“… this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage and
wait – acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were
not true -- … seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. … Indeed we may wait if we will –- I hope you do not think that I am denying that, -- but if we do so, we do so at our own peril as much as if we believed. In either case we
act, taking our life in our hands. No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism’s glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things. …”
~ “The Will to Believe”