most sacred treasure.  If you want to form an opinion on religion, you should always bear in mind the character of the great multitude for which it is destined, and form a picture to yourself of its complete inferiority, moral and intellectual.  It is incredible how far this inferiority goes, and how perseveringly a spark of truth will glimmer on even under the crudest covering of monstrous fable or grotesque ceremony, clinging indestructibly, like the odor of musk, to everything that has once come into contact with it.  In illustration of this, consider the profound wisdom of the Upanishads, and then look at the mad idolatry in the India of to-day, with its pilgrimages, processions and festivities, or at the insane and ridiculous goings-on of the Saniassi.  Still one can’t deny that in all this insanity and nonsense there lies some obscure purpose which accords with, or is a reflection of the profound wisdom I mentioned.  But for the brute multitude, it had to be dressed up in this form.  In such a contrast as this we have the two poles of humanity, the wisdom of the individual and the bestiality of the many, both of which find their point of contact in the moral sphere.  That saying from the Kurral must occur to everybody. Base people look like men, but I have never seen their exact counterpart.  The man of education may, all the same, interpret religion to himself cum grano salis; the man of learning, the contemplative spirit may secretly exchange it for a philosophy.  But here again one philosophy wouldn’t suit everybody; by the laws of affinity every system would draw to itself that public to whose education and capacities it was most suited.  So there is always an inferior metaphysical system of the schools for the educated multitude, and a higher one for the elite.  Kant’s lofty doctrine, for instance, had to be degraded to the level of the schools and ruined by such men as Fries, Krug and Salat.  In short, here, if anywhere, Goethe’s maxim is true, One does not suit all.  Pure faith in revelation and pure metaphysics are for the two extremes, and for the intermediate steps mutual modifications of both in innumerable combinations and gradations.  And this is rendered necessary by the immeasurable differences which nature and education have placed between man and man.

Philalethes.  The view you take reminds me seriously of the mysteries of the ancients, which you mentioned just now.  Their fundamental purpose seems to have been to remedy the evil arising from the differences of intellectual capacity and education.  The plan was, out of the great multitude utterly impervious to unveiled truth, to select certain persons who might have it revealed to them up to a given point; out of these, again, to choose others to whom more would be revealed, as being able to grasp more; and so on up to the Epopts.  These grades correspond to the little, greater and greatest mysteries.  The arrangement was founded on a correct estimate of the intellectual inequality of mankind.