The Damned

A novel by Algernon Blackwood in which tells the story of a haunted house.

Towards the end, there is an interesting dialogue on beliefs and thinking. He writes

“What is the world,” she told me, “but thinking and feeling? An individual’s world is entirely what that individual thinks and believes –interpretation. There is no other. And unless he really thinks and really believes, he has no permanent world at all. I grant that few people think, and still fewer believe, and that most take ready-made suits and make them do. Only the strong make their own things; the lesser fry, Mabel among them, are merely swept up into what has been manufactured for them. They get along somehow.

Bill then says

None of us have Truth, my dear Frances

to which she responds

“Precisely,” she answered, “but most of us have beliefs. And what one believes and thinks affects the world at large. Consider the legacy of hatred and cruelty involved in the doctrines men have built into their creeds where the sine qua non of salvation is absolute acceptance of one particular set of views or else perishing everlastingly–for only by repudiating history can they disavow it–

Frances says

“Trying to get out of it,” she admitted, “perhaps they are, but damnation of unbelievers–of most of the world, that is–is their rather favorite idea if you talk with them.”

If the whole book was just these few paragraphs, I would have loved it just as much.