Mankind
[Sigh]

According to Ferdinand Mount, writing in the LRB (20 March 2008) Arthur Balfour, of the famous Declaration, also wrote something called The Foundations of Belief.
He was said to be a cheerful man, much given to golfing in Scotland, but had a touch of the desolate in him.
Balfour wrote:

Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets ... after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude.

Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and 'immortal deeds,' death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been."

--- Review of Balfour: The Last Grandee
R. J. Q. Adams (John Murray).
In the same article,
the reviewer quotes Anthony Blanche:
"Charm is the great English blight.
It does not exist
outside these damp islands.
It spots and kills anything it touches.
It kills love; it kills art."