Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/227

 monkey, they do not esteem them worthy of further acquaintance. They prefer calmly to toss out of the window the intellectual labour of two thousand years and treat the public to a philosophy concocted out of their own rich mental resources, on the basis of the catechism on the one hand, and on that of crucibles and retorts or the catalogue of monkeys on the other. They ought to be told in plain language that they are ignoramuses, who have much to learn before they can be allowed to have any voice in the matter. Everyone, in fact, who dogmatizes at random, with the naïve realism of a child on such arguments as God, the soul, the world's origin, atoms, &c. &c. &c., as if the Critique of Pure Reason had been written on the moon and no copy had found its way to our planet—is simply one of the vulgar. Send him into the servants' hall, where his wisdom will best find a market.

The other circumstance which calls for a real progress in philosophy, is the steady growth of unbelief in the face of all the hypocritical dissembling and the outward conformity to the Church. This unbelief necessarily and unavoidably goes hand in hand with the growing expansion of empirical and historical knowledge. It threatens to destroy not only the form, but even the spirit of Christianity (a spirit which has a much wider reach than Christianity itself), and to deliver up mankind to moral materialism—a thing even more dangerous than the chemical materialism already mentioned. And nothing plays more into the hands of this unbelief, than the Tartuffianism de rigueur