More from that Undset essay (“Catholic Propaganda”) from which I was quoting a week or two ago:
Mankind has often explained its tragic isolation from the animal kingdom by conceiving of a supersensual world, peopled with invisible beings, bodiless but yet with personalities of the highest degree. And it is this world which has never left mankind at peace, and men have never been able to leave it in peace.
We could add “and never will”. What strikes me about this is its unassailable truth as a fact of human life. Even if you don’t believe the invisible world is really there, any way of looking at life that fails to recognize that the human mind inevitably works this way is hopelessly inadequate; it isn’t dealing with the facts. Which is part of the reason why the militant atheists (Dawkins et.al.) always sound so desperate and outraged: they can’t believe that human nature won’t conform itself to what seems to them so reasonable.
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