Demop. So that’s your higher point of view.  But I assure you that there is a higher still. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari is of more comprehensive significance than one supposes at first sight.  Before everything else, the raw and wicked tendencies of the masses ought to be restrained, in order to protect them from doing anything that is extremely unjust, or committing cruel, violent, and disgraceful deeds.  If one waited until they recognised and grasped the truth one would assuredly come too late.  And supposing they had already found truth, it would surpass their powers of comprehension.  In any case it would be a mere allegorical investiture of truth, a parable, or a myth that would be of any good to them.  There must be, as Kant has said, a public standard of right and virtue, nay, this must at all times flutter high.  It is all the same in the end what kind of heraldic figures are represented on it, if they only indicate what is meant.  Such an allegorical truth is at all times and everywhere, for mankind at large, a beneficial substitute for an eternally unattainable truth, and in general, for a philosophy which it can never grasp; to say nothing of its changing its form daily, and not having as yet attained any kind of general recognition.  Therefore practical aims, my good Philalethes, have in every way the advantage of theoretical.

Phil. This closely resembles the ancient advice of Timaeus of Locrus, the Pythagorean:  [Greek:  tas psychas apeirgomes pseudesi logois, ei ka mae agaetai alathesi].[13] And I almost suspect that it is your wish, according to the fashion of to-day, to remind me—­

  “Good friend, the time is near
  When we may feast off what is good in peace.”

And your recommendation means that we should take care in time, so that the waves of the dissatisfied, raging masses may not disturb us at table.  But the whole of this point of view is as false as it is nowadays universally liked and praised; this is why I make haste to put in a protest against it.  It is false that state, justice, and law cannot be maintained without the aid of religion and its articles of belief, and that justice and police regulations need religion as a complement in order to carry out legislative arrangements.  It is false if it were repeated a hundred times.  For the ancients, and especially the Greeks, furnish us with striking instantia in contrarium founded on fact.  They had absolutely nothing of what we understand by religion.  They had no sacred documents, no dogma to be learnt, and its acceptance advanced by every one, and its principles inculcated early in youth.  The servants of religion preached just as little about morals, and the ministers concerned themselves very little about any kind of morality or in general about what the people either did or left undone.  No such thing.  But the duty of the priests was confined merely to temple ceremonies, prayers, songs, sacrifices,