Note 73 — Chapter IV · RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE.

Moreover when one has passed one’s life, or even many years, in any study whatsoever, one is inclined extremely to exaggerate the importance of this study. Greek professors believe that Greek is necessary to the best interests of humanity. When any question arises of drawing up a curriculum, if the professors of the several studies are interrogated, each wishes to see his own especial branch of science in the first rank. I remember that after I myself had been making Latin verses for some years I would have ranged myself voluntarily among the defenders of Latin verse. Whenever anyone makes an especial study of some work of genius, that of an individual, or a fortiori that of a people—Plato, Aristotle or Kant, the Vedas or the Bible, this work tends to become in his eyes the very centre of human thought; the book of which one makes a special study tends to become the book. A priest looks upon the whole of human life as an affair of faith simply; knowledge to a priest means simply a knowledge of the Fathers of the Church. It is not astonishing that even members of the laity, who have made religion the principal object of their studies, should be inclined to magnify its importance for humanity, or that the historian of religious thought should regard it as including the whole of human life, and as acquiring, even independently of any notion of revelation, a sort of inviolable character.