The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the HourMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Christianity; Church history; Logos (Christian theology); Logos (Philosophy); Religion
“A specialist in mental disease can point out the traces of his malady
years before it openly broke out. And as if he had not written enough when
the world still considered him of sound mind, must men still try to glean
from the time when his brain was already visibly clouded?
“How few there are who can pick out of the desolate morass of growing
imbecility the scanty grains of higher intelligence! There will always be
people who will be impressed, not by the sound part of his thought, but by
his paradoxical nonsense. (_May be._)
“But—I am straying from the path. Now to the subject. I perfectly
understand that the majority of religions had to assume a good and evil
principle to guard themselves against the blasphemy of attributing all the
suffering of the world to an all-merciful Creator. (_Some religions have
done this, on the theory that an almighty God stands beyond good and
evil._) The devil is a necessary antithesis to God; to deny him is the
first step made by the consistent man of science toward that atheism which
originates really from the search for a better God. The Horseherd is wrong
when he denies the existence of things beyond our power of conception.
There are, as can be proved, tones that we do not hear, and rays that we
cannot see. There are many things that we shall learn to comprehend in the
hundreds of thousands of years that are in store for mankind. We are
merely in the beginning of our development. Something, however, will
always remain over. The ‘Ignorabimus’ of one of our foremost thinkers and
investigators will always retain its value for us. (_Most certainly._)
“The other world is of but little concern to him who has constantly
endeavoured to lead a good life, even if he has never given much thought
to correct belief. If personal existence is continued, our earthly being
must be divested of so many of its outer husks that we should scarcely
recognise each other, for only a part of the soul is the soul. (_What we
call soul is a modification of the Self._) If, however, an eternal sleep
is decreed for us, then this can be no great misfortune. Let the wise
saying in _Stobœi Florilegium_, Vol. VI, No. 19, in ‘praise of death’
serve to comfort us: ‘Ἀναξαγόρας δύο ἔλεγε διδασκαλίας εῖναι θανάτου, τὸν
τε πρὸ τοῦ γενέσθαι χρόνον καὶ τὸν ὕπνον,’—‘Anaxagoras said that two
things admonished us about death: the time before birth and sleep.’
“The raindrop, because it is a drop, may fear for its individuality when
it falls back into the sea whence it came. We men are perhaps only passing
drops formed out of the everlasting changes of the world-sea. (_Of what
does the world-sea consist but drops?_)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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