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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tragic Sense Of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Tragic Sense Of Life
+
+Author: Miguel de Unamuno
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2005 [EBook #14636]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Starner, Martin Pettit and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE
+
+MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
+
+translator, J.E. CRAWFORD FLITCH
+
+
+DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC
+
+New York
+
+This Dover edition, first published in 1954, is an unabridged and
+unaltered republication of the English translation originally published
+by Macmillan and Company, Ltd., in 1921. This edition is published by
+special arrangement with Macmillan and Company, Ltd.
+
+The publisher is grateful to the Library of the University of
+Pennsylvania for supplying a copy of this work for the purpose of
+reproduction.
+
+_Standard Book Number: 486-20257-7 Library of Congress Catalog Card
+Number: 54-4730_
+
+Manufactured in the United States of America
+Dover Publications, Inc.
+180 Varick Street
+New York, N.Y. 10014
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                   PAGES
+INTRODUCTORY ESSAY                                              xi-xxxii
+
+AUTHOR'S PREFACE                                             xxxiii-xxxv
+
+I
+
+THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE
+
+     Philosophy and the concrete man--The man Kant, the man Butler, and
+     the man Spinoza--Unity and continuity of the person--Man an end not
+     a means--Intellectual necessities and necessities of the heart and
+     the will--Tragic sense of life in men and in peoples           1-18
+
+II
+
+THE STARTING-POINT
+
+     Tragedy of Paradise--Disease an element of progress--Necessity of
+     knowing in order to live--Instinct of preservation and instinct of
+     perpetuation--The sensible world and the ideal world--Practical
+     starting-point of all philosophy--Knowledge an end in itself?--The
+     man Descartes--The longing not to die                         19-37
+
+III
+
+THE HUNGER OF IMMORTALITY
+
+     Thirst of being--Cult of immortality--Plato's "glorious
+     risk"--Materialism--Paul's discourse to the Athenians--Intolerance
+     of the intellectuals--Craving for fame--Struggle for survival 38-57
+
+IV
+
+THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM
+
+     Immortality and resurrection--Development of idea of immortality in
+     Judaic and Hellenic religions--Paul and the dogma of the
+     resurrection--Athanasius--Sacrament of the
+     Eucharist--Lutheranism--Modernism--The Catholic
+     ethic--Scholasticism--The Catholic solution                   58-78
+
+V
+
+THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION
+
+     Materialism--Concept of substance--Substantiality of the
+     soul--Berkeley--Myers--Spencer--Combat of life with
+     reason--Theological advocacy--_Odium anti-theologicum_--The
+     rationalist attitude--Spinoza--Nietzsche--Truth and consolation
+                                                                  79-105
+
+VI
+
+IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS
+
+     Passionate doubt and Cartesian doubt--Irrationality of the problem
+     of immortality--Will and intelligence--Vitalism and
+     rationalism--Uncertainty as basis of faith--The ethic of
+     despair--Pragmatical justification of despair--Summary of preceding
+     criticism                                                   106-131
+
+VII
+
+LOVE, SUFFERING, PITY, AND PERSONALITY
+
+     Sexual love--Spiritual love--Tragic love--Love and
+     pity--Personalizing faculty of love--God the Personalization of the
+     All--Anthropomorphic tendency--Consciousness of the Universe--What
+     is Truth?--Finality of the Universe                         132-155
+
+VIII
+
+FROM GOD TO GOD
+
+     Concept and feeling of Divinity--Pantheism--Monotheism--The
+     rational God--Proofs of God's existence--Law of necessity--Argument
+     from _Consensus gentium_--The living God--Individuality and
+     personality--God a multiplicity--The God of Reason--The God of
+     Love--Existence of God                                      156-185
+
+IX
+
+FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY
+
+     Personal element in faith--Creative power of faith--Wishing that
+     God may exist--Hope the form of faith--Love and suffering--The
+     suffering God--Consciousness revealed through
+     suffering--Spiritualization of matter                       186-215
+
+X
+
+RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND, AND THE APOCATASTASIS
+
+     What is religion?--The longing for immortality--Concrete
+     representation of a future life--Beatific vision--St.
+     Teresa--Delight requisite for happiness--Degradation of
+     energy--Apocatastasis--Climax of the tragedy--Mystery of the Beyond
+                                                                 216-259
+
+XI
+
+THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM
+
+     Conflict as basis of conduct--Injustice of annihilation--Making
+     ourselves irreplaceable--Religious value of the civil
+     occupation--Business of religion and religion of business--Ethic of
+     domination--Ethic of the cloister--Passion and culture--The Spanish
+     soul                                                        260-296
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN TRAGI-COMEDY
+
+     Culture--Faust--The modern Inquisition--Spain and the scientific
+     spirit--Cultural achievement of Spain--Thought and language--Don
+     Quixote the hero of Spanish thought--Religion a transcendental
+     economy--Tragic ridicule--Quixotesque philosophy--Mission of Don
+     Quixote to-day                                              297-330
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
+
+DON MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
+
+
+I sat, several years ago, at the Welsh National Eisteddfod, under the
+vast tent in which the Bard of Wales was being crowned. After the small
+golden crown had been placed in unsteady equilibrium on the head of a
+clever-looking pressman, several Welsh bards came on the platform and
+recited little epigrams. A Welsh bard is, if young, a pressman, and if
+of maturer years, a divine. In this case, as England was at war, they
+were all of the maturer kind, and, while I listened to the music of
+their ditties--the sense thereof being, alas! beyond my reach--I was
+struck by the fact that all of them, though different, closely resembled
+Don Miguel de Unamuno. It is not my purpose to enter into the wasp-nest
+of racial disquisitions. If there is a race in the world over which more
+sense and more nonsense can be freely said for lack of definite
+information than the Welsh, it is surely this ancient Basque people,
+whose greatest contemporary figure is perhaps Don Miguel de Unamuno. I
+am merely setting down that intuitional fact for what it may be worth,
+though I do not hide my opinion that such promptings of the inner,
+untutored man are worth more than cavefuls of bones and tombfuls of
+undecipherable papers.
+
+This reminiscence, moreover, which springs up into the light of my
+memory every time I think of Don Miguel de Unamuno, has to my mind a
+further value in that in it the image of Don Miguel does not appear as
+evoked by one man, but by many, though many of one species, many who in
+depth are but one man, one type, the Welsh divine. Now, this unity
+underlying a multiplicity, these many faces, moods, and movements,
+traceable to one only type, I find deeply connected in my mind with
+Unamuno's person and with what he signifies in Spanish life and letters.
+And when I further delve into my impression, I first realize an
+undoubtedly physical relation between the many-one Welsh divines and the
+many-one Unamuno. A tall, broad-shouldered, bony man, with high cheeks,
+a beak-like nose, pointed grey beard, and a complexion the colour of the
+red hematites on which Bilbao, his native town, is built, and which
+Bilbao ruthlessly plucks from its very body to exchange for gold in the
+markets of England--and in the deep sockets under the high aggressive
+forehead prolonged by short iron-grey hair, two eyes like gimlets
+eagerly watching the world through spectacles which seem to be purposely
+pointed at the object like microscopes; a fighting expression, but of
+noble fighting, above the prizes of the passing world, the contempt for
+which is shown in a peculiar attire whose blackness invades even that
+little triangle of white which worldly men leave on their breast for the
+necktie of frivolity and the decorations of vanity, and, blinding it,
+leaves but the thinnest rim of white collar to emphasize, rather than
+relieve, the priestly effect of the whole. Such is Don Miguel de
+Unamuno.
+
+Such is, rather, his photograph. For Unamuno himself is ever changing. A
+talker, as all good Spaniards are nowadays, but a talker in earnest and
+with his heart in it, he is varied, like the subjects of his
+conversation, and, still more, like the passions which they awake in
+him. And here I find an unsought reason in intellectual support of that
+intuitional observation which I noted down in starting--that Unamuno
+resembles the Welsh in that he is not ashamed of showing his
+passions--a thing which he has often to do, for he is very much alive
+and feels therefore plenty of them. But a word of caution may here be
+necessary, since that term, "passion," having been diminished--that is,
+made meaner--by the world, an erroneous impression might be conveyed by
+what precedes, of the life and ways of Unamuno. So that it may not be
+superfluous to say that Don Miguel de Unamuno is a Professor of Greek in
+the University of Salamanca, an ex-Rector of it who left behind the
+reputation of being a strong ruler; a father of a numerous family, and a
+man who has sung the quiet and deep joys of married life with a
+restraint, a vigour, and a nobility which it would be difficult to match
+in any literature. _Yet_ a passionate man--or, as he would perhaps
+prefer to say, _therefore_ a passionate man. But in a major, not in a
+minor key; of strong, not of weak passions.
+
+The difference between the two lies perhaps in that the man with strong
+passions lives them, while the man with weak passions is lived by them,
+so that while weak passions paralyze the will, strong passions urge man
+to action. It is such an urge towards life, such a vitality ever awake,
+which inspires Unamuno's multifarious activities in the realm of the
+mind. The duties of his chair of Greek are the first claim upon his
+time. But then, his reading is prodigious, as any reader of this book
+will realize for himself. Not only is he familiar with the
+stock-in-trade of every intellectual worker--the Biblical, Greek, Roman,
+and Italian cultures--but there is hardly anything worth reading in
+Europe and America which he has not read, and, but for the Slav
+languages, in the original. Though never out of Spain, and seldom out of
+Salamanca, he has succeeded in establishing direct connections with most
+of the intellectual leaders of the world, and in gathering an
+astonishingly accurate knowledge of the spirit and literature of foreign
+peoples. It was in his library at Salamanca that he once explained to
+an Englishman the meaning of a particular Scotticism in Robert Burns;
+and it was there that he congratulated another Englishman on his having
+read _Rural Rides_, "the hall-mark," he said, "of the man of letters who
+is no mere man of letters, but also a man." From that corner of Castile,
+he has poured out his spirit in essays, poetry, criticism, novels,
+philosophy, lectures, and public meetings, and that daily toil of press
+article writing which is the duty rather than the privilege of most
+present-day writers in Spain. Such are the many faces, moods, and
+movements in which Unamuno appears before Spain and the world. And yet,
+despite this multiplicity and this dispersion, the dominant impression
+which his personality leaves behind is that of a vigorous unity, an
+unswerving concentration both of mind and purpose. Bagaria, the national
+caricaturist, a genius of rhythm and character which the war revealed,
+but who was too good not to be overshadowed by the facile art of
+Raemaekers (imagine Goya overshadowed by Reynolds!), once represented
+Unamuno as an owl. A marvellous thrust at the heart of Unamuno's
+character. For all this vitality and ever-moving activity of mind is
+shot through by the absolute immobility of two owlish eyes piercing the
+darkness of spiritual night. And this intense gaze into the mystery is
+the steel axis round which his spirit revolves and revolves in
+desperation; the unity under his multiplicity; the one fire under his
+passions and the inspiration of his whole work and life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was Unamuno himself who once said that the Basque is the alkaloid of
+the Spaniard. The saying is true, so far as it goes. But it would be
+more accurate to say "one of the two alkaloids." It is probable that if
+the Spanish character were analyzed--always provided that the
+Mediterranean aspect of it be left aside as a thing apart--two main
+principles would be recognized in it--_i.e._, the Basque, richer in
+concentration, substance, strength; and the Andalusian, more given to
+observation, grace, form. The two types are to this day socially
+opposed. The Andalusian is a people which has lived down many
+civilizations, and in which even illiterate peasants possess a kind of
+innate education. The Basques are a primitive people of mountaineers and
+fishermen, in which even scholars have a peasant-like roughness not
+unlike the roughness of Scotch tweeds--or character. It is the even
+balancing of these two elements--the force of the Northerner with the
+grace of the Southerner--which gives the Castilian his admirable poise
+and explains the graceful virility of men such as Fray Luis de León and
+the feminine strength of women such as Queen Isabel and Santa Teresa. We
+are therefore led to expect in so forcible a representative of the
+Basque race as Unamuno the more substantial and earnest features of the
+Spanish spirit.
+
+Our expectation is not disappointed. And to begin with it appears in
+that very concentration of his mind and soul on the mystery of man's
+destiny on earth. Unamuno is in earnest, in dead earnest, as to this
+matter. This earnestness is a distinct Spanish, nay, Basque feature in
+him. There is something of the stern attitude of Loyola about his
+"tragic sense of life," and on this subject--under one form or another,
+his only subject--he admits no joke, no flippancy, no subterfuge. A true
+heir of those great Spanish saints and mystics whose lifework was
+devoted to the exploration of the kingdoms of faith, he is more human
+than they in that he has lost hold of the firm ground where they had
+stuck their anchor. Yet, though loose in the modern world, he refuses to
+be drawn away from the main business of the Christian, the saving of his
+soul, which, in his interpretation, means the conquest of his
+immortality, his own immortality.
+
+An individualist. Certainly. And he proudly claims the title. Nothing
+more refreshing in these days of hoggish communistic cant than this
+great voice asserting the divine, the eternal rights of the individual.
+But it is not with political rights that he is concerned. Political
+individualism, when not a mere blind for the unlimited freedom of civil
+privateering, is but the outcome of that abstract idea of man which he
+so energetically condemns as pedantic--that is, inhuman. His opposition
+of the individual to society is not that of a puerile anarchist to a no
+less puerile socialist. There is nothing childish about Unamuno. His
+assertion that society is for the individual, not the individual for
+society, is made on a transcendental plane. It is not the argument of
+liberty against authority--which can be easily answered on the
+rationalistic plane by showing that authority is in its turn the liberty
+of the social or collective being, a higher, more complex, and
+longer-living "individual" than the individual pure and simple. It is
+rather the unanswerable argument of eternity against duration. Now that
+argument must rest on a religious basis. And it is on a religious basis
+that Unamuno founds his individualism. Hence the true Spanish flavour of
+his social theory, which will not allow itself to be set down and
+analyzed into principles of ethics and politics, with their inevitable
+tendency to degenerate into mere economics, but remains free and fluid
+and absolute, like the spirit.
+
+Such an individualism has therefore none of the features of that
+childish half-thinking which inspires most anarchists. It is, on the
+contrary, based on high thinking, the highest of all, that which refuses
+to dwell on anything less than man's origin and destination. We are here
+confronted with that humanistic tendency of the Spanish mind which can
+be observed as the dominant feature of her arts and literature. All
+races are of course predominantly concerned with man. But they all
+manifest their concern with a difference. Man is in Spain a concrete
+being, the man of flesh and bones, and the whole man. He is neither
+subtilized into an idea by pure thinking nor civilized into a gentleman
+by social laws and prejudices. Spanish art and letters deal with
+concrete, tangible persons. Now, there is no more concrete, no more
+tangible person for every one of us than ourself. Unamuno is therefore
+right in the line of Spanish tradition in dealing predominantly--one
+might almost say always--with his own person. The feeling of the
+awareness of one's own personality has seldom been more forcibly
+expressed than by Unamuno. This is primarily due to the fact that he is
+himself obsessed by it. But in his expression of it Unamuno derives also
+some strength from his own sense of matter and the material--again a
+typically Spanish element of his character. Thus his human beings are as
+much body as soul, or rather body and soul all in one, a union which he
+admirably renders by bold mixtures of physical and spiritual metaphors,
+as in _gozarse uno la carne del alma_ (to enjoy the flesh of one's own
+soul).
+
+In fact, Unamuno, as a true Spaniard which he is, refuses to surrender
+life to ideas, and that is why he runs shy of abstractions, in which he
+sees but shrouds wherewith we cover dead thoughts. He is solely
+concerned with his own life, nothing but his life, and the whole of his
+life. An egotistical position? Perhaps. Unamuno, however, can and does
+answer the charge. We can only know and feel humanity in the one human
+being which we have at hand. It is by penetrating deep into ourselves
+that we find our brothers in us--branches of the same trunk which can
+only touch each other by seeking their common origin. This searching
+within, Unamuno has undertaken with a sincerity, a fearlessness which
+cannot be excelled. Nowhere will the reader find the inner
+contradictions of a modern human being, who is at the same time healthy
+and capable of thought set down with a greater respect for truth. Here
+the uncompromising tendency of the Spanish race, whose eyes never turn
+away from nature, however unwelcome the sight, is strengthened by that
+passion for life which burns in Unamuno. The suppression of the
+slightest thought or feeling for the sake of intellectual order would
+appear to him as a despicable worldly trick. Thus it is precisely
+because he does sincerely feel a passionate love of his own life that he
+thinks out with such scrupulous accuracy every argument which he finds
+in his mind--his own mind, a part of his life--against the possibility
+of life after death; but it is also because he feels that, despite such
+conclusive arguments, his will to live perseveres, that he refuses to
+his intellect the power to kill his faith. A knight-errant of the
+spirit, as he himself calls the Spanish mystics, he starts for his
+adventures after having, like Hernán Cortés, burnt his ships. But, is it
+necessary to enhance his figure by literary comparison? He is what he
+wants to be, a man--in the striking expression which he chose as a title
+for one of his short stories, _nothing less than a whole man_. Not a
+mere thinking machine, set to prove a theory, nor an actor on the world
+stage, singing a well-built poem, well built at the price of many a
+compromise; but a whole man, with all his affirmations and all his
+negations, all the pitiless thoughts of a penetrating mind that denies,
+and all the desperate self-assertions of a soul that yearns for eternal
+life.
+
+This strife between enemy truths, the truth thought and the truth felt,
+or, as he himself puts it, between veracity and sincerity, is Unamuno's
+_raison d'être_. And it is because the "_Tragic Sense of Life_" is the
+most direct expression of it that this book is his masterpiece. The
+conflict is here seen as reflected in the person of the author. The book
+opens by a definition of the Spanish man, the "man of flesh and bones,"
+illustrated by the consideration of the real living men who stood behind
+the bookish figures of great philosophers and consciously or
+unconsciously shaped and misshaped their doctrines in order to satisfy
+their own vital yearnings. This is followed by the statement of the will
+to live or hunger for immortality, in the course of which the usual
+subterfuges with which this all-important issue is evaded in philosophy,
+theology, or mystic literature, are exposed and the real, concrete,
+"flesh and bones" character of the immortality which men desire is
+reaffirmed. The Catholic position is then explained as the _vital_
+attitude in the matter, summed up in Tertullian's _Credo quia absurdum_,
+and this is opposed to the critical attitude which denies the
+possibility of individual survival in the sense previously defined. Thus
+Unamuno leads us to his inner deadlock: his reason can rise no higher
+than scepticism, and, unable to become vital, dies sterile; his faith,
+exacting anti-rational affirmations and unable therefore to be
+apprehended by the logical mind, remains incommunicable. From the bottom
+of this abyss Unamuno builds up his theory of life. But is it a theory?
+Unamuno does not claim for it such an intellectual dignity. He knows too
+well that in the constructive part of his book his vital self takes the
+leading part and repeatedly warns his reader of the fact, lest critical
+objections might be raised against this or that assumption or
+self-contradiction. It is on the survival of his will to live, after all
+the onslaughts of his critical intellect, that he finds the basis for
+his belief--or rather for his effort to believe. Self-compassion leads
+to self-love, and this self-love, founded as it is on a universal
+conflict, widens into love of all that lives and therefore wants to
+survive. So, by an act of love, springing from our own hunger for
+immortality, we are led to give a conscience to the Universe--that is,
+to create God.
+
+Such is the process by which Unamuno, from the transcendental pessimism
+of his inner contradiction, extracts an everyday optimism founded on
+love. His symbol of this attitude is the figure of Don Quixote, of whom
+he truly says that his creed "can hardly be called idealism, since he
+did not fight for ideas: it was spiritualism, for he fought for the
+spirit." Thus he opposes a synthetical to an analytical attitude; a
+religious to an ethico-scientific ideal; Spain, his Spain--_i.e._, the
+spiritual manifestation of the Spanish race--to Europe, his
+Europe--_i.e._, the intellectual manifestation of the white race, which
+he sees in Franco-Germany; and heroic love, even when comically
+unpractical, to culture, which, in this book, written in 1912, is
+already prophetically spelt Kultura.
+
+This courageous work is written in a style which is the man--for
+Buffon's saying, seldom true, applies here to the letter. It is written
+as Carlyle wrote, not merely with the brain, but with the whole soul and
+the whole body of the man, and in such a vivid manner that one can
+without much effort imagine the eager gesticulation which now and then
+underlines, interprets, despises, argues, denies, and above all asserts.
+In his absolute subservience to the matter in hand this manner of
+writing has its great precedent in Santa Teresa. The differences, and
+they are considerable, are not of art, absent in either case, but of
+nature. They are such deep and obvious differences as obtain between the
+devout, ignorant, graceful nun of sixteenth-century Avila and the
+free-thinking, learned, wilful professor of twentieth-century Salamanca.
+In the one case, as in the other, the language is the most direct and
+simple required. It is also the least literary and the most popular.
+Unamuno, who lives in close touch with the people, has enriched the
+Spanish literary language by returning to it many a popular term. His
+vocabulary abounds in racy words of the soil, and his writings gain from
+them an almost peasant-like pith and directness which suits his own
+Basque primitive nature. His expression occurs simultaneously with the
+thoughts and feelings to be expressed, the flow of which, but loosely
+controlled by the critical mind, often breaks through the meshes of
+established diction and gives birth to new forms created under the
+pressure of the moment. This feature Unamuno has also in common with
+Santa Teresa, but what in the Saint was a self-ignorant charm becomes in
+Unamuno a deliberate manner inspired, partly by an acute sense of the
+symbolical and psychological value of word-connections, partly by that
+genuine need for expansion of the language which all true original
+thinkers or "feelers" must experience, but partly also by an acquired
+habit of juggling with words which is but natural in a philologist
+endowed with a vigorous imagination. Unamuno revels in words. He
+positively enjoys stretching them beyond their usual meaning, twisting
+them, composing, opposing, and transposing them in all sorts of possible
+ways. This game--not wholly unrewarded now and then by striking
+intellectual finds--seems to be the only relaxation which he allows his
+usually austere mind. It certainly is the only light feature of a style
+the merit of which lies in its being the close-fitting expression of a
+great mind earnestly concentrated on a great idea.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The earnestness, the intensity, and the oneness of his predominant
+passion are the main cause of the strength of Unamuno's philosophic
+work. They remain his main asset, yet become also the principal cause of
+his weakness, as a creative artist. Great art can only flourish in the
+temperate zone of the passions, on the return journey from the torrid.
+Unamuno, as a creator, has none of the failings of those artists who
+have never felt deeply. But he does show the limitations of those
+artists who cannot cool down. And the most striking of them is that at
+bottom he is seldom able to put himself in a purely esthetical mood. In
+this, as in many other features, Unamuno curiously resembles
+Wordsworth--whom, by the way, he is one of the few Spaniards to read
+and appreciate.[1] Like him, Unamuno is an essentially purposeful and
+utilitarian mind. Of the two qualities which the work of art requires
+for its inception--earnestness and detachment--both Unamuno and
+Wordsworth possess the first; both are deficient in the second. Their
+interest in their respective leading thought--survival in the first,
+virtue in the second--is too direct, too pressing, to allow them the
+"distance" necessary for artistic work. Both are urged to work by a
+lofty utilitarianism--the search for God through the individual soul in
+Unamuno, the search for God through the social soul in Wordsworth--so
+that their thoughts and sensations are polarized and their spirit loses
+that impartial transparence for nature's lights without which no great
+art is possible. Once suggested, this parallel is too rich in sidelights
+to be lightly dropped. This single-mindedness which distinguishes them
+explains that both should have consciously or unconsciously chosen a
+life of semi-seclusion, for Unamuno lives in Salamanca very much as
+Wordsworth lived in the Lake District--
+
+                       in a still retreat
+    Sheltered, but not to social duties lost,
+
+hence in both a certain proclivity towards ploughing a solitary furrow
+and becoming self-centred. There are no doubt important differences. The
+Englishman's sense of nature is both keener and more concrete; while the
+Spaniard's knowledge of human nature is not barred by the subtle
+inhibitions and innate limitations which tend to blind its more
+unpleasant aspects to the eye of the Englishman. There is more courage
+and passion in the Spaniard; more harmony and goodwill in the
+Englishman; the one is more like fire, the other like light. For
+Wordsworth, a poem is above all an essay, a means for conveying a lesson
+in forcible and easily remembered terms to those who are in need of
+improvement. For Unamuno, a poem or a novel (and he holds that a novel
+is but a poem) is the outpouring of a man's passion, the overflow of the
+heart which cannot help itself and lets go. And it may be that the
+essential difference between the two is to be found in this difference
+between their respective purposes: Unamuno's purpose is more intimately
+personal and individual; Wordsworth's is more social and objective. Thus
+both miss the temperate zone, where emotion takes shape into the moulds
+of art; but while Wordsworth is driven by his ideal of social service
+this side of it, into the cold light of both moral and intellectual
+self-control, Unamuno remains beyond, where the molten metal is too near
+the fire of passion, and cannot cool down into shape.
+
+Unamuno is therefore not unlike Wordsworth in the insufficiency of his
+sense of form. We have just seen the essential cause of this
+insufficiency to lie in the nonesthetical attitude of his mind, and we
+have tried to show one of the roots of such an attitude in the very
+loftiness and earnestness of his purpose. Yet, there are others, for
+living nature is many-rooted as it is many-branched. It cannot be
+doubted that a certain refractoriness to form is a typical feature of
+the Basque character. The sense of form is closely in sympathy with the
+feminine element in human nature, and the Basque race is strongly
+masculine. The predominance of the masculine element--strength without
+grace--is as typical of Unamuno as it is of Wordsworth. The literary
+gifts which might for the sake of synthesis be symbolized in a smile are
+absent in both. There is as little humour in the one as in the other.
+Humour, however, sometimes occurs in Unamuno, but only in his
+ill-humoured moments, and then with a curious bite of its own which adds
+an unconscious element to its comic effect. Grace only visits them in
+moments of inspiration, and then it is of a noble character, enhanced as
+it is by the ever-present gift of strength. And as for the sense for
+rhythm and music, both Unamuno and Wordsworth seem to be limited to the
+most vigorous and masculine gaits. This feature is particularly
+pronounced in Unamuno, for while Wordsworth is painstaking,
+all-observant, and too good a "teacher" to underestimate the importance
+of pleasure in man's progress, Unamuno knows no compromise. His aim is
+not to please but to strike, and he deliberately seeks the naked, the
+forceful, even the brutal word for truth. There is in him, however, a
+cause of formlessness from which Wordsworth is free--namely, an
+eagerness for sincerity and veracity which brushes aside all
+preparation, ordering or planning of ideas as suspect of "dishing up,"
+intellectual trickery, and juggling with spontaneous truths.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such qualities--both the positive and the negative--are apparent in his
+poetry. In it, the appeal of force and sincerity is usually stronger
+than that of art. This is particularly the case in his first volume
+(_Poesías_, 1907), in which a lofty inspiration, a noble attitude of
+mind, a rich and racy vocabulary, a keen insight into the spirit of
+places, and above all the overflowing vitality of a strong man in the
+force of ripeness, contend against the still awkward gait of the Basque
+and a certain rebelliousness of rhyme. The dough of the poetic language
+is here seen heavily pounded by a powerful hand, bent on reducing its
+angularities and on improving its plasticity. Nor do we need to wait for
+further works in order to enjoy the reward of such efforts, for it is
+attained in this very volume more than once, as for instance in _Muere
+en el mar el ave que voló del nido_, a beautiful poem in which emotion
+and thought are happily blended into exquisite form.
+
+In his last poem, _El Cristo de Velázquez_ (1920), Unamuno undertakes
+the task of giving a poetical rendering of his tragic sense of life, in
+the form of a meditation on the Christ of Velázquez, the beautiful and
+pathetic picture in the Prado. Why Velázquez's and not Christ himself?
+The fact is that, though in his references to actual forms, Unamuno
+closely follows Velázquez's picture, the spiritual interpretation of it
+which he develops as the poem unfolds itself is wholly personal. It
+would be difficult to find two great Spaniards wider apart than Unamuno
+and Velázquez, for if Unamuno is the very incarnation of the masculine
+spirit of the North--all strength and substance--Velázquez is the image
+of the feminine spirit of the South--all grace and form. Velázquez is a
+limpid mirror, with a human depth, yet a mirror. That Unamuno has
+departed from the image of Christ which the great Sevillian reflected on
+his immortal canvas was therefore to be expected. But then Unamuno has,
+while speaking of Don Quixote, whom he has also freely and personally
+interpreted,[2] taken great care to point out that a work of art is, for
+each of us, all that we see in it. And, moreover, Unamuno has not so
+much departed from Velázquez's image of Christ as delved into its
+depths, expanded, enlarged it, or, if you prefer, seen in its limpid
+surface the immense figure of his own inner Christ. However free and
+unorthodox in its wide scope of images and ideas, the poem is in its
+form a regular meditation in the manner approved by the Catholic Church,
+and it is therefore meet that it should rise from a concrete, tangible
+object as it is recommended to the faithful. To this concrete character
+of its origin, the poem owes much of its suggestiveness, as witness the
+following passage quoted here, with a translation sadly unworthy of the
+original, as being the clearest link between the poetical meditation
+and the main thought that underlies all the work and the life of
+Unamuno.
+
+NUBE NEGRA
+
+    O es que una nube negra de los cielos
+    ese negror le dió a tu cabellera
+    de nazareno, cual de mustio sauce
+    de una noche sin luna sobre el río?
+    ¿Es la sombra del ala sin perfiles
+    del ángel de la nada negadora,
+    de Luzbel, que en su caída inacabable
+    --fondo no puede dar--su eterna cuita
+    clava en tu frente, en tu razón? ¿Se vela,
+    el claro Verbo en Ti con esa nube,
+    negra cual de Luzbel las negras alas,
+    mientras brilla el Amor, todo desnudo,
+    con tu desnudo pecho por cendal?
+
+BLACK CLOUD
+
+    Or was it then that a black cloud from heaven
+    Such blackness gave to your Nazarene's hair,
+    As of a languid willow o'er the river
+    Brooding in moonless night? Is it the shadow
+    Of the profileless wing of Luzbel, the Angel
+    Of denying nothingness, endlessly falling--
+    Bottom he ne'er can touch--whose grief eternal
+    He nails on to Thy forehead, to Thy reason?
+    Is the clear Word in Thee with that cloud veiled
+    --A cloud as black as the black wings of Luzbel--
+    While Love shines naked within Thy naked breast?
+
+The poem, despite its length, easily maintains this lofty level
+throughout, and if he had written nothing else Unamuno would still
+remain as having given to Spanish letters the noblest and most sustained
+lyrical flight in the language. It abounds in passages of ample beauty
+and often strikes a note of primitive strength in the true Old Testament
+style. It is most distinctively a poem in a major key, in a group with
+_Paradise Lost_ and _The Excursion_, but in a tone halfway between the
+two; and, as coming from the most Northern-minded and substantial poet
+that Spain ever had, wholly free from that tendency towards
+grandiloquence and Ciceronian drapery which blighted previous similar
+efforts in Spain. Its weakness lies in a certain monotony due to the
+interplay of Unamuno's two main limitations as an artist: the absolute
+surrender to one dominant thought and a certain deficiency of form
+bordering here on contempt. The plan is but a loose sequence of
+meditations on successive aspects of Christ as suggested by images or
+advocations of His divine person, or even of parts of His human body:
+Lion, Bull, Lily, Sword, Crown, Head, Knees. Each meditation is treated
+in a period of blank verse, usually of a beautiful texture, the
+splendour of which is due less to actual images than to the inner vigour
+of ideas and the eagerness with which even the simplest facts are
+interpreted into significant symbols. Yet, sometimes, this blank verse
+becomes hard and stony under the stubborn hammering of a too insistent
+mind, and the device of ending each meditation with a line accented on
+its last syllable tends but to increase the monotony of the whole.
+
+Blank verse is never the best medium for poets of a strong masculine
+inspiration, for it does not sufficiently correct their usual deficiency
+in form. Such poets are usually at their best when they bind themselves
+to the discipline of existing forms and particularly when they limit the
+movements of their muse to the "sonnet's scanty plot of ground."
+Unamuno's best poetry, as Wordsworth's, is in his sonnets. His _Rosario
+de Sonetos Líricos_, published in 1911, contains some of the finest
+sonnets in the Spanish language. There is variety in this volume--more
+at least than is usual in Unamuno: from comments on events of local
+politics (sonnet lii.) which savour of the more prosaic side of
+Wordsworth, to meditations on space and time such as that sonnet
+xxxvii., so reminiscent of Shelley's _Ozymandias of Egypt_; from a
+suggestive homily to a "Don Juan of Ideas" whose thirst for knowledge is
+"not love of truth, but intellectual lust," and whose "thought is
+therefore sterile" (sonnet cvii.), to an exquisitely rendered moonlight
+love scene (sonnet civ.). The author's main theme itself, which of
+course occupies a prominent part in the series, appears treated under
+many different lights and in genuinely poetical moods which truly do
+justice to the inherent wealth of poetical inspiration which it
+contains. Many a sonnet might be quoted here, and in particular that
+sombre and fateful poem _Nihil Novum sub Sole_ (cxxiii.), which defeats
+its own theme by the striking originality of its inspiration.
