Time & Perspective Quote by P. D. James

A bracing image recasts God as a scientist and creation as a trial that might be abandoned. The metaphor is unsettling because it fuses reverence with laboratory pragmatism: hypotheses are tested, results assessed, and at some point one must cut losses. That cold clarity is part of scientific integrity, yet applied to existence itself it becomes a meditation on limits, mercy, and responsibility. To write off an experiment is to accept failure and prevent further harm; to write off a world sounds like cosmic despair.

P. D. James often worked at the fault line between moral gravity and institutional rationality. Her detectives and bureaucrats move through systems that prize procedure and outcomes, sometimes at the cost of persons. The line captures that tension. It strips away sentimental insistence on perseverance and asks when persistence becomes cruelty. If creation is an experiment, then creatures are subjects. What does ethical stewardship look like under that analogy? The reader feels the chill of a calculus that would regard lives as data points, and James wants that discomfort.

Yet the sentence also counsels humility. Scientific progress depends on recognizing when a model is wrong. So do human projects, relationships, even ideals of social reform. Pride clings to a doomed design; wisdom stops. James’s work, notably in The Children of Men with its barren world and the suggestion of divine withdrawal, circles the fear that perseverance alone cannot redeem a fatally flawed course. To say even God might write off an experiment is not doctrine but provocation: do not mistake stubbornness for virtue.

At its core, the line interrogates the ethics of agency. How far may creators, leaders, or investigators go before duty requires relinquishment? What debts remain to the subjects of our trials? James leaves those questions open, but insists on the gravity of answering them before the damage becomes irreparable.