Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/61

 This world of ours will in time attain to such nicety that it will be just as ridiculous to believe in a God as it now is to believe in ghosts. Nothing is more difficult in philosophy than to take up a subject from the very beginning, and yet in considering it to make use of knowledge already acquired: to reflect, for example, on the immortality of the soul without keeping an eye on some particular end or goal. Usually we jump at a conclusion in drawing, say, the sixth inference, and then merely tack the seventh, eighth, ninth, and so forth, on to it. The reason perhaps why our thought and the material substance of us should be two things so difficult to reconcile may be because we are ourselves no more than a thought. The nearer we get to any natural object, the more incomprehensible it becomes. The grain of sand is undoubtedly not what I take it to be. I have just as little conception how a complex being can think as how a simple one can be brought into combination with a complex. Could we submit questions of this sort to analysis, or reduce the matter to some formula, we should see that the two things were one and the same, and that the mystery had only been put further back, not solved. How wide apart in my head are the two sentences, “Twice two are four” and “Henry IV. was murdered by Ravaillac,” I do not know. Nor have I any notion whether each in turn occupies the whole brain; or whether, if they only occupy a small portion of it, the compartments are the same in all of us. It seems probable to me that each thought