A direct controversy with error entails one disadvantage. By such a course the latter is unduly acknowledged for a positive power of evil. But in reality it only becomes so conditionally, through the atomistic splitting and diffusion of false ideas, and by the mass of its followers, when once every thing is resolved into elementary decomposition. Moreover, one extreme of exaggeration, whenever in controversy we enter into it and get involved in it, easily introduces its opposite, which then again is on its side carried too far--or which even, though strictly and literally it be right enough, is yet asserted with too little of limitation, and applied with unsalutary rigor. It is, therefore, a lamentable mistake if men of great and deserving talents, who from a scientific point of view have devoted themselves to the great task of morally regenerating the age, have adopted a too decidedly polemical tendency. For it is partly through exclusively following such a course that their influence for good has been so narrow and limited, and has not met with a more general and more unqualified success. If men would only, first and before all things, endeavor to set forth with all possible vividness the intrinsic unity which subsists between higher science with a divine faith, and develop it for its own sake, without passion or interest, the further results on life of applied truth would follow spontaneously. From this simple and pure source they would continue to flow in ample and widening streams over the whole domain and all its relations. God is truth, and simply on this account the spirit of truth in a good and true science must even be divine. Its proper aim is, accordingly, directed to the divine; and on this account there can not be such a thing as an indifferent science. For every science which is not directed to the divine is shallow, superficial, sensuously negative, and idly rationalizing. On this account it is false, and must consequently prove, in its external effects, nothing less than evil, injurious, and destructive.