“If I might be permitted,” Naphta interpolated, “to introduce a little logic into the premises, I should state the question thus: either Ptolemy and the schoolmen were right, and the world is finite in time and space, the deity is transcendent, the antithesis between God and man is sustained, and man’s being is dual; from which it follows that the problem of his soul consists in the conflict between the spiritual and the material, to which all social problems are entirely secondary⁠—and this is the only sort of individualism I can recognize as consistent⁠—or else, on the other hand, your Renaissance astronomers hit upon the truth, and the cosmos is infinite. Then there exists no supra-sensible world, no dualism; the Beyond is absorbed into the Here, the antithesis between God and nature falls; man ceases to be the theatre of a struggle between two hostile principles, and becomes harmonious and unitary, the conflict subsists merely between his individual and his collective interest; and the will of the State becomes, in good pagan wise, the law of morality. Either one thing or the other.”