The whole Semitic dramaturgy has
come to seem to me a work of the imagination. The apostolic documents
have changed in value and meaning to my eyes. Belief and truth have
become distinct to me with a growing distinctness. Religious psychology
has become a simple phenomenon, and has lost its fixed and absolute
value. The apologetics of Pascal, of Leibnitz, of Secretan, are to me no
more convincing than those of the Middle Ages, for they presuppose what
is really in question--a revealed doctrine, a definite and unchangeable
Christianity. It seems to me that what remains to me from all my studies
is a new phenomenology of mind, an intuition of universal
metamorphosis. All particular convictions, all definite principles, all
clear-cut formulas and fixed ideas, are but prejudices, useful in
practice, but still narrownesses of the mind. The absolute in detail is
absurd and contradictory. All political, religious, aesthetic, or
literary parties are protuberances, misgrowths of thought. Every special
belief represents a stiffening and thickening of thought; a stiffening,
however, which is necessary in its time and place. Our monad, in its
thinking capacity, overleaps the boundaries of time and space and of its
own historical surroundings; but in its individual capacity, and for
purposes of action, it adapts itself to current illusions, and puts
before itself a definite end.
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