+
+So active, so positive is the inspiration of this poetry that the
+question of outside influences does not even arise. Unamuno is probably
+the Spanish contemporary poet whose manner owes least, if anything at
+all, to modern developments of poetry such as those which take their
+source in Baudelaire and Verlaine. These over-sensitive and over-refined
+artists have no doubt enriched the sensuous, the formal, the
+sentimental, even the intellectual aspects of verse with an admirable
+variety of exquisite shades, lacking which most poetry seems
+old-fashioned to the fastidious palate of modern men. Unamuno is too
+genuine a representative of the spiritual and masculine variety of
+Spanish genius, ever impervious to French, and generally, to
+intellectual, influences, to be affected by the esthetic excellence of
+this art. Yet, for all his disregard of the modern resources which it
+adds to the poetic craft, Unamuno loses none of his modernity. He is
+indeed more than modern. When, as he often does, he strikes the true
+poetic note, he is outside time. His appeal is not in complexity but in
+strength. He is not refined: he is final.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the Preface to his _Tres Novelas Ejemplares y un Prólogo_ (1921)
+Unamuno says: " ... novelist--that is, poet ... a novel--that is, a
+poem." Thus, with characteristic decision, he sides with the lyrical
+conception of the novel. There is of course an infinite variety of
+types of novels. But they can probably all be reduced to two
+classes--_i.e._, the dramatic or objective, and the lyrical or
+subjective, according to the mood or inspiration which predominates in
+them. The present trend of the world points towards the dramatic or
+objective type. This type is more in tune with the detached and
+scientific character of the age. The novel is often nowadays considered
+as a document, a "slice of life," a piece of information, a literary
+photograph representing places and people which purse or time prevents
+us from seeing with our own eyes. It is obvious, given what we now know
+of him, that such a view of the novel cannot appeal to Unamuno. He is a
+utilitarian, but not of worldly utilities. His utilitarianism transcends
+our daily wants and seeks to provide for our eternal ones. He is,
+moreover, a mind whose workings turn in spiral form towards a central
+idea and therefore feels an instinctive antagonism to the dispersive
+habits of thought and sensation which such detailed observation of life
+usually entails. For at bottom the opposition between the lyrical and
+the dramatic novel may be reduced to that between the poet and the
+dramatist. Both the dramatist and the poet create in order to link up
+their soul and the world in one complete circle of experience, but this
+circle is travelled in opposite directions. The poet goes inwards first,
+then out to nature full of his inner experience, and back home. The
+dramatist goes outwards first, then comes back to himself, his harvest
+of wisdom gathered in reality. It is the recognition of his own lyrical
+inward-looking nature which makes Unamuno pronounce the identity of the
+novel and the poem.
+
+Whatever we may think of it as a general theory, there is little doubt
+that this opinion is in the main sound in so far as it refers to
+Unamuno's own work. His novels are created within. They are--and their
+author is the first to declare it so--novels which happen in the
+kingdom of the spirit. Outward points of reference in time and space
+are sparingly given--in fact, reduced to a bare minimum. In some of
+them, as for instance _Niebla_ (1914), the name of the town in which the
+action takes place is not given, and such scanty references to the
+topography and general features as are supplied would equally apply to
+any other provincial town of Spain. Action, in the current sense of the
+word, is correspondingly simplified, since the material and local
+elements on which it usually exerts itself are schematized, and in their
+turn made, as it were, spiritual. Thus a street, a river of colour for
+some, for others a series of accurately described shops and dwellings,
+becomes in Unamuno (see _Niebla_) a loom where the passions and desires
+of men and women cross and recross each other and weave the cloth of
+daily life. Even the physical description of characters is reduced to a
+standard of utmost simplicity. So that, in fine, Unamuno's novels, by
+eliminating all other material, appear, if the boldness of the metaphor
+be permitted, as the spiritual skeletons of novels, conflicts between
+souls.
+
+Nor is this the last stage in his deepening and narrowing of the
+creative furrow. For these souls are in their turn concentrated so that
+the whole of their vitality burns into one passion. If a somewhat
+fanciful comparison from another art may throw any light on this feature
+of his work we might say that his characters are to those of Galdós, for
+instance, as counterpoint music to the complex modern symphony. Joaquín
+Monegro, the true hero of his _Abel Sánchez_ (1917), is the
+personification of hatred. Raquel in _Dos Madres_[1] and Catalina in _El
+Marqués de Lumbría_[1] are two widely different but vigorous, almost
+barbarous, "maternities." Alejandro, the hero of his powerful _Nada
+Menos que Todo un Hombre_,[3] is masculine will, pure and unconquerable,
+save by death. Further still, in most if not all of his main
+characters, we can trace the dominant passion which is their whole being
+to a mere variety of the one and only passion which obsesses Unamuno
+himself, the hunger for life, a full life, here and after. Here is, for
+instance, _Abel Sánchez_, a sombre study of hatred, a modern paraphrase
+of the story of Cain. Joaquín Monegro, the Cain of the novel, has been
+reading Byron's poem, and writes in his diary: "It was when I read how
+Lucifer declared to Cain that he, Cain, was immortal, that I began in
+terror to wonder whether I also was immortal and whether in me would be
+also immortal my hatred. 'Have I a soul?' I said to myself then. 'Is
+this my hatred soul?' And I came to think that it could not be
+otherwise, that such a hatred cannot be the function of a body.... A
+corruptible organism could not hate as I hated."
+
+Thus Joaquín Monegro, like every other main character in his work,
+appears preoccupied by the same central preoccupation of Unamuno. In one
+word, all Unamuno's characters are but incarnations of himself. But that
+is what we expected to find in a lyrical novelist.
+
+There are critics who conclude from this observation that these
+characters do not exist, that they are mere arguments on legs,
+personified ideas. Here and there, in Unamuno's novels, there are
+passages which lend some colour of plausibility to this view. Yet, it is
+in my opinion mistaken. Unamuno's characters may be schematized,
+stripped of their complexities, reduced to the mainspring of their
+nature; they may, moreover, reveal mainsprings made of the same steel.
+But that they are alive no one could deny who has a sense for life. The
+very restraint in the use of physical details which Unamuno has made a
+feature of his creative work may have led his critics to forget the
+intensity of those--admirably chosen--which are given. It is significant
+that the eyes play an important part in his description of characters
+and in his narrative too. His sense of the interpenetration of body and
+soul is so deep that he does not for one moment let us forget how bodily
+his "souls" are, and how pregnant with spiritual significance is every
+one of their words and gestures. No. These characters are not arguments
+on legs. They truly are men and women of "flesh and bones," human,
+terribly human.
+
+In thus emphasizing a particular feature in their nature, Unamuno
+imparts to his creations a certain deformity which savours of romantic
+days. Yet Unamuno is not a romanticist, mainly because Romanticism was
+an esthetic attitude, and his attitude is seldom purely esthetic. For
+all their show of passion, true Romanticists seldom gave their real
+selves to their art. They created a stage double of their own selves for
+public exhibitions. They sought the picturesque. Their form was lyrical,
+but their substance was dramatic. Unamuno, on the contrary, even though
+he often seeks expression in dramatic form, is essentially lyrical. And
+if he is always intense, he never is exuberant. He follows the Spanish
+tradition for restraint--for there is one, along its opposite tradition
+for grandiloquence--and, true to the spirit of it, he seeks the maximum
+of effect through the minimum of means. Then, he never shouts. Here is
+an example of his quiet method, the rhythmical beauty of which is
+unfortunately almost untranslatable:
+
+"Y así pasaron días de llanto y de negrura hasta que las lágrimas fueron
+yéndose hacia adentro y la casa fué derritiendo los negrores" (_Niebla_)
+(And thus, days of weeping and mourning went by, till the tears began to
+flow inward and the blackness to melt in the home).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miguel de Unamuno is to-day the greatest literary figure of Spain.
+Baroja may surpass him in variety of external experience, Azorín in
+delicate art, Ortega y Gasset in philosophical subtlety, Ayala in
+intellectual elegance, Valle Inclán in rhythmical grace. Even in
+vitality he may have to yield the first place to that over-whelming
+athlete of literature, Blasco Ibáñez. But Unamuno is head and shoulders
+above them all in the highness of his purpose and in the earnestness and
+loyalty with which, Quixote-like, he has served all through his life his
+unattainable Dulcinea. Then there is another and most important reason
+which explains his position as first, _princeps_, of Spanish letters,
+and it is that Unamuno, by the cross which he has chosen to bear,
+incarnates the spirit of modern Spain. His eternal conflict between
+faith and reason, between life and thought, between spirit and
+intellect, between heaven and civilization, is the conflict of Spain
+herself. A border country, like Russia, in which East and West mix their
+spiritual waters, Spain wavers between two life-philosophies and cannot
+rest. In Russia, this conflict emerges in literature during the
+nineteenth century, when Dostoievsky and Tolstoy stand for the East
+while Turgeniev becomes the West's advocate. In Spain, a country less
+articulate, and, moreover, a country in which the blending of East and
+West is more intimate, for both found a common solvent in centuries of
+Latin civilization, the conflict is less clear, less on the surface.
+To-day Ortega y Gasset is our Turgeniev--not without mixture. Unamuno is
+our Dostoievsky, but painfully aware of the strength of the other side
+within him, and full of misgivings. Nor is it sure that when we speak of
+East in this connection we really mean East. There is a third country in
+Europe in which the "Eastern" view is as forcibly put and as deeply
+understood as the "Western," a third border country--England. England,
+particularly in those of her racial elements conventionally named
+Celtic, is closely in sympathy with the "East." Ireland is almost purely
+"Eastern" in this respect. That is perhaps why Unamuno feels so strong
+an attraction for the English language and its literature, and why, even
+to this day, he follows so closely the movements of English thought.[4]
+For his own nature, of a human being astride two enemy ideals, draws him
+instinctively towards minds equally placed in opposition, yet a
+co-operating opposition, to progress. Thus Unamuno, whose literary
+qualities and defects make him a genuine representative of the more
+masculine variety of the Spanish genius, becomes in his spiritual life
+the true living symbol of his country and his time. And that he is great
+enough to bear this incarnation is a sufficient measure of his
+greatness.
+
+S. DE MADARIAGA.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] In what follows, I confess to refer not so much to the generally
+admitted opinion on Wordsworth as to my own views on him and his poetry,
+which I tried to explain in my essay: "The Case of Wordsworth" (_Shelley
+and Calderón, and other Essays_, Constable and Co., 1920).
+
+[2] _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, explicada y comentada_, por M. de
+Unamuno: Madrid, Fernando Fé, 1905.
+
+[3] These three novels appeared together as _Tres Novelas y un Prólogo_
+Calpe, Madrid, 1921.
+
+[4] "Me va interesando ese Dean Inge," he wrote to me last year.
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+I intended at first to write a short Prologue to this English
+translation of my _Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_, which has been
+undertaken by my friend Mr. J.E. Crawford Flitch. But upon further
+consideration I have abandoned the idea, for I reflected that after all
+I wrote this book not for Spaniards only, but for all civilized and
+Christian men--Christian in particular, whether consciously so or
+not--of whatever country they may be.
+
+Furthermore, if I were to set about writing an Introduction in the light
+of all that we see and feel now, after the Great War, and, still more,
+of what we foresee and forefeel, I should be led into writing yet
+another book. And that is a thing to be done with deliberation and only
+after having better digested this terrible peace, which is nothing else
+but the war's painful convalescence.
+
+As for many years my spirit has been nourished upon the very core of
+English literature--evidence of which the reader may discover in the
+following pages--the translator, in putting my _Sentimiento Trágico_
+into English, has merely converted not a few of the thoughts and
+feelings therein expressed back into their original form of expression.
+Or retranslated them, perhaps. Whereby they emerge other than they
+originally were, for an idea does not pass from one language to another
+without change.
+
+The fact that this English translation has been carefully revised here,
+in my house in this ancient city of Salamanca, by the translator and
+myself, implies not merely some guarantee of exactitude, but also
+something more--namely, a correction, in certain respects, of the
+original.
+
+The truth is that, being an incorrigible Spaniard, I am naturally given
+to a kind of extemporization and to neglectfulness of a filed niceness
+in my works. For this reason my original work--and likewise the Italian
+and French translations of it--issued from the press with a certain
+number of errors, obscurities, and faulty references. The labour which
+my friend Mr. J.E. Crawford Flitch fortunately imposed upon me in making
+me revise his translation obliged me to correct these errors, to clarify
+some obscurities, and to give greater exactitude to certain quotations
+from foreign writers. Hence this English translation of my _Sentimiento
+Trágico_ presents in some ways a more purged and correct text than that
+of the original Spanish. This perhaps compensates for what it may lose
+in the spontaneity of my Spanish thought, which at times, I believe, is
+scarcely translatable.
+
+It would advantage me greatly if this translation, in opening up to me a
+public of English-speaking readers, should some day lead to my writing
+something addressed to and concerned with this public. For just as a new
+friend enriches our spirit, not so much by what he gives us of himself,
+as by what he causes us to discover in our own selves, something which,
+if we had never known him, would have lain in us undeveloped, so it is
+with a new public. Perhaps there may be regions in my own Spanish
+spirit--my Basque spirit, and therefore doubly Spanish--unexplored by
+myself, some corner hitherto uncultivated, which I should have to
+cultivate in order to offer the flowers and fruits of it to the peoples
+of English speech.
+
+And now, no more.
+
+God give my English readers that inextinguishable thirst for truth which
+I desire for myself.
+
+MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO.
+
+SALAMANCA,
+_April, 1921._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
+
+Footnotes added by the Translator, other than those which merely
+supplement references to writers or their works mentioned in the text,
+are distinguished by his initials.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE
+
+
+_Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto_, said the Latin playwright.
+And I would rather say, _Nullum hominem a me alienum puto_: I am a man;
+no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective _humanus_ is
+no less suspect than its abstract substantive _humanitas_, humanity.
+Neither "the human" nor "humanity," neither the simple adjective nor the
+substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive--man. The man of
+flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who
+dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and
+wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.
+
+For there is another thing which is also called man, and he is the
+subject of not a few lucubrations, more or less scientific. He is the
+legendary featherless biped, the _zôon politikhon_ of Aristotle,
+the social contractor of Rousseau, the _homo economicus_ of the
+Manchester school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnæus, or, if you like, the
+vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age
+nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief,
+merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man.
+
+The man we have to do with is the man of flesh and bone--I, you, reader
+of mine, the other man yonder, all of us who walk solidly on the earth.
+
+And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the
+subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain
+self-styled philosophers like it or not.
+
+In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems
+are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously, and
+their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inner
+biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a
+secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that
+explains for us most things.
+
+It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry
+than to science. All philosophic systems which have been constructed as
+a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have
+in every age possessed much less consistency and life than those which
+expressed the integral spiritual yearning of their authors.
+
+And, though they concern us so greatly, and are, indeed, indispensable
+for our life and thought, the sciences are in a certain sense more
+foreign to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end--that is
+to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are fundamentally a
+matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind called
+theoretical, is, like a mechanical discovery--that of the steam-engine,
+the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane--a thing which is useful
+for something else. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in enabling
+us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But she,
+wherefore is she useful to us? A man takes an electric tram to go to
+hear an opera, and asks himself, Which, in this case, is the more
+useful, the tram or the opera?
+
+Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary
+conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception,
+a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to outward
+action. But the fact is that this feeling, instead of being a
+consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our
+philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the
+world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And life,
+like everything affective, has roots in subconsciousness, perhaps in
+unconsciousness.
+
+It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it
+is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps
+pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.
+
+Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been
+defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which
+differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason.
+More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps
+or laughs inwardly--but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves
+equations of the second degree.
+
+And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man.
+
+Take Kant, the man Immanuel Kant, who was born and lived at Königsberg,
+in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
+nineteenth. In the philosophy of this man Kant, a man of heart and
+head--that is to say, a man--there is a significant somersault, as
+Kierkegaard, another man--and what a man!--would have said, the
+somersault from the _Critique of Pure Reason_ to the _Critique of
+Practical Reason_. He reconstructs in the latter what he destroyed in
+the former, in spite of what those may say who do not see the man
+himself. After having examined and pulverized with his analysis the
+traditional proofs of the existence of God, of the Aristotelian God, who
+is the God corresponding to the _zôon politikon_, the abstract
+God, the unmoved prime Mover, he reconstructs God anew; but the God of
+the conscience, the Author of the moral order--the Lutheran God, in
+short. This transition of Kant exists already in embryo in the Lutheran
+notion of faith.
+
+The first God, the rational God, is the projection to the outward
+infinite of man as he is by definition--that is to say, of the abstract
+man, of the man no-man; the other God, the God of feeling and volition,
+is the projection to the inward infinite of man as he is by life, of the
+concrete man, the man of flesh and bone.
+
+Kant reconstructed with the heart that which with the head he had
+overthrown. And we know, from the testimony of those who knew him and
+from his testimony in his letters and private declarations, that the man
+Kant, the more or less selfish old bachelor who professed philosophy at
+Königsberg at the end of the century of the Encyclopedia and the goddess
+of Reason, was a man much preoccupied with the problem--I mean with the
+only real vital problem, the problem that strikes at the very root of
+our being, the problem of our individual and personal destiny, of the
+immortality of the soul. The man Kant was not resigned to die utterly.
+And because he was not resigned to die utterly he made that leap, that
+immortal somersault,[5] from the one Critique to the other.
+
+Whosoever reads the _Critique of Practical Reason_ carefully and without
+blinkers will see that, in strict fact, the existence of God is therein
+deduced from the immortality of the soul, and not the immortality of the
+soul from the existence of God. The categorical imperative leads us to a
+moral postulate which necessitates in its turn, in the teleological or
+rather eschatological order, the immortality of the soul, and in order
+to sustain this immortality God is introduced. All the rest is the
+jugglery of the professional of philosophy.
+
+The man Kant felt that morality was the basis of eschatology, but the
+professor of philosophy inverted the terms.
+
+Another professor, the professor and man William James, has somewhere
+said that for the generality of men God is the provider of immortality.
+Yes, for the generality of men, including the man Kant, the man James,
+and the man who writes these lines which you, reader, are reading.
+
+Talking to a peasant one day, I proposed to him the hypothesis that
+there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a
+Consciousness[6] of the Universe, but that for all that the soul of
+every man may not be immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. He
+replied: "Then wherefore God?" So answered, in the secret tribunal of
+their consciousness, the man Kant and the man James. Only in their
+capacity as professors they were compelled to justify rationally an
+attitude in itself so little rational. Which does not mean, of course,
+that the attitude is absurd.
+
+Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the
+real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel,
+continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that
+reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of
+definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe,
+like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a
+hole and enclosing it with steel.
+
+Another man, the man Joseph Butler, the Anglican bishop who lived at the
+beginning of the eighteenth century and whom Cardinal Newman declared to
+be the greatest man in the Anglican Church, wrote, at the conclusion of
+the first chapter of his great work, _The Analogy of Religion_, the
+chapter which treats of a future life, these pregnant words: "This
+credibility of a future life, which has been here insisted upon, how
+little soever it may satisfy our curiosity, seems to answer all the
+purposes of religion, in like manner as a demonstrative proof would.
+Indeed a proof, even a demonstrative one, of a future life, would not be
+a proof of religion. For, that we are to live hereafter, is just as
+reconcilable with the scheme of atheism, and as well to be accounted for
+by it, as that we are now alive is: and therefore nothing can be more
+absurd than to argue from that scheme that there can be no future
+state."
+
+The man Butler, whose works were perhaps known to the man Kant, wished
+to save the belief in the immortality of the soul, and with this object
+he made it independent of belief in God. The first chapter of his
+_Analogy_ treats, as I have said, of the future life, and the second of
+the government of God by rewards and punishments. And the fact is that,
+fundamentally, the good Anglican bishop deduces the existence of God
+from the immortality of the soul. And as this deduction was the good
+Anglican bishop's starting-point, he had not to make that somersault
+which at the close of the same century the good Lutheran philosopher had
+to make. Butler, the bishop, was one man and Kant, the professor,
+another man.
+
+To be a man is to be something concrete, unitary, and substantive; it is
+to be a thing--_res_. Now we know what another man, the man Benedict
+Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew who was born and lived in Holland in the
+middle of the seventeenth century, wrote about the nature of things. The
+sixth proposition of Part III. of his _Ethic_ states: _unaquoeque res,
+quatenus in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur_--that is,
+Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its
+own being. Everything in so far as it is in itself--that is to say, in
+so far as it is substance, for according to him substance is _id quod in
+se est et per se concipitur_--that which is in itself and is conceived
+by itself. And in the following proposition, the seventh, of the same
+part, he adds: _conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare
+conatur, nihil est proeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam_--that is, the
+endeavour wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being is
+nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself. This means that your
+essence, reader, mine, that of the man Spinoza, that of the man Butler,
+of the man Kant, and of every man who is a man, is nothing but the
+endeavour, the effort, which he makes to continue to be a man, not to
+die. And the other proposition which follows these two, the eighth,
+says: _conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur,
+nullum tempus finitum, sed indefinitum involvit_--that is, The endeavour
+whereby each individual thing endeavours to persist involves no finite
+time but indefinite time. That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza wish
+never to die and that this longing of ours never to die is our actual
+essence. Nevertheless, this poor Portuguese Jew, exiled in the mists of
+Holland, could never attain to believing in his own personal
+immortality, and all his philosophy was but a consolation which he
+contrived for his lack of faith. Just as other men have a pain in hand
+or foot, heart-ache or head-ache, so he had God-ache. Unhappy man! And
+unhappy fellow-men!
+
+And man, this thing, is he a thing? How absurd soever the question may
+appear, there are some who have propounded it. Not long ago there went
+abroad a certain doctrine called Positivism, which did much good and
+much ill. And among other ills that it wrought was the introduction of a
+method of analysis whereby facts were pulverized, reduced to a dust of
+facts. Most of the facts labelled as such by Positivism were really only
+fragments of facts. In psychology its action was harmful. There were
+even scholastics meddling in literature--I will not say philosophers
+meddling in poetry, because poet and philosopher are twin brothers, if
+not even one and the same--who carried this Positivist psychological
+analysis into the novel and the drama, where the main business is to
+give act and motion to concrete men, men of flesh and bone, and by dint
+of studying states of consciousness, consciousness itself disappeared.
+The same thing happened to them which is said often to happen in the
+examination and testing of certain complicated, organic, living chemical
+compounds, when the reagents destroy the very body which it was proposed
+to examine and all that is obtained is the products of its
+decomposition.
+
+Taking as their starting-point the evident fact that contradictory
+states pass through our consciousness, they did not succeed in
+envisaging consciousness itself, the "I." To ask a man about his "I" is
+like asking him about his body. And note that in speaking of the "I," I
+speak of the concrete and personal "I," not of the "I" of Fichte, but of
+Fichte himself, the man Fichte.
+
+That which determines a man, that which makes him one man, one and not
+another, the man he is and not the man he is not, is a principle of
+unity and a principle of continuity. A principle of unity firstly in
+space, thanks to the body, and next in action and intention. When we
+walk, one foot does not go forward and the other backward, nor, when we
+look, if we are normal, does one eye look towards the north and the
+other towards the south. In each moment of our life we entertain some
+purpose, and to this purpose the synergy of our actions is directed.
+Notwithstanding the next moment we may change our purpose. And in a
+certain sense a man is so much the more a man the more unitary his
+action. Some there are who throughout their whole life follow but one
+single purpose, be it what it may.
+
+Also a principle of continuity in time. Without entering upon a
+discussion--an unprofitable discussion--as to whether I am or am not he
+who I was twenty years ago, it appears to me to be indisputable that he
+who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of
+consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is
+the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of
+the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by
+memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our
+memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past
+to transform itself into our future.
+
+All this, I know well, is sheer platitude; but in going about in the
+world one meets men who seem to have no feeling of their own
+personality. One of my best friends with whom I have walked and talked
+every day for many years, whenever I spoke to him of this sense of one's
+own personality, used to say: "But I have no sense of myself; I don't
+know what that is."
+
+On a certain occasion this friend remarked to me: "I should like to be
+So-and-so" (naming someone), and I said: "That is what I shall never be
+able to understand--that one should want to be someone else. (To want to
+be someone else is to want to cease to be he who one is.) I understand
+that one should wish to have what someone else has, his wealth or his
+knowledge; but to be someone else, that is a thing I cannot comprehend."
+It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes
+prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be
+someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their
+normality in their misfortune--that is to say, when they endeavour to
+persist in their own being--prefer misfortune to non-existence. For
+myself I can say that as a youth, and even as a child, I remained
+unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then
+nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a
+furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as
+one of our ascetics has put it.[7]
+
+To propose to a man that he should be someone else, that he should
+become someone else, is to propose to him that he should cease to be
+himself. Everyone defends his own personality, and only consents to a
+change in his mode of thinking or of feeling in so far as this change is
+able to enter into the unity of his spirit and become involved in its
+continuity; in so far as this change can harmonize and integrate itself
+with all the rest of his mode of being, thinking and feeling, and can at
+the same time knit itself with his memories. Neither of a man nor of a
+people--which is, in a certain sense, also a man--can a change be
+demanded which breaks the unity and continuity of the person. A man can
+change greatly, almost completely even, but the change must take place
+within his continuity.
+
+It is true that in certain individuals there occur what are called
+changes of personality; but these are pathological cases, and as such
+are studied by alienists. In these changes of personality, memory, the
+basis of consciousness, is completely destroyed, and all that is left to
+the sufferer as the substratum of his individual continuity, which has
+now ceased to be personal, is the physical organism. For the subject who
+suffers it, such an infirmity is equivalent to death--it is not
+equivalent to death only for those who expect to inherit his fortune, if
+he possesses one! And this infirmity is nothing less than a revolution,
+a veritable revolution.
+
+A disease is, in a certain sense, an organic dissociation; it is a
+rebellion of some element or organ of the living body which breaks the
+vital synergy and seeks an end distinct from that which the other
+elements co-ordinated with it seek. Its end, considered in itself--that
+is to say, in the abstract--may be more elevated, more noble, more
+anything you like; but it is different. To fly and breathe in the air
+may be better than to swim and breathe in the water; but if the fins of
+a fish aimed at converting themselves into wings, the fish, as a fish,
+would perish. And it is useless to say that it would end by becoming a
+bird, if in this becoming there was not a process of continuity. I do
+not precisely know, but perhaps it may be possible for a fish to
+engender a bird, or another fish more akin to a bird than itself; but a
+fish, this fish, cannot itself and during its own lifetime become a
+bird.
+
+Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my
+life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. Every
+individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and
+continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as
+a part of that people. What if some other people is better than our own?
+Very possibly, although perhaps we do not clearly understand what is
+meant by better or worse. Richer? Granted. More cultured? Granted
+likewise. Happier? Well, happiness ... but still, let it pass! A
+conquering people (or what is called conquering) while we are conquered?
+Well and good. All this is good--but it is something different. And that
+is enough. Because for me the becoming other than I am, the breaking of
+the unity and continuity of my life, is to cease to be he who I am--that
+is to say, it is simply to cease to be. And that--no! Anything rather
+than that!
+
+Another, you say, might play the part that I play as well or better?
+Another might fulfil my function in society? Yes, but it would not be I.
+
+"I, I, I, always I!" some reader will exclaim; "and who are you?" I
+might reply in the words of Obermann, that tremendous man Obermann: "For
+the universe, nothing--for myself, everything"; but no, I would rather
+remind him of a doctrine of the man Kant--to wit, that we ought to think
+of our fellow-men not as means but as ends. For the question does not
+touch me alone, it touches you also, grumbling reader, it touches each
+and all. Singular judgments have the value of universal judgments, the
+logicians say. The singular is not particular, it is universal.
+
+Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to man, to
+each man, to each I. What is that idol, call it Humanity or call it what
+you like, to which all men and each individual man must be sacrificed?
+For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen, for
+my children, and these sacrifice themselves in their turn for theirs,
+and theirs again for those that come after them, and so on in a
+never-ending series of generations. And who receives the fruit of this
+sacrifice?
+
+Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication
+without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live.
+What is this right to live? They tell me I am here to realize I know not
+what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here
+to realize myself, to live.
+
+Yes, yes, I see it all!--an enormous social activity, a mighty
+civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of
+morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial
+marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums, and libraries, we
+shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist--for
+whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
+
+"Why!" the reader will exclaim again, "we are coming back to what the
+Catechism says: '_Q_. For whom did God create the world? _A_. For man.'"
+Well, why not?--so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it
+took account of these matters and were a person, would reply "For the
+ant," and it would reply rightly. The world is made for consciousness,
+for each consciousness.
+
+A human soul is worth all the universe, someone--I know not whom--has
+said and said magnificently. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life.
+Not this life. And it happens that the less a man believes in the
+soul--that is to say in his conscious immortality, personal and
+concrete--the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory
+life. This is the source from which springs all that effeminate,
+sentimental ebullition against war. True, a man ought not to wish to
+die, but the death to be renounced is the death of the soul. "Whosoever
+will save his life shall lose it," says the Gospel; but it does not say
+"whosoever will save his soul," the immortal soul--or, at any rate,
+which we believe and wish to be immortal.
+
+And what all the objectivists do not see, or rather do not wish to see,
+is that when a man affirms his "I," his personal consciousness, he
+affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true humanism--the
+humanism of man, not of the things of man--and in affirming man he
+affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of which we have
+consciousness is that of man.
+
+The world is for consciousness. Or rather this _for_, this notion of
+finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling, is
+born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are
+fundamentally the same thing.
+
+If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it
+lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above
+all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them light
+and enjoy itself in giving them light and so live. And it would think
+well.
+
+And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal craving
+for immortality which caused the man Kant to make that immortal leap of
+which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for consciousness. If
+consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a
+flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing
+more execrable than existence.
+
+Some may espy a fundamental contradiction in everything that I am
+saying, now expressing a longing for unending life, now affirming that
+this earthly life does not possess the value that is given to it.
+Contradiction? To be sure! The contradiction of my heart that says Yes
+and of my head that says No! Of course there is contradiction. Who does
+not recollect those words of the Gospel, "Lord, I believe, help thou my
+unbelief"? Contradiction! Of course! Since we only live in and by
+contradictions, since life is tragedy and the tragedy is perpetual
+struggle, without victory or the hope of victory, life is contradiction.
+
+The values we are discussing are, as you see, values of the heart, and
+against values of the heart reasons do not avail. For reasons are only
+reasons--that is to say, they are not even truths. There is a class of
+pedantic label-mongers, pedants by nature and by grace, who remind me of
+that man who, purposing to console a father whose son has suddenly died
+in the flower of his years, says to him, "Patience, my friend, we all
+must die!" Would you think it strange if this father were offended at
+such an impertinence? For it is an impertinence. There are times when
+even an axiom can become an impertinence. How many times may it not be
+said--
+
+    _Para pensar cual tú, sólo es preciso
+    no tener nada mas que inteligencia_.[8]
+
+There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or
+with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think
+with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of
+the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the
+life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into
+definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought. And you
+know what a professional is? You know what a product of the
+differentiation of labour is?
+
+Take a professional boxer. He has learnt to hit with such economy of
+effort that, while concentrating all his strength in the blow, he only
+brings into play just those muscles that are required for the immediate
+and definite object of his action--to knock out his opponent. A blow
+given by a non-professional will not have so much immediate, objective
+efficiency; but it will more greatly vitalize the striker, causing him
+to bring into play almost the whole of his body. The one is the blow of
+a boxer, the other that of a man. And it is notorious that the Hercules
+of the circus, the athletes of the ring, are not, as a rule, healthy.
+They knock out their opponents, they lift enormous weights, but they die
+of phthisis or dyspepsia.
+
+If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is
+above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. The
+cultivation of any branch of science--of chemistry, of physics, of
+geometry, of philology--may be a work of differentiated specialization,
+and even so only within very narrow limits and restrictions; but
+philosophy, like poetry, is a work of integration and synthesis, or else
+it is merely pseudo-philosophical erudition.
+
+All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowledge for the sake of
+knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the
+question. We learn something either for an immediate practical end, or
+in order to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the knowledge that
+appears to us to be most theoretical--that is to say, of least immediate
+application to the non-intellectual necessities of life--answers to a
+necessity which is no less real because it is intellectual, to a reason
+of economy in thinking, to a principle of unity and continuity of
+consciousness. But just as a scientific fact has its finality in the
+rest of knowledge, so the philosophy that we would make our own has also
+its extrinsic object--it refers to our whole destiny, to our attitude in
+face of life and the universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy
+is to reconcile intellectual necessities with the necessities of the
+heart and the will. For it is on this rock that every philosophy that
+pretends to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction, the basis of
+our existence, breaks to pieces. But do all men face this contradiction
+squarely?
