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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 195
monkey, they do not esteem them worthy of further acquain
tance. They prefer calmly to toss out of the window the
intellectual labour of two thousand years and treat the
public to a philosophy concocted out of their own rich
mental resources, on the basis of the catechism on the one
hand, and on that of crucibles and retorts or the catalogue
of monkeys on the other. They ought to be told in plain
language that they are ignoramuses, who have much to
learn before they can be allowed to have any voice in the
matter. Everyone, in fact, who dogmatizes at random,
with the naive realism of a child on such arguments as
G-od, the soul, the world s origin, atoms, &c. &c. &c., as if
the Critique of Pure Reason had been written in the moon
and no copy had found its way to our planet is simply one
of the vulgar. Send him into the servants hall, where his
wisdom will best find a market. 1
The other circumstance which calls for a real progress
in philosophy, is the steady growth of unbelief in the face
of all the hypocritical dissembling and the outward con
formity to the Church. This unbelief necessarily and un
avoidably goes hand in hand with the growing expansion
of empirical and historical knowledge. It threatens to
destroy not only the form, but even the spirit of Christianity
(a spirit which has a much wider reach than Christianity
itself), and to deliver up mankind to moral materialism a
thing even more dangerous than the chemical materialism
already mentioned. And nothing plays more into the
hands of this unbelief, than the Tartuffianism de rigueur
1 There too he will meet with people who fling about words of foreign
origin, which they have caught up without understanding them, just as
readily as he does himself, when he talks about "Idealism" without
knowing what it means, mostly therefore using the word instead of
Spiritualism (which being Eealism, is the opposite to Idealism). Hundreds
of examples of this kind besides other quid pro quos are to be found
in books, and critical periodicals. [Add. to 3rd ed.]