B342 <=> B344 [BTG XXIV Beelzebub’s fifth flight, p. 343]

“What this said particularity of terrestrial morality is, you can easily represent to yourself and understand if I tell you that both inwardly and outwardly, it acquired exactly that ‘unique property’ which belongs to the beings bearing the name ‘chameleon.’

“And the oddity and peculiarity of this said particularity of the morality there, especially of contemporary morality, is that its functioning automatically depends entirely on the moods of the local authorities, which moods in their turn depend also automatically on the state of the four sources of action existing there under the names of ‘mother-in-law,’ ‘digestion,’ ‘John Thomas,’ and ‘cash.’

“The second Babylonian teaching which then had many followers, and which, passing from generation to generation, also reached your contemporary favorites, was on the contrary one of the atheistic teachings of that period.

“In this teaching by the terrestrial Hasnamussian candidates of that time, it was stated that there is no God in the world, and moreover no soul in man, and hence that all those talks and discussions about the soul are nothing more than the deliriums of sick visionaries.

“It was further maintained that there exists in the World only one special law of mechanics, according to which everything that exists passes from one form into another; that is to say, the results which arise from certain preceding causes are gradually transformed and become causes for subsequent results.

“Man also is therefore only a consequence of some preceding cause and in his turn must, as a result, be a cause of certain consequences.

“Further, it was said that even what are called ‘super-natural phenomena’ really perceptible to most people, are all nothing but these same results ensuing from the mentioned special law of mechanics.