+
+Little can be hoped from a ruler, for example, who has not at some time
+or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first
+beginning and the ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with
+the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny.
+
+And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must
+involve the heart. It is not enough to think about our destiny: it must
+be felt. And the would-be leader of men who affirms and proclaims that
+he pays no heed to the things of the spirit, is not worthy to lead them.
+By which I do not mean, of course, that any ready-made solution is to be
+required of him. Solution? Is there indeed any?
+
+So far as I am concerned, I will never willingly yield myself, nor
+entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who is not penetrated with
+the feeling that he who orders a people orders men, men of flesh and
+bone, men who are born, suffer, and, although they do not wish to die,
+die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who must be
+themselves and not others; men, in fine, who seek that which we call
+happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of
+men to the generation which follows, without having any feeling for the
+destiny of those who are sacrificed, without having any regard, not for
+their memory, not for their names, but for them themselves.
+
+All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in
+the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only
+those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be
+persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess
+great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as
+regards the feelings and even morally imbecile. There have been
+instances.
+
+These clever-witted, affectively stupid persons are wont to say that it
+is useless to seek to delve in the unknowable or to kick against the
+pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has had to be
+amputated that it does not help him at all to think about it. And we all
+lack something; only some of us feel the lack and others do not. Or they
+pretend not to feel the lack, and then they are hypocrites.
+
+A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him,
+"Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?" And the sage answered
+him, "Precisely for that reason--because it does not avail." It is
+manifest that weeping avails something, even if only the alleviation of
+distress; but the deep sense of Solon's reply to the impertinent
+questioner is plainly seen. And I am convinced that we should solve many
+things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs,
+which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined
+together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling
+upon God. And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would
+hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to
+which men go to weep in common. A _miserere_ sung in common by a
+multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a philosophy. It is
+not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it. Yes, we
+must learn to weep! Perhaps that is the supreme wisdom. Why? Ask Solon.
+
+There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the
+tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life
+itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated,
+more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is
+possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. And this
+sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though
+afterwards, as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it.
+Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness--dyspepsia, for example;
+but at other times it is constitutional. And it is useless to speak, as
+we shall see, of men who are healthy and men who are not healthy. Apart
+from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved
+that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the
+very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison
+with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.
+
+Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those
+who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St.
+Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, _René, Obermann_, Thomson,[9] Leopardi,
+Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard--men burdened with
+wisdom rather than with knowledge.
+
+And there are, I believe, peoples who possess this tragic sense of life
+also.
+
+It is to this that we must now turn our attention, beginning with this
+matter of health and disease.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] "_Salto inmortal_." There is a play here upon the term _salto
+mortal_, used to denote the dangerous aerial somersault of the acrobat,
+which cannot be rendered in English.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[6] "_Conciencia_." The same word is used in Spanish to denote both
+consciousness and conscience. If the latter is specifically intended,
+the qualifying adjective "_moral_" or "_religiosa_" is commonly
+added.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[7] San Juan de los Angeles.
+
+[8] To be lacking in everything but intelligence is the necessary
+qualification for thinking like you.
+
+[9] James Thomson, author of _The City of Dreadful Night_.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE STARTING-POINT
+
+
+To some, perhaps, the foregoing reflections may seem to possess a
+certain morbid character. Morbid? But what is disease precisely? And
+what is health?
+
+May not disease itself possibly be the essential condition of that which
+we call progress and progress itself a disease?
+
+Who does not know the mythical tragedy of Paradise? Therein dwelt our
+first parents in a state of perfect health and perfect innocence, and
+Jahwé gave them to eat of the tree of life and created all things for
+them; but he commanded them not to taste of the fruit of the tree of the
+knowledge of good and evil. But they, tempted by the serpent--Christ's
+type of prudence--tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of
+good and evil, and became subject to all diseases, and to death, which
+is their crown and consummation, and to labour and to progress. For
+progress, according to this legend, springs from original sin. And thus
+it was the curiosity of Eve, of woman, of her who is most thrall to the
+organic necessities of life and of the conservation of life, that
+occasioned the Fall and with the Fall the Redemption, and it was the
+Redemption that set our feet on the way to God and made it possible for
+us to attain to Him and to be in Him.
+
+Do you want another version of our origin? Very well then. According to
+this account, man is, strictly speaking, merely a species of gorilla,
+orang-outang, chimpanzee, or the like, more or less hydrocephalous. Once
+on a time an anthropoid monkey had a diseased offspring--diseased from
+the strictly animal or zoological point of view, really diseased; and
+this disease, although a source of weakness, resulted in a positive gain
+in the struggle for survival. The only vertical mammal at last succeeded
+in standing erect--man. The upright position freed him from the
+necessity of using his hands as means of support in walking; he was
+able, therefore, to oppose the thumb to the other four fingers, to seize
+hold of objects and to fashion tools; and it is well known that the
+hands are great promoters of the intelligence. This same position gave
+to the lungs, trachea, larynx, and mouth an aptness for the production
+of articulate speech, and speech is intelligence. Moreover, this
+position, causing the head to weigh vertically upon the trunk,
+facilitated its development and increase of weight, and the head is the
+seat of the mind. But as this necessitated greater strength and
+resistance in the bones of the pelvis than in those of species whose
+head and trunk rest upon all four extremities, the burden fell upon
+woman, the author of the Fall according to Genesis, of bringing forth
+larger-headed offspring through a harder framework of bone. And Jahwé
+condemned her, for having sinned, to bring forth her children in sorrow.
+
+The gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-outang, and their kind, must look
+upon man as a feeble and infirm animal, whose strange custom it is to
+store up his dead. Wherefore?
+
+And this primary disease and all subsequent diseases--are they not
+perhaps the capital element of progress? Arthritis, for example, infects
+the blood and introduces into it scoriæ, a kind of refuse, of an
+imperfect organic combustion; but may not this very impurity happen to
+make the blood more stimulative? May not this impure blood promote a
+more active cerebration precisely because it is impure? Water that is
+chemically pure is undrinkable. And may not also blood that is
+physiologically pure be unfit for the brain of the vertical mammal that
+has to live by thought?
+
+The history of medicine, moreover, teaches us that progress consists
+not so much in expelling the germs of disease, or rather diseases
+themselves, as in accommodating them to our organism and so perhaps
+enriching it, in dissolving them in our blood. What but this is the
+meaning of vaccination and all the serums, and immunity from infection
+through lapse of time?
+
+If this notion of absolute health were not an abstract category,
+something which does not strictly exist, we might say that a perfectly
+healthy man would be no longer a man, but an irrational animal.
+Irrational, because of the lack of some disease to set a spark to his
+reason. And this disease which gives us the appetite of knowing for the
+sole pleasure of knowing, for the delight of tasting of the fruit of the
+tree of the knowledge of good and evil, is a real disease and a tragic
+one.
+
+_Pantes anthrôpoi ton eidenai oregontai phusei_, "all men
+naturally desire to know." Thus Aristotle begins his Metaphysic, and it
+has been repeated a thousand times since then that curiosity or the
+desire to know, which according to Genesis led our first mother to sin,
+is the origin of knowledge.
+
+But it is necessary to distinguish here between the desire or appetite
+for knowing, apparently and at first sight for the love of knowledge
+itself, between the eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of
+knowledge, and the necessity of knowing for the sake of living. The
+latter, which gives us direct and immediate knowledge, and which in a
+certain sense might be called, if it does not seem too paradoxical,
+unconscious knowledge, is common both to men and animals, while that
+which distinguishes us from them is reflective knowledge, the knowing
+that we know.
+
+Man has debated at length and will continue to debate at length--the
+world having been assigned as a theatre for his debates--concerning the
+origin of knowledge; but, apart from the question as to what the real
+truth about this origin may be, which we will leave until later, it is
+a certainly ascertained fact that in the apparential order of things, in
+the life of beings who are endowed with a certain more or less cloudy
+faculty of knowing and perceiving, or who at any rate appear to act as
+if they were so endowed, knowledge is exhibited to us as bound up with
+the necessity of living and of procuring the wherewithal to maintain
+life. It is a consequence of that very essence of being, which according
+to Spinoza consists in the effort to persist indefinitely in its own
+being. Speaking in terms in which concreteness verges upon grossness, it
+may be said that the brain, in so far as its function is concerned,
+depends upon the stomach. In beings which rank in the lowest scale of
+life, those actions which present the characteristics of will, those
+which appear to be connected with a more or less clear consciousness,
+are actions designed to procure nourishment for the being performing
+them.
+
+Such then is what we may call the historical origin of knowledge,
+whatever may be its origin from another point of view. Beings which
+appear to be endowed with perception, perceive in order to be able to
+live, and only perceive in so far as they require to do so in order to
+live. But perhaps this stored-up knowledge, the utility in which it had
+its origin being exhausted, has come to constitute a fund of knowledge
+far exceeding that required for the bare necessities of living.
+
+Thus we have, first, the necessity of knowing in order to live, and
+next, arising out of this, that other knowledge which we might call
+superfluous knowledge or knowledge _de luxe_, which may in its turn come
+to constitute a new necessity. Curiosity, the so-called innate desire of
+knowing, only awakes and becomes operative after the necessity of
+knowing for the sake of living is satisfied; and although sometimes in
+the conditions under which the human race is actually living it may not
+so befall, but curiosity may prevail over necessity and knowledge over
+hunger, nevertheless the primordial fact is that curiosity sprang from
+the necessity of knowing in order to live, and this is the dead weight
+and gross matter carried in the matrix of science. Aspiring to be
+knowledge for the sake of knowledge, to know the truth for the sake of
+the truth itself, science is forced by the necessities of life to turn
+aside and put it itself at their service. While men believe themselves
+to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in
+truth. The variations of science depend upon the variations of human
+needs, and men of science are wont to work, willingly or unwillingly,
+wittingly or unwittingly, in the service of the powerful or in that of a
+people that demands from them the confirmation of its own desires.
+
+But is this really a dead weight that impedes the progress of science,
+or is it not rather its innermost redeeming essence? It is in fact the
+latter, and it is a gross stupidity to presume to rebel against the very
+condition of life.
+
+Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and
+primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. This
+necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge
+and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches,
+tastes, and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear,
+touch, taste, and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or the
+loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is
+environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in
+which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch,
+and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could
+not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common
+sense.
+
+Man, then, in his quality of an isolated individual, only sees, hears,
+touches, tastes, and smells in so far as is necessary for living and
+self-preservation. If he does not perceive colours below red or above
+violet, the reason perhaps is that the colours which he does perceive
+suffice for the purposes of self-preservation. And the senses themselves
+are simplifying apparati which eliminate from objective reality
+everything that it is not necessary to know in order to utilize objects
+for the purpose of preserving life. In complete darkness an animal, if
+it does not perish, ends by becoming blind. Parasites which live in the
+intestines of other animals upon the nutritive juices which they find
+ready prepared for them by these animals, as they do not need either to
+see or hear, do in fact neither see nor hear; they simply adhere, a kind
+of receptive bag, to the being upon whom they live. For these parasites
+the visible and audible world does not exist. It is enough for them that
+the animals, in whose intestines they live, see and hear.
+
+Knowledge, then, is primarily at the service of the instinct of
+self-preservation, which is indeed, as we have said with Spinoza, its
+very essence. And thus it may be said that it is the instinct of
+self-preservation that makes perceptible for us the reality and truth of
+the world; for it is this instinct that cuts out and separates that
+which exists for us from the unfathomable and illimitable region of the
+possible. In effect, that which has existence for us is precisely that
+which, in one way or another, we need to know in order to exist
+ourselves; objective existence, as we know it, is a dependence of our
+own personal existence. And nobody can deny that there may not exist,
+and perhaps do exist, aspects of reality unknown to us, to-day at any
+rate, and perhaps unknowable, because they are in no way necessary to us
+for the preservation of our own actual existence.
+
+But man does not live alone; he is not an isolated individual, but a
+member of society. There is not a little truth in the saying that the
+individual, like the atom, is an abstraction. Yes, the atom apart from
+the universe is as much an abstraction as the universe apart from the
+atom. And if the individual maintains his existence by the instinct of
+self-preservation, society owes its being and maintenance to the
+individual's instinct of perpetuation. And from this instinct, or rather
+from society, springs reason.
+
+Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the
+distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.
+
+It owes its origin, perhaps, to language. We think articulately--_i.e._,
+reflectively--thanks to articulate language, and this language arose out
+of the need of communicating our thought to our neighbours. To think is
+to talk with oneself, and each one of us talks with himself, thanks to
+our having had to talk with one another. In everyday life it frequently
+happens that we hit upon an idea that we were seeking and succeed in
+giving it form--that is to say, we obtain the idea, drawing it forth
+from the mist of dim perceptions which it represents, thanks to the
+efforts which we make to present it to others. Thought is inward
+language, and the inward language originates in the outward. Hence it
+results that reason is social and common. A fact pregnant with
+consequences, as we shall have occasion to see.
+
+Now if there is a reality which, in so far as we have knowledge of it,
+is the creation of the instinct of personal preservation and of the
+senses at the service of this instinct, must there not be another
+reality, not less real than the former, the creation, in so far as we
+have knowledge of it, of the instinct of perpetuation, the instinct of
+the species, and of the senses at the service of this instinct? The
+instinct of preservation, hunger, is the foundation of the human
+individual; the instinct of perpetuation, love, in its most rudimentary
+and physiological form, is the foundation of human society. And just as
+man knows that which he needs to know in order that he may preserve his
+existence, so society, or man in so far as he is a social being, knows
+that which he needs to know in order that he may perpetuate himself in
+society.
+
+There is a world, the sensible world, that is the child of hunger, and
+there is another world, the ideal world, that is the child of love. And
+just as there are senses employed in the service of the knowledge of the
+sensible world, so there are also senses, at present for the most part
+dormant, for social consciousness has scarcely awakened, employed in the
+service of the knowledge of the ideal world. And why must we deny
+objective reality to the creations of love, of the instinct of
+perpetuation, since we allow it to the creations of hunger or the
+instinct of preservation? For if it be said that the former creations
+are only the creations of our imagination, without objective value, may
+it not equally be said of the latter that they are only the creations of
+our senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible and intangible
+world, perceived by the inward sense that lives in the service of the
+instinct of perpetuation?
+
+Human society, as a society, possesses senses which the individual, but
+for his existence in society, would lack, just as the individual, man,
+who is in his turn a kind of society, possesses senses lacking in the
+cells of which he is composed. The blind cells of hearing, in their dim
+consciousness, must of necessity be unaware of the existence of the
+visible world, and if they should hear it spoken of they would perhaps
+deem it to be the arbitrary creation of the deaf cells of sight, while
+the latter in their turn would consider as illusion the audible world
+which the hearing cells create.
+
+We have remarked before that the parasites which live in the intestines
+of higher animals, feeding upon the nutritive juices which these animals
+supply, do not need either to see or hear, and therefore for them the
+visible and audible world does not exist. And if they possessed a
+certain degree of consciousness and took account of the fact that the
+animal at whose expense they live believed in a world of sight and
+hearing, they would perhaps deem such belief to be due merely to the
+extravagance of its imagination. And similarly there are social
+parasites, as Mr. A.J. Balfour admirably observes,[10] who, receiving
+from the society in which they live the motives of their moral conduct,
+deny that belief in God and the other life is a necessary foundation for
+good conduct and for a tolerable life, society having prepared for them
+the spiritual nutriment by which they live. An isolated individual can
+endure life and live it well and even heroically without in any sort
+believing either in the immortality of the soul or in God, but he lives
+the life of a spiritual parasite. What we call the sense of honour is,
+even in non-Christians, a Christian product. And I will say further,
+that if there exists in a man faith in God joined to a life of purity
+and moral elevation, it is not so much the believing in God that makes
+him good, as the being good, thanks to God, that makes him believe in
+Him. Goodness is the best source of spiritual clear-sightedness.
+
+I am well aware that it may be objected that all this talk of man
+creating the sensible world and love the ideal world, of the blind cells
+of hearing and the deaf cells of sight, of spiritual parasites, etc., is
+merely metaphor. So it is, and I do not claim to discuss otherwise than
+by metaphor. And it is true that this social sense, the creature of
+love, the creator of language, of reason, and of the ideal world that
+springs from it, is at bottom nothing other than what we call fancy or
+imagination. Out of fancy springs reason. And if by imagination is
+understood a faculty which fashions images capriciously, I will ask:
+What is caprice? And in any case the senses and reason are also
+fallible.
+
+We shall have to enquire what is this inner social faculty, the
+imagination which personalizes everything, and which, employed in the
+service of the instinct of perpetuation, reveals to us God and the
+immortality of the soul--God being thus a social product.
+
+But this we will reserve till later.
+
+And now, why does man philosophize?--that is to say, why does he
+investigate the first causes and ultimate ends of things? Why does he
+seek the disinterested truth? For to say that all men have a natural
+tendency to know is true; but wherefore?
+
+Philosophers seek a theoretic or ideal starting-point for their human
+work, the work of philosophizing; but they are not usually concerned to
+seek the practical and real starting-point, the purpose. What is the
+object in making philosophy, in thinking it and then expounding it to
+one's fellows? What does the philosopher seek in it and with it? The
+truth for the truth's own sake? The truth, in order that we may subject
+our conduct to it and determine our spiritual attitude towards life and
+the universe comformably with it?
+
+Philosophy is a product of the humanity of each philosopher, and each
+philosopher is a man of flesh and bone who addresses himself to other
+men of flesh and bone like himself. And, let him do what he will, he
+philosophizes not with the reason only, but with the will, with the
+feelings, with the flesh and with the bones, with the whole soul and the
+whole body. It is the man that philosophizes.
+
+I do not wish here to use the word "I" in connection with
+philosophizing, lest the impersonal "I" should be understood in place of
+the man that philosophizes; for this concrete, circumscribed "I," this
+"I" of flesh and bone, that suffers from tooth-ache and finds life
+insupportable if death is the annihilation of the personal
+consciousness, must not be confounded with that other counterfeit "I,"
+the theoretical "I" which Fichte smuggled into philosophy, nor yet with
+the Unique, also theoretical, of Max Stirner. It is better to say "we,"
+understanding, however, the "we" who are circumscribed in space.
+
+Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is
+inhuman. And if we say that theoretical philosophy addresses itself to
+practical philosophy, truth to goodness, science to ethics, I will ask:
+And to what end is goodness? Is it, perhaps, an end in itself? Good is
+simply that which contributes to the preservation, perpetuation, and
+enrichment of consciousness. Goodness addresses itself to man, to the
+maintenance and perfection of human society which is composed of men.
+And to what end is this? "So act that your action may be a pattern to
+all men," Kant tells us. That is well, but wherefore? We must needs seek
+for a wherefore.
+
+In the starting-point of all philosophy, in the real starting-point, the
+practical not the theoretical, there is a wherefore. The philosopher
+philosophizes for something more than for the sake of philosophizing.
+_Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_, says the old Latin adage; and as
+the philosopher is a man before he is a philosopher, he must needs live
+before he can philosophize, and, in fact, he philosophizes in order to
+live. And usually he philosophizes either in order to resign himself to
+life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget
+his griefs, or for pastime and amusement. A good illustration of this
+last case is to be found in that terrible Athenian ironist, Socrates, of
+whom Xenophon relates in his _Memorabilia_ that he discovered to
+Theodata, the courtesan, the wiles that she ought to make use of in
+order to lure lovers to her house so aptly, that she begged him to act
+as her companion in the chase, _sunthêratês_, her pimp, in a
+word. And philosophy is wont, in fact, not infrequently to convert
+itself into a kind of art of spiritual pimping. And sometimes into an
+opiate for lulling sorrows to sleep.
+
+I take at random a book of metaphysics, the first that comes to my hand,
+_Time and Space, a Metaphysical Essay_, by Shadworth H. Hodgson. I open
+it, and in the fifth paragraph of the first chapter of the first part I
+read:
+
+"Metaphysics is, properly speaking, not a science but a philosophy--that
+is, it is a science whose end is in itself, in the gratification and
+education of the minds which carry it on, not in external purpose, such
+as the founding of any art conducive to the welfare of life." Let us
+examine this. We see that metaphysics is not, properly speaking, a
+science--that is, it is a science whose end is in itself. And this
+science, which, properly speaking, is not a science, has its end in
+itself, in the gratification and education of the minds that cultivate
+it. But what are we to understand? Is its end in itself or is it to
+gratify and educate the minds that cultivate it? Either the one or the
+other! Hodgson afterwards adds that the end of metaphysics is not any
+external purpose, such as that of founding an art conducive to the
+welfare of life. But is not the gratification of the mind of him who
+cultivates philosophy part of the well-being of his life? Let the reader
+consider this passage of the English metaphysician and tell me if it is
+not a tissue of contradictions.
+
+Such a contradiction is inevitable when an attempt is made to define
+humanly this theory of science, of knowledge, whose end is in itself, of
+knowing for the sake of knowing, of attaining truth for the sake of
+truth. Science exists only in personal consciousness and thanks to it;
+astronomy, mathematics, have no other reality than that which they
+possess as knowledge in the minds of those who study and cultivate them.
+And if some day all personal consciousness must come to an end on the
+earth; if some day the human spirit must return to the nothingness--that
+is to say, to the absolute unconsciousness--from whence it sprang; and
+if there shall no more be any spirit that can avail itself of all our
+accumulated knowledge--then to what end is this knowledge? For we must
+not lose sight of the fact that the problem of the personal immortality
+of the soul involves the future of the whole human species.
+
+This series of contradictions into which the Englishman falls in his
+desire to explain the theory of a science whose end is in itself, is
+easily understood when it is remembered that it is an Englishman who
+speaks, and that the Englishman is before everything else a man. Perhaps
+a German specialist, a philosopher who had made philosophy his
+speciality, who had first murdered his humanity and then buried it in
+his philosophy, would be better able to explain this theory of a science
+whose end is in itself and of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
+
+Take the man Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland; read his
+_Ethic_ as a despairing elegiac poem, which in fact it is, and tell me
+if you do not hear, beneath the disemburdened and seemingly serene
+propositions _more geometrico_, the lugubrious echo of the prophetic
+psalms. It is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair. And when
+he wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and
+that his wisdom consists in meditating not on death but on life--homo
+liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat et eius sapientia non
+mortis, sed vitæ meditatio est (_Ethic_, Part IV., Prop. LXVII.)--when
+he wrote that, he felt, as we all feel, that we are slaves, and he did
+in fact think about death, and he wrote it in a vain endeavour to free
+himself from this thought. Nor in writing Proposition XLII. of Part V.,
+that "happiness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself," did he
+feel, one may be sure, what he wrote. For this is usually the reason why
+men philosophize--in order to convince themselves, even though they fail
+in the attempt. And this desire of convincing oneself--that is to say,
+this desire of doing violence to one's own human nature--is the real
+starting-point of not a few philosophies.
+
+Whence do I come and whence comes the world in which and by which I
+live? Whither do I go and whither goes everything that environs me? What
+does it all mean? Such are the questions that man asks as soon as he
+frees himself from the brutalizing necessity of labouring for his
+material sustenance. And if we look closely, we shall see that beneath
+these questions lies the wish to know not so much the "why" as the
+"wherefore," not the cause but the end. Cicero's definition of
+philosophy is well known--"the knowledge of things divine and human and
+of the causes in which these things are contained," _rerum divinarum et
+humanarum, causarumque quibus hæ res continentur_; but in reality these
+causes are, for us, ends. And what is the Supreme Cause, God, but the
+Supreme End? The "why" interests us only in view of the "wherefore." We
+wish to know whence we came only in order the better to be able to
+ascertain whither we are going.
+
+This Ciceronian definition, which is the Stoic definition, is also found
+in that formidable intellectualist, Clement of Alexandria, who was
+canonized by the Catholic Church, and he expounds it in the fifth
+chapter of the first of his _Stromata_. But this same Christian
+philosopher--Christian?--in the twenty-second chapter of his fourth
+_Stroma_ tells us that for the gnostic--that is to say, the
+intellectual--knowledge, _gnosis_, ought to suffice, and he adds: "I
+will dare aver that it is not because he wishes to be saved that he, who
+devotes himself to knowledge for the sake of the divine science itself,
+chooses knowledge. For the exertion of the intellect by exercise is
+prolonged to a perpetual exertion. And the perpetual exertion of the
+intellect is the essence of an intelligent being, which results from an
+uninterrupted process of admixture, and remains eternal contemplation, a
+living substance. Could we, then, suppose anyone proposing to the
+gnostic whether he would choose the knowledge of God or everlasting
+salvation, and if these, which are entirely identical, were separable,
+he would without the least hesitation choose the knowledge of God?" May
+He, may God Himself, whom we long to enjoy and possess eternally,
+deliver us from this Clementine gnosticism or intellectualism!
+
+Why do I wish to know whence I come and whither I go, whence comes and
+whither goes everything that environs me, and what is the meaning of it
+all? For I do not wish to die utterly, and I wish to know whether I am
+to die or not definitely. If I do not die, what is my destiny? and if I
+die, then nothing has any meaning for me. And there are three solutions:
+(_a_) I know that I shall die utterly, and then irremediable despair, or
+(_b_) I know that I shall not die utterly, and then resignation, or
+(_c_) I cannot know either one or the other, and then resignation in
+despair or despair in resignation, a desperate resignation or a resigned
+despair, and hence conflict.
+
+"It is best," some reader will say, "not to concern yourself with what
+cannot be known." But is it possible? In his very beautiful poem, _The
+Ancient Sage_, Tennyson said:
+
+    Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
+    Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
+    Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
+    Thou canst not prove that thou art spirit alone,
+    Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
+    Nor canst thou prove thou art immortal, no,
+    Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son,
+    Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
+    Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
+    For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
+    Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
+    Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
+    Cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
+
+Yes, perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy proving can be proven,
+nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to
+wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which may conduce
+to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge, as the
+Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is
+another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition
+between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational,
+not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And
+this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.
+
+The defect of Descartes' _Discourse of Method_ lies not in the
+antecedent methodical doubt; not in his beginning by resolving to doubt
+everything, a merely intellectual device; but in his resolution to begin
+by emptying himself of himself, of Descartes, of the real man, the man
+of flesh and bone, the man who does not want to die, in order that he
+might be a mere thinker--that is, an abstraction. But the real man
+returned and thrust himself into the philosophy.
+
+"_Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée_." Thus begins the
+_Discourse of Method_, and this good sense saved him. He continues
+talking about himself, about the man Descartes, telling us among other
+things that he greatly esteemed eloquence and loved poetry; that he
+delighted above all in mathematics because of the evidence and certainty
+of its reasons, and that he revered our theology and claimed as much as
+any to attain to heaven--_et prétendais autant qu'aucun autre à gagner
+le ciel_. And this pretension--a very laudable one, I think, and above
+all very natural--was what prevented him from deducing all the
+consequences of his methodical doubt. The man Descartes claimed, as much
+as any other, to attain to heaven, "but having learned as a thing very
+sure that the way to it is not less open to the most ignorant than to
+the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead thither are
+beyond our intelligence, I did not dare submit them to my feeble
+reasonings, and I thought that to undertake to examine them and to
+succeed therein, I should want some extraordinary help from heaven and
+need to be more than man." And here we have the man. Here we have the
+man who "did not feel obliged, thank God, to make a profession
+(_métier_) of science in order to increase his means, and who did not
+pretend to play the cynic and despise glory." And afterwards he tells us
+how he was compelled to make a sojourn in Germany, and there, shut up in
+a stove (_poêle_) he began to philosophize his method. But in Germany,
+shut up in a stove! And such his discourse is, a stove-discourse, and
+the stove a German one, although the philosopher shut up in it was a
+Frenchman who proposed to himself to attain to heaven.
+
+And he arrives at the _cogito ergo sum_, which St. Augustine had already
+anticipated; but the _ego_ implicit in this enthymeme, _ego cogito, ergo
+ego sum_, is an unreal--that is, an ideal--_ego_ or I, and its _sum_,
+its existence, something unreal also. "I think, therefore I am," can
+only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of the "I am,"
+which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is
+knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think,
+but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this
+living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek
+to join in wedlock life and reason!
+
+The truth is _sum, ergo cogito_--I am, therefore I think, although not
+everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all
+consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness
+of self, without personality? Can there exist pure knowledge without
+feeling, without that species of materiality which feeling lends to it?
+Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act
+of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove have said: "I
+feel, therefore I am"? or "I will, therefore I am"? And to feel oneself,
+is it not perhaps to feel oneself imperishable? To will oneself, is it
+not to wish oneself eternal--that is to say, not to wish to die? What
+the sorrowful Jew of Amsterdam called the essence of the thing, the
+effort that it makes to persist indefinitely in its own being,
+self-love, the longing for immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and
+fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is it
+not therefore the true base, the real starting-point, of all philosophy,
+although the philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, may not
+recognize it?
+
+And, moreover, it was the _cogito_ that introduced a distinction which,
+although fruitful of truths, has been fruitful also of confusions, and
+this distinction is that between object, _cogito_, and subject, _sum_.
+There is scarcely any distinction that does not also lead to confusion.
+But we will return to this later.
+
+For the present let us remain keenly suspecting that the longing not to
+die, the hunger for personal immortality, the effort whereby we tend to
+persist indefinitely in our own being, which is, according to the tragic
+Jew, our very essence, that this is the affective basis of all knowledge
+and the personal inward starting-point of all human philosophy, wrought
+by a man and for men. And we shall see how the solution of this inward
+affective problem, a solution which may be but the despairing
+renunciation of the attempt at a solution, is that which colours all the
+rest of philosophy. Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge
+there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the enquiry into
+the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore,"
+the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive
+others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself.
+
+And this personal and affective starting-point of all philosophy and all
+religion is the tragic sense of life. Let us now proceed to consider
+this.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[10] _The Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study
+of Theology_, by the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour London, 1895: "So
+it is with those persons who claim to show by their example that
+naturalism is practically consistent with the maintenance of ethical
+ideals with which naturalism has no natural affinity. Their spiritual
+life is parasitic: it is sheltered by convictions which belong, not to
+them, but to the society of which they form a part; it is nourished by
+processes in which they take no share. And when those convictions decay,
+and those processes come to an end, the alien life which they have
+maintained can scarce be expected to outlast them" (Chap. iv.).
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE HUNGER OF IMMORTALITY
+
+
+Let us pause to consider this immortal yearning for immortality--even
+though the gnostics or intellectuals may be able to say that what
+follows is not philosophy but rhetoric. Moreover, the divine Plato, when
+he discussed the immortality of the soul in his _Phædo_, said that it
+was proper to clothe it in legend, _muthologein_.
+
+First of all let us recall once again--and it will not be for the last
+time--that saying of Spinoza that every being endeavours to persist in
+itself, and that this endeavour is its actual essence, and implies
+indefinite time, and that the soul, in fine, sometimes with a clear and
+distinct idea, sometimes confusedly, tends to persist in its being with
+indefinite duration, and is aware of its persistency (_Ethic_, Part
+III., Props. VI.-X.).
+
+It is impossible for us, in effect, to conceive of ourselves as not
+existing, and no effort is capable of enabling consciousness to realize
+absolute unconsciousness, its own annihilation. Try, reader, to imagine
+to yourself, when you are wide awake, the condition of your soul when
+you are in a deep sleep; try to fill your consciousness with the
+representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility
+of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.
+We cannot conceive ourselves as not existing.
+
+The visible universe, the universe that is created by the instinct of
+self-preservation, becomes all too narrow for me. It is like a cramped
+cell, against the bars of which my soul beats its wings in vain. Its
+lack of air stifles me. More, more, and always more! I want to be
+myself, and yet without ceasing to be myself to be others as well, to
+merge myself into the totality of things visible and invisible, to
+extend myself into the illimitable of space and to prolong myself into
+the infinite of time. Not to be all and for ever is as if not to be--at
+least, let me be my whole self, and be so for ever and ever. And to be
+the whole of myself is to be everybody else. Either all or nothing!
+
+All or nothing! And what other meaning can the Shakespearean "To be or
+not to be" have, or that passage in _Coriolanus_ where it is said of
+Marcius "He wants nothing of a god but eternity"? Eternity,
+eternity!--that is the supreme desire! The thirst of eternity is what is
+called love among men, and whosoever loves another wishes to eternalize
+himself in him. Nothing is real that is not eternal.
