Episode #020 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

One of the hallmarks of philosophy is looking at one question from multiple different angles. I mean, it’s not enough to just think about stuff for a while and come to what seems like a reasonable conclusion about something and then just call it a life after that. You can’t do that. In fact, our thoughts on any subject should really be a constant evolution, in my opinion. Well, the subject we’re going to talk about today is one that we’ve danced around a little bit. We’ve covered little pieces of it, but today we’re going to talk about it much more. By the end of the show today, you guys are all going to definitively know the answer to the question “Does God exist?” Now, obviously I’m just kidding. I mean, people have been arguing about that for thousands of years. I’m certainly not going to solve it on one episode of this show. But I would like to talk about some common ways that people think about that question and address them.

A long time ago, for about a year of my life, I spent most of my free time reading proofs of God’s existence or non-existence. Not just philosophical proofs—although I did read a lot of those—I read all kinds of stuff. I read books, forums, articles. I read tons of hateful YouTube comments. At the time I called it my spiritual quest. You know, there are many philosophers that we’ve talked about on the show where they come to a place in their life where they question the nature of existence or what they think about things, and they go on some long, spiritual, transformative journey where they find themselves. I’m pretty sure I compared it to John Travolta’s mid-life crisis on the movie Wild Hogs at some point. Well, this year that I spent was my Wild Hogs when it comes to the question of “Does God exist?” And what I saw was, like most things, the vast majority of people are emphatically on one side or the other.

One of the main lines of thinking I saw from the atheist side of things was that they were proving God didn’t exist, or at least making fun of the idea of a God existing, based on a very limited view of what God is. These people are born into a world where monotheism rules the day when it comes to religion. People are given a code of ethics to follow; they’re given forbidden behaviors. And if they don’t do the forbidden behaviors, they’re given VIP treatment in the afterlife. That’s the world they’re born into. That’s what God is to them, because that’s the only concept they’ve ever been introduced to, because they’ve never bothered to study it. And they just come to a conclusion about it and call it a life, you know? Pathetic fairytale, only meant to keep humans in line—God doesn’t exist. Case closed, right?

Well, it’s not that simple. Just like when philosophers use words like “virtue” and “good” and “truth,” and when they say those words they mean something very different based on who is saying them at the time because the individual definitions of them change, the word “God” is describing a concept that changes based on who is saying it. I mean, how ridiculous would it be to think that when Plato talked about God he had the same concept in his mind as a modern-day Christian or Jew. I mean, he lived hundreds of years before Jesus even supposedly walked the earth. I feel like some of these people get so caught up in thinking, “Look at me! I realize that snakes can’t actually talk and that a guy didn’t actually round up two of each animal while God killed everybody else on the planet. I know that’s just a story.” They get so caught up in that phase that they quit. They don’t look at it any deeper. They don’t think about the underlying concepts and whether they have merit or not. They don’t think about the fact that maybe they just disagree with the medium it’s being communicated through.

Just think about something for a second. Just on the concept of God, just on this show, we’ve already talked about several definitions of the concept. We’ve talked about God being the thing, whatever it is, that brought this cosmos into existence—nothing more, not interested in things like whether you said a bad word yesterday, not interested in whether you cheated on your math test last week—to put a modern spin on it, the thing that caused the Big Bang. What is that creative mechanism? Couldn’t that be considered God? Later philosophers would say stuff like, God is the totality of all existence. Think of everything that exists as a single unit, a unit that we and everything else in the universe are just aspects of. Couldn’t that totality be considered God too?

Now, if you didn’t think the Big Bang needed a cause, you certainly can’t think it’s pointless to entertain the possibility that it had one. We’ve talked about the stoics and their pantheistic view of God where God is the universe. You know, this thing that’s very difficult to describe with words that animates all things that possess life—can we call that God? We’ve talked about Plotinus and his transcendent One. And guess what, guys. We’ve barely even gotten started with the concept of God. In fact, there are people for each and every one of these philosophers that I just talked about that dedicate their entire lives to understanding just what they meant by their concept of God, you know, how they used reason to determine that something transcendent like that might exist. If you logically keep going, well, what caused that to come into existence? What caused that to come into existence?

