The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

‘haunted by ghosts from a dead world and not yet
at home in its own, its predicament is not unlike the
predicament of the adolescent who has not yet
learned to orient himself without reference to the
mythology amid which his childhood was passed.’
This statement is entirely correct as applied to a
certain section of intellectuals, those, namely, who,
having had a literary education, can know nothing
of the modern world, and having throughout their
youth been taught to base belief upon emotion,
cannot divest themselves of that infantile desire for
safety and protection which the world of science
cannot gratify. Mr Krutch, like most other literary
men, is obsessed with the idea that science has not
fulfilled its promises. He does not, of course, tell
us what these promises were, but he seems to think
that sixty years ago men like Darwin and Huxley
expected something of science which it has not
given. I think this is an entire delusion; fostered by
those writers and clergymen who do not wish their
specialties to be thought of little value.
That the world contains many pessimists at the