here, it is in _you_;
it is the life that lies in love free from all retreats and exclusions,
from all keeping of distances. Every one is the child of God--Jesus
claims nothing for himself alone--as the child of God each man is the
equal of every other man.... Imagine making Jesus a _hero_!--And what a
tremendous misunderstanding appears in the word "genius"! Our whole
conception of the "spiritual," the whole conception of our civilization,
could have had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in. In the
strict sense of the physiologist, a quite different word ought to be
used here.... We all know that there is a morbid sensibility of the
tactile nerves which causes those suffering from it to recoil from every
touch, and from every effort to grasp a solid object. Brought to its
logical conclusion, such a physiological _habitus_ becomes an
instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the "intangible," into
the "incomprehensible"; a distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions
of time and space, for everything established--customs, institutions,
the church--; a feeling of being at home in a world in which no sort of
reality survives, a merely "inner" world, a "true" world, an "eternal"
world.... "The Kingdom of God is within _you_"....

30.

_The instinctive hatred of reality_: the consequence of an extreme
susceptibility to pain and irritation--so great that merely to be
"touched" becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too profound.

_The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds
and distances in feeling_: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility
to pain and irritation--so great that it senses all resistance, all
compulsion to resistance, as unbearable _anguish_ (--that is to say, as
_harmful_, as _prohibited_ by the instinct of self-preservation), and
regards blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer
necessary to offer resistance to anybody or anything, however evil or
dangerous--love, as the only, as the _ultimate_ possibility of life....

These are the two _physiological realities_ upon and out of which the
doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime
super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What
stands most closely related to them, though with a large admixture of
Greek vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the theory of salvation
of paganism. Epicurus was a _typical decadent_: I was the first to
recognize him.--The