+
+From the poets of all ages and from the depths of their souls this
+tremendous vision of the flowing away of life like water has wrung
+bitter cries--from Pindar's "dream of a shadow," _skias onar_, to
+Calderón's "life is a dream" and Shakespeare's "we are such stuff as
+dreams are made on," this last a yet more tragic sentence than
+Calderón's, for whereas the Castilian only declares that our life is a
+dream, but not that we ourselves are the dreamers of it, the Englishman
+makes us ourselves a dream, a dream that dreams.
+
+The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and
+heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which
+neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling
+of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing
+that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills
+life again and eternalizes it. In appearance at any rate, for in
+reality.... And love, above all when it struggles against destiny,
+overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of
+appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is
+overcome and liberty is law.
+
+Everything passes! Such is the refrain of those who have drunk, lips to
+the spring, of the fountain of life, of those who have tasted of the
+fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
+
+To be, to be for ever, to be without ending! thirst of being, thirst of
+being more! hunger of God! thirst of love eternalizing and eternal! to
+be for ever! to be God!
+
+"Ye shall be as gods!" we are told in Genesis that the serpent said to
+the first pair of lovers (Gen. iii. 5). "If in this life only we have
+hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable," wrote the Apostle (1
+Cor. xv. 19); and all religion has sprung historically from the cult of
+the dead--that is to say, from the cult of immortality.
+
+The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that the free man thinks of
+nothing less than of death; but this free man is a dead man, free from
+the impulse of life, for want of love, the slave of his liberty. This
+thought that I must die and the enigma of what will come after death is
+the very palpitation of my consciousness. When I contemplate the green
+serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through
+which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the
+diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows
+about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery
+whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me
+with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depths of my
+spirit with the blood of divinity.
+
+Like Pascal, I do not understand those who assert that they care not a
+farthing for these things, and this indifference "in a matter that
+touches themselves, their eternity, their all, exasperates me rather
+than moves me to compassion, astonishes and shocks me," and he who feels
+thus "is for me," as for Pascal, whose are the words just quoted, "a
+monster."
+
+It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand books that
+ancestor-worship is for the most part the source of primitive religions,
+and it may be strictly said that what most distinguishes man from the
+other animals is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and
+does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother earth; he is an
+animal that guards its dead. And from what does he thus guard them? From
+what does he so futilely protect them? The wretched consciousness
+shrinks from its own annihilation, and, just as an animal spirit, newly
+severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the
+world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs
+desire to possess another life than that of the world itself. And so the
+earth would run the risk of becoming a vast cemetery before the dead
+themselves should die again.
+
+When mud huts or straw shelters, incapable of resisting the inclemency
+of the weather, sufficed for the living, tumuli were raised for the
+dead, and stone was used for sepulchres before it was used for houses.
+It is the strong-builded houses of the dead that have withstood the
+ages, not the houses of the living; not the temporary lodgings but the
+permanent habitations.
+
+This cult, not of death but of immortality, originates and preserves
+religions. In the midst of the delirium of destruction, Robespierre
+induced the Convention to declare the existence of the Supreme Being and
+"the consolatory principle of the immortality of the soul," the
+Incorruptible being dismayed at the idea of having himself one day to
+turn to corruption.
+
+A disease? Perhaps; but he who pays no heed to his disease is heedless
+of his health, and man is an animal essentially and substantially
+diseased. A disease? Perhaps it may be, like life itself to which it is
+thrall, and perhaps the only health possible may be death; but this
+disease is the fount of all vigorous health. From the depth of this
+anguish, from the abyss of the feeling of our mortality, we emerge into
+the light of another heaven, as from the depth of Hell Dante emerged to
+behold the stars once again--
+
+    _e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle._
+
+Although this meditation upon mortality may soon induce in us a sense of
+anguish, it fortifies us in the end. Retire, reader, into yourself and
+imagine a slow dissolution of yourself--the light dimming about you--all
+things becoming dumb and soundless, enveloping you in silence--the
+objects that you handle crumbling away between your hands--the ground
+slipping from under your feet--your very memory vanishing as if in a
+swoon--everything melting away from you into nothingness and you
+yourself also melting away--the very consciousness of nothingness,
+merely as the phantom harbourage of a shadow, not even remaining to you.
+
+I have heard it related of a poor harvester who died in a hospital bed,
+that when the priest went to anoint his hands with the oil of extreme
+unction, he refused to open his right hand, which clutched a few dirty
+coins, not considering that very soon neither his hand nor he himself
+would be his own any more. And so we close and clench, not our hand, but
+our heart, seeking to clutch the world in it.
+
+A friend confessed to me that, foreseeing while in the full vigour of
+physical health the near approach of a violent death, he proposed to
+concentrate his life and spend the few days which he calculated still
+remained to him in writing a book. Vanity of vanities!
+
+If at the death of the body which sustains me, and which I call mine to
+distinguish it from the self that is I, my consciousness returns to the
+absolute unconsciousness from which it sprang, and if a like fate
+befalls all my brothers in humanity, then is our toil-worn human race
+nothing but a fatidical procession of phantoms, going from nothingness
+to nothingness, and humanitarianism the most inhuman thing known.
+
+And the remedy is not that suggested in the quatrain that runs--
+
+    _Cada vez que considero
+    que me tengo de morir,
+    tiendo la capa en el suelo
+    y no me harto de dormir._[11]
+
+No! The remedy is to consider our mortal destiny without flinching, to
+fasten our gaze upon the gaze of the Sphinx, for it is thus that the
+malevolence of its spell is discharmed.
+
+If we all die utterly, wherefore does everything exist? Wherefore? It is
+the Wherefore of the Sphinx; it is the Wherefore that corrodes the
+marrow of the soul; it is the begetter of that anguish which gives us
+the love of hope.
+
+Among the poetic laments of the unhappy Cowper there are some lines
+written under the oppression of delirium, in which, believing himself to
+be the mark of the Divine vengeance, he exclaims--
+
+    Hell might afford my miseries a shelter.
+
+This is the Puritan sentiment, the preoccupation with sin and
+predestination; but read the much more terrible words of Sénancour,
+expressive of the Catholic, not the Protestant, despair, when he makes
+his Obermann say, "L'homme est périssable. Il se peut; mais périssons en
+résistant, et, si le néant nous est réservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit
+une justice." And I must confess, painful though the confession be, that
+in the days of the simple faith of my childhood, descriptions of the
+tortures of hell, however terrible, never made me tremble, for I always
+felt that nothingness was much more terrifying. He who suffers lives,
+and he who lives suffering, even though over the portal of his abode is
+written "Abandon all hope!" loves and hopes. It is better to live in
+pain than to cease to be in peace. The truth is that I could not
+believe in this atrocity of Hell, of an eternity of punishment, nor did
+I see any more real hell than nothingness and the prospect of it. And I
+continue in the belief that if we all believed in our salvation from
+nothingness we should all be better.
+
+What is this _joie de vivre_ that they talk about nowadays? Our hunger
+for God, our thirst of immortality, of survival, will always stifle in
+us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not. It is
+the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life to be unending,
+that most often urges us to long for death. "If it is true that I am to
+die utterly," we say to ourselves, "then once I am annihilated the world
+has ended so far as I am concerned--it is finished. Why, then, should it
+not end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed to suffer the
+tormenting illusion of a transient and apparential existence, may come
+into being? If, the illusion of living being shattered, living for the
+mere sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise doomed to
+die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the good of living? Our best
+remedy is death." And thus it is that we chant the praises of the
+never-ending rest because of our dread of it, and speak of liberating
+death.
+
+Leopardi, the poet of sorrow, of annihilation, having lost the ultimate
+illusion, that of believing in his immortality--
+
+        _Peri l'inganno estremo
+    ch'eterno io mi credei_,
+
+spoke to his heart of _l'infinita vanitá del tutto_, and perceived how
+close is the kinship between love and death, and how "when love is born
+deep down in the heart, simultaneously a languid and weary desire to die
+is felt in the breast." The greater part of those who seek death at
+their own hand are moved thereto by love; it is the supreme longing for
+life, for more life, the longing to prolong and perpetuate life, that
+urges them to death, once they are persuaded of the vanity of this
+longing.
+
+The problem is tragic and eternal, and the more we seek to escape from
+it, the more it thrusts itself upon us. Four-and-twenty centuries ago,
+in his dialogue on the immortality of the soul, the serene Plato--but
+was he serene?--spoke of the uncertainty of our dream of being immortal
+and of the _risk_ that the dream might be vain, and from his own soul
+there escaped this profound cry--Glorious is the risk!--_kalos
+gar o kindunos_, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our
+souls never dying--a sentence that was the germ of Pascal's famous
+argument of the wager.
+
+Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to
+eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the
+immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression
+upon me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is
+not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die--no; I
+neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for
+ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live--this poor "I" that I am
+and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of
+the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.
+
+I am the centre of my universe, the centre of the universe, and in my
+supreme anguish I cry with Michelet, "Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!"
+What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own
+soul? (Matt. xvi. 26). Egoism, you say? There is nothing more universal
+than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of
+all. Each man is worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do
+to sacrifice each to all save in so far as all sacrifice themselves to
+each. That which we call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the
+necessary postulate. "Love thy neighbour as thyself," we are told, the
+presupposition being that each man loves himself; and it is not said
+"Love thyself." And, nevertheless, we do not know how to love ourselves.
+
+Put aside the persistence of your own self and ponder what they tell
+you. Sacrifice yourself to your children! And sacrifice yourself to them
+because they are yours, part and prolongation of yourself, and they in
+their turn will sacrifice themselves to their children, and these
+children to theirs, and so it will go on without end, a sterile
+sacrifice by which nobody profits. I came into the world to create my
+self, and what is to become of all our selves? Live for the True, the
+Good, the Beautiful! We shall see presently the supreme vanity and the
+supreme insincerity of this hypocritical attitude.
+
+"That art thou!" they tell me with the Upanishads. And I answer: Yes, I
+am that, if that is I and all is mine, and mine the totality of things.
+As mine I love the All, and I love my neighbour because he lives in me
+and is part of my consciousness, because he is like me, because he is
+mine.
+
+Oh, to prolong this blissful moment, to sleep, to eternalize oneself in
+it! Here and now, in this discreet and diffused light, in this lake of
+quietude, the storm of the heart appeased and stilled the echoes of the
+world! Insatiable desire now sleeps and does not even dream; use and
+wont, blessed use and wont, are the rule of my eternity; my disillusions
+have died with my memories, and with my hopes my fears.
+
+And they come seeking to deceive us with a deceit of deceits, telling us
+that nothing is lost, that everything is transformed, shifts and
+changes, that not the least particle of matter is annihilated, not the
+least impulse of energy is lost, and there are some who pretend to
+console us with this! Futile consolation! It is not my matter or my
+energy that is the cause of my disquiet, for they are not mine if I
+myself am not mine--that is, if I am not eternal. No, my longing is not
+to be submerged in the vast All, in an infinite and eternal Matter or
+Energy, or in God; not to be possessed by God, but to possess Him, to
+become myself God, yet without ceasing to be I myself, I who am now
+speaking to you. Tricks of monism avail us nothing; we crave the
+substance and not the shadow of immortality.
+
+Materialism, you say? Materialism? Without doubt; but either our spirit
+is likewise some kind of matter or it is nothing. I dread the idea of
+having to tear myself away from my flesh; I dread still more the idea of
+having to tear myself away from everything sensible and material, from
+all substance. Yes, perhaps this merits the name of materialism; and if
+I grapple myself to God with all my powers and all my senses, it is that
+He may carry me in His arms beyond death, looking into these eyes of
+mine with the light of His heaven when the light of earth is dimming in
+them for ever. Self-illusion? Talk not to me of illusion--let me live!
+
+They also call this pride--"stinking pride" Leopardi called it--and they
+ask us who are we, vile earthworms, to pretend to immortality; in virtue
+of what? wherefore? by what right? "In virtue of what?" you ask; and I
+reply, In virtue of what do we now live? "Wherefore?"--and wherefore do
+we now exist? "By what right?"--and by what right are we? To exist is
+just as gratuitous as to go on existing for ever. Do not let us talk of
+merit or of right or of the wherefore of our longing, which is an end in
+itself, or we shall lose our reason in a vortex of absurdities. I do not
+claim any right or merit; it is only a necessity; I need it in order to
+live.
+
+And you, who are you? you ask me; and I reply with Obermann, "For the
+universe, nothing; for myself, everything!" Pride? Is it pride to want
+to be immortal? Unhappy men that we are! 'Tis a tragic fate, without a
+doubt, to have to base the affirmation of immortality upon the insecure
+and slippery foundation of the desire for immortality; but to condemn
+this desire on the ground that we believe it to have been proved to be
+unattainable, without undertaking the proof, is merely supine. I am
+dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me
+from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for
+immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really
+believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me,
+wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask
+the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the
+principle.
+
+But these are things which it is impossible to discuss.
+
+It is related in the book of the Acts of the Apostles how wherever Paul
+went the Jews, moved with envy, were stirred up to persecute him. They
+stoned him in Iconium and Lystra, cities of Lycaonia, in spite of the
+wonders that he worked therein; they scourged him in Philippi of
+Macedonia and persecuted his brethren in Thessalonica and Berea. He
+arrived at Athens, however, the noble city of the intellectuals, over
+which brooded the sublime spirit of Plato--the Plato of the gloriousness
+of the risk of immortality; and there Paul disputed with Epicureans and
+Stoics. And some said of him, "What doth this babbler (_spermologos_)
+mean?" and others, "He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods"
+(Acts xvii. 18), "and they took him and brought him unto Areopagus,
+saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is?
+for thou bringest certain strange things to our ears; we would know,
+therefore, what these things mean" (verses 19-20). And then follows that
+wonderful characterization of those Athenians of the decadence, those
+dainty connoisseurs of the curious, "for all the Athenians and strangers
+which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or
+to hear some new thing" (verse 21). A wonderful stroke which depicts for
+us the condition of mind of those who had learned from the _Odyssey_
+that the gods plot and achieve the destruction of mortals in order that
+their posterity may have something to narrate!
+
+Here Paul stands, then, before the subtle Athenians, before the
+_græuli_, men of culture and tolerance, who are ready to welcome and
+examine every doctrine, who neither stone nor scourge nor imprison any
+man for professing these or those doctrines--here he stands where
+liberty of conscience is respected and every opinion is given an
+attentive hearing. And he raises his voice in the midst of the Areopagus
+and speaks to them as it was fitting to speak to the cultured citizens
+of Athens, and all listen to him, agog to hear the latest novelty. But
+when he begins to speak to them of the resurrection of the dead their
+stock of patience and tolerance comes to an end, and some mock him, and
+others say: "We will hear thee again of this matter!" intending not to
+hear him. And a similar thing happened to him at Cæsarea when he came
+before the Roman prætor Felix, likewise a broad-minded and cultured man,
+who mitigated the hardships of his imprisonment, and wished to hear and
+did hear him discourse of righteousness and of temperance; but when he
+spoke of the judgement to come, Felix said, terrified (_emphobos
+genomenos_): "Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season
+I will call for thee" (Acts xxiv. 22-25). And in his audience before
+King Agrippa, when Festus the governor heard him speak of the
+resurrection of the dead, he exclaimed: "Thou art mad, Paul; much
+learning hath made thee mad" (Acts xxvi. 24).
+
+Whatever of truth there may have been in Paul's discourse in the
+Areopagus, and even if there were none, it is certain that this
+admirable account plainly shows how far Attic tolerance goes and where
+the patience of the intellectuals ends. They all listen to you, calmly
+and smilingly, and at times they encourage you, saying: "That's
+strange!" or, "He has brains!" or "That's suggestive," or "How fine!" or
+"Pity that a thing so beautiful should not be true!" or "this makes one
+think!" But as soon as you speak to them of resurrection and life after
+death, they lose their patience and cut short your remarks and exclaim,
+"Enough of this! we will talk about this another day!" And it is about
+this, my poor Athenians, my intolerant intellectuals, it is about this
+that I am going to talk to you here.
+
+And even if this belief be absurd, why is its exposition less tolerated
+than that of others much more absurd? Why this manifest hostility to
+such a belief? Is it fear? Is it, perhaps, spite provoked by inability
+to share it?
+
+And sensible men, those who do not intend to let themselves be deceived,
+keep on dinning into our ears the refrain that it is no use giving way
+to folly and kicking against the pricks, for what cannot be is
+impossible. The manly attitude, they say, is to resign oneself to fate;
+since we are not immortal, do not let us want to be so; let us submit
+ourselves to reason without tormenting ourselves about what is
+irremediable, and so making life more gloomy and miserable. This
+obsession, they add, is a disease. Disease, madness, reason ... the
+everlasting refrain! Very well then--No! I do not submit to reason, and
+I rebel against it, and I persist in creating by the energy of faith my
+immortalizing God, and in forcing by my will the stars out of their
+courses, for if we had faith as a grain of mustard seed we should say to
+that mountain, "Remove hence," and it would remove, and nothing would be
+impossible to us (Matt. xvii. 20).
+
+There you have that "thief of energies," as he[12] so obtusely called
+Christ who sought to wed nihilism with the struggle for existence, and
+he talks to you about courage. His heart craved the eternal all while
+his head convinced him of nothingness, and, desperate and mad to defend
+himself from himself, he cursed that which he most loved. Because he
+could not be Christ, he blasphemed against Christ. Bursting with his own
+self, he wished himself unending and dreamed his theory of eternal
+recurrence, a sorry counterfeit of immortality, and, full of pity for
+himself, he abominated all pity. And there are some who say that his is
+the philosophy of strong men! No, it is not. My health and my strength
+urge me to perpetuate myself. His is the doctrine of weaklings who
+aspire to be strong, but not of the strong who are strong. Only the
+feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire
+for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for
+perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance
+of life overflows upon the other side of death.
+
+Before this terrible mystery of mortality, face to face with the Sphinx,
+man adopts different attitudes and seeks in various ways to console
+himself for having been born. And now it occurs to him to take it as a
+diversion, and he says to himself with Renan that this universe is a
+spectacle that God presents to Himself, and that it behoves us to carry
+out the intentions of the great Stage-Manager and contribute to make the
+spectacle the most brilliant and the most varied that may be. And they
+have made a religion of art, a cure for the metaphysical evil, and
+invented the meaningless phrase of art for art's sake.
+
+And it does not suffice them. If the man who tells you that he writes,
+paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to
+the public, he lies; he lies if he puts his name to his writing,
+painting, statue, or song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a
+shadow of his spirit, something that may survive him. If the _Imitation
+of Christ_ is anonymous, it is because its author sought the eternity of
+the soul and did not trouble himself about that of the name. The man of
+letters who shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying rascal. Of
+Dante, the author of those three-and-thirty vigorous verses (_Purg._ xi.
+85-117) on the vanity of worldly glory, Boccaccio says that he relished
+honours and pomps more perhaps than suited with his conspicuous virtue.
+The keenest desire of his condemned souls is that they may be remembered
+and talked of here on earth, and this is the chief solace that lightens
+the darkness of his Inferno. And he himself confessed that his aim in
+expounding the concept of Monarchy was not merely that he might be of
+service to others, but that he might win for his own glory the palm of
+so great prize (_De Monarchia_, lib. i., cap. i.). What more? Even of
+that holy man, seemingly the most indifferent to worldly vanity, the
+Poor Little One of Assisi, it is related in the _Legenda Trium Sociorum_
+that he said: _Adhuc adorabor per totum mundum!_--You will see how I
+shall yet be adored by all the world! (II. _Celano_, i. 1). And even of
+God Himself the theologians say that He created the world for the
+manifestation of His glory.
+
+When doubts invade us and cloud our faith in the immortality of the
+soul, a vigorous and painful impulse is given to the anxiety to
+perpetuate our name and fame, to grasp at least a shadow of immortality.
+And hence this tremendous struggle to singularize ourselves, to survive
+in some way in the memory of others and of posterity. It is this
+struggle, a thousand times more terrible than the struggle for life,
+that gives its tone, colour, and character to our society, in which the
+medieval faith in the immortal soul is passing away. Each one seeks to
+affirm himself, if only in appearance.
+
+Once the needs of hunger are satisfied--and they are soon satisfied--the
+vanity, the necessity--for it is a necessity--arises of imposing
+ourselves upon and surviving in others. Man habitually sacrifices his
+life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity. He boasts
+even of his weaknesses and his misfortunes, for want of anything better
+to boast of, and is like a child who, in order to attract attention,
+struts about with a bandaged finger. And vanity, what is it but
+eagerness for survival?
+
+The vain man is in like case with the avaricious--he takes the means for
+the end; forgetting the end he pursues the means for its own sake and
+goes no further. The seeming to be something, conducive to being it,
+ends by forming our objective. We need that others should believe in our
+superiority to them in order that we may believe in it ourselves, and
+upon their belief base our faith in our own persistence, or at least in
+the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him who
+congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are
+to him who recognizes the truth or the goodness of the cause itself. A
+rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and
+characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius
+than hit the mark with the crowd. Rousseau has said in his _Émile_ (book
+iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the
+truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well
+that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports
+it because it is his. There is not a single one of them who, if he came
+to know the true and the false, would not prefer the falsehood that he
+had found to the truth discovered by another. Where is the philosopher
+who would not willingly deceive mankind for his own glory? Where is he
+who in the secret of his heart does not propose to himself any other
+object than to distinguish himself? Provided that he lifts himself above
+the vulgar, provided that he outshines the brilliance of his
+competitors, what does he demand more? The essential thing is to think
+differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists
+he would be a believer." How much substantial truth there is in these
+gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity!
+
+This violent struggle for the perpetuation of our name extends backwards
+into the past, just as it aspires to conquer the future; we contend
+with the dead because we, the living, are obscured beneath their shadow.
+We are jealous of the geniuses of former times, whose names, standing
+out like the landmarks of history, rescue the ages from oblivion. The
+heaven of fame is not very large, and the more there are who enter it
+the less is the share of each. The great names of the past rob us of our
+place in it; the space which they fill in the popular memory they usurp
+from us who aspire to occupy it. And so we rise up in revolt against
+them, and hence the bitterness with which all those who seek after fame
+in the world of letters judge those who have already attained it and are
+in enjoyment of it. If additions continue to be made to the wealth of
+literature, there will come a day of sifting, and each one fears lest he
+be caught in the meshes of the sieve. In attacking the masters,
+irreverent youth is only defending itself; the iconoclast or
+image-breaker is a Stylite who erects himself as an image, an _icon_.
+"Comparisons are odious," says the familiar adage, and the reason is
+that we wish to be unique. Do not tell Fernandez that he is one of the
+most talented Spaniards of the younger generation, for though he will
+affect to be gratified by the eulogy he is really annoyed by it; if,
+however, you tell him that he is the most talented man in Spain--well
+and good! But even that is not sufficient: one of the worldwide
+reputations would be more to his liking, but he is only fully satisfied
+with being esteemed the first in all countries and all ages. The more
+alone, the nearer to that unsubstantial immortality, the immortality of
+the name, for great names diminish one another.
+
+What is the meaning of that irritation which we feel when we believe
+that we are robbed of a phrase, or a thought, or an image, which we
+believed to be our own, when we are plagiarized? Robbed? Can it indeed
+be ours once we have given it to the public? Only because it is ours we
+prize it; and we are fonder of the false money that preserves our
+impress than of the coin of pure gold from which our effigy and our
+legend has been effaced. It very commonly happens that it is when the
+name of a writer is no longer in men's mouths that he most influences
+his public, his mind being then disseminated and infused in the minds of
+those who have read him, whereas he was quoted chiefly when his thoughts
+and sayings, clashing with those generally received, needed the
+guarantee of a name. What was his now belongs to all, and he lives in
+all. But for him the garlands have faded, and he believes himself to
+have failed. He hears no more either the applause or the silent tremor
+of the heart of those who go on reading him. Ask any sincere artist
+which he would prefer, whether that his work should perish and his
+memory survive, or that his work should survive and his memory perish,
+and you will see what he will tell you, if he is really sincere. When a
+man does not work merely in order to live and carry on, he works in
+order to survive. To work for the work's sake is not work but play. And
+play? We will talk about that later on.
+
+A tremendous passion is this longing that our memory may be rescued, if
+it is possible, from the oblivion which overtakes others. From it
+springs envy, the cause, according to the biblical narrative, of the
+crime with which human history opened: the murder of Abel by his brother
+Cain. It was not a struggle for bread--it was a struggle to survive in
+God, in the divine memory. Envy is a thousand times more terrible than
+hunger, for it is spiritual hunger. If what we call the problem of life,
+the problem of bread, were once solved, the earth would be turned into a
+hell by the emergence in a more violent form of the struggle for
+survival.
+
+For the sake of a name man is ready to sacrifice not only life but
+happiness--life as a matter of course. "Let me die, but let my fame
+live!" exclaimed Rodrigo Arias in _Las Mocedades del Cid_ when he fell
+mortally wounded by Don Ordóñez de Lara. "Courage, Girolamo, for you
+will long be remembered; death is bitter, but fame eternal!" cried
+Girolamo Olgiati, the disciple of Cola Montano and the murderer,
+together with his fellow-conspirators Lampugnani and Visconti, of
+Galeazzo Sforza, tyrant of Milan. And there are some who covet even the
+gallows for the sake of acquiring fame, even though it be an infamous
+fame: _avidus malæ famæ_, as Tacitus says.
+
+And this erostratism, what is it at bottom but the longing for
+immortality, if not for substantial and concrete immortality, at any
+rate for the shadowy immortality of the name?
+
+And in this there are degrees. If a man despises the applause of the
+crowd of to-day, it is because he seeks to survive in renewed minorities
+for generations. "Posterity is an accumulation of minorities," said
+Gounod. He wishes to prolong himself in time rather than in space. The
+crowd soon overthrows its own idols and the statue lies broken at the
+foot of the pedestal without anyone heeding it; but those who win the
+hearts of the elect will long be the objects of a fervent worship in
+some shrine, small and secluded no doubt, but capable of preserving them
+from the flood of oblivion. The artist sacrifices the extensiveness of
+his fame to its duration; he is anxious rather to endure for ever in
+some little corner than to occupy a brilliant second place in the whole
+universe; he prefers to be an atom, eternal and conscious of himself,
+rather than to be for a brief moment the consciousness of the whole
+universe; he sacrifices infinitude to eternity.
+
+And they keep on wearying our ears with this chorus of Pride! stinking
+Pride! Pride, to wish to leave an ineffaceable name? Pride? It is like
+calling the thirst for riches a thirst for pleasure. No, it is not so
+much the longing for pleasure that drives us poor folk to seek money as
+the terror of poverty, just as it was not the desire for glory but the
+terror of hell that drove men in the Middle Ages to the cloister with
+its _acedia_. Neither is this wish to leave a name pride, but terror of
+extinction. We aim at being all because in that we see the only means of
+escaping from being nothing. We wish to save our memory--at any rate,
+our memory. How long will it last? At most as long as the human race
+lasts. And what if we shall save our memory in God?
+
+Unhappy, I know well, are these confessions; but from the depth of
+unhappiness springs new life, and only by draining the lees of spiritual
+sorrow can we at last taste the honey that lies at the bottom of the cup
+of life. Anguish leads us to consolation.
+
+This thirst for eternal life is appeased by many, especially by the
+simple, at the fountain of religious faith; but to drink of this is not
+given to all. The institution whose primordial end is to protect this
+faith in the personal immortality of the soul is Catholicism; but
+Catholicism has sought to rationalize this faith by converting religion
+into theology, by offering a philosophy, and a philosophy of the
+thirteenth century, as a basis for vital belief. This and its
+consequences we will now proceed to examine.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[11] Each time that I consider that it is my lot to die, I spread my
+cloak upon the ground and am never surfeited with sleeping.
+
+[12] Nietzsche.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM
+
+
+Let us now approach the Christian, Catholic, Pauline, or Athanasian
+solution of our inward vital problem, the hunger of immortality.
+
+Christianity sprang from the confluence of two mighty spiritual
+streams--the one Judaic, the other Hellenic--each of which had already
+influenced the other, and Rome finally gave it a practical stamp and
+social permanence.
+
+It has been asserted, perhaps somewhat precipitately, that primitive
+Christianity was an-eschatological, that faith in another life after
+death is not clearly manifested in it, but rather a belief in the
+proximate end of the world and establishment of the kingdom of God, a
+belief known as chiliasm. But were they not fundamentally one and the
+same thing? Faith in the immortality of the soul, the nature of which
+was not perhaps very precisely defined, may be said to be a kind of
+tacit understanding or supposition underlying the whole of the Gospel;
+and it is the mental orientation of many of those who read it to-day, an
+orientation contrary to that of the Christians from among whom the
+Gospel sprang, that prevents them from seeing this. Without doubt all
+that about the second coming of Christ, when he shall come among the
+clouds, clothed with majesty and great power, to judge the quick and the
+dead, to open to some the kingdom of heaven and to cast others into
+Gehenna, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, may be
+understood in a chiliastic sense; and it is even said of Christ in the
+Gospel (Mark ix. I), that there were with him some who should not taste
+of death till they had seen the kingdom of God--that is, that the
+kingdom should come during their generation. And in the same chapter,
+verse 10, it is said of Peter and James and John, who went up with Jesus
+to the Mount of Transfiguration and heard him say that he would rise
+again from the dead, that "they kept that saying within themselves,
+questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean."
+And at all events the Gospel was written when this belief, the basis and
+_raison d'être_ of Christianity, was in process of formation. See Matt.
+xxii. 29-32; Mark xii. 24-27; Luke xvi. 22-31; xx. 34-37; John v. 24-29;
+vi. 40, 54, 58; viii. 51; xi. 25, 56; xiv. 2, 19. And, above all, that
+passage in Matt. xxvii. 52, which tells how at the resurrection of
+Christ "many bodies of the saints which slept arose."
+
+And this was not a natural resurrection. No; the Christian faith was
+born of the faith that Jesus did not remain dead, but that God raised
+him up again, and that this resurrection was a fact; but this did not
+presuppose a mere immortality of the soul in the philosophical sense
+(see Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, Prolegomena, v. 4). For the first
+Fathers of the Church themselves the immortality of the soul was not a
+thing pertaining to the natural order; the teaching of the Divine
+Scriptures, as Nimesius said, sufficed for its demonstration, and it
+was, according to Lactantius, a gift--and as such gratuitous--of God.
+But more of this later.
+
+Christianity sprang, as we have said, from two great spiritual
+streams--the Judaic and the Hellenic--each one of which had arrived on
+its account, if not at a precise definition of, at any rate at a
+definite yearning for, another life. Among the Jews faith in another
+life was neither general nor clear; but they were led to it by faith in
+a personal and living God, the formation of which faith comprises all
+their spiritual history.
+
+Jahwé, the Judaic God, began by being one god among many others--the
+God of the people of Israel, revealed among the thunders of the tempest
+on Mount Sinai. But he was so jealous that he demanded that worship
+should be paid to him alone, and it was by way of monocultism that the
+Jews arrived at monotheism. He was adored as a living force, not as a
+metaphysical entity, and he was the god of battles. But this God of
+social and martial origin, to whose genesis we shall have to return
+later, became more inward and personal in the prophets, and in becoming
+more inward and personal he thereby became more individual and more
+universal. He is the Jahwé who, instead of loving Israel because Israel
+is his son, takes Israel for a son because he loves him (Hosea xi. 1).
+And faith in the personal God, in the Father of men, carries with it
+faith in the eternalization of the individual man--a faith which had
+already dawned in Pharisaism even before Christ.
+
+Hellenic culture, on its side, ended by discovering death; and to
+discover death is to discover the hunger of immortality. This longing
+does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final,
+in their character, marking not the start but the close of a
+civilization. They indicate the transition from the old religion of
+Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo--of
+redemption. But the popular and inward religion of the Eleusinian
+mysteries, the worship of souls and ancestors, always persisted
+underneath. "In so far as it is possible to speak of a Delphic theology,
+among its more important elements must be counted the belief in the
+continuation of the life of souls after death in its popular forms, and
+in the worship of the souls of the dead."[13] There were the Titanic and
+the Dionysiac elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the
+Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which
+the soul was like a captive in a prison (see Rohde, _Psyche_, "Die
+Orphiker," 4). The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic
+idea. But the idea of the immortality of the soul was not a
+philosophical principle. The attempt of Empedocles to harmonize a
+hylozoistic system with spiritualism proved that a philosophical natural
+science cannot by itself lead to a corroboration of the axiom of the
+perpetuity of the individual soul; it could only serve as a support to a
+theological speculation. It was by a contradiction that the first Greek
+philosophers affirmed immortality, by abandoning natural philosophy and
+intruding into theology, by formulating not an Apollonian but a
+Dionysiac and Orphic dogma. But "an immortality of the soul as such, in
+virtue of its own nature and condition as an imperishable divine force
+in the mortal body, was never an object of popular Hellenic belief"
+(Rohde, _op. cit._).
