The second of the two similes, however, as it is most immediately connected with, so it throws most light upon, the problem before us, the explanation, viz., of intellectual error. For science, too, has its sects, and even into the calm regions of philosophy (for such it surely ought to be, as professing to be the satisfaction of our inmost longing after a knowledge of ourselves and of nature in truth and in God), the violent spirit of party finds too often an entrance. In the spirit of system, and in the prejudices of a view or opinion once adopted, the absolute and resolved will, which originally is rather a fault of character than an error of the understanding, nevertheless co-operates essentially to the establishment of a philosophical error, at least from its formal side. When, however, as, under the influence of the spirit of system, is easily, and indeed generally done by the founders of scientific sects, the _absolute_ is itself adopted as the immediate object, then it is the pursuit of this idea of the unconditional that carries each of these two general forms of error to the highest pitch of extravagance. Applied to nature and any positive view and particular system thereof, it gives to it a character of exclusiveness and definiteness, by which, separated from all that is higher and properly divine, and made to rest entirely in itself, it is carried away to the pantheistic self-sufficiency and deification of a false unity. Combined with the egoistic or subjective reason, this pursuit of the absolute and the idea thereof creates the idealistic delusion, or, at least, readily gives rise to it, and this is the first step, or, at any rate, the usual introduction, to scientific atheism.