[MA-WS-211]
ON THE SOIL OF INSULT
He who wishes to deprive men of a conception is generally not satisfied with refuting it and drawing out of it the illogical worm that resides within. Rather, when the worm has been killed, does he throw the whole fruit as well into the mire, in order to make it ignoble in men’s sight and to inspire disgust. Thus he thinks that he has found a means of making the usual “third-day resurrection” of conceptions an impossibility.—He is wrong, for on the very soil of insult, in the midst of the filth, the kernel of the conception soon produces new seeds.—The right thing then, is not to scorn and bespatter what one wishes finally to remove, but to lay it tenderly on ice again and again, having regard to the fact that conceptions are very tenacious of life. Here we must act according to the maxim: “One refutation is no refutation.”