131

Religious after-effects. However much one thinks he has lost the habit of religion, he has not lost it to the degree that he would not enjoy encountering religious feelings and moods without any conceptual content as, for example, in music. And if a philosophy shows us the justification of metaphysical hopes, of a deep peace of the soul to be attained therefrom, and, for example, speaks of the "whole, certain gospel in the glance of Raphael's madonnas,"¹⁵ then we approach such statements and explanations with an especially warm disposition. Here it is easier for the philosopher to make his proofs; what he wants to give accords with a heart that gladly takes. We notice here how less careful free thinkers actually object only to the dogmas, but know very well the magic of religious feeling; it hurts them to let the latter go, for the sake of the former.
Scientific philosophy has to be very careful about smuggling in errors on the basis of that need (an acquired and, consequently, also transitory need). Even logicians¹⁶ speak of "intuitions" of truth in morality and art (for example, the intuition "that the essence of things is one"), which should be forbidden them. Between painstakingly deduced truths and such "intuited" things there remains the unbridgeable gap that the former are due to the intellect, the latter to need. Hunger does not prove that any food to satisfy it exists, but it wishes the food. "To intuit" does not mean to recognize the existence of a thing to any extent, but rather to hold it to be possible, in that one wishes or fears it. "Intuition" takes us not one step farther into the land of certainty.
We believe instinctively that the religiously tinged sections of a philosophy are better proved than the others. But basically it is the reverse; we simply have the inner wish that it might be so--that is, that what gladdens might be also true. This wish misleads us into buying bad reasons as good ones.