erests of mankind.

This, in its most essential features, is the pleasing result of our
critical examination; and such a demonstration of the immovably solid
foundation, secure from all the change of opinions and all the progress of
discoveries on which morality and religion rest, has still an entire series
of further pleasing consequences in its train.

In the first place, it is a living and actual proof of the fact that
religion and morality give to all sciences _the full freedom of
investigation_. The religious and ethical interest itself not only gives,
but even _requires_, this freedom of investigation. It requires it in
consequence of that _impulse of truth_ which religion has in common with
every impulse of knowledge, and which in itself is an ethical impulse. In
consequence of this impulse, religion must found its possession on nothing
else than subjective and objective truth, and can look upon all the paths
which lead through even the remotest realm of knowledge to the
establishment of truth, only with sympathetic interest. Precisely those who
see in religion more than a mere expression of emotion, and all those who
require that their religious life and the object of {403} their religious
faith shall possess truth, subjective and objective, cannot commit any
greater folly than treating search for truth in any other realm with
suspicion, or even ignoring it. They only injure that which they meant to
defend, by rendering the purity of their own religious interest suspected,
and by establishing more firmly the breach between religious life and faith
and the other acquisitions of culture and interests of their time, of which
neither religion nor science, but only a misguided tendency of their minds
and hearts, is guilty. How much unfriendly and unjust judgment has already
found utterance by means of the pen and voice, in reference to honest and
meritorious workers, on the part of religious zealots who fail to recognize
that close relationship of the religious with the scientific impulse of
truth! How often and how much does such a judgment gain great consideration
from a public of which but a few are able to form an independent opinion of
the men and works which are thus abused before their eyes and ears, and how
much of the aversion to the form in which the religious life of the present
offers itself, on the part of those men who are thus suspected, is in the
last instance to be attributed neither to be irreligious