+
+Recall the _Phædo_ of Plato and the neo-platonic lucubrations. In them
+the yearning for personal immortality already shows itself--a yearning
+which, as it was left totally unsatisfied by reason, produced the
+Hellenic pessimism. For, as Pfleiderer very well observes
+(_Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtliche Grundlage_, 3. Berlin, 1896),
+"no people ever came upon the earth so serene and sunny as the Greeks in
+the youthful days of their historical existence ... but no people
+changed so completely their idea of the value of life. The Hellenism
+which ended in the religious speculations of neo-pythagorism and
+neo-platonism viewed this world, which had once appeared to it so joyous
+and radiant, as an abode of darkness and error, and earthly existence as
+a period of trial which could never be too quickly traversed." Nirvana
+is an Hellenic idea.
+
+Thus Jews and Greeks each arrived independently at the real discovery
+of death--a discovery which occasions, in peoples as in men, the
+entrance into spiritual puberty, the realization of the tragic sense of
+life, and it is then that the living God is begotten by humanity. The
+discovery of death is that which reveals God to us, and the death of the
+perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation of death, being the
+death of the man who ought not to have died yet did die.
+
+Such a discovery--that of immortality--prepared as it was by the Judaic
+and Hellenic religious processes, was a specifically Christian
+discovery. And its full achievement was due above all to Paul of Tarsus,
+the hellenizing Jew and Pharisee. Paul had not personally known Jesus,
+and hence he discovered him as Christ. "It may be said that the theology
+of the Apostle Paul is, in general, the first Christian theology. For
+him it was a necessity; it was, in a certain sense, his substitution for
+the lack of a personal knowledge of Jesus," says Weizsäcker (_Das
+apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche_. Freiburg-i.-B., 1892).
+He did not know Jesus, but he felt him born again in himself, and thus
+he could say, "Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in
+me."[14] And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and
+unto the Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for
+the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ. The
+important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died
+and had risen again, and not what he did in his life--not his ethical
+work as a teacher, but his religious work as a giver of immortality. And
+he it was who wrote those immortal words: "Now if Christ be preached
+that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no
+resurrection from the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead,
+then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our
+preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.... Then they also which are
+fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope
+in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (I Cor. xv. 12-19).
+
+And it is possible to affirm that thenceforward he who does not believe
+in the bodily resurrection of Christ may be Christophile but cannot be
+specifically Christian. It is true that a Justin Martyr could say that
+"all those are Christians who live in accordance with reason, even
+though they may be deemed to be atheists, as, among the Greeks, Socrates
+and Heraclitus and other such"; but this martyr, is he a martyr--that is
+to say a witness--of Christianity? No.
+
+And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced by Paul, the dogma of
+the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of the
+resurrection and immortality of each believer, that the whole of
+Christology was built up. The God-man, the incarnate Word, came in order
+that man, according to his mode, might be made God--that is, immortal.
+And the Christian God, the Father of Christ, a God necessarily
+anthropomorphic, is He who--as the Catechism of Christian Doctrine which
+we were made to learn by heart at school says--created the world for
+man, for each man. And the end of redemption, in spite of appearances
+due to an ethical deflection of a dogma properly religious, was to save
+us from death rather than from sin, or from sin in so far as sin implies
+death. And Christ died, or rather rose again, for _me_, for each one of
+us. And a certain solidarity was established between God and His
+creature. Malebranche said that the first man fell _in order that_
+Christ might redeem us, rather than that Christ redeemed us _because_
+man had fallen.
+
+After the death of Paul years passed, and generations of Christianity
+wrought upon this central dogma and its consequences in order to
+safeguard faith in the immortality of the individual soul, and the
+Council of Nicæa came, and with it the formidable Athanasius, whose
+name is still a battle-cry, an incarnation of the popular faith.
+Athanasius was a man of little learning but of great faith, and above
+all of popular faith, devoured by the hunger of immortality. And he
+opposed Arianism, which, like Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism,
+threatened, although unknowingly and unintentionally, the foundation of
+that belief. For the Arians, Christ was first and foremost a teacher--a
+teacher of morality, the wholly perfect man, and therefore the guarantee
+that we may all attain to supreme perfection; but Athanasius felt that
+Christ cannot make us gods if he has not first made himself God; if his
+Divinity had been communicated, he could not have communicated it to us.
+"He was not, therefore," he said, "first man and then became God; but He
+was first God and then became man in order that He might the better
+deify us (_theopoiêsê_)" (_Orat._ i. 39). It was not the Logos of
+the philosophers, the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and
+adored;[15] and thus he instituted a separation between nature and
+revelation. The Athanasian or Nicene Christ, who is the Catholic Christ,
+is not the cosmological, nor even, strictly, the ethical Christ; he is
+the eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ. Harnack says of
+this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is
+essentially docetic--that is, apparential--because the process of the
+divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of
+eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called
+historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a
+myth or in a social atom?
+
+This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or
+Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it to
+cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the
+learned might pass over to Catholicism--that is to say, from reason to
+faith. To this same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an
+indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who
+saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with God,
+should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus,
+whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor yet Harnack
+himself. Among Protestants, this historical Jesus is subjected to the
+scalpel of criticism, while the Catholic Christ lives, the really
+historical Christ, he who lives throughout the centuries guaranteeing
+the faith in personal immortality and personal salvation.
+
+And Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith, that of asserting
+things mutually contradictory: "The complete contradiction that exists
+in the _homoousios_ carried in its train a whole army of
+contradictions which increased as thought advanced," says Harnack. Yes,
+so it was, and so it had to be. And he adds: "Dogma took leave for ever
+of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and habituated itself to the
+contra-rational." In truth, it drew closer to life, which is
+contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Not only are judgements
+of worth never rationalizable--they are anti-rational.
+
+At Nicæa, then, as afterwards at the Vatican, victory rested with the
+idiots--taking this word in its proper, primitive, and etymological
+sense--the simple-minded, the rude and headstrong bishops, the
+representatives of the genuine human spirit, the popular spirit, the
+spirit that does not want to die, in spite of whatever reason may say,
+and that seeks a guarantee, the most material possible, for this desire.
+
+_Quid ad æternitatem?_ This is the capital question. And the Creed ends
+with that phrase, _resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi
+sæculi_--the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
+In the cemetery of Mallona, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a
+tombstone on which this verse is carved:
+
+    _Aunque estamos en polvo convertidos,
+    en Ti, Señor, nuestra esperanza fía,
+    que tornaremos a vivir vestidos
+    con la carne y la piel que nos cubria._[16]
+
+"With the same bodies and souls that they had," as the Catechism says.
+So much so, that it is orthodox Catholic doctrine that the happiness of
+the blessed is not perfectly complete until they recover their bodies.
+They lament in heaven, says our Brother Pedro Malón de Chaide of the
+Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque,[17] and "this lament
+springs from their not being perfectly whole in heaven, for only the
+soul is there; and although they cannot suffer, because they see God, in
+whom they unspeakably delight, yet with all this it appears that they
+are not wholly content. They will be so when they are clothed with their
+own bodies."
+
+And to this central dogma of the resurrection in Christ and by Christ
+corresponds likewise a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic
+piety--the Sacrament of the Eucharist. In it is administered the body of
+Christ, which is the bread of immortality.
+
+This sacrament is genuinely realist--_dinglich_, as the Germans would
+say--which may without great violence be translated "material." It is
+the sacrament most genuinely _ex opere operato_, for which is
+substituted among Protestants the idealistic sacrament of the word.
+Fundamentally it is concerned with--and I say it with all possible
+respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the expressiveness of the
+phrase--the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding
+upon Him. Little wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when she was
+communicating in the monastery of the Incarnation and in the second year
+of her being Prioress there, on the octave of St. Martin, and the
+Father, Fr. Juan de la Cruz, divided the Host between her and another
+sister, she thought that it was done not because there was any want of
+Hosts, but because he wished to mortify her, "for I had told him how
+much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that
+the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole
+and entire in the smallest particle." Here reason pulls one way, feeling
+another. And what importance for this feeling have the thousand and one
+difficulties that arise from reflecting rationally upon the mystery of
+this sacrament? What is a divine body? And the body, in so far as it is
+the body of Christ, is it divine? What is an immortal and immortalizing
+body? What is substance separated from the accidents? Nowadays we have
+greatly refined our notion of materiality and substantiality; but there
+were even some among the Fathers of the Church to whom the immateriality
+of God Himself was not a thing so clear and definite as it is for us.
+And this sacrament of the Eucharist is the immortalizing sacrament _par
+excellence_, and therefore the axis of popular Catholic piety, and if it
+may be so said, the most specifically religious of sacraments.
+
+For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not
+justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical.
+It was from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of
+him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions--namely,
+that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in
+Catholicism.
+
+The preoccupation of sin has never been such a matter of anguish, or at
+any rate has never displayed itself with such an appearance of anguish,
+among Catholics. The sacrament of Confession contributes to this. And
+there persists, perhaps, among Catholics more than among Protestants
+the substance of the primitive Judaic and pagan conception of sin as
+something material and infectious and hereditary, which is cured by
+baptism and absolution. In Adam all his posterity sinned, almost
+materially, and his sin was transmitted as a material disease is
+transmitted. Renan, whose education was Catholic, was right, therefore,
+in calling to account the Protestant Amiel who accused him of not giving
+due importance to sin. And, on the other hand, Protestantism, absorbed
+in this preoccupation with justification, which in spite of its
+religious guise was taken more in an ethical sense than anything else,
+ends by neutralizing and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons
+the Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure religious
+individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or cultured religiosity.
+What we may call "other-worldliness" (_Jenseitigkeit_) was obliterated
+little by little by "this-worldliness" (_Diesseitigkeit_); and this in
+spite of Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it. To its
+earthly vocation and passive trust in God is due the religious
+coarseness of Lutheranism, which was almost at the point of expiring in
+the age of the Enlightenment, of the _Aufklärung_, and which pietism,
+infusing into it something of the religious sap of Catholicism, barely
+succeeded in galvanizing a little. Hence the exactness of the remarks of
+Oliveira Martins in his magnificent _History of Iberian Civilization_,
+in which he says (book iv., chap, iii.) that "Catholicism produced
+heroes and Protestantism produced societies that are sensible, happy,
+wealthy, free, as far as their outer institutions go, but incapable of
+any great action, because their religion has begun by destroying in the
+heart of man all that made him capable of daring and noble
+self-sacrifice."
+
+Take any of the dogmatic systems that have resulted from the latest
+Protestant dissolvent analysis--that of Kaftan, the follower of Ritschl,
+for example--and note the extent to which eschatology is reduced. And
+his master, Albrecht Ritschl, himself says: "The question regarding the
+necessity of justification or forgiveness can only be solved by
+conceiving eternal life as the direct end and aim of that divine
+operation. But if the idea of eternal life be applied merely to our
+state in the next life, then its content, too, lies beyond all
+experience, and cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind.
+Hopes and desires, though marked by the strongest subjective certainty,
+are not any the clearer for that, and contain in themselves no guarantee
+of the completeness of what one hopes or desires. Clearness and
+completeness of idea, however, are the conditions of comprehending
+anything--_i.e._, of understanding the necessary connection between the
+various elements of a thing, and between the thing and its given
+presuppositions. The Evangelical article of belief, therefore, that
+justification by faith establishes or brings with it assurance of
+eternal life, is of no use theologically, so long as this purposive
+aspect of justification cannot be verified in such experience as is
+possible now" (_Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung_, vol. iii., chap. vii.,
+52). All this is very rational, but ...
+
+In the first edition of Melanchthon's _Loci Communes_, that of 1521, the
+first Lutheran theological work, its author omits all Trinitarian and
+Christological speculations, the dogmatic basis of eschatology. And Dr.
+Hermann, professor at Marburg, the author of a book on the Christian's
+commerce with God (_Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_)--a book the
+first chapter of which treats of the opposition between mysticism and
+the Christian religion, and which is, according to Harnack, the most
+perfect Lutheran manual--tells us in another place,[18] referring to
+this Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that "the effective
+knowledge of God and of Christ, in which knowledge faith lives, is
+something entirely different. Nothing ought to find a place in Christian
+doctrine that is not capable of helping man to recognize his sins, to
+obtain the grace of God, and to serve Him in truth. Until that
+time--that is to say, until Luther--the Church had accepted much as
+_doctrina sacra_ which cannot absolutely contribute to confer upon man
+liberty of heart and tranquillity of conscience." For my part, I cannot
+conceive the liberty of a heart or the tranquillity of a conscience that
+are not sure of their perdurability after death. "The desire for the
+soul's salvation," Hermann continues, "must at last have led men to the
+knowledge and understanding of the effective doctrine of salvation." And
+in his book on the Christian's commerce with God, this eminent Lutheran
+doctor is continually discoursing upon trust in God, peace of
+conscience, and an assurance of salvation that is not strictly and
+precisely certainty of everlasting life, but rather certainty of the
+forgiveness of sins.
+
+And I have read in a Protestant theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, that in the
+conceptual order Protestantism has attained its highest reach in music,
+in which art Bach has given it its mightiest artistic expression. This,
+then, is what Protestantism dissolves into--celestial music![19] On the
+other hand we may say that the highest artistic expression of
+Catholicism, or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is in the art that is
+most material, tangible, and permanent--for the vehicle of sounds is
+air--in sculpture and painting, in the Christ of Velasquez, that Christ
+who is for ever dying, yet never finishes dying, in order that he may
+give us life.
+
+And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can
+leave ethics on one side. But our religion--although its doctors may
+protest against this--is fundamentally and for the most part a
+compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed
+into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the
+eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline
+apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind those words which the _Theologica
+Germanica_, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the
+mouth of God: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with
+good, for I am and have none other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive
+them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps
+knows what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the
+social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and
+hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly
+eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is
+a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element
+preponderating. The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism,
+is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual
+soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of
+virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to
+perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?
+The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And, strictly, what is
+important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not. It is not
+necessary to take very literally, but as a lyrical, or rather
+rhetorical, effusion, the words of our famous sonnet--
+
+    _No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
+    el cielo que me tienes prometido,_[20]
+
+and the rest that follows.
+
+The real sin--perhaps it is the sin against the Holy Ghost for which
+there is no remission--is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for
+oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be
+a liberal--that is, a heretic--is worse than being an assassin, a thief,
+or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose
+infallibility protects us from reason.
+
+And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What
+difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible--the
+Bible, or a society of men--the Church, or a single man? Does it make
+any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the
+infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than
+that of a single man, this supreme offence in the eyes of reason had to
+be posited.
+
+It is the vital asserting itself, and in order to assert itself it
+creates, with the help of its enemy, the rational, a complete dogmatic
+structure, and this the Church defends against rationalism, against
+Protestantism, and against Modernism. The Church defends life. It stood
+up against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its
+inception and until it became assimilated to the general body of human
+knowledge, tended to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the
+universe was created for man. It opposed Darwin, and it did right, for
+Darwinism tends to shatter our belief that man is an exceptional animal,
+created expressly to be eternalized. And lastly, Pius IX., the first
+Pontiff to be proclaimed infallible, declared that he was irreconcilable
+with the so-called modern civilization. And he did right.
+
+Loisy, the Catholic ex-abbé, said: "I say simply this, that the Church
+and theology have not looked with favour upon the scientific movement,
+and that on certain decisive occasions, so far as it lay in their power,
+they have hindered it. I say, above all, that Catholic teaching has not
+associated itself with, or accommodated itself to, this movement.
+Theology has conducted itself, and conducts itself still, as if it were
+self-possessed of a science of nature and a science of history,
+together with that general philosophy of nature and history which
+results from a scientific knowledge of them. It might be supposed that
+the domain of theology and that of science, distinct in principle and
+even as defined by the Vatican Council, must not be distinct in
+practice. Everything proceeds almost as if theology had nothing to learn
+from modern science, natural or historical, and as if by itself it had
+the power and the right to exercise a direct and absolute control over
+all the activities of the human mind" (_Autour d'un Petit Livre_, 1903,
+p. 211).
+
+And such must needs be, and such in fact is, the Church's attitude in
+its struggle with Modernism, of which Loisy was the learned and leading
+exponent.
+
+The recent struggle against Kantian and fideist Modernism is a struggle
+for life. Is it indeed possible for life, life that seeks assurance of
+survival, to tolerate that a Loisy, a Catholic priest, should affirm
+that the resurrection of the Saviour is not a fact of the historical
+order, demonstrable and demonstrated by the testimony of history alone?
+Read, moreover, the exposition of the central dogma, that of the
+resurrection of Jesus, in E. Le Roy's excellent work, _Dogme et
+Critique_, and tell me if any solid ground is left for our hope to build
+on. Do not the Modernists see that the question at issue is not so much
+that of the immortal life of Christ, reduced, perhaps, to a life in the
+collective Christian consciousness, as that of a guarantee of our own
+personal resurrection of body as well as soul? This new psychological
+apologetic appeals to the moral miracle, and we, like the Jews, seek for
+a sign, something that can be taken hold of with all the powers of the
+soul and with all the senses of the body. And with the hands and the
+feet and the mouth, if it be possible.
+
+But alas! we do not get it. Reason attacks, and faith, which does not
+feel itself secure without reason, has to come to terms with it. And
+hence come those tragic contradictions and lacerations of
+consciousness. We need security, certainty, signs, and they give us
+_motiva credibilitatis_--motives of credibility--upon which to establish
+the _rationale obsequium_, and although faith precedes reason (_fides
+præcedit rationem_), according to St. Augustine, this same learned
+doctor and bishop sought to travel by faith to understanding (_per fidem
+ad intellectum_), and to believe in order to understand (_credo ut
+intelligam_). How far is this from that superb expression of
+Tertullian--_et sepultus resurrexit, certum est quia impossibile
+est!_--"and he was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is
+impossible!" and his sublime _credo quia absurdum!_--the scandal of the
+rationalists. How far from the _il faut s'abêtir_ of Pascal and from the
+"human reason loves the absurd" of our Donoso Cortés, which he must have
+learned from the great Joseph de Maistre!
+
+And a first foundation-stone was sought in the authority of tradition
+and the revelation of the word of God, and the principle of unanimous
+consent was arrived at. _Quod apud multos unum invenitur, non est
+erratum, sed traditum_, said Tertullian; and Lamennais added, centuries
+later, that "certitude, the principle of life and intelligence ... is,
+if I may be allowed the expression, a social product."[21] But here, as
+in so many cases, the supreme formula was given by that great Catholic,
+whose Catholicism was of the popular and vital order, Count Joseph de
+Maistre, when he wrote: "I do not believe that it is possible to show a
+single opinion of universal utility that is not true."[22] Here you have
+the Catholic hall-mark--the deduction of the truth of a principle from
+its supreme goodness or utility. And what is there of greater, of more
+sovereign utility, than the immortality of the soul? "As all is
+uncertain, either we must believe all men or none," said Lactantius; but
+that great mystic and ascetic, Blessed Heinrich Seuse, the Dominican,
+implored the Eternal Wisdom for one word affirming that He was love, and
+when the answer came, "All creatures proclaim that I am love," Seuse
+replied, "Alas! Lord, that does not suffice for a yearning soul." Faith
+feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition,
+nor with authority. It seeks the support of its enemy, reason.
+
+And thus scholastic theology was devised, and with it its
+handmaiden--_ancilla theologiæ_--scholastic philosophy, and this
+handmaiden turned against her mistress. Scholasticism, a magnificent
+cathedral, in which all the problems of architectonic mechanism were
+resolved for future ages, but a cathedral constructed of unbaked bricks,
+gave place little by little to what is called natural theology and is
+merely Christianity depotentialized. The attempt was even made, where it
+was possible, to base dogmas upon reason, to show at least that if they
+were indeed super-rational they were not contra-rational, and they were
+reinforced with a philosophical foundation of Aristotelian-Neoplatonic
+thirteenth-century philosophy. And such is the Thomism recommended by
+Leo XIII. And now the question is not one of the enforcement of dogma
+but of its philosophical, medieval, and Thomist interpretation. It is
+not enough to believe that in receiving the consecrated Host we receive
+the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; we must needs negotiate all
+those difficulties of transubstantiation and substance separated from
+accidents, and so break with the whole of the modern rational conception
+of substantiality.
+
+But for this, implicit faith suffices--the faith of the coalheaver,[23]
+the faith of those who, like St. Teresa (_Vida_, cap. xxv. 2), do not
+wish to avail themselves of theology. "Do not ask me the reason of
+that, for I am ignorant; Holy Mother Church possesses doctors who will
+know how to answer you," as we were made to learn in the Catechism. It
+was for this, among other things, that the priesthood was instituted,
+that the teaching Church might be the depositary--"reservoir instead of
+river," as Phillips Brooks said--of theological secrets. "The work of
+the Nicene Creed," says Harnack (_Dogmengeschichte_, ii. 1, cap. vii.
+3), "was a victory of the priesthood over the faith of the Christian
+people. The doctrine of the Logos had already become unintelligible to
+those who were not theologians. The setting up of the Niceno-Cappadocian
+formula as the fundamental confession of the Church made it perfectly
+impossible for the Catholic laity to get an inner comprehension of the
+Christian Faith, taking as their guide the form in which it was
+presented in the doctrine of the Church. The idea became more and more
+deeply implanted in men's minds that Christianity was the revelation of
+the unintelligible." And so, in truth, it is.
+
+And why was this? Because faith--that is, Life--no longer felt sure of
+itself. Neither traditionalism nor the theological positivism of Duns
+Scotus sufficed for it; it sought to rationalize itself. And it sought
+to establish its foundation--not, indeed, over against reason, where it
+really is, but upon reason--that is to say, within reason--itself. The
+nominalist or positivist or voluntarist position of Scotus--that which
+maintains that law and truth depend, not so much upon the essence as
+upon the free and inscrutable will of God--by accentuating its supreme
+irrationality, placed religion in danger among the majority of believers
+endowed with mature reason and not mere coalheavers. Hence the triumph
+of the Thomist theological rationalism. It is no longer enough to
+believe in the existence of God; but the sentence of anathema falls on
+him who, though believing in it, does not believe that His existence is
+demonstrable by rational arguments, or who believes that up to the
+present nobody by means of these rational arguments has ever
+demonstrated it irrefutably. However, in this connection the remark of
+Pohle is perhaps capable of application: "If eternal salvation depended
+upon mathematical axioms, we should have to expect that the most odious
+human sophistry would attack their universal validity as violently as it
+now attacks God, the soul, and Christ."[24]
+
+The truth is, Catholicism oscillates between mysticism, which is the
+inward experience of the living God in Christ, an intransmittible
+experience, the danger of which, however, is that it absorbs our own
+personality in God, and so does not save our vital longing--between
+mysticism and the rationalism which it fights against (see Weizsäcker,
+_op. cit._); it oscillates between religionized science and
+scientificized religion. The apocalyptic enthusiasm changed little by
+little into neo-platonic mysticism, which theology thrust further into
+the background. It feared the excesses of the imagination which was
+supplanting faith and creating gnostic extravagances. But it had to sign
+a kind of pact with gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither
+imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished. And
+thus the body of Catholic dogma became a system of contradictions, more
+or less successfully harmonized. The Trinity was a kind of pact between
+monotheism and polytheism, and humanity and divinity sealed a peace in
+Christ, nature covenanted with grace, grace with free will, free will
+with the Divine prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps true, as
+Hermann says (_loc. cit._), that "as soon as we develop religious
+thought to its logical conclusions, it enters into conflict with other
+ideas which belong equally to the life of religion." And this it is that
+gives to Catholicism its profound vital dialectic. But at what a cost?
+
+At the cost, it must needs be said, of doing violence to the mental
+exigencies of those believers in possession of an adult reason. It
+demands from them that they shall believe all or nothing, that they
+shall accept the complete totality of dogma or that they shall forfeit
+all merit if the least part of it be rejected. And hence the result, as
+the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out,[25] that in France
+and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery
+to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd
+doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget scepticism in
+those who received them without reflection. None are so likely to
+believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here
+is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the
+terrible danger comes from another quarter--from seeking to believe with
+the reason and not with life.
+
+The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the
+problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the individual soul,
+satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to
+rationalize it by means of dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the
+reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It
+is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what
+clearly appears to us to be contra-rational, neither is it any good
+wishing to become coalheavers when we are not coalheavers.
+Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a
+rationalistic category.
+
+Let us now consider the rationalist or scientific solution--or, more
+properly, dissolution--of our problem.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[13] Erwin Rohde, _Psyche_, "Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der
+Griechen." Tübingen, 1907. Up to the present this is the leading work
+dealing with the belief of the Greeks in the immortality of the soul.
+
+[14] Gal. ii. 20.
+
+[15] On all relating to this question see, among others, Harnack,
+_Dogmengeschichte_, ii., Teil i., Buch vii., cap. i.
+
+[16]
+
+    Though we are become dust,
+    In thee, O Lord, our hope confides,
+    That we shall live again clad
+    In the flesh and skin that once covered us.
+
+[17] _Libra de la Conversión de la Magdelena_, part iv., chap. ix.
+
+[18] In his exposition of Protestant dogma in _Systematische christliche
+Religion_, Berlin, 1909, one of the series entitled _Die Kultur der
+Gegenwart_, published by P. Hinneberg.
+
+[19] The common use of the expression _música celestial_ to denote
+"nonsense, something not worth listening to," lends it a satirical
+byplay which disappears in the English rendering.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[20] It is not Thy promised heaven, my God, that moves me to love Thee.
+(Anonymous, sixteenth or seventeenth century. See _Oxford Book of
+Spanish Verse_, No. 106.)
+
+[21] _Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion_, part iii., chap.
+i.
+
+[22] _Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg_, x^{me} entretien.
+
+[23] The allusion is to the traditional story of the coalheaver whom the
+devil sought to convince of the irrationality of belief in the Trinity.
+The coalheaver took the cloak that he was wearing and folded it in three
+folds. "Here are three folds," he said, "and the cloak though threefold
+is yet one." And the devil departed baffled.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[24] Joseph Pohle, "Christlich Katolische Dogmatik," in _Systematische
+Christliche Religion_, Berlin, 1909. _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_ series.
+
+[25] "Objections to Unitarian Christianity Considered," 1816, in _The
+Complete Works of William Ellery Channing, D.D._, London, 1884.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION
+
+
+The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his
+essay "On the Immortality of the Soul" with these decisive words: "It
+appears difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality
+of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from
+metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really the
+Gospel, and only the Gospel, that has brought to light life and
+immortality." Which is equivalent to denying the rationality of the
+belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal.
+
+Kant, whose criticism found its point of departure in Hume, attempted to
+establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the belief
+that it imports; and this is the real origin, the inward origin, of his
+_Critique of Practical Reason_, and of his categorical imperative and of
+his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation of Hume
+holds good. There is no way of proving the immortality of the soul
+rationally. There are, on the other hand, ways of proving rationally its
+mortality.
+
+It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to enlarge here upon
+the extent to which the individual human consciousness is dependent upon
+the physical organism, pointing out how it comes to birth by slow
+degrees according as the brain receives impressions from the outside
+world, how it is temporarily suspended during sleep, swoons, and other
+accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture that
+death carries with it the loss of consciousness. And just as before our
+birth we were not, nor have we any personal pre-natal memory, so after
+our death we shall cease to be. This is the rational position.
+
+The designation "soul" is merely a term used to denote the individual
+consciousness in its integrity and continuity; and that this soul
+undergoes change, that in like manner as it is integrated so it is
+disintegrated, is a thing very evident. For Aristotle it was the
+substantial form of the body--the entelechy, but not a substance. And
+more than one modern has called it an epiphenomenon--an absurd term. The
+appellation phenomenon suffices.
+
+Rationalism--and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely
+by reason, by objective truth--is necessarily materialist. And let not
+idealists be scandalized thereby.
+
+The truth is--it is necessary to be perfectly explicit in this
+matter--that what we call materialism means for us nothing else but the
+doctrine which denies the immortality of the individual soul, the
+persistence of personal consciousness after death.
+
+In another sense it may be said that, as we know what matter is no more
+than we know what spirit is, and as matter is for us merely an idea,
+materialism is idealism. In fact, and as regards our problem--the most
+vital, the only really vital problem--it is all the same to say that
+everything is matter as to say that everything is idea, or that
+everything is energy, or whatever you please. Every monist system will
+always seem to us materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only
+by the dualist systems--those which teach that human consciousness is
+something substantially distinct and different from the other
+manifestations of phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is
+the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in
+order to understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the
+soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of explaining and
+understanding our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the
+soul is unnecessary. What was formerly called rational psychology, in
+opposition to empirical psychology, is not psychology but metaphysics,
+and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it rational, but profoundly
+irrational, or rather contra-rational.
+
+The pretended rational doctrine of the substantiality and spirituality
+of the soul, with all the apparatus that accompanies it, is born simply
+of the necessity which men feel of grounding upon reason their
+inexpugnable longing for immortality and the subsequent belief in it.
+All the sophistries which aim at proving that the soul is substance,
+simple and incorruptible, proceed from this source. And further, the
+very concept of substance, as it was fixed and defined by scholasticism,
+a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept,
+designed expressly to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.
+
+William James, in the third of the lectures which he devoted to
+pragmatism in the Lowell Institute in Boston, in December, 1906, and
+January, 1907[26]--the weakest thing in all the work of the famous
+American thinker, an extremely weak thing indeed--speaks as follows:
+"Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and
+made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have
+fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are
+from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved
+the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I
+refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance
+here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents
+of the wafer do not change in the Lord's Supper, and yet it has become
+the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance
+solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn and the Divine
+substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate
+sensible properties. But though these do not alter, a tremendous
+difference has been made--no less a one than this, that we who take the
+sacrament now feed upon the very substance of Divinity. The
+substance-notion breaks into life, with tremendous effect, if once you
+allow that substances can separate from their accidents and exchange
+these latter. This is the only pragmatic application of the
+substance-idea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it
+will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the 'real
+presence' on independent grounds."
+
+Now, leaving on one side the question as to whether it is good
+theology--and I do not say good reasoning because all this lies outside
+the sphere of reason--to confound the substance of the body--the body,
+not the soul--of Christ with the very substance of Divinity--that is to
+say, with God Himself--it would appear impossible that one so ardently
+desirous of the immortality of the soul as William James, a man whose
+whole philosophy aims simply at establishing this belief on rational
+grounds, should not have perceived that the pragmatic application of the
+concept of substance to the doctrine of the Eucharistic
+transubstantiation is merely a consequence of its anterior application
+to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. As I explained in the
+preceding chapter, the Sacrament of the Eucharist is simply the
+reflection of the belief in immortality; it is, for the believer, the
+proof, by a mystical experience, that the soul is immortal and will
+enjoy God eternally. And the concept of substance was born, above all
+and before all, of the concept of the substantiality of the soul, and
+the latter was affirmed in order to confirm faith in the persistence of
+the soul after its separation from the body. Such was at the same time
+its first pragmatic application and its origin. And subsequently we
+have transferred this concept to external things. It is because I feel
+myself to be substance--that is to say, permanent in the midst of my
+changes--that I attribute substantiality to those agents exterior to me,
+which are also permanent in the midst of their changes--just as the
+concept of force is born of my sensation of personal effort in putting a
+thing in motion.
+
+Read carefully in the first part of the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas
+Aquinas the first six articles of question lxxv., which discuss whether
+the human soul is body, whether it is something self-subsistent, whether
+such also is the soul of the lower animals, whether the soul is the man,
+whether the soul is composed of matter and form, and whether it is
+incorruptible, and then say if all this is not subtly intended to
+support the belief that this incorruptible substantiality of the soul
+renders it capable of receiving from God immortality, for it is clear
+that as He created it when He implanted it in the body, as St. Thomas
+says, so at its separation from the body He could annihilate it. And as
+the criticism of these proofs has been undertaken a hundred times, it is
+unnecessary to repeat it here.
+
+Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to conclude that our soul is
+a substance from the fact that our consciousness of our identity--and
+this within very narrow and variable limits--persists through all the
+changes of our body? We might as well say of a ship that put out to sea
+and lost first one piece of timber, which was replaced by another of the
+same shape and dimensions, then lost another, and so on with all her
+timbers, and finally returned to port the same ship, with the same
+build, the same sea-going qualities, recognizable by everybody as the
+same--we might as well say of such a ship that it had a substantial
+soul. Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to infer the simplicity
+of the soul from the fact that we have to judge and unify our thoughts?
+Thought is not one but complex, and for the reason the soul is nothing
+but the succession of co-ordinated states of consciousness.
+
+In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it
+is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a
+simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in
+me a principle which thinks, wills, and feels.... Now this implies a
+begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth
+that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I
+think, will, and feel. And I--the I that thinks, wills, and feels--am
+immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it
+sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills, and feels. How? How
+you please.
