is transfixed by shafts of man;
The MCE, prone in the dust of battlefields,
Stirling his blood with dying fellow -men,
Beeones in turn the food of ravenous birds.
Thus the m'kole world in every member groans,
All bv?n for torment and for mutual death.
And u'cr this ghastly chaos you would say
The ills of each make up the good of all!
VShat blessedness! And as, with quaking voice,
Mortal and pitiful ye cry, "All's well"
The tinners? belies you, and your heart
Refutes a hundred times your mind's conceit. . . .
What is the lerdict of the vastest mind?
Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.
Man is a stranger to his own research;
He kno-^s not whence he comes, nor whither goes.
Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate;
But thinking atoms, it'hose far-seeing eyes,
Guided by thoughts, have measured the faint stars.
Our being mingles with the infinite;
Ourselves we never see, or come to know.
This world, this theatre of pride and wrong,
Swarms with sick fools who talk of happiness. . . .
Once did I sing, in less lugubrious tone,
The sunny ways of pleasure's general rule;
The times have changed^ and f taught by growing age>
And sharing of the frailty of mankind,
Seeking a light amid the deepening gloom,
I can but suffer, and will not repine. 5*
^Selected Works of Voltaire; London, 191 1 ; pp, 3-5.