253.
This is an attempt at investigating morality without being affected by
its charm, and not without some mistrust in regard to the beguiling
beauty of its attitudes and looks. A world which we can admire, which
is in keeping with our capacity for worship--which is continually
_demonstrating_ itself--in small things or in large: this is the
Christian standpoint which is common to us all.
But owing to an increase in our astuteness, in our mistrust, and in our
scientific spirit (also through a more developed instinct for truth,
which again is due to Christian influence), this interpretation has
grown ever less and less tenable for us.
The craftiest of subterfuges: Kantian criticism. The intellect not
only denies itself every right to interpret things in that way, but
also to reject the interpretation once it has been made. People are
satisfied with a _greater_ demand upon their credulity and faith, with
a renunciation of all right to reason concerning the proof of their
creed, with an intangible and superior "Ideal" (God) as a stop-gap.
The Hegelian subterfuge, a continuation of the Platonic, a piece
of romanticism and reaction, and at the same time a symptom of
the historical sense of a new _power_: "Spirit" itself is the
"self-revealing and self-realising ideal": we believe that in the
"process of, development" an ever greater proportion of this ideal is
being manifested--thus the ideal is being realised, faith is vested in
the _future_ into which all its noble needs are projected and in which
they are being worshipped.