Kant originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of
a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping
the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to
propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted
doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof
unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a
reader’s critical faculty—a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations,
circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant
side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy
proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as
self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the
never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the unprovable—all of it resting
on a zero: the absence of definitions. I offer in evidence the
Critique of Pure Reason.