religion must be regarded as a necessary evil, its necessity resting on

the pitiful weak-mindedness of the great majority of mankind, incapable of grasping the truth, and consequently when in extremity requires a substitute for truth. _Demop._ Really, one would think that you philosophers had truth lying in readiness, and all that one had to do was to lay hold of it. _Phil._ If we have not got it, it is principally to be ascribed to the pressure under which philosophy, at all periods and in all countries, has been held by religion. We have tried to make not only the expression and communication of truth impossible, but even the contemplation and discovery of it, by giving the minds of children in earliest childhood into the hands of priests to be worked upon; to have the groove in which their fundamental thoughts are henceforth to run so firmly imprinted, as in principal matters, to become fixed and determined for a lifetime. I am sometimes shocked to see when I take into my hand the writings of even the most intelligent minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and especially if I have just left my oriental studies, how paralysed and hemmed in on all sides they are by Jewish notions. Prepared in this way, one cannot form any idea of the true philosophy! _Demop._ And if, moreover, this true philosophy were discovered,