Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/90

54 the problem of the origin of religious: there has always been somebody in whom this process was possible.Let us presume that, previous to this, he had believed in revelations. But one day his own her thoughtsuddenly flashes upon him and the blessedness of his own great hypothesis, encompassing the world andexistence, so overpoweringly fills his mind, that he shrinks from feeling himself to be the originator of such blessedness, and attributes the cause, and again the cause of the cause, of that new thought to his God, whose revelation he conceives it to be. He is troubled by pessimist doubts. How can a human being possibly be the originator of such great happiness? Otherlevers besides are secretly at work: an opinion, for instance, may be ratified before oneself, by being felt as a revelation; its hypothetical nature is removed; it is withdrawn from criticism, nay, even from doubt; it is made holy. Thus we dlebase ourselves to an “organon,"but our thought will at last be triumphant as a divine thought this feeling, that we shall finally prove victorious, gains the ascendency over that feeling of degradation. Another feeling also lurks in the background: if one raises one's productions above oneself and apparently overlooks one's own worth, there yet remains all exultation of paternal love and pride which compensates—and more than compensates—for every-thing