What are the conspicuous tragic elements in human nature?
The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an
intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny; the
belief that the order of nature and events is controlled by a law not
adapted to man, nor man to that, but which holds on its way to the
end, serving him if his wishes chance to lie in the same course, --
crushing him if his wishes lie contrary to it, -- and heedless
whether it serves or crushes him. This is the terrible idea that
lies at the foundation of the old Greek tragedy, and makes the
;oEdipus and Antigone and Orestes objects of such hopeless
commiseration. They must perish, and there is no over-god to stop or
to mollify this hideous enginery that grinds and thunders, and takes
them up into its terrific system. The same idea makes the paralyzing
terror with which the East Indian mythology haunts the imagination.
The same thought is the predestination of the Turk. And universally
in uneducated and unreflecting persons, on whom too the religious
sentiment exerts little force, we discover traits of the same
superstition; `if you baulk water, you will be drowned the next
time:' `if you count ten stars, you will fall down dead:' `if you
spill the salt;' `if your fork sticks upright in the floor;' `if you
say the Lord's prayer backwards;' -- and so on, a several penalty,
nowise grounded in the nature of the thing, but on an arbitrary will.
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