+
+And they proceed to seek to establish the substantiality of the soul,
+hypostatizing the states of consciousness, and they begin by saying that
+this substance must be simple--that is, by opposing thought to
+extension, after the manner of the Cartesian dualism. And as Balmes was
+one of the spiritualist writers who have given the clearest and most
+concise form to the argument, I will present it as he expounds it in the
+second chapter of his _Curso de Filosofia Elemental_. "The human soul is
+simple," he says, and adds: "Simplicity consists in the absence of
+parts, and the soul has none. Let us suppose that it has three parts--A,
+B, C. I ask, Where, then, does thought reside? If in A only, then B and
+C are superfluous; and consequently the simple subject A will be the
+soul. If thought resides in A, B, and C, it follows that thought is
+divided into parts, which is absurd. What sort of a thing is a
+perception, a comparison, a judgement, a ratiocination, distributed
+among three subjects?" A more obvious begging of the question cannot be
+conceived. Balmes begins by taking it for granted that the whole, as a
+whole, is incapable of making a judgement. He continues: "The unity of
+consciousness is opposed to the division of the soul. When we think,
+there is a subject which knows everything that it thinks, and this is
+impossible if parts be attributed to it. Of the thought that is in A, B
+and C will know nothing, and so in the other cases respectively. There
+will not, therefore, be _one_ consciousness of the whole thought: each
+part will have its special consciousness, and there will be within us as
+many thinking beings as there are parts." The begging of the question
+continues; it is assumed without any proof that a whole, as a whole,
+cannot perceive as a unit. Balmes then proceeds to ask if these parts A,
+B, and C are simple or compound, and repeats his argument until he
+arrives at the conclusion that the thinking subject must be a part which
+is not a whole--that is, simple. The argument is based, as will be seen,
+upon the unity of apperception and of judgement. Subsequently he
+endeavours to refute the hypothesis of a communication of the parts
+among themselves.
+
+Balmes--and with him the _a priori_ spiritualists who seek to
+rationalize faith in the immortality of the soul--ignore the only
+rational explanation, which is that apperception and judgement are a
+resultant, that perceptions or ideas themselves are components which
+agree. They begin by supposing something external to and distinct from
+the states of consciousness, something that is not the living body which
+supports these states, something that is not I but is within me.
+
+The soul is simple, others say, because it reflects upon itself as a
+complete whole. No; the state of consciousness A, in which I think of my
+previous state of consciousness B, is not the same as its predecessor.
+Or if I think of my soul, I think of an idea distinct from the act by
+which I think of it. To think that one thinks and nothing more, is not
+to think.
+
+The soul is the principle of life, it is said. Yes; and similarly the
+category of force or energy has been conceived as the principle of
+movement. But these are concepts, not phenomena, not external realities.
+Does the principle of movement move? And only that which moves has
+external reality. Does the principle of life live? Hume was right when
+he said that he never encountered this idea of himself--that he only
+observed himself desiring or performing or feeling something.[27] The
+idea of some individual thing--of this inkstand in front of me, of that
+horse standing at my gate, of these two and not of any other individuals
+of the same class--is the fact, the phenomenon itself. The idea of
+myself is myself.
+
+All the efforts to substantiate consciousness, making it independent of
+extension--remember that Descartes opposed thought to extension--are but
+sophistical subtilties intended to establish the rationality of faith in
+the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective
+reality to that which does not possess it--to that whose reality exists
+only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal
+immortality--it is the continuation of this present life.
+
+The unity of consciousness is for scientific psychology--the only
+rational psychology--simply a phenomenal unity. No one can say what a
+substantial unity is. And, what is more, no one can say what a substance
+is. For the notion of substance is a non-phenomenal category. It is a
+noumenon and belongs properly to the unknowable--that is to say,
+according to the sense in which it is understood. But in its
+transcendental sense it is something really unknowable and strictly
+irrational. It is precisely this concept of substance that an
+unforewarned mind reduces to a use that is very far from that pragmatic
+application to which William James referred.
+
+And this application is not saved by understanding it in an idealistic
+sense, according to the Berkeleyan principle that to be is to be
+perceived (_esse est percipi_). To say that everything is idea or that
+everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or
+that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or everything
+spirit, and if, therefore, this diamond is idea or spirit, just as my
+consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for
+ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures for
+ever.
+
+George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne and brother in spirit to the
+Anglican bishop Joseph Butler, was equally as anxious to save the belief
+in the immortality of the soul. In the first words of the Preface to his
+_Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge_, he tells us
+that he considers that this treatise will be useful, "particularly to
+those who are tainted with scepticism, or want a demonstration of the
+existence and immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the
+soul." In paragraph cxl. he lays it down that we have an idea, or rather
+a notion, of spirit, and that we know other spirits by means of our own,
+from which follows--so in the next paragraph he roundly affirms--the
+natural immortality of the soul. And here he enters upon a series of
+confusions arising from the ambiguity with which he invests the term
+notion. And after having established the immortality of the soul, almost
+as it were _per saltum_, on the ground that the soul is not passive like
+the body, he proceeds to tell us in paragraph cxlvii. that the existence
+of God is more evident than that of man. And yet, in spite of this,
+there are still some who are doubtful!
+
+The question was complicated by making consciousness a property of the
+soul, consciousness being something more than soul--that is to say, a
+substantial form of the body, the originator of all the organic
+functions of the body. The soul not only thinks, feels, and wills, but
+moves the body and prompts its vital functions; in the human soul are
+united the vegetative, animal, and rational functions. Such is the
+theory. But the soul separated from the body can have neither
+vegetative nor animal functions.
+
+A theory, in short, which for the reason is a veritable contexture of
+confusions.
+
+After the Renaissance and the restoration of purely rational thought,
+emancipated from all theology, the doctrine of the mortality of the soul
+was re-established by the newly published writings of the second-century
+philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias and by Pietro Pomponazzi and
+others. And in point of fact, little or nothing can be added to what
+Pomponazzi has written in his _Tractatus de immortalitate animæ_. It is
+reason itself, and it serves nothing to reiterate his arguments.
+
+Attempts have not been wanting, however, to find an empirical support
+for belief in the immortality of the soul, and among these may be
+counted the work of Frederic W.H. Myers on _Human Personality and its
+Survival of Bodily Death_. No one ever approached more eagerly than
+myself the two thick volumes of this work in which the leading spirit of
+the Society for Psychical Research resumed that formidable mass of data
+relating to presentiments, apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of
+dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism, ecstasy, and all the
+rest that goes to furnish the spiritualist arsenal. I entered upon the
+reading of it not only without that temper of cautious suspicion which
+men of science maintain in investigations of this character, but even
+with a predisposition in its favour, as one who comes to seek the
+confirmation of his innermost longings; but for this reason was my
+disillusion all the greater. In spite of its critical apparatus it does
+not differ in any respect from medieval miracle-mongering. There is a
+fundamental defect of method, of logic.
+
+And if the belief in the immortality of the soul has been unable to find
+vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with
+pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die we return
+to God, or, more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing
+nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were
+born, and if when we die we return to where we were before being born,
+then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And
+since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of
+Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the
+guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said, to
+be merely atheism disguised; and, in my opinion, undisguised. And they
+were right in calling Spinoza an atheist, for his is the most logical,
+the most rational, system of pantheism.
+
+Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and
+submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable, which,
+when it has professed to wish to leave religious feelings scathless, has
+always been inspired by the most refined hypocrisy. The whole of the
+first part of Spencer's _First Principles_, and especially the fifth
+chapter entitled "Reconciliation"--that between reason and faith or
+science and religion being understood--is a model at the same time of
+philosophical superficiality and religious insincerity, of the most
+refined British cant. The unknowable, if it is something more than the
+merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of
+limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up.
+
+The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion considered as an
+individual and social psychic phenomenon irrespective of the
+transcendental objective validity of religious affirmations, is a
+science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul is
+something that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the
+rationality of this belief. However much the religious man may repeat
+with Schleiermacher, "Science can teach thee nothing; it is for science
+to learn from thee," inwardly he thinks otherwise.
+
+From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that
+reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts
+it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of
+life.
+
+A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to
+stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely
+individual, is, strictly, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce
+everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no
+more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or
+relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains the same
+for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different
+each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of
+the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes
+it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to
+arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or
+destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it,
+to lay it out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas,
+even though life may issue from them. Worms also feed upon corpses. My
+own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the innermost recesses of my
+soul, once they are torn from their roots in the heart, poured out on to
+this paper and there fixed in unalterable shape, are already only the
+corpses of thoughts. How, then, shall reason open its portals to the
+revelation of life? It is a tragic combat--it is the very essence of
+tragedy--this combat of life with reason. And truth? Is truth something
+that is lived or that is comprehended?
+
+It is only necessary to read the terrible _Parmenides_ of Plato to
+arrive at his tragic conclusion that "the one is and is not, and both
+itself and others, in relation to themselves and one another, are and
+are not, and appear to be and appear not to be." All that is vital is
+irrational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is
+essentially sceptical.
+
+The rational, in effect, is simply the relational; reason is limited to
+relating irrational elements. Mathematics is the only perfect science,
+inasmuch as it adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers, but not
+real and substantial things, inasmuch as it is the most formal of the
+sciences. Who can extract the cube root of an ash-tree?
+
+Nevertheless we need logic, this terrible power, in order to communicate
+thoughts and perceptions and even in order to think and perceive, for we
+think with words, we perceive with forms. To think is to converse with
+oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and logic. But may
+they not perhaps possess a content, an individual matter, incommunicable
+and untranslatable? And may not this be the source of their power?
+
+The truth is that man, the prisoner of logic, without which he cannot
+think, has always sought to make logic subservient to his desires, and
+principally to his fundamental desire. He has always sought to hold fast
+to logic, and especially in the Middle Ages, in the interests of
+theology and jurisprudence, both of which based themselves on what was
+established by authority. It was not until very much later that logic
+propounded the problem of knowledge, the problem of its own validity,
+the scrutiny of the metalogical foundations.
+
+"The Western theology," Dean Stanley wrote, "is essentially logical in
+form and based on law. The Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and
+based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate.
+The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist."[28]
+
+And all the laboured arguments in support of our hunger of immortality,
+which pretend to be grounded on reason or logic, are merely advocacy and
+sophistry.
+
+The property and characteristic of advocacy is, in effect, to make use
+of logic in the interests of a thesis that is to be defended, while, on
+the other hand, the strictly scientific method proceeds from the facts,
+the data, presented to us by reality, in order that it may arrive, or
+not arrive, as the case may be, at a certain conclusion. What is
+important is to define the problem clearly, whence it follows that
+progress consists not seldom in undoing what has been done. Advocacy
+always supposes a _petitio principii_, and its arguments are _ad
+probandum_. And theology that pretends to be rational is nothing but
+advocacy.
+
+Theology proceeds from dogma, and dogma, _dogma_, in its
+primitive and most direct sense, signifies a decree, something akin to
+the Latin _placitum_, that which has seemed to the legislative authority
+fitting to be law. This juridical concept is the starting-point of
+theology. For the theologian, as for the advocate, dogma, law, is
+something given--a starting-point which admits of discussion only in
+respect of its application and its most exact interpretation. Hence it
+follows that the theological or advocatory spirit is in its principle
+dogmatical, while the strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is
+sceptical, _skeptikos_--that is, investigative. It is so at least
+in its principle, for there is the other sense of the term scepticism,
+that which is most usual to-day, that of a system of doubt, suspicion,
+and uncertainty, and this has arisen from the theological or advocatory
+use of reason, from the abuse of dogmatism. The endeavour to apply the
+law of authority, the _placitum_, the dogma, to different and sometimes
+contraposed practical necessities, is what has engendered the scepticism
+of doubt. It is advocacy, or what amounts to the same thing, theology,
+that teaches the distrust of reason--not true science, not the science
+of investigation, sceptical in the primitive and direct meaning of the
+word, which hastens towards no predetermined solution nor proceeds save
+by the testing of hypotheses.
+
+Take the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas, the classical monument of the
+theology--that is, of the advocacy--of Catholicism, and open it where
+you please. First comes the thesis--_utrum_ ... whether such a thing be
+thus or otherwise; then the objections--_ad primum sic proceditur_; next
+the answers to these objections--_sed contra est_ ... or _respondeo
+dicendum_.... Pure advocacy! And underlying many, perhaps most, of its
+arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be expressed _more
+scholastico_ by this syllogism: I do not understand this fact save by
+giving it this explanation; it is thus that I must understand it,
+therefore this must be its explanation. The alternative being that I am
+left without any understanding of it at all. True science teaches, above
+all, to doubt and to be ignorant; advocacy neither doubts nor believes
+that it does not know. It requires a solution.
+
+To the mentality that assumes, more or less consciously, that we must of
+necessity find a solution to every problem, belongs the argument based
+on the disastrous consequences of a thing. Take any book of
+apologetics--that is to say, of theological advocacy--and you will see
+how many times you will meet with this phrase--"the disastrous
+consequences of this doctrine." Now the disastrous consequences of a
+doctrine prove at most that the doctrine is disastrous, but not that it
+is false, for there is no proof that the true is necessarily that which
+suits us best. The identification of the true and the good is but a
+pious wish. In his _Études sur Blaise Pascal_, A. Vinet says: "Of the
+two needs that unceasingly belabour human nature, that of happiness is
+not only the more universally felt and the more constantly experienced,
+but it is also the more imperious. And this need is not only of the
+senses; it is intellectual. It is not only for the _soul_; it is for the
+_mind_ that happiness is a necessity. Happiness forms a part of truth."
+This last proposition--_le bonheur fait partie de la verité_--is a
+proposition of pure advocacy, but not of science or of pure reason. It
+would be better to say that truth forms a part of happiness in a
+Tertullianesque sense, in the sense of _credo quia absurdum_, which
+means actually _credo quia consolans_--I believe because it is a thing
+consoling to me.
+
+No, for reason, truth is that of which it can be proved that it is, that
+it exists, whether it console us or not. And reason is certainly not a
+consoling faculty. That terrible Latin poet Lucretius, whose apparent
+serenity and Epicurean _ataraxia_ conceal so much despair, said that
+piety consists in the power to contemplate all things with a serene
+soul--_pacata posse mente omnia tueri_. And it was the same Lucretius
+who wrote that religion can persuade us into so great evils--_tantum
+religio potuit suadere malorum_. And it is true that religion--above all
+the Christian religion--has been, as the Apostle says, to the Jews a
+stumbling-block, and to the intellectuals foolishness.[29] The Christian
+religion, the religion of the immortality of the soul, was called by
+Tacitus a pernicious superstition (_exitialis superstitio_), and he
+asserted that it involved a hatred of mankind (_odium generis humani_).
+
+Speaking of the age in which these men lived, the most genuinely
+rationalistic age in the world's history, Flaubert, writing to Madame
+Roger des Genettes, uttered these pregnant words: "You are right; we
+must speak with respect of Lucretius; I see no one who can compare with
+him except Byron, and Byron has not his gravity nor the sincerity of his
+sadness. The melancholy of the ancients seems to me more profound than
+that of the moderns, who all more or less presuppose an immortality on
+the yonder side of the _black hole_. But for the ancients this black
+hole was the infinite itself; the procession of their dreams is imaged
+against a background of immutable ebony. The gods being no more and
+Christ being not yet, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius a
+unique moment in which man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find this
+grandeur; but what renders Lucretius intolerable is his physics, which
+he gives as if positive. If he is weak, it is because he did not doubt
+enough; he wished to explain, to arrive at a conclusion!"[30]
+
+Yes, Lucretius wished to arrive at a conclusion, a solution, and, what
+is worse, he wished to find consolation in reason. For there is also an
+anti-theological advocacy, and an _odium anti-theologicum_.
+
+Many, very many, men of science, the majority of those who call
+themselves rationalists, are afflicted by it.
+
+The rationalist acts rationally--that is to say, he does not speak out
+of his part--so long as he confines himself to denying that reason
+satisfies our vital hunger for immortality; but, furious at not being
+able to believe, he soon becomes a prey to the vindictiveness of the
+_odium anti-theologicum_, and exclaims with the Pharisees: "This people
+who knoweth not the law are cursed." There is much truth in these words
+of Soloviev: "I have a foreboding of the near approach of a time when
+Christians will gather together again in the Catacombs, because of the
+persecution of the faith--a persecution less brutal, perhaps, than that
+of Nero's day, but not less refined in its severity, consummated by
+mendacity, derision, and all the hypocrisies."
+
+The anti-theological hate, the scientificist--I do not say
+scientific--fury, is manifest. Consider, not the more detached
+scientific investigators, those who know how to doubt, but the fanatics
+of rationalism, and observe with what gross brutality they speak of
+faith. Vogt considered it probable that the cranial structure of the
+Apostles was of a pronounced simian character; of the indecencies of
+Haeckel, that supreme incomprehender, there is no need to speak, nor yet
+of those of Büchner; even Virchow is not free from them. And others work
+with more subtilty. There are people who seem not to be content with
+not believing that there is another life, or rather, with believing that
+there is none, but who are vexed and hurt that others should believe in
+it or even should wish that it might exist. And this attitude is as
+contemptible as that is worthy of respect which characterizes those who,
+though urged by the need they have of it to believe in another life, are
+unable to believe. But of this most noble attitude of the spirit, the
+most profound, the most human, and the most fruitful, the attitude of
+despair, we will speak later on.
+
+And the rationalists who do not succumb to the anti-theological fury are
+bent on convincing men that there are motives for living and
+consolations for having been born, even though there shall come a time,
+at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all
+human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for
+living and working, this thing which some call humanism, are the amazing
+products of the affective and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of
+its stupendous hypocrisy--a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing sincerity to
+veracity, and sworn not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and
+disconsolatory power.
+
+Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this business of
+manufacturing culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and
+beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those
+who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, and all
+this without our taking thought for the ultimate end of each one of us?
+Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of science,
+of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these
+beautiful conceptions, if at the last, in four days or in four millions
+of centuries--it matters not which--no human consciousness shall exist
+to appropriate this civilization, this science, art, good, truth,
+beauty, justice, and all the rest?
+
+Many and very various have been the rationalist devices--more or less
+rational--by means of which from the days of the Epicureans and the
+Stoics it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and
+to convince men, although those who sought so to do remained themselves
+unconvinced, that there are motives for working and lures for living,
+even though the human consciousness be destined some day to disappear.
+
+The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is
+"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," or the Horatian _carpe
+diem_, which may be rendered by "Live for the day," does not differ in
+its essence from the Stoic attitude with its "Accomplish what the moral
+conscience dictates to thee, and afterward let it be as it may be." Both
+attitudes have a common base; and pleasure for pleasure's sake comes to
+the same as duty for duty's sake.
+
+Spinoza, the most logical and consistent of atheists--I mean of those
+who deny the persistence of individual consciousness through indefinite
+future time--and at the same time the most pious, Spinoza devoted the
+fifth and last part of his _Ethic_ to elucidating the path that leads to
+liberty and to determining the concept of happiness. The concept!
+Concept, not feeling! For Spinoza, who was a terrible intellectualist,
+happiness (_beatitudo_) is a concept, and the love of God an
+intellectual love. After establishing in proposition xxi. of the fifth
+part that "the mind can imagine nothing, neither can it remember
+anything that is past, save during the continuance of the body"--which
+is equivalent to denying the immortality of the soul, since a soul
+which, disjoined from the body in which it lived, does not remember its
+past, is neither immortal nor is it a soul--he goes on to affirm in
+proposition xxiii. that "the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed
+with the body, but there remains of it something which is _eternal_,"
+and this eternity of the mind is a certain mode of thinking. But do not
+let yourselves be deceived; there is no such eternity of the individual
+mind. Everything is _sub æternitatis specie_--that is to say, pure
+illusion. Nothing could be more dreary, nothing more desolating, nothing
+more anti-vital than this happiness, this _beatitudo_, of Spinoza, that
+consists in the intellectual love of the mind towards God, which is
+nothing else but the very love with which God loves Himself (prop,
+xxxvi.). Our happiness--that is to say, our liberty--consists in the
+constant and eternal love of God towards men. So affirms the corollary
+to this thirty-sixth proposition. And all this in order to arrive at the
+conclusion, which is the final and crowning proposition of the whole
+_Ethic_, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.
+The everlasting refrain! Or, to put it plainly, we proceed from God and
+to God we return, which, translated into concrete language, the language
+of life and feeling, means that my personal consciousness sprang from
+nothingness, from my unconsciousness, and to nothingness it will return.
+
+And this most dreary and desolating voice of Spinoza is the very voice
+of reason. And the liberty of which he tells us is a terrible liberty.
+And against Spinoza and his doctrine of happiness there is only one
+irresistible argument, the argument _ad hominem_. Was he happy, Benedict
+Spinoza, while, to allay his inner unhappiness, he was discoursing of
+happiness? Was he free?
+
+In the corollary to proposition xli. of this same final and most tragic
+part of that tremendous tragedy of his _Ethic_, the poor desperate Jew
+of Amsterdam discourses of the common persuasion of the vulgar of the
+truth of eternal life. Let us hear what he says: "It would appear that
+they esteem piety and religion--and, indeed, all that is referred to
+fortitude or strength of mind--as burdens which they expect to lay down
+after death, when they hope to receive a reward for their servitude, not
+for their piety and religion in this life. Nor is it even this hope
+alone that leads them; the fear of frightful punishments with which they
+are menaced after death also influences them to live--in so far as their
+impotence and poverty of spirit permits--in conformity with the
+prescription of the Divine law. And were not this hope and this fear
+infused into the minds of men--but, on the contrary, did they believe
+that the soul perished with the body, and that, beyond the grave, there
+was no other life prepared for the wretched who had borne the burden _of
+piety_ in this--they would return to their natural inclinations,
+preferring to accommodate everything to their own liking, and would
+follow fortune rather than reason. But all this appears no less absurd
+than it would be to suppose that a man, because he did not believe that
+he could nourish his body eternally with wholesome food, would saturate
+himself with deadly poisons; or than if because believing that his soul
+was not eternal and immortal, he should therefore prefer to be without a
+soul (_amens_) and to live without reason; all of which is so absurd as
+to be scarcely worth refuting (_quæ adeo absurda sunt, ut vix recenseri
+mereantur_)."
+
+When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that
+either it is flagrantly stupid--in which case all comment is
+superfluous--or it is something formidable, the very crux of the
+problem. And this it is in this case. Yes! poor Portuguese Jew exiled in
+Holland, yes! that he who is convinced without a vestige of doubt,
+without the faintest hope of any saving uncertainty, that his soul is
+not immortal, should prefer to be without a soul (_amens_), or
+irrational, or idiot, that he should prefer not to have been born, is a
+supposition that has nothing, absolutely nothing, absurd in it. Was he
+happy, the poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and
+of happiness? For that and no other is the problem. "What does it profit
+thee to know the definition of compunction if thou dost not feel it?"
+says à Kempis. And what profits it to discuss or to define happiness if
+you cannot thereby achieve happiness? Not inapposite in this connection
+is that terrible story that Diderot tells of a eunuch who desired to
+take lessons in esthetics from a native of Marseilles in order that he
+might be better qualified to select the slaves destined for the harem of
+the Sultan, his master. At the end of the first lesson, a physiological
+lesson, brutally and carnally physiological, the eunuch exclaimed
+bitterly, "It is evident that I shall never know esthetics!" Even so,
+and just as eunuchs will never know esthetics as applied to the
+selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever
+know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for
+happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is
+reasoned about or defined.
+
+And you have another rationalist, one not sad or submissive, like
+Spinoza, but rebellious, and though concealing a despair not less
+bitter, making a hypocritical pretence of light-heartedness, you have
+Nietzsche, who discovered _mathematically_ (!!!) that counterfeit of the
+immortality of the soul which is called "eternal recurrence," and which
+is in fact the most stupendous tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy. The number
+of atoms or irreducible primary elements being finite and the universe
+eternal, a combination identical with that which at present exists must
+at some future time be reproduced, and therefore that which now is must
+be repeated an infinite number of times. This is evident, and just as I
+shall live again the life that I am now living, so I have already lived
+it before an infinite number of times, for there is an eternity that
+stretches into the past--_a parte ante_--just as there will be one
+stretching into the future--_a parte post_. But, unfortunately, it
+happens that I remember none of my previous existences, and perhaps it
+is impossible that I should remember them, for two things absolutely and
+completely identical are but one. Instead of supposing that we live in a
+finite universe, composed of a finite number of irreducible primary
+elements, suppose that we live in an infinite universe, without limits
+in space--which concrete infinity is not less inconceivable than the
+concrete eternity in time--then it will follow that this system of
+ours, that of the Milky Way, is repeated an infinite number of times in
+the infinite of space, and that therefore I am now living an infinite
+number of lives, all exactly identical. A jest, as you see, but one not
+less comic--that is to say, not less tragic--than that of Nietzsche,
+that of the laughing lion. And why does the lion laugh? I think he
+laughs with rage, because he can never succeed in finding consolation in
+the thought that he has been the same lion before and is destined to be
+the same lion again.
+
+But if Spinoza and Nietzsche were indeed both rationalists, each after
+his own manner, they were not spiritual eunuchs; they had heart,
+feeling, and, above all, hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for
+immortality. The physical eunuch does not feel the need of reproducing
+himself carnally, in the body, and neither does the spiritual eunuch
+feel the hunger for self-perpetuation.
+
+Certain it is that there are some who assert that reason suffices them,
+and they counsel us to desist from seeking to penetrate into the
+impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith
+in an eternal personal life to furnish them with incentives to living
+and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from
+birth may also assure us that he feels no great longing to enjoy the
+world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it,
+and we must needs believe him, for what is wholly unknown cannot be the
+object of desire--_nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, there can be no
+volition save of things already known. But I cannot be persuaded that he
+who has once in his life, either in his youth or for some other brief
+space of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will
+ever find peace without it. And of this sort of blindness from birth
+there are but few instances among us, and then only by a kind of strange
+aberration. For the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration
+and nothing but an aberration.
+
+More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say: "We must not talk
+about it, for in talking about it we only waste our time and weaken our
+will; let us do our duty here and hereafter let come what may." But this
+sincerity hides a yet deeper insincerity. May it perhaps be that by
+saying "We must not talk about it," they succeed in not thinking about
+it? Our will is weakened? And what then? We lose the capacity for human
+action? And what then? It is very convenient to tell a man whom a fatal
+disease condemns to an early death, and who knows it, not to think about
+it.
+
+    _Meglio oprando obliar, senzá indagarlo,
+    Questo enorme mister del universo!_
+
+"Better to work and to forget and not to probe into this vast mystery of
+the universe!" Carducci wrote in his _Idilio Maremmano_, the same
+Carducci who at the close of his ode _Sul Monte Mario_ tells us how the
+earth, the mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory
+and sorrow round the sun "until, worn out beneath the equator, mocked by
+the last flames of dying heat, the exhausted human race is reduced to a
+single man and woman, who, standing in the midst of dead woods,
+surrounded by sheer mountains, livid, with glassy eyes watch thee, O
+sun, set across the immense frozen waste."
+
+But is it possible for us to give ourselves to any serious and lasting
+work, forgetting the vast mystery of the universe and abandoning all
+attempt to understand it? Is it possible to contemplate the vast All
+with a serene soul, in the spirit of the Lucretian piety, if we are
+conscious of the thought that a time must come when this All will no
+longer be reflected in any human consciousness?
+
+Cain, in Byron's poem, asks of Lucifer, the prince of the intellectuals,
+"Are ye happy?" and Lucifer replies, "We are mighty." Cain questions
+again, "Are ye happy?" and then the great Intellectual says to him: "No;
+art thou?" And further on, this same Lucifer says to Adah, the sister
+and wife of Cain: "Choose betwixt love and knowledge--since there is no
+other choice." And in the same stupendous poem, when Cain says that the
+tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a lying tree, for "we know
+nothing; at least it promised knowledge at the price of death," Lucifer
+answers him: "It may be death leads to the highest knowledge"--that is
+to say, to nothingness.
+
+To this word _knowledge_ which Lord Byron uses in the above quotations,
+the Spanish _ciencia_, the French _science_, the German _Wissenschaft_,
+is often opposed the word _wisdom, sabiduria, sagesse, Weisheit_.
+
+    Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
+    Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest,
+
+says another lord, Tennyson, in his _Locksley Hall_. And what is this
+wisdom which we have to seek chiefly in the poets, leaving knowledge on
+one side? It is well enough to say with Matthew Arnold in his
+Introduction to Wordsworth's poems, that poetry is reality and
+philosophy illusion; but reason is always reason and reality is always
+reality, that which can be proved to exist externally to us, whether we
+find in it consolation or despair.
+
+I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be
+scandalized, when Brunetière proclaimed again the bankruptcy of science.
+For science as a substitute for religion and reason as a substitute for
+faith have always fallen to pieces. Science will be able to satisfy, and
+in fact does satisfy in an increasing measure, our increasing logical or
+intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but
+science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, and far
+from satisfying our hunger for immortality it contradicts it. Rational
+truth and life stand in opposition to one another. And is it possible
+that there is any other truth than rational truth?
+
+It must remain established, therefore, that reason--human reason--within
+its limits, not only does not prove rationally that the soul is
+immortal or that the human consciousness shall preserve its
+indestructibility through the tracts of time to come, but that it proves
+rather--within its limits, I repeat--that the individual consciousness
+cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it
+depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves
+this, are the limits of rationality, of what is known by demonstration.
+Beyond these limits is the irrational, which, whether it be called the
+super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational, is all the
+same thing. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the
+impossible of the _certum est, quia impossibile est_. And this absurd
+can only base itself upon the most absolute uncertainty.
+
+The rational dissolution ends in dissolving reason itself; it ends in
+the most absolute scepticism, in the phenomenalism of Hume or in the
+doctrine of absolute contingencies of Stuart Mill, the most consistent
+and logical of the positivists. The supreme triumph of reason, the
+analytical--that is, the destructive and dissolvent--faculty, is to cast
+doubt upon its own validity. The stomach that contains an ulcer ends by
+digesting itself; and reason ends by destroying the immediate and
+absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept of
+necessity. Both concepts are relative; there is no absolute truth, no
+absolute necessity. We call a concept true which agrees with the general
+system of all our concepts; and we call a perception true which does not
+contradict the system of our perceptions. Truth is coherence. But as
+regards the whole system, the aggregate, as there is nothing outside of
+it of which we have knowledge, we cannot say whether it is true or not.
+It is conceivable that the universe, as it exists in itself, outside of
+our consciousness, may be quite other than it appears to us, although
+this is a supposition that has no meaning for reason. And as regards
+necessity, is there an absolute necessity? By necessary we mean merely
+that which is, and in so far as it is, for in another more
+transcendental sense, what absolute necessity, logical and independent
+of the fact that the universe exists, is there that there should be a
+universe or anything else at all?
+
+Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than scepticism, in
+the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the
+reasoning reason.
+
+Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does
+reason succeed in converting truth into consolation. But reason going
+beyond truth itself, beyond the concept of reality itself, succeeds in
+plunging itself into the depths of scepticism. And in this abyss the
+scepticism of the reason encounters the despair of the heart, and this
+encounter leads to the discovery of a basis--a terrible basis!--for
+consolation to build on.
+
+Let us examine it.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[26] _Pragmatism, a New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking_. Popular
+lectures on philosophy by William James, 1907.
+
+[27] _Treatise of Human Nature_, book i., part iv., sect. vi., "Of
+Personal Identity": "I never can catch _myself_ at any time without a
+perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."
+
+[28] Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, _Lectures on the History of the Eastern
+Church_, lecture i., sect. iii.
+
+[29] 1 Cor. i. 23.
+
+[30] Gustave Flaubert, _Correspondance_, troisième série (1854-1869).
+Paris, 1910.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS
+
+_Parce unicæ spes totius orbis._--TERTULLIANUS, Adversus Marcionem, 5.
+
+
+We have seen that the vital longing for human immortality finds no
+consolation in reason and that reason leaves us without incentive or
+consolation in life and life itself without real finality. But here, in
+the depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and of the will and
+the scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace like brothers.
+And we shall see it is from this embrace, a tragic--that is to say, an
+intimately loving--embrace, that the wellspring of life will flow, a
+life serious and terrible. Scepticism, uncertainty--the position to
+which reason, by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own
+validity, at last arrives--is the foundation upon which the heart's
+despair must build up its hope.
+
+Disillusioned, we had to abandon the position of those who seek to give
+consolation the force of rational and logical truth, pretending to prove
+the rationality, or at any rate the non-irrationality, of consolation;
+and we had to abandon likewise the position of those who seek to give
+rational truth the force of consolation and of a motive for life.
+Neither the one nor the other of these positions satisfied us. The one
+is at variance with our reason, the other with our feeling. These two
+powers can never conclude peace and we must needs live by their war. We
+must make of this war, of war itself, the very condition of our
+spiritual life.
