have made this distinction before them; they have warred against
evil, and have sought the good, and have slowly but uninterruptedly
advanced in that path. And divers delusions have always stood
before men, hemming in this path, and having for their object to
demonstrate to them, that it was not necessary to do this, and that
it was not necessary to live as they were living. With fearful
conflict and difficulty, men have freed themselves from many
delusions. And behold, a new and a still more evil delusion has
sprung up in the path of mankind,--the scientific delusion.

This new delusion is precisely the same in nature as the old ones;
its gist lies in secretly leading astray the activity of our reason
and conscience, and of those who have lived before us, by something
external. In scientific science, this external thing is--
investigation.

The cunning of this science consists in this,--that, after pointing
out to men the coarsest false interpretations of the activity of the
reason and conscience of man, it destroys in them faith in their own
reason and conscience, and assures them that every thing which their
reason and conscience say to them, that all that these have said to
the loftiest representatives of man heretofore, ever since the world
has existed,--that all this is conventional and subjective. "All
this must be abandoned," they say; "it is impossible to understand
the truth by the reason, for we may be mistaken. But there exists
another unerring and almost mechanical path: it is necessary to
investigate facts."

But facts must be investigated on the foundation of scientific
science, i.e., of the two hypotheses of positivism and evolution,