In the very next paragraph we find further evidence tending to show us the point at which this courage veers round to its opposite; for Strauss continues: "Ever remember that thou, and all that thou beholdest within and around thee, all that befalls thee and others, is no disjointed fragment, no wild chaos of atoms or casualties, but that, following eternal law, it springs from the one primal source of all life, all reason, and all good: this is the essence of religion" (pp. 277-78). Out of that "one primal source," however, all ruin and irrationality, all evil flows as well, and its name, according to Strauss, is Cosmos. Now, how can this Cosmos, with all the contradictions and the self-annihilating characteristics which Strauss gives it, be worthy of religious veneration and be addressed by the name "God," as Strauss addresses it?--"Our God does not, indeed, take us into His arms from the outside (here one expects, as an antithesis, a somewhat miraculous process of being "taken into His arms from the inside"), but He unseals the well-springs of consolation within our own bosoms. He shows us that although Chance would be an unreasonable ruler, yet necessity, or the enchainment of causes in the world, is Reason itself." (A misapprehension of which only the "We" can fail to perceive the folly; because they were brought up in the Hegelian worship of Reality as the Reasonable--that is to say, in the canonisation of success.) "He teaches us to perceive that to demand an exception in the accomplishment of a single natural law would be to demand the destruction of the universe" (pp. 435-36). On the contrary, Great Master: an honest natural scientist believes in the unconditional rule of natural laws in the world, without, however, taking up any position in regard to the ethical or intellectual value of these laws. Wherever neutrality is abandoned in this respect, it is owing to an anthropomorphic attitude of mind which allows reason to exceed its proper bounds. But it is just at the point where the natural scientist resigns that Strauss, to put it in his own words, "reacts religiously," and leaves the scientific and scholarly standpoint in order to proceed along less honest lines of his own. Without any further warrant, he assumes that all that has happened possesses the highest intellectual value; that it was therefore absolutely reasonably and intentionally so arranged, and that it even contained a revelation of eternal goodness. He therefore has to appeal to a complete cosmodicy, and finds himself at a disadvantage in regard to him who is contented with a theodicy, and who, for instance, regards the whole of man's existence as a punishment for sin or a process of purification. At this stage, and in this embarrassing position, Strauss even suggests a metaphysical hypothesis--the driest and most palsied ever conceived--and, in reality, but an unconscious parody of one of Lessing's sayings. We read on page 255: "And that