the
merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of
limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up.

The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion considered as an
individual and social psychic phenomenon irrespective of the
transcendental objective validity of religious affirmations, is a
science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul is
something that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the
rationality of this belief. However much the religious man may repeat
with Schleiermacher, "Science can teach thee nothing; it is for science
to learn from thee," inwardly he thinks otherwise.

From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that
reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts
it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of
life.

A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to
stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely
individual, is, strictly, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce
everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no
more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or
relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains the same
for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different
each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of
the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes
it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to
arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or
destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it,
to lay it out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas,
even though life may issue from them. Worms also feed upon corpses. My
own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the innermost recesses of my
soul, once they are torn from their roots in the heart, poured out on to
this paper and there fixed in unalterable shape, are already only the
corpses of thoughts. How, then, shall reason open its portals to the
revelation of life? It is a tragic combat--it is the very essence of
tragedy--this combat of life with reason. And truth? Is truth something
that is lived or that is comprehended?

It is only necessary to read the terrible _Parmenides_ of Plato to
arrive at his tragic conclusion that "the one is and i