THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



to maintain artificially and rear the thousands of 

 cripples, deaf-mutes, idiots, etc., who are born every 

 year with an hereditary burden of incurable disease? 

 Is it not better and more rational to cut off from the 

 first this unavoidable misery which their poor lives will 

 bring to themselves and their families ? It is no use to 

 reply that religion forbids it. Christianity also bids us 

 give up our life for our brethren, and to cast it from us 

 when it hurts us — that is to say, when it only causes 

 useless pain to us and our friends. The truth is, the 

 opposition is only due to sentiment and the power of 

 conventional morality — that is to say, to the hereditary 

 bias which is clothed in early youth with the mantle of 

 religion, however irrational and superstitious be its 

 foundation. Pious morality of this sort is often really 

 the deepest immorality. "Laws and rights creep on 

 like an eternal sickness;" this is equally true of the 

 social customs and morals on which laws and rights are 

 founded. Sentiment should never be allowed to usurp 

 the place of reason in these weighty ethical questions. 

 As I pointed out in the first chapter of the Riddle, sen- 

 timent is a very amiable, but a very dangerous, function 

 of the brain. It has no more to do with the attainment 

 of the truth than what is called revelation. That is 

 well seen in Kant's dualism, for his nmndtis intclligihilis 

 is essentially an outcome of his religious sentimentality 



