Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else.

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.

With hidden powers of unknown extent apparently at his disposal, Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town.

The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.

All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.