10/08/2024
A Machine for the Making of Gods
Joy indeed would be that simplicity of life diffused throughout the world by an ever spreading mystic intuition; joy, too, that which would automatically follow a vision of the life beyond attained through the furtherance of scientific experiment.
Failing so thorough going a spiritual reform, we must be content with shifts and submit to more and more numerous and vexatious regulations intended to provide a means of circumventing each successive obstacle that our nature sets up against our civilization. But, whether we go bail for small measures or great, a decision is imperative. Mankind lies groaning, half crushed beneath the weight of his own progress. Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs the responsibility for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.
— Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
