sun was like an ocean of fire. In order not to set fire to the earth it pulled
little shining flames out of itself and allotted them a place in the surround-
ing space. This completed the universe and produced its firmament.”
[ 4 ] Then one person who was there stood up and said, “You are all
wrong. You seem wise to yourselves and I seem simple to you, but in my
simplicity I have believed and I still believe that God created the uni-
verse. Since nature is part of the universe, God then was also the Creator
of all nature. If nature had created itself, would it have existed from eter-
nity? What madness!”
As he was speaking, one of the so-called wise philosophers urgently
pushed closer and closer to him. The philosopher brought his left ear
right up to the speaker’s mouth; his right ear was stuffed with a piece of
cotton. He asked him what he had said, so the speaker repeated it again.
Then the philosopher who had hurried forward looked around to see if
there was a priest nearby; he noticed one beside the speaker. So the
philosopher turned around and said, “I too confess that all nature is from
God, but.. .” Then he left; and speaking in a whisper to his friends, he
told them, “I said that because there was a priest nearby. You and I know
that nature is from nature. That makes nature God, so that is why I said
all nature is from God, but.. .”
[ 5 ] The priest heard what they whispered and said, “Your wisdom,
which is purely philosophical, has led you astray. It has closed the inner
realms of your minds so tightly that no light from God or his heaven can
flow in and enlighten you. You have extinguished that light.” Then he
added, “Hold a debate and figure out among yourselves where your
immortal souls come from. Do they come from nature? Were they
together in that great chaos?”
So then the philosopher went to his colleagues and asked them to
join him in unraveling this knotty question.
They concluded that the human soul is nothing but ether. Thought,
they decided, is nothing but a modification in the ether caused by the
light of the sun, and the ether is part of nature.
They said, “Everyone knows that we use air to speak. What is thought
except speech in a still purer air called the ether? This is how thought and
speech become one thing. We see this in human children. First they
learn to talk. In the next phase they learn to talk to themselves, which is
thinking. What else is thought, then, but a modification of the ether?
What else is the sound of speech but a modulation of thought? On the
singke
(singke)
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