Recognising the truth in Voltaire’s flippant saying, that if God did not exist we should have to invent Him, we do not, as the superstitious scientists do, first abolish Him and then re-invent Him in the clumsy form of a “mechanical causality.” We let the holders of the ominous rings—of which Nathan der Weiser told Saladin—do their utmost to prove by virtue and happiness that they hold the magic ring conferring these privileges. It matters little to us whether the genuine ring be the Christian one, the Jewish one, or the scientists’, so long as the belief in the holders of each of the rings stimulates them to prove its genuineness. We would not tell the great majority who pin their faith to the Christian ring—even if we believe it to be spurious—that we can prove it to be worthless, and that the scientists’ ring alone will bring salvation: for we know that this ring is beyond the reach of most of them, and that, handled in the wrong way, it will work curses instead of blessings. We limit ourselves to telling them that the rings held by the others must not be despised until the Great Competition is adjudicated. In our quest for the causes of degeneration, we do not begin by trying to discover traces of lunacy in a small number of prominent citizens. We bear in mind that these are either isolated cases, or types of a generally prevailing tendency. In the first case, we leave them alone; in the second, we search for the cause of this tendency. If we find that the tendency, let us say, toward hysteria, or egomania, in the upper classes is being produced by a craving for excitement, unhealthy pleasures, or artificial sensations, and by a frivolous and empty life, we set about to discover the causes of this craving and this empty life. If we again discover that the cause is found in the decay of the beliefs in personal responsibility, in the importance of philanthropy, morality, and patriotism, we try to discover why these beliefs have decayed. If it be found that they have decayed simultaneously with and in consequence of the decay of the authority of the Church, we try either to strengthen the influence of the Church by purifying and reforming it, or we replace its dogmas and its doctrines by a healthy and moral philosophy. Should we find, on the other hand, that the deplorable state among the poorer classes—their suffering, their degradation, and their joyless lives, co-existing with large fortunes, and irremediable under present laws and institutions—leads to the conclusion that the altruistic feelings of the wealthy are useless, and thus prompt among the upper classes selfishness and egomania, and the determination to drown their higher emotions in a giddy life, and in the poorer classes to foster destructive tendencies and the desire for revenge, we turn our attention to social remedies.