a lie.  One might regard this fact as the monogram of the moral world.  Meanwhile let us not give up the hope that mankind will some day attain that point of maturity and education at which it is able to produce a true philosophy on the one hand, and accept it on the other. Simplex sigillum veri:  the naked truth must be so simple and comprehensible that one can impart it to all in its true form without any admixture of myth and fable (a pack of lies)—­in other words, without masking it as religion.

Demop. You have not a sufficient idea of the wretched capacities of the masses.

Phil. I express it only as a hope; but to give it up is impossible.  In that case, if truth were in a simpler and more comprehensible form, it would surely soon drive religion from the position of vicegerent which it has so long held.  Then religion will have fulfilled her mission and finished her course; she might then dismiss the race which she has guided to maturity and herself retire in peace.  This will be the euthanasia of religion.  However, as long as she lives she has two faces, one of truth and one of deceit.  According as one looks attentively at one or the other one will like or dislike her.  Hence religion must be regarded as a necessary evil, its necessity resting on the pitiful weak-mindedness of the great majority of mankind, incapable of grasping the truth, and consequently when in extremity requires a substitute for truth.

Demop. Really, one would think that you philosophers had truth lying in readiness, and all that one had to do was to lay hold of it.

Phil. If we have not got it, it is principally to be ascribed to the pressure under which philosophy, at all periods and in all countries, has been held by religion.  We have tried to make not only the expression and communication of truth impossible, but even the contemplation and discovery of it, by giving the minds of children in earliest childhood into the hands of priests to be worked upon; to have the groove in which their fundamental thoughts are henceforth to run so firmly imprinted, as in principal matters, to become fixed and determined for a lifetime.  I am sometimes shocked to see when I take into my hand the writings of even the most intelligent minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and especially if I have just left my oriental studies, how paralysed and hemmed in on all sides they are by Jewish notions.  Prepared in this way, one cannot form any idea of the true philosophy!

Demop. And if, moreover, this true philosophy were discovered, religion would not cease to exist, as you imagine.  There cannot be one system of metaphysics for everybody; the natural differences of intellectual power in addition to those of education make this impossible.  The great majority of mankind must necessarily be engaged in that arduous bodily labour which is requisite in order to furnish the