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