We can have no view of the scheme of things or our place in it, because there may be no such scheme. Lovecraft set out a view of things that animates pretty well everything he wrote thereafter: The human mind is an accident in the universe, which is indifferent to the welfare of the species. In this opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu,” first published in the pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales in 1928, H.P. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
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