_Demopheles_. However that may be, I wanted to remind you that you
should look at religion more from the practical than from the
theoretical side. _Personified_ metaphysics may be the enemy of
religion, but all the same _personified_ morality will be its friend.
Perhaps the metaphysical element in all religions is false; but the
moral element in all is true. This might perhaps be presumed from the
fact that they all disagree in their metaphysics, but are in accord as
regards morality.

_Philalethes_. Which is an illustration of the rule of logic that false
premises may give a true conclusion.

_Demopheles_. Let me hold you to your conclusion: let me remind you that
religion has two sides. If it can't stand when looked at from its
theoretical, that is, its intellectual side; on the other hand, from the
moral side, it proves itself the only means of guiding, controlling and
mollifying those races of animals endowed with reason, whose kinship
with the ape does not exclude a kinship with the tiger. But at the same
time religion is, as a rule, a sufficient satisfaction for their dull
metaphysical necessities. You don't seem to me to possess a proper idea
of the difference, wide as the heavens asunder, the deep gulf between
your man of learning and enlightenment, accustomed to the process of
thinking, and the heavy, clumsy, dull and sluggish consciousness of
humanity's beasts of burden, whose thoughts have once and for all taken
the direction of anxiety about their livelihood, and cannot be put in
motion in any other; whose muscular strength is so exclusively brought
into play that the nervous power, which makes intelligence, sinks to a
very low ebb. People like that must have something tangible which they
can lay hold of on the slippery and thorny pathway of their life, some
sort of beautiful fable, by means of which things can be imparted to