Demopheles.  Really, one would think that you philosophers had truth in a cupboard, and that all you had to do was to go and get it!

Philalethes.  Well, if we haven’t got it, it is chiefly owing to the pressure put upon philosophy by religion at all times and in all places.  People have tried to make the expression and communication of truth, even the contemplation and discovery of it, impossible, by putting children, in their earliest years, into the hands of priests to be manipulated; to have the lines, in which their fundamental thoughts are henceforth to run, laid down with such firmness as, in essential matters, to be fixed and determined for this whole life.  When I take up the writings even of the best intellects of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, (more especially if I have been engaged in Oriental studies), I am sometimes shocked to see how they are paralyzed and hemmed in on all sides by Jewish ideas.  How can anyone think out the true philosophy when he is prepared like this?

Demopheles.  Even if the true philosophy were to be discovered, religion wouldn’t disappear from the world, as you seem to think.  There can’t be one system of metaphysics for everybody; that’s rendered impossible by the natural differences of intellectual power between man and man, and the differences, too, which education makes.  It is a necessity for the great majority of mankind to engage in that severe bodily labor which cannot be dispensed with if the ceaseless requirements of the whole race are to be satisfied.  Not only does this leave the majority no time for education, for learning, for contemplation; but by virtue of the hard and fast antagonism between muscles and mind, the intelligence is blunted by so much exhausting bodily labor, and becomes heavy, clumsy, awkward, and consequently incapable of grasping any other than quite simple situations.  At least nine-tenths of the human race falls under this category.  But still the people require a system of metaphysics, that is, an account of the world and our existence, because such an account belongs to the most natural needs of mankind, they require a popular system; and to be popular it must combine many rare qualities.  It must be easily understood, and at the same time possess, on the proper points, a certain amount of obscurity, even of impenetrability; then a correct and satisfactory system of morality must be bound up with its dogmas; above all, it must afford inexhaustible consolation in suffering and death; the consequence of all this is, that it can only be true in an allegorical and not in a real sense.  Further, it must have the support of an authority which is impressive by its great age, by being universally recognized, by its documents, their tone and utterances; qualities which are so extremely difficult to combine that many a man wouldn’t be so ready, if he considered the matter, to help to undermine a religion, but would reflect that what he is attacking is a people’s