Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/469

Rh bring that great truth within the sphere of its practical application, a mythical vehicle for it, as it were a receptacle, without which it would be lost and dissipated. The truth had therefore everywhere to borrow the garb of the fable, and also constantly to endeavour to connect itself with what in each case was historically given, already familiar, and already revered. What sensu proprio remained inaccessible to the great mass of man kind of all ages and lands, with their low tone of mind, their intellectual stupidity and general brutality, had, for practical purposes, to be brought home to them sensu allegorico, in order to become their guiding star. So, then, the religions mentioned above are to be regarded as the sacred vessels in which the great truth, known and expressed for several thousand years, indeed perhaps since the beginning of the human race, which yet in itself, for the great mass of mankind always remains a mystery, is, according to the measure of their powers, made accessible to them, preserved and transmitted through the centuries. Yet, because all that does not through and through consist of the imperishable material of pure truth is subject to destruction, whenever this fate befalls such a vessel, through contact with a heterogeneous age, its sacred content must in some way be saved and preserved for mankind by another. But it is the task of philosophy, since it is one with pure truth, to present that content pure and unmixed, thus merely in abstract conceptions, and consequently without that vehicle, for those who are capable of thinking, who are always an exceedingly small number. It is therefore related to religions as a straight line to several curves running near it: for it expresses sensu proprio, thus reaches directly, what they show in veiled forms and reach by circuitous routes.

If now, in order to illustrate what has just been said by an example, and also to follow a philosophical fashion of my time, I should wish perhaps to attempt to solve the profoundest mystery of Christianity, that of the