https://aeon.co/essays/the-terror-of-reality-was-the-true-horror-for-h-p-lovecraft
[opening paragraph of 'The Call of Chtulhu']
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. 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 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.
As an absolute determinist, Lovecraft's metaphysics describes an infinite universe in eternal predetermined motion: 'each human act,' he wrote, 'can be no less than the inevitable result of every antecedent and circumambient condition in an eternal cosmos.' This left no room for teleology, the notion that the universe is moving towards some pre-ordained goal, or that humans and other species are evolving for some purpose. His determinism was accompanied by a strict materialism that, in line with the views of many of his contemporaries, made the immaterial - the soul and spirit - inconceivable. These views shaped the nightmarish figures in his tales, which are not apparitions or spectres, the 'supernatural beings of conventional horror writing, but materially real horrors that only appear supernatural because of humanity's inability to comprehend their true nature.
Through a belief in the impossible, Lovecraft thought we might 'acquire a certain flush of triumphant emancipation comparable in its comforting power to the opiate dreams of religion'. But that would happen only if we had, he believed, 'the illusory sensation that some law of the ruthless cosmos has been - or could be - invalidated or defeated'. In that sense, the illusory depictions of nature contravened in weird fiction tales provide some respite, even if only aesthetic, from the rigid and unerring clockwork of the mechanistic and predetermined universe.
