Reader. This explanation is not to the point. Your assertion implied that philosophers and others ever cherished the notion that the creative power had suddenly arisen out of nothing, and that all religious conceptions lean more or less towards this idea. This is what I challenged you to show. Does your explanation show it? On the contrary, it shows that the idea towards which religious conceptions lean is quite different.
Büchner. Be this as it may, “conceptions of this kind cannot concern us, not being the result of philosophical reasoning. Individual human qualities and imperfections are transferred to philosophical notions, and belief is made to occupy the place of actual knowledge” (p. 7).
Reader. I perceive, doctor, that you are persistently wrong. It seems as though you could not open your mouth without uttering some false or incongruent assertion. What are those conceptions which “cannot concern us”? Are they not the dreams you have just imagined? How, then, do you insinuate that the existence of a creative power does not concern us, because your dreams are not the result of philosophical reasoning? And pray, who ever “transferred individual human qualities and imperfections to philosophical notions”? Has this phrase any intelligible meaning? Lastly, it is evidently false that, in order to admit a creative power, “belief is made to occupy the place of actual knowledge.” The existence of God is a philosophical truth; now, philosophy is a method of knowledge, not of belief.
I trust I have sufficiently exposed your “intellectual jugglery” to let you see that you are at best a charlatan, not a philosopher.
To Be Continued.
Dante's Purgatorio. Canto Fourteenth.
Note.—This canto, like the preceding (XIII.), illustrates the sin of envy, which Dante deems a special vice of the Florentines, against whom and the other inhabitants of Valdarno he inveighs with a bitterness that savors more of the style of the Inferno than of “the milder shade of Purgatory.”
In the Thirteenth Canto, Envy has been rebuked by voices of love and gentleness; as, for instance, the kindly comment of the Virgin at the marriage feast of Cana, “They have no wine.” These and similar words are the scourge which the envious have to endure. But the bridle, Dante says, are tones of a contrary import, such as the terrific voice of Cain, who passes by in a peal of thunder, but invisible, followed by the dreadful cry of Aglauros, described in the concluding paragraph of this canto.
“What man is this who round our mountain goes,