Stueck, 2, § 4, Allgemeine Anmerkung). Thus it happens that in his opinion those who have advanced in perfection cease to pray. Nor does it seem that _Kant_ is serious about his postulate of the _immortality_ of the soul. Asked by _Lacharpe_ what he thought of the soul, he did not answer at first, but remarked, when the question was repeated: “We must not make too much boast of it” (_H. Hettner_, Literat. Gesch. des 18. Jahrh., III, 4. ed., 3, p. 26. From _Varnhausen’s_ Denkwuerdigkeiten). Thousands have with _Kant_ destroyed their religious conviction by a boastful scepticism, and, like him, finally given it up to replace its lack by artificial autosuggestions. And is not the religious life of man thereby made completely valueless? The highest truths on which the mind of man lives, and which from the first stage of his existence not only interested but deeply stirred him, become fiction, pictures of the fancy, suggestions of an effeminate mind, that cannot make a lasting impression on stronger minds. And how can the products of autosuggestion give comfort and strength in hours of need and trial? It is true they do not impose any obligations. Every one is free to form his own notions of life; they are not to be taken seriously anyway, whether they be this or that; they are all equally true and equally false. Buddhism is just as true as Christianity, Materialism as true as Spiritualism, Mohammedanism as true as Quakerism, the wisdom of the Saints as true as the philosophy of the worldly. “The most beautiful flower is growing on the same soil (that of the emotions) with the rankest weed” (_Hegel_). The decision rests with sentiments which admit of no arguing. Thus all is made over to scepticism, to that constant doubting which degrades and unnerves the higher life of modern times, to that _modern agnosticism_ which, though bearing the distinction of aristocratic reserve, is in reality dulness and poverty of intellect; not a perfection of the human intellect, but a hideous disease, all the more dangerous because difficult to cure. It is the neurasthenia of the intellect of which the physical neurasthenia of our generation is the counterpart. The distinguishing mark between man and the lower animals has ever been held to be that the former could knowingly step beyond the sphere of the senses, into that world of which his intellect is a part. The conviction has always prevailed that man by means of his own valid laws of thought, for instance, the principle of causality, could safely ascend from the visible world to an invisible one. Thus also the physician concludes the interior cause of the disease from the exterior symptoms, the physicist thus comes to the knowledge of the existence of atoms and ions which he has never seen, and the astronomer calculates with _Leverrier_ the existence and location of stars which no eye has yet detected.