How we
laugh as they bustle about so eagerly, and struggle with one another
in so tiny a space! And whether here, or in the little span of human
life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect.
It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an
indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of
Time and Space.
ON SUICIDE.
As far as I know, none but the votaries of monotheistic, that is to
say, Jewish religions, look upon suicide as a crime. This is all the
more striking, inasmuch as neither in the Old nor in the New Testament
is there to be found any prohibition or positive disapproval of it;
so that religious teachers are forced to base their condemnation of
suicide on philosophical grounds of their own invention. These are
so very bad that writers of this kind endeavor to make up for the
weakness of their arguments by the strong terms in which they express
their abhorrence of the practice; in other words, they declaim against
it. They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that
only a madman could be guilty of it; and other insipidities of the
same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is
_wrong_; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world
to which every mail has a more unassailable title than to his own life
and person.
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