Now, here’s the point of all this. That’s just what God is. That’s just one very small part of what’s laid out in these monotheistic religious texts. Just imagine being five years old and your parents take you to church for the first time. It’s your first day. You’re all excited. You get all dressed up. And when you get there, instead of hearing the story about the man who built the giant ship, and with God’s wind at his back, managed to conquer this seemingly unconquerable task, just imagine if you started diving right into Plato’s Timaeus. Just imagine if you started talking about the concept of a transcendent Good that can serve as a wind at your back while you try to live a virtuous life. I mean, how many Sundays would it take before on Sunday morning you just started convulsing on the floor of your room like you’re in Paranormal Activity just so you don’t have to go to church.

The philosophical concept of each virtue goes equally as deep as the concept of a God. People go to school for years to understand these things with any kind of depth. And like Averroes pointed out last episode, can we expect the average person to go through that kind of schooling and to understand the underlying concepts of religion in depth? Make no mistake, when philosophers talk about the concept of a God, they’re thinking about it in a philosophical way. They have a lot of different definitions for that God.

Today we’re going to be talking about probably the most famous proof of God’s existence in the history of the world, and it was put forward in the Middle Ages where we’re studying philosophy right now. Now, as we’ve talked about before, monotheistic religions were very powerful and very in charge during the Middle Ages. The whole time period is marked by that. And as a result, most of the great thinkers of the time period were members of these monotheistic religions. And most of them used all their excess brain power to make adjustments to either Plato or Aristotle to make them compatible with their particular brand of monotheism.

Some examples of this that we’ve seen—we’ve seen Plotinus and his Neo-Platonism and Saint Augustine who was heavily influenced by him. We’ve seen people like Philo of Alexandria trying to make Plato compatible with the Torah and Judaism. Plato’s philosophy really leant itself to being compatible with these new religions for various reasons. One, he believed in a creator. He believed in mind and body being separate from each other, which then allows for the possibility of an immortal soul. I mean, many things were good about it. But Aristotle was a tougher sell to the Church, much harder to make that compatible. We’ve seen how the Islamic world and beyond worked to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy with Islamic theology. But what was going on in the West during that time?

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Greek East, Latin West?” Well, it refers to this period of time that we’re in right now. When the Roman Empire fell, it broke into two parts: the very Greek Byzantine Empire of the East, and the Latin-speaking West. Now, philosophy continued in both areas, but the more historically significant thing to talk about is what was happening all throughout Europe at the same time. It’s what’s known as scholasticism.

People use scholasticism as a way to categorize the philosophy of the time. You have a list of names known as scholastic philosophers, but really scholasticism is just a method of acquiring knowledge and learning that focuses heavily on dialectical reasoning. Dialectic is what Socrates used all the time. It’s a style of doing philosophy that’s conversational. One or more people have opposing viewpoints about a certain subject, and they argue against each other, being sure to use their tools of logic and reason as best they can. And hopefully at the end of the conversation, they’re a little bit closer to the truth for the process.

Well, one of the guys we’re talking about today is known as the father of scholasticism, Saint Anselm of Canterbury. And it’s his argument for the existence of God which would later become known as the ontological argument. It’s the most famous proof of God’s existence in history, like I said. But I want to give it to you guys in true dialectical fashion. I want you guys to have a conversation with Saint Anselm and let him convince you that God existed. But first, the most important thing is, we need to understand the way Saint Anselm would have been thinking about things that exist at all.

Simply put, he would have broken things down into two types: things that exist in our human understanding alone and things that exist in reality. So, let’s think about some examples of these. What are some things that exist only in our human understanding? Well, that would be anything that exists in our imagination that does not exist in reality. There are millions of options. You can take your pick—My Little Pony, Harry Potter. Let’s say you have an idea for an invention, and it exists only in your mind because you haven’t actually created it yet. These are all things that can be thought of as only having existence in relation to a human understanding them.

Now, if you had that invention manufactured—let’s say you finally put pen to paper and got off your parents’ futon and made that invention exist in reality. Then it would not only exist in reality; the invention would still exist in your imagination too, right? Well, at that point, your new invention falls into the category of most everything we see around us: a lawnmower, a vacuum cleaner, a Honda Civic with the muffler taken off of it. All of these things exist not only in our imagination but in reality, where they ruin the recording of this podcast week after week.

