§ 77: And why should not we, too, be guided by a religion whose historical truth, if you will, looks so dubious, to more precise and better conceptions of the divine being, of our own nature, and of our relations with God, which human reason would never have arrived at on its own?
§ 78: It is not true that speculation about these things has ever done harm and become detrimental to civil society. This reproach should not be aimed at the speculations, but at the folly and the tyranny of controlling them, at people who did not allow men to exercise the speculations that they had.
§ 79: On the contrary, such speculations – whatever the result – are unquestionably the most fitting exercises of the human understanding, so long as the human heart, generally, is at best only capable of loving virtue for the sake of its eternal blessed consequences.
§ 80: For given this selfishness of the human heart, to wish to exercise the understanding only on those things that concern our corporal needs, would be to blunt rather than to sharpen it. It absolutely must be exercised on spiritual objects if it is to attain complete enlightenment and bring about that purity of heart which qualifies us to love virtue for its own sake.
§ 81: Or shall the human race never reach these highest levels of enlightenment and purity? - Never?
§ 82: Never? – Let me not think such blasphemy, all-bountiful one! Education has its goal for the race no less than for the Individual. That which is educated is educated for something.
§ 83: The flattering prospects which are suggested to the youth, the honor and prosperity one lures him with, what are they but means of educating him to become a man who, even in the absence of these prospects of honor and prosperity, shall still be capable of doing his duty?
§ 84: If this is the aim of human education, should not divine education reach as far? What art succeeds in doing for the individual, should not nature succeed in doing for the whole? Blasphemy! Blasphemy!!
§ 85: No; it will come, it will surely come, the time of fulfillment, when man, the more convinced his reason is of an ever better future, will nevertheless have no need to borrow motives for his actions from this future; when he will do good because it is good, not because it is tied to arbitrary rewards that were previously intended merely to fix and strengthen his unsteady gaze, so that he recognizes the inner, better, rewards of doing good.
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