Worry: the disease of the age.

  • Saleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams), 1878-1940.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Worry: the disease of the age. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    them falsehoods and be frank—did actually suffice to avert and relieve the worry and fear of which they are the fruit—then, indeed, the utility argument would be applicable. But it is only too easy to demonstrate that these falsehoods follow the custom of false- hoods in that they do more harm than good. Primitive religion is certainly a product of fear and worry, but they are as certainly generated by it. The religion of fear produces fear. Ignorance is not bliss, for ignorance leads to superstition, and superstition breeds more worry and misery and fear than were ever produced merely by man’s foreknowledge of death or his intercourse with nature. The story of Frankenstein is true—the creations of man’s own mind are far more terrible to him than any reality. Sentences may be conceived and words written down and read, but fortunately the imagination is unable to conceive the whole horror and pathos of the unnecessary agony that man-made superstition has wrought in the life of man. The powdered bones of the dead go to constitute the soil upon which the living tread, and as we contemplate the emotions and the deeds of which the life of our ancestors was composed, we feel anew the force of Macbeth’s tragic words : “ To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time ; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.”