But there is another class of things, things that exist only in reality and not in human understanding. For example, you see every once in a while some backpackers go deep into the Amazon rainforest and come across some new species of bird or insect, a species that was buried so deep in the Amazon jungle, no human new that it existed. No human had understanding of it. No human had it in their imagination, but it still existed in reality despite the fact that a human didn’t know about it yet. And there are all kinds of examples of this. There may be galaxies distant that we’ve never seen before, but they still exist now. There may be strange, invisible beings flying all around us all the time, but we can’t see them. We don’t know that they exist, but they still exist.

Well, that’s how Saint Anselm would have been thinking about things that exist. And when we look at Anselm’s famous proof of God’s existence, we have to be careful not to let our individual modern biases of what the word “God” means get in the way. See, Anselm is proving the existence of the concept of God. He says himself, “I began to ask myself whether there might be found a single argument which would require no other for its proof than itself alone; and alone would suffice to demonstrate that God truly exists, and that there is a supreme good requiring nothing else, which all other things require for their existence and well-being; and whatever we believe regarding the divine Being.”

Now, focus on what he said there. All he’s looking to do is prove that there is a supreme good that requires nothing else for its existence, which all other things require for their existence and well-being. If that’s the criteria, he could equally be proving the existence of Plotinus’ transcendent One or Good, which didn’t have any human characteristics. What’s important to point out is that, whenever you’re proving that God exists or you’re proving that anything exists, for that matter, the most important thing you have to do is define terms. You have to understand exactly what it is we’re trying to prove. You need to give a definition.

And this is where Saint Anselm’s ontological argument begins and ends, within his definition of what God is. He’s setting up the idea here: “Therefore, Lord, you who give knowledge of the faith, give me as much knowledge as you know to be fitting for me, because you are as we believe and that which we believe. And indeed we believe you are something greater than which cannot be thought. Or is there no such kind of thing, for ‘the fool said in his heart, ‘there is no God?’’ But certainly that same fool, having heard what I just said, ‘something greater than which cannot be thought,’ understands what he heard, and what he understands is in his thought, even if he does not think it exists. For it is one thing for something to exist in a person’s thought and quite another for the person to think that thing exists.”

So, if you were having a conversation with Saint Anselm and you were one of those people who know for a fact that God doesn’t exist, he would start by setting a trap for you. He would say, okay, I hear what you’re saying. God doesn’t exist. Alright. Let’s just talk about what we religious people think of as God. Would you agree that if God existed—remember, we’re only talking hypothetically here—if God existed, he would be the greatest thing you could ever imagine. If this thing existed, you as a mere human could never imagine something greater than him, right? Now, this seems perfectly reasonable. I think 99.9% of people would answer yes here. Remember, he’s not saying that that thing exists yet. He’s just defining what it is we’re trying to prove the existence of. And he does so by describing it as that than which nothing greater can be thought.

Now, if you’re a gnostic atheist that claims to know that God doesn’t exist, you’re quick to agree to this because you see him as just shining a light on this delusional concept he believes in. But wait, it’s a trap! He quickly makes that person feel a little bit stupid with this quote here. “Thus even the fool is compelled to grant that something greater than which cannot be thought exists in thought, because he understands what he hears, and whatever is understood exists in thought. And certainly that greater than which cannot be understood cannot exist only in thought, for if it exists only in thought it could also be thought of as existing in reality as well, which is greater. If, therefore, that than which greater cannot be thought exists in thought alone, then that than which greater nothing can be thought turns out to be that than which something greater actually can be thought, but that is obviously impossible. Therefore something than which greater cannot be thought undoubtedly exists in both thought and reality.”

That’s something he does a lot in his writing. He writes in these crazy tongue twisters that nobody can understand. It’s seriously like something Ron Burgundy would read before he goes out onto the air. But good thing you got me to turn it back into English for you. What he's saying is this: by acknowledging that God is the greatest thing you could ever imagine, you are acknowledging that God exists in your imagination, right? Now, again, most atheists wouldn’t have a problem with that. They would say, “He only exists in my imagination. The problem I have is saying that he exists in reality.” And remember, as we talked about before, there is a difference to Saint Anselm between things that exist only in human understanding and things that exist in reality.

Well, then Anselm would say, well, certainly it’s wonderful to be able to imagine things. I mean, you could imagine that new invention of yours being made and manufactured and on store shelves. But it’s much greater when that invention exists in reality, when it’s actually on store shelves, right? Most people would say yes here. Things that exist in reality are a little bit better than that same thing only existing in a daydream of ours. The reason why is because they not only have existence in our human understanding, but they also have existence in reality. Whatever small benefit that might be, it still might be considered a benefit, right? Well, that’s what Anselm thought.

