Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/78

 is very strange that Heaven has given us so much latitude in the matter. Presumably we are allowed to err so often in jest in order that it may not occur to us to err of our own free will in earnest. Just as when we learn of a discovery it annoys us not to have made it ourselves, though it required only one more step on our part, so it is even more annoying not to have expressed in words the thousand and one minor thoughts and sentiments (the true backbone of human philosophy) which create astonishment when we find them expressed by others. Men of learning only too often write what everyone else is capable of writing and omit that which would immortalize them. Many of the reflexions which Farmer Hodge makes at the well I have in my time myself made. Should the world still endure an innumerable term of years, the universal religion will be a refined Spinozism. Reason, when left to itself, could not possibly lead to anything else. Undoubtedly a certain truth, and therefore a certain utility, underlies religious hatred. I really wish that it could be discovered. Our philosophers talk of religious hatred as of something that could be reasoned away ; but this it assuredly cannot be. Unquestionably it is one of the cleverest achievements of the human mind to have focussed men’s hopes upon a point of time about which nothing