+
+Neither does this high debate admit of that indecent and repugnant
+expedient which the more or less parliamentary type of politician has
+devised and dubbed "a formula of agreement," the property of which is to
+render it impossible for either side to claim to be victorious. There
+is no place here for a time-serving compromise. Perhaps a degenerate and
+cowardly reason might bring itself to propose some such formula of
+agreement, for in truth reason lives by formulas; but life, which cannot
+be formulated, life which lives and seeks to live for ever, does not
+submit to formulas. Its sole formula is: all or nothing. Feeling does
+not compound its differences with middle terms.
+
+_Initium sapientiæ timor Domini_, it is said, meaning perhaps _timor
+mortis_, or it may be, _timor vitæ_, which is the same thing. Always it
+comes about that the beginning of wisdom is a fear.
+
+Is it true to say of this saving scepticism which I am now going to
+discuss, that it is doubt? It is doubt, yes, but it is much more than
+doubt. Doubt is commonly something very cold, of very little vitalizing
+force, and above all something rather artificial, especially since
+Descartes degraded it to the function of a method. The conflict between
+reason and life is something more than a doubt. For doubt is easily
+resolved into a comic element.
+
+The methodical doubt of Descartes is a comic doubt, a doubt purely
+theoretical and provisional--that is to say, the doubt of a man who acts
+as if he doubted without really doubting. And because it was a
+stove-excogitated doubt, the man who deduced that he existed from the
+fact that he thought did not approve of "those turbulent
+(_brouillonnes_) and restless persons who, being called neither by birth
+nor by fortune to the management of public affairs, are perpetually
+devising some new reformation," and he was pained by the suspicion that
+there might be something of this kind in his own writings. No, he,
+Descartes, proposed only to "reform his own thoughts and to build upon
+ground that was wholly his." And he resolved not to accept anything as
+true when he did not recognize it clearly to be so, and to make a clean
+sweep of all prejudices and received ideas, to the end that he might
+construct his intellectual habitation anew. But "as it is not enough,
+before beginning to rebuild one's dwelling-house, to pull it down and to
+furnish materials and architects, or to study architecture oneself ...
+but it is also necessary to be provided with some other wherein to lodge
+conveniently while the work is in progress," he framed for himself a
+provisional ethic--_une morale de provision_--the first law of which was
+to observe the customs of his country and to keep always to the religion
+in which, by the grace of God, he had been instructed from his infancy,
+governing himself in all things according to the most moderate opinions.
+Yes, exactly, a provisional religion and even a provisional God! And he
+chose the most moderate opinions "because these are always the most
+convenient for practice." But it is best to proceed no further.
+
+This methodical or theoretical Cartesian doubt, this philosophical doubt
+excogitated in a stove, is not the doubt, is not the scepticism, is not
+the incertitude, that I am talking about here. No! This other doubt is a
+passionate doubt, it is the eternal conflict between reason and feeling,
+science and life, logic and biotic. For science destroys the concept of
+personality by reducing it to a complex in continual flux from moment to
+moment--that is to say, it destroys the very foundation of the spiritual
+and emotional life, which ranges itself unyieldingly against reason.
+
+And this doubt cannot avail itself of any provisional ethic, but has to
+found its ethic, as we shall see, on the conflict itself, an ethic of
+battle, and itself has to serve as the foundation of religion. And it
+inhabits a house which is continually being demolished and which
+continually it has to rebuild. Without ceasing the will, I mean the will
+never to die, the spirit of unsubmissiveness to death, labours to build
+up the house of life, and without ceasing the keen blasts and stormy
+assaults of reason beat it down.
+
+And more than this, in the concrete vital problem that concerns us,
+reason takes up no position whatever. In truth, it does something worse
+than deny the immortality of the soul--for that at any rate would be one
+solution--it refuses even to recognize the problem as our vital desire
+presents it to us. In the rational and logical sense of the term
+problem, there is no such problem. This question of the immortality of
+the soul, of the persistence of the individual consciousness, is not
+rational, it falls outside reason. As a problem, and whatever solution
+it may receive, it is irrational. Rationally even the very propounding
+of the problem lacks sense. The immortality of the soul is as
+unconceivable as, in all strictness, is its absolute mortality. For the
+purpose of explaining the world and existence--and such is the task of
+reason--it is not necessary that we should suppose that our soul is
+either mortal or immortal. The mere enunciation of the problem is,
+therefore, an irrationality.
+
+Let us hear what our brother Kierkegaard has to say. "The danger of
+abstract thought is seen precisely in respect of the problem of
+existence, the difficulty of which it solves by going round it,
+afterwards boasting that it has completely explained it. It explains
+immortality in general, and it does so in a remarkable way by
+identifying it with eternity--with the eternity which is essentially the
+medium of thought. But with the immortality of each individually
+existing man, wherein precisely the difficulty lies, abstraction does
+not concern itself, is not interested in it. And yet the difficulty of
+existence lies just in the interest of the existing being--the man who
+exists is infinitely interested in existing. Abstract thought besteads
+immortality only in order that it may kill me as an individual being
+with an individual existence, and so make me immortal, pretty much in
+the same way as that famous physician in one of Holberg's plays, whose
+medicine, while it took away the patient's fever, took away his life at
+the same time. An abstract thinker, who refuses to disclose and admit
+the relation that exists between his abstract thought and the fact that
+he is an existing being, produces a comic impression upon us, however
+accomplished and distinguished he may be, for he runs the risk of
+ceasing to be a man. While an effective man, compounded of infinitude
+and finitude, owes his effectiveness precisely to the conjunction of
+these two elements and is infinitely interested in existing, an abstract
+thinker, similarly compounded, is a double being, a fantastical being,
+who lives in the pure being of abstraction, and at times presents the
+sorry figure of a professor who lays aside this abstract essence as he
+lays aside his walking-stick. When one reads the Life of a thinker of
+this kind--whose writings may be excellent--one trembles at the thought
+of what it is to be a man. And when one reads in his writings that
+thinking and being are the same thing, one thinks, remembering his life,
+that that being, which is identical with thinking, is not precisely the
+same thing as being a man" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_,
+chap. iii.).
+
+What intense passion--that is to say, what truth--there is in this
+bitter invective against Hegel, prototype of the rationalist!--for the
+rationalist takes away our fever by taking away our life, and promises
+us, instead of a concrete, an abstract immortality, as if the hunger for
+immortality that consumes us were an abstract and not a concrete hunger!
+
+It may indeed be said that when once the dog is dead there is an end to
+the rabies, and that after I have died I shall no more be tortured by
+this rage of not dying, and that the fear of death, or more properly, of
+nothingness, is an irrational fear, but ... Yes, but ... _Eppur si
+muove!_ And it will go on moving. For it is the source of all movement!
+
+I doubt, however, whether our brother Kierkegaard is altogether in the
+right, for this same abstract thinker, or thinker of abstractions,
+thinks _in order that_ he may exist, that he may not cease to exist, or
+thinks perhaps in order to forget that he will have to cease to exist.
+This is the root of the passion for abstract thought. And possibly Hegel
+was as infinitely interested as Kierkegaard in his own concrete,
+individual existence, although the professional decorum of the
+state-philosopher compelled him to conceal the fact.
+
+Faith in immortality is irrational. And, notwithstanding, faith, life,
+and reason have mutual need of one another. This vital longing is not
+properly a problem, cannot assume a logical status, cannot be formulated
+in propositions susceptible of rational discussion; but it announces
+itself in us as hunger announces itself. Neither can the wolf that
+throws itself with the fury of hunger upon its prey or with the fury of
+instinct upon the she-wolf, enunciate its impulse rationally and as a
+logical problem. Reason and faith are two enemies, neither of which can
+maintain itself without the other. The irrational demands to be
+rationalized and reason only can operate on the irrational. They are
+compelled to seek mutual support and association. But association in
+struggle, for struggle is a mode of association.
+
+In the world of living beings the struggle for life establishes an
+association, and a very close one, not only between those who unite
+together in combat against a common foe, but between the combatants
+themselves. And is there any possible association more intimate than
+that uniting the animal that eats another and the animal that is eaten,
+between the devourer and the devoured? And if this is clearly seen in
+the struggle between individuals, it is still more evident in the
+struggle between peoples. War has always been the most effective factor
+of progress, even more than commerce. It is through war that conquerors
+and conquered learn to know each other and in consequence to love each
+other.
+
+Christianity, the foolishness of the Cross, the irrational faith that
+Christ rose from the dead in order to raise us from the dead, was saved
+by the rationalistic Hellenic culture, and this in its turn was saved by
+Christianity. Without Christianity the Renaissance would have been
+impossible. Without the Gospel, without St. Paul, the peoples who had
+traversed the Middle Ages would have understood neither Plato nor
+Aristotle. A purely rationalist tradition is as impossible as a
+tradition purely religious. It is frequently disputed whether the
+Reformation was born as the child of the Renaissance or as a protest
+against it, and both propositions may be said to be true, for the son is
+always born as a protest against the father. It is also said that it was
+the revived Greek classics that led men like Erasmus back to St. Paul
+and to primitive Christianity, which is the most irrational form of
+Christianity; but it may be retorted that it was St. Paul, that it was
+the Christian irrationality underlying his Catholic theology, that led
+them back to the classics. "Christianity is what it has come to be," it
+has been said, "only through its alliance with antiquity, while with the
+Copts and Ethiopians it is but a kind of buffoonery. Islam developed
+under the influence of Persian and Greek culture, and under that of the
+Turks it has been transformed into a destructive barbarism."[31]
+
+We have emerged from the Middle Ages, from the medieval faith as ardent
+as it was at heart despairing, and not without its inward and abysmal
+incertitudes, and we have entered upon the age of rationalism, likewise
+not without its incertitudes. Faith in reason is exposed to the same
+rational indefensibility as all other faith. And we may say with Robert
+Browning,
+
+    All we have gained, then, by our unbelief
+    Is a life of doubt diversified by faith
+    For one of faith diversified by doubt.
+
+                     (_Bishop Blougram's Apology_.)
+
+And if, as I have said, faith, life, can only sustain itself by leaning
+upon reason, which renders it transmissible--and above all transmissible
+from myself to myself--that is to say, reflective and conscious--it is
+none the less true that reason in its turn can only sustain itself by
+leaning upon faith, upon life, even if only upon faith in reason, faith
+in its availability for something more than mere knowing, faith in its
+availability for living. Nevertheless, neither is faith transmissible or
+rational, nor is reason vital.
+
+The will and the intelligence have need of one another, and the reverse
+of that old aphorism, _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, nothing is
+willed but what is previously known, is not so paradoxical as at first
+sight it may appear--_nihil cognitum quin prævolitum_, nothing is known
+but what is previously willed. Vinet, in his study of Cousin's book on
+the _Pensées_ of Pascal, says: "The very knowledge of the mind as such
+has need of the heart. Without the desire to see there is no seeing; in
+a great materialization of life and of thought there is no believing in
+the things of the spirit." We shall see presently that to believe is, in
+the first instance, to wish to believe.
+
+The will and the intelligence seek opposite ends: that we may absorb the
+world into ourselves, appropriate it to ourselves, is the aim of the
+will; that we may be absorbed into the world, that of the intelligence.
+Opposite ends?--are they not rather one and the same? No, they are not,
+although they may seem to be so. The intelligence is monist or
+pantheist, the will monotheist or egoist. The intelligence has no need
+of anything outside it to exercise itself upon; it builds its foundation
+with ideas themselves, while the will requires matter. To know something
+is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it,
+to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself.
+
+Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they
+have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophic
+basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. Each lives by its
+contrary. The history of philosophy is, strictly speaking, a history of
+religion. And the attacks which are directed against religion from a
+presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks
+from another but opposing religious point of view. "The opposition which
+professedly exists between natural science and Christianity really
+exists between an impulse derived from natural religion blended with the
+scientific investigation of nature, and the validity of the Christian
+view of the world, which assures to spirit its pre-eminence over the
+entire world of nature," says Ritschl (_Rechtfertgung und Versöhnung_,
+iii. chap. iv. § 28). Now this instinct is the instinct of rationality
+itself. And the critical idealism of Kant is of religious origin, and it
+is in order to save religion that Kant enlarged the limits of reason
+after having in a certain sense dissolved it in scepticism. The system
+of antitheses, contradictions, and antinomies, upon which Hegel
+constructed his absolute idealism, has its root and germ in Kant
+himself, and this root is an irrational root.
+
+We shall see later on, when we come to deal with faith, that faith is in
+its essence simply a matter of will, not of reason, that to believe is
+to wish to believe, and to believe in God is, before all and above all,
+to wish that there may be a God. In the same way, to believe in the
+immortality of the soul is to wish that the soul may be immortal, but to
+wish it with such force that this volition shall trample reason under
+foot and pass beyond it. But reason has its revenge.
+
+The instinct of knowing and the instinct of living, or rather of
+surviving, come into conflict. In his work on the _Analysis of the
+Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical_,[32] Dr.
+E. Mach tells us that not even the investigator, the savant, _der
+Forscher_, is exempted from taking his part in the struggle for
+existence, that even the roads of science lead mouth-wards, and that in
+the actual conditions of the society in which we live the pure instinct
+of knowing, _der reine Erkenntnisstrieb_, is still no more than an
+ideal. And so it always will be. _Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_,
+or perhaps better, _primum supervivere_ or _superesse_.
+
+Every position of permanent agreement or harmony between reason and
+life, between philosophy and religion, becomes impossible. And the
+tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle
+between reason and life--reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing
+it to submit to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing
+reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its own vital desires.
+And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of
+religion.
+
+Our sense of the world of objective reality is necessarily subjective,
+human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will always rise up against
+rationalism; reason will always find itself confronted by will. Hence
+the rhythm of the history of philosophy and the alternation of periods
+in which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual forms, with
+those in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to materialist forms,
+although both of these classes of forms of belief may be disguised by
+other names. Neither reason nor life ever acknowledges itself
+vanquished. But we will return to this in the next chapter.
+
+The vital consequence of rationalism would be suicide. Kierkegaard puts
+it very well: "The consequence for existence[33] of pure thought is
+suicide.... We do not praise suicide but passion. The thinker, on the
+contrary, is a curious animal--for a few spells during the day he is
+very intelligent, but, for the rest, he has nothing in common with man"
+(_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, chap iii., § 1).
+
+As the thinker, in spite of all, does not cease to be a man, he employs
+reason in the interests of life, whether he knows it or not. Life cheats
+reason and reason cheats life. Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy
+fabricated in the interest of life a teleologic-evolutionist system,
+rational in appearance, which might serve as a support for our vital
+longing. This philosophy, the basis of the orthodox Christian
+supernaturalism, whether Catholic or Protestant, was, in its essence,
+merely a trick on the part of life to force reason to lend it its
+support. But reason supported it with such pressure that it ended by
+pulverizing it.
+
+I have read that the ex-Carmelite, Hyacinthe Loyson, declared that he
+could present himself before God with tranquillity, for he was at peace
+with his conscience and with his reason. With what conscience? If with
+his religious conscience, then I do not understand. For it is a truth
+that no man can serve two masters, and least of all when, though they
+may sign truces and armistices and compromises, these two are enemies
+because of their conflicting interests.
+
+To all this someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself
+to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is
+unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought,
+therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur:
+"Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason,
+because the end of life is living and not understanding.
+
+Again, there are those who talk of the religious duty of resignation to
+mortality. This is indeed the very summit of aberration and insincerity.
+But someone is sure to oppose the idea of veracity to that of sincerity.
+Granted, and yet the two may very well be reconciled. Veracity, the
+homage I owe to what I believe to be rational, to what logically we
+call truth, moves me to affirm, in this case, that the immortality of
+the individual soul is a contradiction in terms, that it is something,
+not only irrational, but contra-rational; but sincerity leads me to
+affirm also my refusal to resign myself to this previous affirmation and
+my protest against its validity. What I feel is a truth, at any rate as
+much a truth as what I see, touch, hear, or what is demonstrated to
+me--nay, I believe it is more of a truth--and sincerity obliges me not
+to hide what I feel.
+
+And life, quick to defend itself, searches for the weak point in reason
+and finds it in scepticism, which it straightway fastens upon, seeking
+to save itself by means of this stranglehold. It needs the weakness of
+its adversary.
+
+Nothing is sure. Everything is elusive and in the air. In an outburst of
+passion Lamennais exclaims: "But what! Shall we, losing all hope, shut
+our eyes and plunge into the voiceless depths of a universal scepticism?
+Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature does not
+allow it; she forces us to believe even when our reason is not
+convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both alike
+forbidden to us. We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes, as
+between being and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be the
+extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man. But it is not
+given to man to annihilate himself; there is in him something which
+invincibly resists destruction, I know not what vital faith, indomitable
+even by his will. Whether he likes it or not, he must believe, because
+he must act, because he must preserve himself. His reason, if he
+listened only to that, teaching him to doubt everything, itself
+included, would reduce him to a state of absolute inaction; he would
+perish before even he had been able to prove to himself that he existed"
+(_Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion_, iii^e partie, chap.
+lxvii.).
+
+Reason, however, does not actually lead us to absolute scepticism. No!
+Reason does not lead me and cannot lead me to doubt that I exist.
+Whither reason does lead me is to vital scepticism, or more properly, to
+vital negation--not merely to doubt, but to deny, that my consciousness
+survives my death. Scepticism is produced by the clash between reason
+and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and
+scepticism, is born that holy, that sweet, that saving incertitude,
+which is our supreme consolation.
+
+The absolute and complete certainty, on the one hand, that death is a
+complete, definite, irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness,
+a certainty of the same order as the certainty that the three angles of
+a triangle are equal to two right angles, or, on the other hand, the
+absolute and complete certainty that our personal consciousness is
+prolonged beyond death in these present or in other conditions, and
+above all including in itself that strange and adventitious addition of
+eternal rewards and punishments--both of these certainties alike would
+make life impossible for us. In the most secret chamber of the spirit of
+him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his
+personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him
+perhaps, there lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of shadow, of
+uncertainty, and while he says within himself, "Well, let us live this
+life that passes away, for there is no other!" the silence of this
+secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs, "Who knows!..." He may not
+think he hears it, but he hears it nevertheless. And likewise in some
+secret place of the soul of the believer who most firmly holds the
+belief in a future life, there is a muffled voice, a voice of
+uncertainty, which whispers in the ear of his spirit, "Who knows!..."
+These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when the south-west wind
+roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint
+humming, yet nevertheless, merged in the clamour of the storm, it
+reaches the ear. Otherwise, without this uncertainty, how could we live?
+
+_"Is there?" "Is there not?"_--these are the bases of our inner life.
+There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of
+the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never
+wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would only
+prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those
+who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their
+intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great
+their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me
+that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst
+loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their
+consciousness. I do not understand those men who tell me that the
+prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the
+thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do
+not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith
+and my reason--I wish rather that there should be war between them!
+
+In the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to Mark it is related how a
+man brought unto Jesus his son who was possessed by a dumb spirit, and
+wheresoever the spirit took him it tore him, causing him to foam and
+gnash his teeth and pine away, wherefore he sought to bring him to Jesus
+that he might cure him. And the Master, impatient of those who sought
+only for signs and wonders, exclaimed: "O faithless generation, how long
+shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto me"
+(ver. 19), and they brought him unto him. And when the Master saw him
+wallowing on the ground, he asked his father how long it was ago since
+this had come unto him and the father replied that it was since he was &
+child. And Jesus said unto him: "If thou canst believe, all things are
+possible to him that believeth" (ver. 23). And then the father of the
+epileptic or demoniac uttered these pregnant and immortal words: "Lord,
+I believe; help thou mine unbelief!"--_Pisteyô, kyrie, boêthei tê
+hapistia mou_ (ver. 24).
+
+"Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!" A contradiction seemingly,
+for if he believes, if he trusts, how is it that he beseeches the Lord
+to help his lack of trust? Nevertheless, it is this contradiction that
+gives to the heart's cry of the father of the demoniac its most profound
+human value. His faith is a faith that is based upon incertitude.
+Because he believes--that is to say, because he wishes to believe,
+because he has need that his son should be cured--he beseeches the Lord
+to help his unbelief, his doubt that such a cure could be effected. Of
+such kind is human faith; of such kind was the heroic faith that Sancho
+Panza had in his master, the knight Don Quijote de la Mancha, as I think
+I have shown in my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_; a faith based upon
+incertitude, upon doubt. Sancho Panza was indeed a man, a whole and a
+true man, and he was not stupid, for only if he had been stupid would he
+have believed, without a shadow of doubt, in the follies of his master.
+And his master himself did not believe in them without a shadow of
+doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though mad, stupid. He was at heart
+a man of despair, as I think I have shown in my above-mentioned book.
+And because he was a man of an heroical despair, the hero of that inward
+and resigned despair, he stands as the eternal exemplar of every man
+whose soul is the battle-ground of reason and immortal desire. Our Lord
+Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose faith is based upon
+uncertainty, and Sancho is the prototype of the rationalist who doubts
+his own reason.
+
+Tormented by torturing doubts, August Hermann Francke resolved to call
+upon God, a God in whom he did not believe, or rather in whom he
+believed that he did not believe, imploring Him to take pity upon him,
+upon the poor pietist Francke, if perchance He really existed.[34] And
+from a similar state of mind came the inspiration of the sonnet entitled
+"The Atheist's Prayer," which is included in my _Rosario de Sonetos
+Líricos_, and closes with these lines:
+
+    _Sufro yo a tu costa,
+    Dios no existiente, pues si tú existieras
+    existiería yo también de veras._[35]
+
+Yes, if God the guarantor of our personal immortality existed, then
+should we ourselves really exist. And if He exists not, neither do we
+exist.
+
+That terrible secret, that hidden will of God which, translated into the
+language of theology, is known as predestination, that idea which
+dictated to Luther his _servum arbitrium_, and which gives to Calvinism
+its tragic sense, that doubt of our own salvation, is in its essence
+nothing but uncertainty, and this uncertainty, allied with despair,
+forms the basis of faith. Faith, some say, consists in not thinking
+about it, in surrendering ourselves trustingly to the arms of God, the
+secrets of whose providence are inscrutable. Yes, but infidelity also
+consists in not thinking about it. This absurd faith, this faith that
+knows no shadow of uncertainty, this faith of the stupid coalheaver,
+joins hands with an absurd incredulity, the incredulity that knows no
+shadow of uncertainty, the incredulity of the intellectuals who are
+afflicted with affective stupidity in order that they may not think
+about it.
+
+And what but uncertainty, doubt, the voice of reason, was that abyss,
+that terrible _gouffre_, before which Pascal trembled? And it was that
+which led him to pronounce his terrible sentence, _il faut
+s'abêtir_--need is that we become fools!
+
+All Jansenism, the Catholic adaptation of Calvinism, bears the same
+impress. Port-Royal, which owed its existence to a Basque, the Abbé de
+Saint-Cyran, a man of the same race as Iñigo de Loyola and as he who
+writes these lines, always preserved deep down a sediment of religious
+despair, of the suicide of reason. Loyola also slew his reason in
+obedience.
+
+Our affirmation is despair, our negation is despair, and from despair we
+abstain from affirming and denying. Note the greater part of our
+atheists and you will see that they are atheists from a kind of rage,
+rage at not being able to believe that there is a God. They are the
+personal enemies of God. They have invested Nothingness with substance
+and personality, and their No-God is an Anti-God.
+
+And concerning that abject and ignoble saying, "If there were not a God
+it would be necessary to invent Him," we shall say nothing. It is the
+expression of the unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look
+upon religion merely as a means of government and whose interest it is
+that in the other life there shall be a hell for those who oppose their
+worldly interests in this life. This repugnant and Sadducean phrase is
+worthy of the time-serving sceptic to whom it is attributed.
+
+No, with all this the deep vital sense has nothing to do. It has nothing
+to do with a transcendental police regimen, or with securing order--and
+what an order!--upon earth by means of promises and threats of eternal
+rewards and punishments after death. All this belongs to a lower
+plane--that is to say, it is merely politics, or if you like, ethics.
+The vital sense has to do with living.
+
+But it is in our endeavour to represent to ourselves what the life of
+the soul after death really means that uncertainty finds its surest
+foundation. This it is that most shakes our vital desire and most
+intensifies the dissolvent efficacy of reason. For even if by a mighty
+effort of faith we overcome that reason which tells and teaches us that
+the soul is only a function of the physical organism, it yet remains
+for our imagination to conceive an image of the immortal and eternal
+life of the soul. This conception involves us in contradictions and
+absurdities, and it may be that we shall arrive with Kierkegaard at the
+conclusion that if the mortality of the soul is terrible, not less
+terrible is its immortality.
+
+But when we have overcome the first, the only real difficulty, when we
+have overcome the impediment of reason, when we have achieved the faith,
+however painful and involved in uncertainty it may be, that our personal
+consciousness shall continue after death, what difficulty, what
+impediment, lies in the way of our imagining to ourselves this
+persistence of self in harmony with our desire? Yes, we can imagine it
+as an eternal rejuvenescence, as an eternal growth of ourselves, and as
+a journeying towards God, towards the Universal Consciousness, without
+ever an arrival, we can imagine it as ... But who shall put fetters upon
+the imagination, once it has broken the chain of the rational?
+
+I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it
+is all necessary. And I must repeat once again that we have nothing to
+do with a transcendental police system or with the conversion of God
+into a great Judge or Policeman--that is to say, we are not concerned
+with heaven or hell considered as buttresses to shore up our poor
+earthly morality, nor are we concerned with anything egoistic or
+personal. It is not I myself alone, it is the whole human race that is
+involved, it is the ultimate finality of all our civilization. I am but
+one, but all men are I's.
+
+Do you remember the end of that _Song of the Wild Cock_ which Leopardi
+wrote in prose?--the despairing Leopardi, the victim of reason, who
+never succeeded in achieving belief. "A time will come," he says, "when
+this Universe and Nature itself will be extinguished. And just as of the
+grandest kingdoms and empires of mankind and the marvellous things
+achieved therein, very famous in their own time, no vestige or memory
+remains to-day, so, in like manner, of the entire world and of the
+vicissitudes and calamities of all created things there will remain not
+a single trace, but a naked silence and a most profound stillness will
+fill the immensity of space. And so before ever it has been uttered or
+understood, this admirable and fearful secret of universal existence
+will be obliterated and lost." And this they now describe by a
+scientific and very rationalistic term--namely, _entropia_. Very pretty,
+is it not? Spencer invented the notion of a primordial homogeneity, from
+which it is impossible to conceive how any heterogeneity could
+originate. Well now, this _entropia_ is a kind of ultimate homogeneity,
+a state of perfect equilibrium. For a soul avid of life, it is the most
+like nothingness that the mind can conceive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To this point, through a series of dolorous reflections, I have brought
+the reader who has had the patience to follow me, endeavouring always to
+do equal justice to the claims of reason and of feeling. I have not
+wished to keep silence on matters about which others are silent; I have
+sought to strip naked, not only my own soul, but the human soul, be its
+nature what it may, its destiny to disappear or not to disappear. And we
+have arrived at the bottom of the abyss, at the irreconcilable conflict
+between reason and vital feeling. And having arrived here, I have told
+you that it is necessary to accept the conflict as such and to live by
+it. Now it remains for me to explain to you how, according to my way of
+feeling, and even according to my way of thinking, this despair may be
+the basis of a vigorous life, of an efficacious activity, of an ethic,
+of an esthetic, of a religion and even of a logic. But in what follows
+there will be as much of imagination as of ratiocination, or rather,
+much more.
+
+I do not wish to deceive anyone, or to offer as philosophy what it may
+be is only poetry or phantasmagoria, in any case a kind of mythology.
+The divine Plato, after having discussed the immortality of the soul in
+his dialogue _Phædo_ (an ideal--that is to say, a lying--immortality),
+embarked upon an interpretation of the myths which treat of the other
+life, remarking that it was also necessary to mythologize. Let us, then,
+mythologize.
+
+He who looks for reasons, strictly so called, scientific arguments,
+technically logical reflections, may refuse to follow me further.
+Throughout the remainder of these reflections upon the tragic sense, I
+am going to fish for the attention of the reader with the naked,
+unbaited hook; whoever wishes to bite, let him bite, but I deceive no
+one. Only in the conclusion I hope to gather everything together and to
+show that this religious despair which I have been talking about, and
+which is nothing other than the tragic sense of life itself, is, though
+more or less hidden, the very foundation of the consciousness of
+civilized individuals and peoples to-day--that is to say, of those
+individuals and those peoples who do not suffer from stupidity of
+intellect or stupidity of feeling.
+
+And this tragic sense is the spring of heroic achievements.
+
+If in that which follows you shall meet with arbitrary apothegms,
+brusque transitions, inconsecutive statements, veritable somersaults of
+thought, do not cry out that you have been deceived. We are about to
+enter--if it be that you wish to accompany me--upon a field of
+contradictions between feeling and reasoning, and we shall have to avail
+ourselves of the one as well as of the other.
+
+That which follows is not the outcome of reason but of life, although in
+order that I may transmit it to you I shall have to rationalize it after
+a fashion. The greater part of it can be reduced to no logical theory or
+system; but like that tremendous Yankee poet, Walt Whitman, "I charge
+that there be no theory or school founded out of me" (_Myself and
+Mine_).
+
+Neither am I the only begetter of the fancies I am about to set forth.
+By no means. They have also been conceived by other men, if not
+precisely by other thinkers, who have preceded me in this vale of tears,
+and who have exhibited their life and given expression to it. Their
+life, I repeat, not their thought, save in so far as it was thought
+inspired by life, thought with a basis of irrationality.
+
+Does this mean that in all that follows, in the efforts of the
+irrational to express itself, there is a total lack of rationality, of
+all objective value? No; the absolutely, the irrevocably irrational, is
+inexpressible, is intransmissible. But not the contra-rational. Perhaps
+there is no way of rationalizing the irrational; but there is a way of
+rationalizing the contra-rational, and that is by trying to explain it.
+Since only the rational is intelligible, really intelligible, and since
+the absurd, being devoid of sense, is condemned to be incommunicable,
+you will find that whenever we succeed in giving expression and
+intelligibility to anything apparently irrational or absurd we
+invariably resolve it into something rational, even though it be into
+the negation of that which we affirm.
+
+The maddest dreams of the fancy have some ground of reason, and who
+knows if everything that the imagination of man can conceive either has
+not already happened, or is not now happening or will not happen some
+time, in some world or another? The possible combinations are perhaps
+infinite. It only remains to know whether all that is imaginable is
+possible.
+
+It may also be said, and with justice, that much of what I am about to
+set forth is merely a repetition of ideas which have been expressed a
+hundred times before and a hundred times refuted; but the repetition of
+an idea really implies that its refutation has not been final. And as I
+do not pretend that the majority of these fancies are new, so neither do
+I pretend, obviously, that other voices before mine have not spoken to
+the winds the same laments. But when yet another voice echoes the same
+eternal lament it can only be inferred that the same grief still dwells
+in the heart.
+
+And it comes not amiss to repeat yet once again the same eternal
+lamentations that were already old in the days of Job and Ecclesiastes,
+and even to repeat them in the same words, to the end that the devotees
+of progress may see that there is something that never dies. Whosoever
+repeats the "Vanity of vanities" of Ecclesiastes or the lamentations of
+Job, even though without changing a letter, having first experienced
+them in his soul, performs a work of admonition. Need is to repeat
+without ceasing the _memento mori_.
+
+"But to what end?" you will ask. Even though it be only to the end that
+some people should be irritated and should see that these things are not
+dead and, so long as men exist, cannot die; to the end that they should
+be convinced that to-day, in the twentieth century, all the bygone
+centuries and all of them alive, are still subsisting. When a supposed
+error reappears, it must be, believe me, that it has not ceased to be
+true in part, just as when one who was dead reappears, it must be that
+he was not wholly dead.
+
+Yes, I know well that others before me have felt what I feel and
+express; that many others feel it to-day, although they keep silence
+about it. Why do I not keep silence about it too? Well, for the very
+reason that most of those who feel it are silent about it; and yet,
+though they are silent, they obey in silence that inner voice. And I do
+not keep silence about it because it is for many the thing which must
+not be spoken, the abomination of abominations--_infandum_--and I
+believe that it is necessary now and again to speak the thing which must
+not be spoken. But if it leads to nothing? Even if it should lead only
+to irritating the devotees of progress, those who believe that truth is
+consolation, it would lead to not a little. To irritating them and
+making them say: Poor fellow! if he would only use his intelligence to
+better purpose!... Someone perhaps will add that I do not know what I
+say, to which I shall reply that perhaps he may be right--and being
+right is such a little thing!--but that I feel what I say and I know
+what I feel and that suffices me. And that it is better to be lacking in
+reason than to have too much of it.
