When one looks to the _bottom_ of anything, _i. e._ searches out its _essence_, one often discovers something quite other than what it _seems_ to be; honeyed speech and a lying heart, pompous words and beggarly thoughts, etc. By bringing the essence into prominence one degrades the hitherto misapprehended appearance to a bare _semblance_, a deception. The essence of the world, so attractive and splendid, is for him who looks to the bottom of it--emptiness; emptiness is == world's essence (world's doings). Now, he who is religious does not occupy himself with the deceitful semblance, with the empty appearances, but looks upon the essence, and in the essence has--the truth.
The essences which are deduced from some appearances are the evil essences, and conversely from others the good. The essence of human feeling, _e. g._, is love; the essence of human will is the good; that of one's thinking, the true; etc.
What at first passed for existence, such as the world and its like, appears now as bare semblance, and the _truly existent_ is much rather the essence, whose realm is filled with gods, spirits, demons, _i. e._ with good or bad essences. Only this inverted world, the world of essences, truly exists now. The human heart may be loveless, but its essence exists, God, "who is love"; human thought may wander in error, but its essence, truth, exists; "God is truth,"--etc.
To know and acknowledge essences alone and nothing but essences, that is religion; its realm is a realm of essences, spooks, and ghosts.
The longing to make the spook comprehensible, or to realize _non-sense_, has brought about a _corporeal ghost_, a ghost or spirit with a real body, an embodied ghost. How the strongest and most talented Christians have tortured themselves to get a conception of this ghostly apparition! But there always remained the contradiction of two natures, the divine and human, _i. e._ the ghostly and sensual; there remained the most wondrous spook, a thing that was not a thing. Never yet was a ghost more soul-torturing, and no shaman, who pricks himself to raving fury and nerve-lacerating cramps to conjure a ghost, can endure such soul-torment as Christians suffered from that most incomprehensible ghost.