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Understanding is nothing but seeing under and seeing far. There is indeed a great mystery in knowledge, but this mystery is present in the simplest memory or presumption. The sciences have nothing to supply more fundamental than vulgar thinking or, as it were, preliminary to it. They are simply elaborations of it; they accept its pre-suppositions and carry on its ordinary processes.
If we take an alien religion as our subject of investigation, we shall not shrink from the consequences of the historical method: whereas, when we criticise Christianity, we are often unable to see the falsity of the pre-suppositions which we necessarily bring to the task of inquiry: our minds follow the doctrines of Christianity, even as our bodies perform their functions in complete unconsciousness.
'But this opinion can be held to be quite true only while we look at the outside of the negro's religion, or estimate its significance from arbitrary pre-suppositions, as is specially the case with Ad. Wuttke.
Likewise even the original productions of man are always composed of two factors of the given pre-suppositions and conditions, and of the new which on their basis and within their frame comes into existence.
His judgment of himself was utterly reversed, his pre-suppositions confounded, his scheme of life wrecked; all this he knew for truth, unless indeed it might be that victory could still be his victory after a struggle even to death; a struggle that had found no type or forecast in the mimic contests that had marked, almost without disturbing, his earlier progress on the road of his choice.
"That is the question to which it always seems to me there is no answer," he said easily, leaning back in his chair. "You think you can take what you like of a great historical religion and leave the rest that you can fall back on its pre-suppositions and build it anew. But the pre-suppositions themselves are all crumbling.
And yet, as the phrases 'pleasure' and 'happiness' are apt too exclusively to suggest material well-being and the gratification of the more animal parts of our nature, so the phrases 'perfection' or 'development' of 'character' are apt altogether to keep out of sight these necessary pre-suppositions of a healthy and progressive condition of humanity.
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