Not Mine for Sure (George Santayana) [Dialogues in Limbo]

"Democritus.    Be reassured. I know that Alcibiades is already your friend; and if Dionysius or Aristippus, who are frivolous wits, should mock you in an unmannerly fashion, they shall be severely rebuked and restrained by me. to the physician the diseases which the vulgar call loathsome, and the animals which they call reptiles and worms, are all worthy of attentive study; and even if you seemed a monster to human convention, to the eye of science you would be neither ridiculous nor unexpected.

The Stranger.    No: but I might be commonplace and unimportant, and therefore better left in the shade.

Democritus.   You would not have found your way into this placid heaven if you did not love the light; and if you love the light, why should you fear it?  Let me observe at once, in order to encourage you, that in one respect you are no ordinary person, since you are my disciple. Superstition is as rife in your time as it was in mine. the vapours of vanity exuding from the brain if blown away here must gather there into some new phantom for fools to worship; and it requires courage to stand alone, smiling at those inevitable follies, and recognizing the immense disproportion between nature and man, and her reptilian indifference to her creatures. They are of her own substance, indeed, which must return to her undiminished: and meantime she spawns them without remorse at their hard and ephemeral fortunes. Even her favours are ironical; and if she lend anybody strength, unless it be the strength of reason, it serves only to prolong his agony, and enable him to trample more cruelly and obstinately on all the rest.  The severity of reason in disabusing us of these vain passion shows true kindness to the soul; nor is it a morose severity, but paternal and indulgent towards every amiable pleasure; for nature is nothing but the sum of her creatures, and laughs and rejoices in them mightily when they are beautiful and strong. Of these triumphs of nature in us true philosophy is the greatest, by which she understands herself.  You, in becoming my disciple, have tasted something of that purest joy; and not only have become in that measure excellent and unassailable, but any morbid or rotten parts that may remain in you by accident should be objects of indifference and cold observation to you, as not portions of your free mind; and if by my help you can disown and extirpate them, you will never again have cause to blush or to tremble, I will not say before men, but before the gods and the decrees of fate. Much less you tremble before us here, who are but shades and wraiths of the thinnest atoms. We shall be grateful to you even for your vices; they will have the savour of the living world, which the gods love to inhale; and in you we shall see a specimen of the fauna, curious if not beautiful, that flourishes to-day.

The Stranger.   I am afraid that even in that capacity I am not worth dissecting. i have been a stranger in all my dwelling-places, and I should hardly have strayed into this sanctuary if I had been a man on my own time.

Democritus.   You are mistaken.  Small differences, at close quarters, seem to you great; in reality you are but one leaf in the tree.  That you should turn for comfort to our pallid sun is no wonder: all you souls are in the dark; you have bred a monstrous parasite that envelops you, and cuts off your own sunlight. How astonishing this tree of yours looks at a distance, the giant of the ages, with its crown of unheard-of-tentacles, like streaming grasses, spreading far into the the aether! But on inspection what a flimsy marvel it all is, how sterile and unhappy! These far-reaching organs are but madness; they drop no seeds; they have no proper life; and the sad stump on which they are grafted, your naked human nature, must supply them all with sap, else in one season they would shrivel and drop to pieces, nor would the least plan or the lest love of them subsist anywhere in nature, whence they might be reborn. Meantime the proper fruits and seeds of your species are lost or stunted, and it is doubtful whether mankind, smothered under its inventions and tools, will not dry up at the root and perish with them.

The Stranger.  I do not think so.  The tools and those pale men and nations are the slaves of tools will no doubt disappear in time; such arts have probably been invented and lost many times before.  But there is a lusty core in the human animal that survives all revolutions; and when the conflagration is past, I seem to see the young hunters with their dogs, camping among the ruins. 

Democritus. Human wit is seldom to be trusted in prophecy. The mind thinks in gaudy images and nature moves in dark currents of molecular change, careless whether those images repeat themselves or not like rhymes. What is your present plight? Dispersion and impotence of soul.  Here a vein of true knowledge; there a vestige of prudent morality; perhaps a secret love; idle political principles that alienate you from politics; a few luxurious and vapid arts; and poisoning the rest of your economy, the taint of antique superstition, for which you have no antidote. The wonder is that you exist at all, for life demands some measure of harmony."

...  pages 22-25