h
bloodthirstiness toward the Jewish idea of God, the soul-phantom, and the
hallucination of immortality.--The facts are so simple and clear; we are
the highest existing forms of being in the animal world of this planet,
and share one and the same nature with them. After death we are just as
entirely reduced to nothing as before our birth. Nature tells us so
plainly that the eternal conditions before and after our birth are
identical.

"You ask me what this juggling means;
Take this short answer for your pains;
A game of chance from the eternal sea
By the same sea again will swallowed be.
--OMAR KHAYYAM (Bodenstedt).

"But there is nothing in this world so false as the statement that good
can ever come out of lies. Nothing in the world is so wholesome as truth,
and truth is under all circumstances lovable, beautiful, and holy. Let us
kneel before the truth of nature; nature cannot go astray. The distinction
between good and evil, the evil heritage of Judaism, must fall in the end.
Max, on quiet fields, in a mountain village of Silesia, I turned
somersaults with joy at the discovery that this distinction is false, and
that good and evil are identical. Max, you will not be angry with me? I am
no learned fellow. I never attended a high school, and now I rejoice at
it, for what a German calls education can only serve to miseducate after
all. Modern life is, for every open-minded person, the real high school.
Max, all German savants, or, if you please, the majority of them, still
labour under the delusion that the mind is a 'prius.' By no means, Max!
Mind is a development, an evolving phenomenon. One would suppose it
impossible that a thinking man, who has ever observed a child, could be of
any other opinion; why seek ghosts behind matter? Mind is a function of
living organisms, which belongs also to a goose and a chicken. Then, Max,
why not be content with the limits of our knowledge, conditioned by
experience, and give up this infamous romancing and tyrannical lying? The
only affection which after fifty years I still cherish in my bosom is the
sweet, unquenchable longing for that truth which fate has denied us.

"Max, you are by no means a free man, as I observe that the religious
congress in Chicago impressed you very much.(35) I was present when the
gayly dressed idolators from Cardinal Gibbons down to the stupid Shinto
priest and the ill-favoured Baptist woman preacher sat together on the
platform. It was very prett