The religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

Whitehead contrasts two ways of appraising existence: a purely secular accounting of pleasures and pains versus a “religious vision” that discloses a larger, developing meaning. By calling the religious vision’s history one of “persistent expansion,” he suggests that humanity’s spiritual imagination and moral reach can grow over time—widening sympathy, deepening ideals, and enlarging what counts as value. Without that horizon, life appears as brief, scattered enjoyments against a dominant background of suffering, reduced to a trivial “bagatelle” of passing sensations. The quote thus frames religion less as dogma than as an interpretive and evaluative framework that makes sustained hope rational.