Then he goes in for the kill. He says, well, you agreed that God is the greatest thing you could ever imagine. And you say this God that only exists in your imagination is the greatest thing you can ever imagine. But you can also imagine that that concept of God also exists in reality. And wouldn’t that be greater than only existing in your imagination? What he’s saying is, if we define God as the greatest thing you can ever imagine, then you can imagine that God exists. So, therefore, according to the definition that you agreed to, he does exist. God exists.

Something funny I’ve noticed as I’ve been rereading all this medieval philosophy is that whenever one of these guys asserts something to be absolutely true—like, they preface what they’re saying with “obviously” or “certainly”—most of the time that’s the portion of the argument that I take issue with the most. It’s some weird psychological thing. It’s like they’re trying to convince themselves of it. Now, when most people hear this argument for the first time, if they’re not invested in the outcome one way or another, I think most people say something like, “Wow, that’s interesting. It sounds good, but it also sounds kind of weird. I think there’s something wrong with it. I just can’t really put my finger on what it is right now.”

For the record, this was my reaction when I first read it. I was 17 years old and homeless and on my personal spiritual quest. And really, I was incredibly openminded to either outcome being true. This argument of Saint Anselm is laid out in chapters two and three of one of his works. And I read chapters two and three probably ten more times, and I thought about it for like a week. And I’ll have you know, because I’m very proud of this myself, I independently arrived at the same conclusion that a guy named Immanuel Kant did centuries after Anselm. And he wrote the most famous refutation of the ontological argument. He’s actually the guy that named it the ontological argument. But I’d like to point out, I’m nowhere near as good as Kant. My thoughts were nowhere near as justified as his, and he did it with a much different educational upbringing than me. So, score: Kant 1, Stephen West -1.

But what Kant says is that the problem with the argument lies in two main areas, both of which are centered around the initial definition of God. God is that than which nothing greater can be thought. But why necessarily is something that exists in reality greater than something that doesn’t exist in reality? That sounds a lot like a bias inherent in a human that values existing over not existing. The second thing Kant said is that Anselm is wrong to think of existence as a quality of something. For example, you can’t think of a banana as being yellow, thin, calorie dense, and existing. The quality of existence is not the same type of thing as the quality of yellow. In fact, Kant would say existence is not even a quality, because without existence, the banana wouldn’t have the ability to be yellow, thin, or calorie dense.

What if we invented a brand-new, fictitious fruit and made existence part of the definition of it? Let’s say we believe in a fruit called a washington. The definition of a washington is that it’s a small, green fruit that’s round, and it grows on trees. And it has an outer shell that you have to peel off to get to the fruit, and it exists. That’s the definition. Well, based on our definition, if you thought that washingtons don’t exist or you said it, you’re contradicting yourself because they, by definition, exist. This sort of tacking existence on after the fact is what Kant said Anselm did in his ontological argument.

One of the other really popular refutations to it that’s valuable because he was devoutly religious himself was by a guy named Gaunilo who actually lived at the same time as Anselm. He thought there was a serious problem with the argument itself. What he does is point out that you can use the exact same argument to prove that lots of other things exist that don’t actually exist. The example he gives was a perfect island. Gaunilo says that he believes in an island existing somewhere out there that is greater than any island you can imagine, this island that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Every single thing about this island is perfection. We can imagine the perfect amount of trees, the perfect temperature, the perfect amount of sand on the beach. We can imagine this glowing, perfect island, but if we defined it as an island than which nothing greater can be conceived, then Anselm proves that that island exists based on his ontological argument.

But then again, there’s a refutation to that argument that says that there can’t be a perfect amount of trees on the island. There can’t be a perfect temperature on the island. There’s no perfection when it comes to those traits. But there can be a perfect goodness and justice, and these are the qualities Anselm was proving the existence of with his argument. To be honest, the best way for you to figure out what you think about it is to either sit alone or with friends and just think about it. This is the kind of thing I do all the time. And for the record, sometimes people think I’m a little weird for it. But when I’m in a setting where people are sitting around each other and no one’s saying anything, like in the car or at a dinner or something, what I do is I look around for the person of the group that obviously thinks they’re very wise, and I ask them what they think about some concept from philosophy or politics that’s highly debated that there isn’t a right answer to, like Saint Anselm’s ontological argument.

