Only by the more modern philosophy since Descartes has a serious effort been made to bring Christianity to complete efficacy, by exalting the "scientific consciousness" to be the only true and valid one. Hence it begins with absolute _doubt_, _dubitare_, with grinding common consciousness to atoms, with turning away from everything that "mind," "thought," does not legitimate. To it _Nature_ counts for nothing; the opinion of men, their "human precepts," for nothing: and it does not rest till it has brought reason into everything, and can say "The real is the rational, and only the rational is the real." Thus it has at last brought mind, reason, to victory; and everything is mind, because everything is rational, because all nature, as well as even the perversest opinions of men, contains reason; for "all must serve for the best," _i. e._ lead to the victory of reason. Descartes's _dubitare_ contains the decided statement that only _cogitare_, thought, mind--_is_. A complete break with "common" consciousness, which ascribes reality to _irrational_ things! Only the rational is, only mind is! This is the principle of modern philosophy, the genuine Christian principle. Descartes in his own time discriminated the body sharply from the mind, and "the spirit 'tis that builds itself the body," says Goethe. But this philosophy itself, Christian philosophy, still does not get rid of the rational, and therefore inveighs against the "merely subjective," against "fancies, fortuities, arbitrariness," etc. What it wants is that the _divine_ should become visible in everything, and all consciousness become a knowing of the divine, and man behold God everywhere; but God never is, without the _devil_. For this very reason the name of philosopher is not to be given to him who has indeed open eyes for the things of the world, a clear and undazzled gaze, a correct judgment about the world, but who sees in the world just the world, in objects only objects, and, in short, everything prosaically as it is; but he alone is a philosopher who sees, and points out or demonstrates, heaven in the world, the supernal in the earthly, the--_divine_ in the mundane. The former may be ever so wise, there is no getting away from this: What wise men see not by their wisdom's art Is practised simply by a childlike heart.[56]