pain,
weakness and deformity; never traveling; and then by sheer persistency
and force of will rising to the first place among thinking men of his
time, one is almost willing to accept Kant's dictum, "Mind is supreme,
and the Universe is but the reflected thought of God."

* * * * *

Kant was great enough to doubt appearances and distrust popular
conclusions. He knew that fallacies of reasoning follow fast upon
actions--reason follows by slow freight. It is quite necessary that we
should believe in a Supreme Power, but quite irrelevant that we should
prove it.

Truth for the most part is unpopular, and the proof of this statement
lies in the fact that it is so seldom told. Preachers tell people what
they wish to hear, and indeed this must be so as long as the
congregation that hears the preaching pays for it. People will not pay
for anything they do not like. Hence, preaching leads naturally to
sophistication and hypocrisy, and the promise of endless bliss for
ourselves and a hell for our enemies comes about as a matter of course.
What men will listen to and pay for is the real science of theology.
That is to say, the science of theology is the science of manipulating
men. Success in theology consists in finding a fallacy that is palatable
and then banking on it. Again and again Kant points out that a
clergyman's advice is usually worthless, because pure truth is out of
his province--unaccustomed, undesirable, inexpedient.

And Kant thought this was true also of doctors--doctors care more about
pleasing their patients than telling them truth. "In fact," he said, "no
doctor with a family to support can afford to tell his patients that his
symptoms are no token of a disease--rather uncomfortable feelings are
proof of health, for dead men don't have them." Most of the aches,
pains and so-called irregularities are remedial moves on the part of
Nature to keep the man well. Kant says that doctors treat symptoms, not
diseases, and often the treatment causes the disease; so no man can tell
what proportion of diseases is caused by medicine and what by other
forms of applied ignorance.

As for lawyers, our little philosopher considered them, for the most
part, sharks and wreckers. A lawyer looks over an estate, not with the
idea of keeping it intact, but of dissolving it, and getting a part of
it for himself. Not that men prefer to do what is wrong, but
self-interest can always produce suffic