See, it’s fun because I know both sides of the argument going into it. And this person, the last thing they’re ever going to do is say “I don’t know” about anything. So, it’s fun to listen to their answer and either find the fallacies in their answer, or you could offer the counterargument in a respectful way and just hear what they have to say. I’ve learned so much about how people arrive at what they think the truth is just by doing this, and I highly recommend it. Come to think of it, now that I’m saying it, it sounds a lot like what Socrates used to do. Hopefully it won’t get me killed one day.

Now, real quick, there’s also a reading of Anselm that says that because a quality of a perfect God would be that he exists in all possible realms, not just one—he would be infinite—that fact somehow proves that if there’s even a possibility of him existing, he must exist. But all the same fallacies are present in that argument. They’re just in different places. I mean, I just thought I’d mention it to be fair and balanced.

Now, if this argument doesn’t convince you that God exists, at least let it illustrate that the concept of God is not a narrow, one-dimensional conversation to have. Just imagine being born 4,000 years ago in the civilization of Babylon. If you were living at that time and someone stole something from you, you’d be going by something similar to Hammurabi’s code. Justice to you was cutting their hands off. Conversely, if you’re born into today’s world and someone steals something from you, you have a very different idea of what sort of retribution balances the scales of justice. Just how you can’t be born into modern times and allow modern social conventions to tell you what justice is and then pretend to understand everything there is to know about justice, you can’t do the same thing with the concept of God either. It's not because it’s not fair to the great thinkers of the past. It’s not fair to yourself. You severely limit your understanding of anything if you experience something once and then pretend like there’s nothing else to know about it.

We talked last time about the period of time before Avicenna where people read Aristotle once and declared it was practically worthless, and then people like Al-Farabi came along and were able to look at it from a different angle, update the examples, and find a way to make it compatible with Islamic theology. Well, there’s still two major monotheistic religions left that could have found a way to make Aristotle compatible with them: Judaism and Christianity. Well, Christianity is done unquestionably best by next week’s episode, Saint Thomas Aquinas. It’s a huge episode. But first, I want to talk about what many consider to be the greatest Jewish thinker in the history of the world, Moses Maimonides.

The discussion about Moses Maimonides and his philosophy is centered around something we were touching on at the beginning of the show. Should we look at the Bible—or in the case of Maimonides, the Torah, the rest of the Old Testament, and some other works—should we take those things literally? Should we look at the stories in the Torah and the way that Moses described this monotheistic, all-powerful creator and take them to be the perfect account of what God is? Well, Maimonides thought to do that was ludicrous. The first thing we have to understand is that Maimonides was smart, really smart. He was trained as not only a doctor but a lawyer too, both of them. I mean, there is no guy in the history of the world that a girl would rather take home to her parents than a guy that’s both a doctor and a lawyer. It’s not even fair. And he applied this massive brain of his to philosophy.

Have you ever thought about the fact that when the Old Testament talks about God, they talk about him as though he has human characteristics? You know, God said, “Let there be light.” He’s speaking like he has vocal cords and a larynx. They always refer to God as though he’s a he, as though he has higher levels of testosterone than other Gods, right? They call him the father as though he actually impregnated something. They even use terms like “create” that have a very human flair to them. So, to the untrained reader, this God sure does seem like something they just made up and didn’t think about it very hard when they wrote it down.

Well, Maimonides thought this was a terrible mistake to make. Firstly, even in his times, the Old Testament was written a long time ago by Moses. Maimonides lived in the 1100s, and the Old Testament was written—most people believe—right around 1400 BC. So, if we use those dates, Maimonides is commenting on a book that was so old—well, Maimonides was to the Old Testament as we are to the New Testament. That’s how long ago it was to him. Maimonides says that Moses, when he wrote the first five books of the Old Testament, had a giant task in front of him. See, we have to understand that the people of his time period weren’t familiar with the idea of a monotheistic, personal God. Moses had enough of a mountain to climb just relaying to people that this single God existed, let alone everything else about it. He had to write it in terms that were understandable to the humans in his day.

