and moral elevation, it is not so much the believing in God that makes
him good, as the being good, thanks to God, that makes him believe in
Him. Goodness is the best source of spiritual clear-sightedness.

I am well aware that it may be objected that all this talk of man
creating the sensible world and love the ideal world, of the blind cells
of hearing and the deaf cells of sight, of spiritual parasites, etc., is
merely metaphor. So it is, and I do not claim to discuss otherwise than
by metaphor. And it is true that this social sense, the creature of
love, the creator of language, of reason, and of the ideal world that
springs from it, is at bottom nothing other than what we call fancy or
imagination. Out of fancy springs reason. And if by imagination is
understood a faculty which fashions images capriciously, I will ask:
What is caprice? And in any case the senses and reason are also
fallible.

We shall have to enquire what is this inner social faculty, the
imagination which personalizes everything, and which, employed in the
service of the instinct of perpetuation, reveals to us God and the
immortality of the soul--God being thus a social product.

But this we will reserve till later.

And now, why does man philosophize?--that is to say, why does he
investigate the first causes and ultimate ends of things? Why does he
seek the disinterested truth? For to say that all men have a natural
tendency to know is true; but wherefore?

Philosophers seek a theoretic or ideal starting-point for their human
work, the work of philosophizing; but they are not usually concerned to