The human race is like a snake—it sheds. Ever and anon, as the ages bloom, old forms of thought are superseded by intellectual bran-news. Shrines at … - J. Howard Moore

Disease is contagious, and death an unavoidable necessity. Pleasure is often exhausting, and life is everywhere interpolated with pain. Droughts, darknesses, floods, pestilences, storms, and scourges harrow the earth from one pole of it to the other. The earth is, and always has been, peopled by deformities—creatures so defective in their natures that they visit upon each other without hesitancy crimes and barbarities of the most horrible hue. These wretches are compelled to pass their lives in the midst of a universe so mysterious and mighty that the most arrogant of us are helpless in the crash and melee of its tendencies. Yet human contemplators look out over this dark and contentious chaos and declare it to be without spot or blemish.

It has been called a problem of adaptation. There is a subjective and there is an objective, a self and a not-self. And between this self and the not-self there is incessant irrelation. That which is not-self is a process, always changing. It never tires of adopting new attitudes toward the self. The self also is a process, and hence is continually losing joint, or is in continual danger of losing joint, with its environment. Life, therefore, at best, since in the nature of things it is a struggle and a search, is an enterprise with exasperating lack of sunshine.

The earth has been headquarters for bigots from time immemorial. I suspect that if we had information from the stars and were able to judge the spheres of space comparatively, we would find that the earth is head and shoulders above every other world within the sweep of the telescope in the enormous output of its assurance.