lives
as if its life were immortal; and far more than the brave young man fears
death in his own person, the whole life of the world fears to be exorcised
by self-knowledge, and lost in air. And with good reason: because, whether
we stop to notice this circumstance or not, every fact, every laborious
beloved achievement of man or of nature, has come to exist against
infinite odds. In the dark grab-bag of Being, this chosen fact was
surrounded by innumerable possible variations or contradictions of it; and
each of those possibilities, happening not to be realised here and now,
yet possesses intrinsically exactly the same aptitude or claim to
existence. Nor are these claims and aptitudes merely imaginary and
practically contemptible. The flux of existence is continually repenting
of its choices, and giving everything actual the lie, by continually
substituting something else, no less specific and no less nugatory.
_This_ world, _any_ world, exists only by an unmerited privilege. Its
glory is offensive to the spirit, like the self-sufficiency of some
obstreperous nobody, who happens to have drawn the big prize in a lottery.
"The world", M. Benda writes, "inspires me with a double sentiment. I feel
it to be full of grandeur, because it has succeeded in asserting itself
and coming to exist; and I feel it to be pitiful, when I consider how it
hung on a mere nothing that this particular world should never have
existed." And though this so accidental world, by its manifold beauties
and excitements, may arouse our romantic enthusiasm, it is fundamentally
an _unholy_ world. Its creation, he adds in italics, "_is something which
reason would wish had never taken place_".

For we must not suppose that God, when God is defined as infinite Being,
can be the creator of the world. Such a notion would hopelessly destroy
that coherence in thought to which M. Benda aspires. The infinite cannot
be selective; it cannot possess a particular structure (such, for
instance, as the Trinity) nor a particular quality (such as goodness). It
cannot exert power or give direction. Nothing can be responsible for the
world except the world itself. It has created, or is creating, itself
perpetually by its own arbitrary act, by a groundless self-assertion which
may be called (somewhat metaphorically) will, or even original sin: the
original sin of existence, particularity, selfishness, or separation from
God. Existence, being absolutely contingent and ung