#godlessness

"The need for knowledge increases with the inability to have faith. There is a boiling point on the scale of culture at which all faith, all revelation, all authority evaporate, at which people, according to their own lights, demand that they be instructed, but they also want to be convinced. The apron strings of childhood have fallen away: people want to stand on their own legs. But in this, people's metaphysical need is as ineradicable as any physical need. It becomes serious in the demand for philosophy, and humankind appeals in its need to all the thoughtful minds to whom it has ever given birth. The hollow verbiage and impotent exertions of intellectual eunuchs are no longer enough; rather, it then requires a serious-minded philosophy, i.e., one aiming at the truth, not at stipends and fees, one which does not ask whether it pleases ministers or councillors or whether it suits the interest of this or that contemporary church faction; rather, it is obvious that the business of philosophy is something completely different from providing a means of livelihood for the poor in spirit." - Arthur Schopenhauer, 'On The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason'