And so on. One has to try to learn to outstare the emptiness and meaninglessness of life, as vividly described in Ecclesiastes as in Shakespeare, which suggests that all this is just imagination. But if it is not imagination, then it ought to be possible to make something of human love too.
What I have done in this book is to synthesise a picture of man and his place in society, limited but adequate in its bare essentials, which escapes the slavery of sexual motivation on the one hand, and of determinism on the other. These things are opposites, although to some they may appear to go hand in hand. To describe man as the slave of sexual motivation is to put him at the mercy of chance encounter, and make him the plaything of random choice. To describe him as the slave of cause and effect is to make him driven by inner compulsion, so that his end is always foreshadowed by the character with which he began, like some Greek hero living out his pre-ordained fate. These conceptions are opposites; not the same. My synthesis, I think, evades the embraces of the one, and the midnight terrors of the other, with fair success. Unless one evades these fantasies, there is little place for good humour; courtesy becomes a mask, and kindness self-interested. In short, the things that make life real are squeezed out of human character. And so far as the description is concerned it all depends on being willing to use the mathematical idea of function to describe human relationships. Some people would say, “How extraordinary that no-one has thought of it before”. The answer is that it only explains the description; it does not explain the ability to see what I wanted to describe, which is harder.
END OF PART II