From E.A. Robinson, 1931:
“If a man is a materialist, or a mechanist, or whatever he likes to call himself, I can see for him no escape from belief in a futilty so prolonged and complicated and diabolical and preposterous as to be worse than absurd: and, as I do not know that such a tragic absurdity is not a fact, I can only know my native inability to believe that it is one.”
There you are, then. Take your pick.
One Comment
Diabolical? Is the good poet claiming that materialists and mechanists have been somehow lulled into this belief by the devil? I suppose that would be another causal influence to factor in . . .
Jeffery Hodges
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