52.  In the Jewish “Old Testament,” the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale, that Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it.  One stands with fear and reverence before those stupendous remains of what man was formerly, and one has sad thoughts about old Asia and its little out-pushed peninsula Europe, which would like, by all means, to figure before Asia as the “Progress of Mankind.”  To be sure, he who is himself only a slender, tame house-animal, and knows only the wants of a house-animal (like our cultured people of today, including the Christians of “cultured” Christianity), need neither be amazed nor even sad amid those ruins—­the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with respect to “great” and “small”:  perhaps he will find that the New Testament, the book of grace, still appeals more to his heart (there is much of the odour of the genuine, tender, stupid beadsman and petty soul in it).  To have bound up this New Testament (a kind of rococo of taste in every respect) along with the Old Testament into one book, as the “Bible,” as “The Book in Itself,” is perhaps the greatest audacity and “sin against the Spirit” which literary Europe has upon its conscience.

53.  Why Atheism nowadays?  “The father” in God is thoroughly refuted; equally so “the judge,” “the rewarder.”  Also his “free will”:  he does not hear—­and even if he did, he would not know how to help.  The worst is that he seems incapable of communicating himself clearly; is he uncertain?—­This is what I have made out (by questioning and listening at a variety of conversations) to be the cause of the decline of European theism; it appears to me that though the religious instinct is in vigorous growth,—­it rejects the theistic satisfaction with profound distrust.

54.  What does all modern philosophy mainly do?  Since Descartes—­ and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his procedure—­an ATTENTAT has been made on the part of all philosophers on the old conception of the soul, under the guise of a criticism of the subject and predicate conception—­that is to say, an ATTENTAT on the fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine.  Modern philosophy, as epistemological skepticism, is secretly or openly anti-Christian, although (for keener ears, be it said) by no means anti-religious.  Formerly, in effect, one believed in “the soul” as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject:  one said, “I” is the condition, “think” is the predicate and is conditioned—­to think is an activity for which one must suppose a subject as cause.  The attempt was then made, with marvelous tenacity and subtlety, to see if one could not get out of this net,—­to see if the opposite was not perhaps true:  “think” the condition, and “I” the conditioned; “I,” therefore, only a synthesis which has been made by thinking itself.  Kant really wished to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved—­nor the object either:  the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject, and therefore of “the soul,” may not always have been strange to him,—­the thought which once had an immense power on earth as the Vedanta philosophy.