ostatic
Union, or even in the existence of God, is, as a moment's reflection
will show, nothing less than monstrous. A human God--and that is the
only kind of God we are able to conceive--would never reject him who was
unable to believe in Him with his head, and it is not in his head but in
his heart that the wicked man says that there is no God, which is
equivalent to saying that he wishes that there may not be a God. If any
belief could be bound up with the attainment of eternal happiness it
would be the belief in this happiness itself and in the possibility of
it.

And what shall we say of that other proposition of the king of pedants,
to the effect that we have not come into the world to be happy but to
fulfil our duty (_Wir sind nicht auf der Welt, um gluecklich zu sein,
sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu tun_)? If we are in the world _for_
something (_um etwas_), whence can this _for_ be derived but from the
very essence of our own will, which asks for happiness and not duty as
the ultimate end? And if it is sought to attribute some other value to
this _for_, an objective value, as some Sadducean pedant would say, then
it must be recognized that the objective reality, that which would
remain even though humanity should disappear, is as indifferent to our
duty as to our happiness, is as little concerned with our morality as
with our felicity. I am not aware that Jupiter, Uranus, or Sirius would
allow their course to be affected by the fact that we are or are not
fulfilling our duty any more than by the fact that we are or are not
happy.

Such considerations must appear to these pedants to be characterized by
a ridiculous vulgarity and a dilettante superficiality. (The
intellectual world is divided into two classes--dilettanti on the one
hand, and pedants on the other.) What choice, then, have we? The modern
man is he who resigns himself to the truth and is content to be ignorant
of the synthesis of culture--witness what Windelband says on this head
in his study of the fate of Hoelderlin (_Praeludien_, i.). Yes, these men
of culture are resigned, but there remain a few poor savages like
ourselves for whom resignation is impossible. We do not resign ourselves
to the idea of having one day to disappear, and the criticism of the
great Pedant does not console us.

The quintessence of common sense was expressed by Galileo Galilei when
he said: "Some perhaps will say that the bitterest pain is the loss of
life, but I s