It’s funny because this is really similar to what we were talking about at the beginning of the show. I mean, what was Moses going to do? Do we expect him to go from zero to calling God an it in three seconds? Similar to the way that a church wouldn’t tell somebody just getting into things about Plato’s Timaeus or abstract concepts like that, was Moses supposed to tell the people of his time about this perfect, infinite entity that was beyond any linguistic explanation? No. Maimonides says that he couldn’t have done that, or it never would have caught on. So, that’s why he wrote the Torah using all this personification. God is not a he. God doesn’t have a hand that he reaches down with. He doesn’t speak. These are all metaphors that are used for what he actually did that humans can understand easier.

In fact, he goes even further than that. When people that believe in God picture God in their head, they must think of something, right? Do they think of a homo sapien sitting on a throne with Jesus at his right hand? What does God look like? Maimonides doesn’t just say that God doesn’t have any human qualities. He actually says that God doesn’t have qualities at all. To have qualities is to have a certain amount of plurality. And that begs an obvious question, one that goes all the way back to Zeno and his famous paradox of Achilles running halfway to the finish line and then halfway to the finish line and never actually reaching the finish line, because he has to go halfway before he can get the whole way. Do you guys remember that? If multiple parts exist in any sense, the question “What brought those two parts together?” becomes valid. God cannot actually possess attributes because of this, to Maimonides.

He says, “There is no oneness at all except in believing that there is one simple essence in which there is no complexity…but one notion only; so that from whatever angle you regard it and from whatever point of view you consider it, you will find that it is one, not divided in any way and by any cause into two notions.” Now, there are obvious similarities between this conception of God and Plotinus’ transcendent One. This is the same thing Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu said about the Tao. It is beyond the unfair categorization of words. Remember, the first rule of the One is that you can’t say anything about the One. It’s not fair to it. The reason why is because whenever we say anything, like “justice” and “God,” to bring it back full circle, we’re categorizing them.

That is the object of language, to convey a specific idea. This is actually a good thing. It’s just the function of language. Language wouldn’t work very well at all if words were like what they are in Hawaii, where one word means 12 different things. But language does run into problems when it tries to categorize something like God. God is infinite, to Maimonides. Maimonides repeatedly says that God is indefinable or other similar things. What he thinks the way around this is, is that he says that it’s impossible for us to say what God is. We can only say what God is not.

One time I was randomly walking down the road, and there was this mother duck and, like, seven baby ducklings all in a line behind her. And they were walking across the road. And there were some people trying to drive, and a couple of them were getting pretty impatient. They were honking their horns at the ducks and swerving around them. So, I went into the road, and I tried to hurry the ducks up across the road. And I held my hands up to the next car that was waiting in line. I’m actually not sure why I even held my hand up like I’m directing traffic or something. But after the ducks crossed, the person that was waiting rolled down their window, and they said, “You’re so benevolent!” And I was like, “Thank you.” At least I think that’s what he said to me.

So, I’m benevolent for helping the ducks. But is calling God benevolent at that point fair to him at all? To put God’s benevolence on the same level as mine for helping some ducks across the road is completely ridiculous to Maimonides. What he draws from this is that anything the Old Testament says about God is completely a metaphor, to Maimonides. To think it’s the truth is naïve. You can’t actually categorize God with words. In fact, outside of understanding what it says in the Torah as a metaphorical representation of God, to Maimonides, there’s only two other ways you can accurately say anything about God.

One is what is known as negative theology, or a concealed negation. You can’t talk about what God is. The only thing you can talk about is what God is not. If you were saying that God is benevolent, that would be wrong because we can’t use the same word to describe me with the ducks. Instead, we would say that God is not merciless, alright? That’s the only thing we can say. We can only say what we know he is not.

The only other way you can talk about God, according to Maimonides, is by talking about what God does and then making inferences yourself afterwards. You can say things like, “God blessed me with a certain quality.” But you can’t say things like, “God is loyal to his children,” or things that you would infer from God blessing you with a certain quality.

So, I’d like to end the episode today with a quote by Maimonides that’s stuck with me for years. He said, “When I have a difficult subject before me—when I find the road narrow, and can see no other way of teaching a well-established truth except by pleasing one intelligent man and displeasing ten thousand fools—I prefer to address myself to the one man, and take no notice whatever of the condemnation of the multitude; I prefer to extricate that intelligent man from his embarrassment and show him the cause of his perplexity, so that he may attain perfection and be at peace.”