took good care of that. It has been asserted of Schopenhaner, and justly so, that he at least was in earnest about the sufferings of mankind : where is he who at last will deal in right earnest with the counter-remedies against these sufferings, and will publicly expose the ineffable quackery with which mankind, up to our own times, have been wont, under the most dazzling names, to treat the infirmities of their souls?
53
‘’Abuse of the conscientious.’’—The conscientious, and not the unscrupulous ones, have been the greatest sufferers from the weariness of lenten sermons and brimstone theology, especially if they happened to be of an imaginative mind. Thus a gloom has been castover the lives of the very people who needed cheerfulness and pleasant images—not only for the sake of their recovery and the relief from themselves, but in order that humanity might rejoice in them and absorb, a small ray of their beauty. Oh, how inch super-fluous cruelty and torment have proceeded from those religions which have invented sin, and from those people who, by means of it, wish to reach the highest summit of their power.
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‘’Thoughts about disease.’’—To soothe the imagination of the patient, and thereby save him the suffering from
