Certain savage tribes believe that their kings need no food, neither to eat nor to drink. As a matter of fact, kings eat and drink, and even relish a good mouthful more than ordinary mortals. So, having no desire, even for the sake of form, to abstain too long, they not infrequently interrupt the long-drawn-out religious ceremonies of their tribes, in order to command refreshment for their frail bodies. But none must witness, or even be aware of this refreshing, and so while he eats the king is hidden within a purple pall. Metaphysicians remind one of these savage kings. They want everyone to believe that empiricism, which means all reality and substantial existence, is nothing to them, they need only pure ideas for their existence. In order to keep up this fiction, they appear before the world invested in a purple veil of fine words. The crowd knows perfectly well that it is all a take-in, but since it likes shows and bright colours, and since also it has no ambition to appear too knowing, it rarely betrays that it has caught the trick of the comedy. On the contrary, it loves to pretend to be fooled, knowing by instinct that actors always do their best when the audience believes implicitly in what happens. Only inexperienced youths and children, unaware of the great importance of the conventional attitude, now and then cry out in indignation and give the lie to the performance: like the child in Andersen's story, who so unexpectedly and inopportunely broke the general, deliberate illusion by calling out--"But the king is naked." Of course everybody knows without telling that the king is naked: that the metaphysicians not only are unable to explain anything, but that hitherto they have not been able to present even a single hypothesis free from contradiction. It is necessary to pretend to believe that kings eat nothing, that philosophers have divined the secrets of the universe, that arbitrary theories are more precious than empirical harvests, and so on. There remains only one difficulty: grownups may be won over to the conventional lie, but what about the children? With them the only remedy is the Pythagorean system of upbringing, so glorified by Hegel. Children must keep silent and not raise their voice until they realise that _some_ things may not be talked about. This is our method. With us pupils remain silent, not only for five years, as the Pythagoreans recommended, but for ten or more--until they have learned to speak like their masters. And then they are granted a freedom which is no longer any good to them. Perhaps they had wings, or might have had them, but they have crawled all their life long in imitation of their masters, so how can they now dream of flight? To a well-informed man, who has studied much, the very thought of the possibility of tearing himself away from the earth, even for a moment, is horrifying: as if he knew beforehand what the result would be. 20