+
+And the reader who perseveres in reading me will also see how out of
+this abyss of despair hope may arise, and how this critical position may
+be the well-spring of human, profoundly human, action and effort, and of
+solidarity and even of progress. He will see its pragmatic
+justification. And he will see how, in order to work, and to work
+efficaciously and morally, there is no need of either of these two
+conflicting certainties, either that of faith or that of reason, and how
+still less is there any need--this never under any circumstances--to
+shirk the problem of the immortality of the soul, or to distort it
+idealistically--that is to say, hypocritically. The reader will see how
+this uncertainty, with the suffering that accompanies it, and the
+fruitless struggle to escape from it, may be and is a basis for action
+and morals.
+
+And in the fact that it serves as a basis for action and morals, this
+feeling of uncertainty and the inward struggle between reason on the one
+hand and faith and the passionate longing for eternal life on the other,
+should find their justification in the eyes of the pragmatist. But it
+must be clearly stated that I do not adduce this practical consequence
+in order to justify the feeling, but merely because I encounter it in my
+inward experience. I neither desire to seek, nor ought I to seek, any
+justification for this state of inward struggle and uncertainty and
+longing; it is a fact and that suffices. And if anyone finding himself
+in this state, in the depth of the abyss, fails to find there motives
+for and incentives to life and action, and concludes by committing
+bodily or spiritual suicide, whether he kills himself or he abandons all
+co-operation with his fellows in human endeavour, it will not be I who
+will pass censure upon him. And apart from the fact that the evil
+consequences of a doctrine, or rather those which we call evil, only
+prove, I repeat, that the doctrine is disastrous for our desires, but
+not that it is false in itself, the consequences themselves depend not
+so much upon the doctrine as upon him who deduces them. The same
+principle may furnish one man with grounds for action and another man
+with grounds for abstaining from action, it may lead one man to direct
+his effort towards a certain end and another man towards a directly
+opposite end. For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the
+justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, or else they are our way of
+trying to explain that conduct to ourselves.
+
+Man, in effect, is unwilling to remain in ignorance of the motives of
+his own conduct. And just as a man who has been led to perform a certain
+action by hypnotic suggestion will afterwards invent reasons which would
+justify it and make it appear logical to himself and others, being
+unaware all the time of the real cause of his action, so every man--for
+since "life is a dream" every man is in a condition of hypnotism--seeks
+to find reasons for his conduct. And if the pieces on a chessboard were
+endowed with consciousness, they would probably have little difficulty
+in ascribing their moves to freewill--that is to say, they would claim
+for them a finalist rationality. And thus it comes about that every
+philosophic theory serves to explain and justify an ethic, a doctrine of
+conduct, which has its real origin in the inward moral feeling of the
+author of the theory. But he who harbours this feeling may possibly
+himself have no clear consciousness of its true reason or cause.
+
+Consequently, if my reason, which is in a certain sense a part of the
+reason of all my brothers in humanity in time and space, teaches me this
+absolute scepticism in respect of what concerns my longing for
+never-ending life, I think that I can assume that my feeling of life,
+which is the essence of life itself, my vitality, my boundless appetite
+for living and my abhorrence of dying, my refusal to submit to
+death--that it is this which suggests to me the doctrines with which I
+try to counter-check the working of the reason. Have these doctrines an
+objective value? someone will ask me, and I shall answer that I do not
+understand what this objective value of a doctrine is. I will not say
+that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines that I am
+about to set forth are those which make me live; but I will venture to
+say that it is my longing to live and to live for ever that inspires
+these doctrines within me. And if by means of them I succeed in
+strengthening and sustaining this same longing in another, perhaps when
+it was all but dead, then I shall have performed a man's work and, above
+all, I shall have lived. In a word, be it with reason or without reason
+or against reason, I am resolved not to die. And if, when at last I die
+out, I die out altogether, then I shall not have died out of
+myself--that is, I shall not have yielded myself to death, but my human
+destiny will have killed me. Unless I come to lose my head, or rather my
+heart, I will not abdicate from life--life will be wrested from me.
+
+To have recourse to those, ambiguous words, "optimism" and "pessimism,"
+does not assist us in any way, for frequently they express the very
+contrary of what those who use them mean to express. To ticket a
+doctrine with the label of pessimism is not to impugn its validity, and
+the so-called optimists are not the most efficient in action. I believe,
+on the contrary, that many of the greatest heroes, perhaps the greatest
+of all, have been men of despair and that by despair they have
+accomplished their mighty works. Apart from this, however, and accepting
+in all their ambiguity these denominations of optimism and pessimism,
+that there exists a certain transcendental pessimism which may be the
+begetter of a temporal and terrestrial optimism, is a matter that I
+propose to develop in the following part of this treatise.
+
+Very different, well I know, is the attitude of our progressives, the
+partisans of "the central current of contemporary European thought"; but
+I cannot bring myself to believe that these individuals do not
+voluntarily close their eyes to the grand problem of existence and that,
+in endeavouring to stifle this feeling of the tragedy of life, they
+themselves are not living a lie.
+
+The foregoing reflections are a kind of practical summary of the
+criticism developed in the first six chapters of this treatise, a kind
+of definition of the practical position to which such a criticism is
+capable of leading whosoever will not renounce life and will not
+renounce reason and who is compelled to live and act between these upper
+and nether millstones which grind upon the soul. The reader who follows
+me further is now aware that I am about to carry him into the region of
+the imagination, of imagination not destitute of reason, for without
+reason nothing subsists, but of imagination founded on feeling. And as
+regards its truth, the real truth, that which is independent of
+ourselves, beyond the reach of our logic and of our heart--of this truth
+who knows aught?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[31] See Troeltsch, _Systematische christliche Religion_, in _Die Kultur
+der Gegenwart_ series.
+
+[32] _Die Analyse der Empfindigungen und das Verhältniss des Physischen
+zum Psychischen_, i., § 12, note.
+
+[33] I have left the original expression here, almost without
+translating it--_Existents-Consequents_. It means the existential or
+practical, not the purely rational or logical, consequence. (Author's
+note.)
+
+[34] Albrecht Ritschl: _Geschichte des Pietismus_, ii., Abt. i., Bonn,
+1884, p. 251.
+
+[35] Thou art the cause of my suffering, O non-existing God, for if Thou
+didst exist, then should I also really exist.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+LOVE, SUFFERING, PITY, AND PERSONALITY
+
+    CAIN: Let me, or happy or unhappy, learn
+          To anticipate my immortality.
+
+    LUCIFER: Thou didst before I came upon thee.
+
+    CAIN:                                       How?
+
+    LUCIFER: By suffering.
+
+                BYRON: _Cain_, Act II., Scene I.
+
+
+The most tragic thing in the world and in life, readers and brothers of
+mine, is love. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of
+disillusion; love is consolation in desolation; it is the sole medicine
+against death, for it is death's brother.
+
+    _Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte
+    Ingeneró la sorte_,
+
+as Leopardi sang.
+
+Love seeks with fury, through the medium of the beloved, something
+beyond, and since it finds it not, it despairs.
+
+Whenever we speak of love there is always present in our memory the idea
+of sexual love, the love between man and woman, whose end is the
+perpetuation of the human race upon the earth. Hence it is that we never
+succeed in reducing love either to a purely intellectual or to a purely
+volitional element, putting aside that part in it which belongs to the
+feeling, or, if you like, to the senses. For, in its essence, love is
+neither idea nor volition; rather it is desire, feeling; it is something
+carnal in spirit itself. Thanks to love, we feel all that spirit has of
+flesh in it.
+
+Sexual love is the generative type of every other love. In love and by
+love we seek to perpetuate ourselves, and we perpetuate ourselves on the
+earth only on condition that we die, that we yield up our life to
+others. The humblest forms of animal life, the lowest of living beings,
+multiply by dividing themselves, by splitting into two, by ceasing to be
+the unit which they previously formed.
+
+But when at last the vitality of the being that multiplies itself by
+division is exhausted, the species must renew the source of life from
+time to time by means of the union of two wasting individuals, by means
+of what is called, among protozoaria, conjugation. They unite in order
+to begin dividing again with more vigour. And every act of generation
+consists in a being's ceasing to be what it was, either wholly or in
+part, in a splitting up, in a partial death. To live is to give oneself,
+to perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself and to give oneself is
+to die. The supreme delight of begetting is perhaps nothing but a
+foretaste of death, the eradication of our own vital essence. We unite
+with another, but it is to divide ourselves; this most intimate embrace
+is only a most intimate sundering. In its essence, the delight of sexual
+love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of renewing our
+life in another, for only in others can we renew our life and so
+perpetuate ourselves.
+
+Without doubt there is something tragically destructive in the essence
+of love, as it presents itself to us in its primitive animal form, in
+the unconquerable instinct which impels the male and the female to mix
+their being in a fury of conjunction. The same impulse that joins their
+bodies, separates, in a certain sense, their souls; they hate one
+another, while they embrace, no less than they love, and above all they
+contend with one another, they contend for a third life, which as yet is
+without life. Love is a contention, and there are animal species in
+which the male maltreats the female in his union with her, and other in
+which the female devours the male after being fertilized by him.
+
+It has been said that love is a mutual selfishness; and, in fact, each
+one of the lovers seeks to possess the other, and in seeking his own
+perpetuation through the instrumentality of the other, though without
+being at the time conscious of it or purposing it, he thereby seeks his
+own enjoyment. Each one of the lovers is an immediate instrument of
+enjoyment and a mediate instrument of perpetuation, for the other. And
+thus they are tyrants and slaves, each one at once the tyrant and slave
+of the other.
+
+Is there really anything strange in the fact that the deepest religious
+feeling has condemned carnal love and exalted virginity? Avarice, said
+the Apostle, is the root of all evil, and the reason is because avarice
+takes riches, which are only a means, for an end; and therein lies the
+essence of sin, in taking means for ends, in not recognizing or in
+disesteeming the end. And since it takes enjoyment for the end, whereas
+it is only the means, and not perpetuation, which is the true end, what
+is carnal love but avarice? And it is possible that there are some who
+preserve their virginity in order the better to perpetuate themselves,
+and in order to perpetuate something more human than the flesh.
+
+For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers
+perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father
+of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that
+in the depth of love there is a depth of eternal despair, out of which
+spring hope and consolation. For out of this carnal and primitive love
+of which I have been speaking, out of this love of the whole body with
+all its senses, which is the animal origin of human society, out of this
+loving-fondness, rises spiritual and sorrowful love.
+
+This other form of love, this spiritual love, is born of sorrow, is
+born of the death of carnal love, is born also of the feeling of
+compassion and protection which parents feel in the presence of a
+stricken child. Lovers never attain to a love of self abandonment, of
+true fusion of soul and not merely of body, until the heavy pestle of
+sorrow has bruised their hearts and crushed them in the same mortar of
+suffering. Sensual love joined their bodies but disjoined their souls;
+it kept their souls strangers to one another; but of this love is
+begotten a fruit of their flesh--a child. And perchance this child,
+begotten in death, falls sick and dies. Then it comes to pass that over
+the fruit of their carnal fusion and spiritual separation and
+estrangement, their bodies now separated and cold with sorrow but united
+by sorrow their souls, the lovers, the parents, join in an embrace of
+despair, and then is born, of the death of the child of their flesh, the
+true spiritual love. Or rather, when the bond of flesh which united them
+is broken, they breathe with a sigh of relief. For men love one another
+with a spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow
+together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground
+bowed beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they
+know one another and feel one another, and feel with one another in
+their common anguish, they pity one another and love one another. For to
+love is to pity; and if bodies are united by pleasure, souls are united
+by pain.
+
+And this is felt with still more clearness and force in the seeding, the
+taking root, and the blossoming of one of those tragic loves which are
+doomed to contend with the diamond-hard laws of Destiny--one of those
+loves which are born out of due time and season, before or after the
+moment, or out of the normal mode in which the world, which is custom,
+would have been willing to welcome them. The more barriers Destiny and
+the world and its law interpose between the lovers, the stronger is the
+impulse that urges them towards one another, and their happiness in
+loving one another turns to bitterness, and their unhappiness in not
+being able to love freely and openly grows heavier, and they pity one
+another from the bottom of their hearts; and this common pity, which is
+their common misery and their common happiness, gives fire and fuel to
+their love. And they suffer their joy, enjoying their suffering. And
+they establish their love beyond the confines of the world, and the
+strength of this poor love suffering beneath the yoke of Destiny gives
+them intuition of another world where there is no other law than the
+liberty of love--another world where there are no barriers because there
+is no flesh. For nothing inspires us more with hope and faith in another
+world than the impossibility of our love truly fructifying in this world
+of flesh and of appearances.
+
+And what is maternal love but compassion for the weak, helpless,
+defenceless infant that craves the mother's milk and the comfort of her
+breast? And woman's love is all maternal.
+
+To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.
+Men aflame with a burning charity towards their neighbours are thus
+enkindled because they have touched the depth of their own misery, their
+own apparentiality, their own nothingness, and then, turning their newly
+opened eyes upon their fellows, they have seen that they also are
+miserable, apparential, condemned to nothingness, and they have pitied
+them and loved them.
+
+Man yearns to be loved, or, what is the same thing, to be pitied. Man
+wishes others to feel and share his hardships and his sorrows. The
+roadside beggar's exhibition of his sores and gangrened mutilations is
+something more than a device to extort alms from the passer-by. True
+alms is pity rather than the pittance that alleviates the material
+hardships of life. The beggar shows little gratitude for alms thrown to
+him by one who hurries past with averted face; he is more grateful to
+him who pities him but does not help than to him who helps but does not
+pity, although from another point of view he may prefer the latter.
+Observe with what satisfaction he relates his woes to one who is moved
+by the story of them. He desires to be pitied, to be loved.
+
+Woman's love, above all, as I have remarked, is always compassionate in
+its essence--maternal. Woman yields herself to the lover because she
+feels that his desire makes him suffer. Isabel had compassion upon
+Lorenzo, Juliet upon Romeo, Francesca upon Paolo. Woman seems to say:
+"Come, poor one, thou shalt not suffer so for my sake!" And therefore is
+her love more loving and purer than that of man, braver and more
+enduring.
+
+Pity, then, is the essence of human spiritual love, of the love that is
+conscious of being love, of the love that is not purely animal, of the
+love, in a word, of a rational person. Love pities, and pities most when
+it loves most.
+
+Reversing the terms of the adage _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, I
+have told you that _nihil cognitum quin prævolitum_, that we know
+nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it
+may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save
+what we pity.
+
+As love grows, this restless yearning to pierce to the uttermost and to
+the innermost, so it continually embraces all that it sees, and pities
+all that it embraces. According as you turn inwards and penetrate more
+deeply into yourself, you will discover more and more your own
+emptiness, that you are not all that you are not, that you are not what
+you would wish to be, that you are, in a word, only a nonentity. And in
+touching your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent base, in
+not reaching your own infinity, still less your own eternity, you will
+have a whole-hearted pity for yourself, and you will burn with a
+sorrowful love for yourself--a love that will consume your so-called
+self-love, which is merely a species of sensual self-delectation, the
+self-enjoyment, as it were, of the flesh of your soul.
+
+Spiritual self-love, the pity that one feels for oneself, may perhaps be
+called egotism; but nothing could be more opposed to ordinary egoism.
+For this love or pity for yourself, this intense despair, bred of the
+consciousness that just as before you were born you were not, so after
+your death you will cease to be, will lead you to pity--that is, to
+love--all your fellows and brothers in this world of appearance, these
+unhappy shadows who pass from nothingness to nothingness, these sparks
+of consciousness which shine for a moment in the infinite and eternal
+darkness. And this compassionate feeling for other men, for your
+fellows, beginning with those most akin to you, those with whom you
+live, will expand into a universal pity for all living things, and
+perhaps even for things that have not life but merely existence. That
+distant star which shines up there in the night will some day be
+quenched and will turn to dust and will cease to shine and cease to
+exist. And so, too, it will be with the whole of the star-strewn
+heavens. Unhappy heavens!
+
+And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it
+would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more
+than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without
+being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to
+be all.
+
+If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you are able
+to look--that is to say, if you look within yourself; if you not only
+contemplate but feel all things in your own consciousness, upon which
+all things have traced their painful impression--you will arrive at the
+abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of something more: at the
+tedium of existence, at the bottomless pit of the vanity of vanities.
+And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal
+love.
+
+In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and
+extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within
+yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves,
+everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only pity--that is to
+say, we only love--that which is like ourselves and in so far as it is
+like ourselves, and the more like it is the more we love; and thus our
+pity for things, and with it our love, grows in proportion as we
+discover in them the likenesses which they have with ourselves. Or,
+rather, it is love itself, which of itself tends to grow, that reveals
+these resemblances to us. If I am moved to pity and love the luckless
+star that one day will vanish from the face of heaven, it is because
+love, pity, makes me feel that it has a consciousness, more or less dim,
+which makes it suffer because it is no more than a star, and a star that
+is doomed one day to cease to be. For all consciousness is consciousness
+of death and of suffering.
+
+Consciousness (_conscientia_) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling,
+and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only
+by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is
+so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves
+everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total
+All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness, a
+Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and
+therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe,
+which love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call
+God. And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by Him; loves
+Him and feels itself loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of
+the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and
+infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself.
+
+God is, then, the personalization of the All; He is the eternal and
+infinite Consciousness of the Universe--Consciousness taken captive by
+matter and struggling to free himself from it. We personalize the All
+in order to save ourselves from Nothingness; and the only mystery really
+mysterious is the mystery of suffering.
+
+Suffering is the path of consciousness, and by it living beings arrive
+at the possession of self-consciousness. For to possess consciousness of
+oneself, to possess personality, is to know oneself and to feel oneself
+distinct from other beings, and this feeling of distinction is only
+reached through an act of collision, through suffering more or less
+severe, through the sense of one's own limits. Consciousness of oneself
+is simply consciousness of one's own limitation. I feel myself when I
+feel that I am not others; to know and to feel the extent of my being is
+to know at what point I cease to be, the point beyond which I no longer
+am.
+
+And how do we know that we exist if we do not suffer, little or much?
+How can we turn upon ourselves, acquire reflective consciousness, save
+by suffering? When we enjoy ourselves we forget ourselves, forget that
+we exist; we pass over into another, an alien being, we alienate
+ourselves. And we become centred in ourselves again, we return to
+ourselves, only by suffering.
+
+           _Nessun maggior dolore
+    che ricordarsi del tempo felice
+    nella miseria_
+
+are the words that Dante puts into the mouth of Francesca da Rimini
+(_Inferno_, v., 121-123); but if there is no greater sorrow than the
+recollection in adversity of happy bygone days, there is, on the other
+hand, no pleasure in remembering adversity in days of prosperity.
+
+"The bitterest sorrow that man can know is to aspire to do much and to
+achieve nothing" (_polla phroneoita mêdenos chrateein_)--so
+Herodotus relates that a Persian said to a Theban at a banquet (book
+ix., chap. xvi.). And it is true. With knowledge and desire we can
+embrace everything, or almost everything; with the will nothing, or
+almost nothing. And contemplation is not happiness--no! not if this
+contemplation implies impotence. And out of this collision between our
+knowledge and our power pity arises.
+
+We pity what is like ourselves, and the greater and clearer our sense of
+its likeness with ourselves, the greater our pity. And if we may say
+that this likeness provokes our pity, it may also be maintained that it
+is our reservoir of pity, eager to diffuse itself over everything, that
+makes us discover the likeness of things with ourselves, the common bond
+that unites us with them in suffering.
+
+Our own struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase our own
+consciousness makes us discover in the endeavours and movements and
+revolutions of all things a struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase
+consciousness, to which everything tends. Beneath the actions of those
+most akin to myself, of my fellow-men, I feel--or, rather, I co-feel--a
+state of consciousness similar to that which lies beneath my own
+actions. On hearing my brother give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes
+and cries in the depth of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel
+the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its branches is
+being cut off, and I feel it most when my imagination is alive, for the
+imagination is the faculty of intuition, of inward vision.
+
+Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only
+consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is
+identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or
+less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for
+they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle
+to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual
+aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and
+yet to preserve their proper limits.
+
+And this process of personalization or subjectivization of everything
+external, phenomenal, or objective, is none other than the vital
+process of philosophy in the contest of life against reason and of
+reason against life. We have already indicated it in the preceding
+chapter, and we must now confirm it by developing it further.
+
+Giovanni Baptista Vico, with his profound esthetic penetration into the
+soul of antiquity, saw that the spontaneous philosophy of man was to
+make of himself the norm of the universe, guided by the _instinto
+d'animazione_. Language, necessarily anthropomorphic, mythopeic,
+engenders thought. "Poetic wisdom, which was the primitive wisdom of
+paganism," says Vico in his _Scienza Nuova_, "must have begun with a
+metaphysic, not reasoned and abstract, like that of modern educated men,
+but felt and imagined, such as must have been that of primitive men.
+This was their own poetry, which with them was inborn, an innate
+faculty, for nature had furnished them with such feelings and such
+imaginations, a faculty born of the ignorance of causes, and therefore
+begetting a universal sense of wonder, for knowing nothing they
+marvelled greatly at everything. This poetry had a divine origin, for,
+while they invented the causes of things out of their own imagination,
+at the same time they regarded these causes with feelings of wonder as
+gods. In this way the first men of the pagan peoples, as children of the
+growing human race, fashioned things out of their ideas.... This nature
+of human things has bequeathed that eternal property which Tacitus
+elucidated with a fine phrase when he said, not without reason, that men
+in their terror _fingunt simul creduntque_."
+
+And then, passing from the age of imagination, Vico proceeds to show us
+the age of reason, this age of ours in which the mind, even the popular
+mind, is too remote from the senses, "with so many abstractions of which
+all languages are full," an age in which "the ability to conceive an
+immense image of such a personage as we call sympathetic Nature is
+denied to us, for though the phrase 'Dame Nature' may be on our lips,
+there is nothing in our minds that corresponds with it, our minds being
+occupied with the false, the non-existent." "To-day," Vico continues,
+"it is naturally impossible for us to enter into the vast imagination of
+these primitive men." But is this certain? Do not we continue to live by
+the creations of their imagination, embodied for ever in the language
+with which we think, or, rather, the language which thinks in us?
+
+It was in vain that Comte declared that human thought had already
+emerged from the age of theology and was now emerging from the age of
+metaphysics into the age of positivism; the three ages coexist, and
+although antagonistic they lend one another mutual support.
+High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny and begins to
+affirm something, whenever it becomes really positive, is nothing but
+metaphysics; and metaphysics, in its essence, is always theology, and
+theology is born of imagination yoked to the service of life, of life
+with its craving for immortality.
+
+Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it,
+is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. When rationalism dawned
+with Thales of Miletus, this philosopher abandoned Oceanus and Thetis,
+gods and the progenitors of gods, and attributed the origin of things to
+water; but this water was a god in disguise. Beneath nature (_phhysist_)
+and the world (_khosmos_), mythical and anthropomorphic creations
+throbbed with life. They were implicated in the structure of language
+itself. Xenophon tells us (_Memorabilia_, i., i., 6-9) that among
+phenomena Socrates distinguished between those which were within the
+scope of human study and those which the gods had reserved for
+themselves, and that he execrated the attempt of Anaxagoras to explain
+everything rationally. His contemporary, Hippocrates, regarded diseases
+as of divine origin, and Plato believed that the sun and stars were
+animated gods with their souls (_Philebus_, cap. xvi., _Laws_, x.), and
+only permitted astronomical investigation so long as it abstained from
+blasphemy against these gods. And Aristotle in his _Physics_ tells us
+that Zeus rains not in order that the corn may grow, but by necessity
+(_ex anharchêst_). They tried to mechanize and rationalize God, but God
+rebelled against them.
+
+And what is the concept of God, a concept continually renewed because
+springing out of the eternal feeling of God in man, but the eternal
+protest of life against reason, the unconquerable instinct of
+personalization? And what is the notion of substance itself but the
+objectivization of that which is most subjective--that is, of the will
+or consciousness? For consciousness, even before it knows itself as
+reason, feels itself, is palpable to itself, is most in harmony with
+itself, as will, and as will not to die. Hence that rhythm, of which we
+spoke, in the history of thought. Positivism inducted us into an age of
+rationalism--that is to say, of materialism, mechanism, or mortalism;
+and behold now the return of vitalism, of spiritualism. What was the
+effort of pragmatism but an effort to restore faith in the human
+finality of the universe? What is the effort of a Bergson, for example,
+especially in his work on creative evolution, but an attempt to
+re-integrate the personal God and eternal consciousness? Life never
+surrenders.
+
+And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic or
+anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if we thought
+only for the sake of thinking and knowing, and not for the sake of
+living. The very language with which we think prevents us from so doing.
+Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a
+mythic and anthropomorphic base. And to construct a purely rational
+philosophy it would be necessary to construct it by means of algebraic
+formulas or to create a new language for it, an inhuman language--that
+is to say, one inapt for the needs of life--as indeed Dr. Richard
+Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zürich, attempted to do in his
+_Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung_), in order to
+avoid preconceptions. And this rigorous attempt of Avenarius, the chief
+of the critics of experience, ends strictly in pure scepticism. He
+himself says at the end of the Prologue to the work above mentioned:
+"The childish confidence that it is granted to us to discover truth has
+long since disappeared; as we progress we become aware of the
+difficulties that lie in the way of its discovery and of the limitation
+of our powers. And what is the end?... If we could only succeed in
+seeing clearly into ourselves!"
+
+Seeing clearly! seeing clearly! Clear vision would be only attainable by
+a pure thinker who used algebra instead of language and was able to
+divest himself of his own humanity--that is to say, by an unsubstantial,
+merely objective being: a no-being, in short. In spite of reason we are
+compelled to think with life, and in spite of life we are compelled to
+rationalize thought.
+
+This animation, this personification, interpenetrates our very
+knowledge. "Who is it that sends the rain? Who is it that thunders?" old
+Strepsiades asks of Socrates in _The Clouds_ of Aristophanes, and the
+philosopher replies: "Not Zeus, but the clouds." "But," questions
+Strepsiades, "who but Zeus makes the clouds sweep along?" to which
+Socrates answers: "Not a bit of it; it is atmospheric whirligig."
+"Whirligig?" muses Strepsiades; "I never thought of that--that Zeus is
+gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead." And so the old man
+goes on personifying and animating the whirlwind, as if the whirlwind
+were now a king, not without consciousness of his kingship. And in
+exchanging a Zeus for a whirlwind--God for matter, for example--we all
+do the same thing. And the reason is because philosophy does not work
+upon the objective reality which we perceive with the senses, but upon
+the complex of ideas, images, notions, perceptions, etc., embodied in
+language and transmitted to us with our language by our ancestors. That
+which we call the world, the objective world, is a social tradition. It
+is given to us ready made.
+
+Man does not submit to being, as consciousness, alone in the Universe,
+nor to being merely one objective phenomenon the more. He wishes to save
+his vital or passional subjectivity by attributing life, personality,
+spirit, to the whole Universe. In order to realize his wish he has
+discovered God and substance; God and substance continually reappear in
+his thought cloaked in different disguises. Because we are conscious, we
+feel that we exist, which is quite another thing from knowing that we
+exist, and we wish to feel the existence of everything else; we wish
+that of all the other individual things each one should also be an "I."
+
+The most consistent, although the most incongruous and vacillating,
+idealism, that of Berkeley, who denied the existence of matter, of
+something inert and extended and passive, as the cause of our sensations
+and the substratum of external phenomena, is in its essence nothing but
+an absolute spiritualism or dynamism, the supposition that every
+sensation comes to us, causatively, from another spirit--that is, from
+another consciousness. And his doctrine has a certain affinity with
+those of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The former's doctrine of the Will
+and the latter's doctrine of the Unconscious are already implied in the
+Berkeleyan theory that to be is to be perceived. To which must be added:
+and to cause others to perceive what is. Thus the old adage _operari
+sequitur esse_ (action follows being) must be modified by saying that to
+be is to act, and only that which acts--the active--exists, and in so
+far as it acts.
+
+As regards Schopenhauer, there is no need to endeavour to show that the
+will, which he posits as the essence of things, proceeds from
+consciousness. And it is only necessary to read his book on the Will in
+Nature to see how he attributed a certain spirit and even a certain
+personality to the plants themselves. And this doctrine of his carried
+him logically to pessimism, for the true property and most inward
+function of the will is to suffer. The will is a force which feels
+itself--that is, which suffers. And, someone will add, which enjoys. But
+the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity to suffer; and
+the faculty of enjoyment is one with that of pain. Whosoever does not
+suffer does not enjoy, just as whosoever is insensible to cold is
+insensible to heat.
+
+And it is also quite logical that Schopenhauer, who deduced pessimism
+from the voluntarist doctrine or doctrine of universal personalization,
+should have deduced from both of these that the foundation of morals is
+compassion. Only his lack of the social and historical sense, his
+inability to feel that humanity also is a person, although a collective
+one, his egoism, in short, prevented him from feeling God, prevented him
+from individualizing and personalizing the total and collective
+Will--the Will of the Universe.
+
+On the other hand, it is easy to understand his aversion from purely
+empirical, evolutionist, or transformist doctrines, such as those set
+forth in the works of Lamarck and Darwin which came to his notice.
+Judging Darwin's theory solely by an extensive extract in _The Times_,
+he described it, in a letter to Adam Louis von Doss (March 1, 1860), as
+"downright empiricism" _(platter Empirismus)_. In fact, for a
+voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously
+empirical and rational as that of Darwin left out of account the inward
+force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the
+hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate
+themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation?
+Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions.
+This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that
+there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a
+feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as
+ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are. And it may be said
+that this force is the divine in us, that it is God Himself who works in
+us because He suffers in us.
+
+And sympathy teaches us to discover this force, this aspiration towards
+consciousness, in all things. It moves and activates the most minute
+living creatures; it moves and activates, perhaps, the very cells of our
+own bodily organism, which is a confederation, more or less solidary, of
+living beings; it moves the very globules of our blood. Our life is
+composed of lives, our vital aspiration of aspirations existing perhaps
+in the limbo of subconsciousness. Not more absurd than so many other
+dreams which pass as valid theories is the belief that our cells, our
+globules, may possess something akin to a rudimentary cellular, globular
+consciousness or basis of consciousness. Or that they may arrive at
+possessing such consciousness. And since we have given a loose rein to
+the fancy, we may fancy that these cells may communicate with one
+another, and that some of them may express their belief that they form
+part of a superior organism endowed with a collective personal
+consciousness. And more than once in the history of human feeling this
+fancy has been expressed in the surmisal of some philosopher or poet
+that we men are a kind of globules in the blood of a Supreme Being, who
+possesses his own personal collective consciousness, the consciousness
+of the Universe.
+
+Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear nights we behold stretching
+across the heavens, this vast encircling ring in which our planetary
+system is itself but a molecule, is in its turn but a cell in the
+Universe, in the Body of God. All the cells of our body combine and
+co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their activity our
+consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness or the souls of all
+these cells entered completely into our consciousness, into the
+composite whole, if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my
+bodily organism, I should feel the universe happening within myself,
+and perhaps the painful sense of my limitedness would disappear. And if
+all the consciousness of all beings unite in their entirety in the
+universal consciousness, this consciousness--that is to say, God--is
+all.
+
+In every instant obscure consciousnesses, elementary souls, are born and
+die within us, and their birth and death constitute our life. And their
+sudden and violent death constitutes our pain. And in like manner, in
+the heart of God consciousnesses are born and die--but do they die?--and
+their births and deaths constitute His life.
+
+If there is a Universal and Supreme Consciousness, I am an idea in it;
+and is it possible for any idea in this Supreme Consciousness to be
+completely blotted out? After I have died, God will go on remembering
+me, and to be remembered by God, to have my consciousness sustained by
+the Supreme Consciousness, is not that, perhaps, to be?
+
+And if anyone should say that God has made the universe, it may be
+rejoined that so also our soul has made our body as much as, if not more
+than, it has been made by it--if, indeed, there be a soul.
+
+When pity, love, reveals to us the whole universe striving to gain, to
+preserve, and to enlarge its consciousness, striving more and more to
+saturate itself with consciousness, feeling the pain of the discords
+which are produced within it, pity reveals to us the likeness of the
+whole universe with ourselves; it reveals to us that it is human, and it
+leads us to discover our Father in it, of whose flesh we are flesh; love
+leads us to personalize the whole of which we form a part.
+
+To say that God is eternally producing things is fundamentally the same
+as saying that things are eternally producing God. And the belief in a
+personal and spiritual God is based on the belief in our own personality
+and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we
+feel God to be consciousness--that is to say, a person; and because we
+desire ardently that our consciousness shall live and be independently
+of the body, we believe that the divine person lives and exists
+independently of the universe, that his state of consciousness is _ad
+extra_.
+
+No doubt logicians will come forward and confront us with the evident
+rational difficulties which this involves; but we have already stated
+that, although presented under logical forms, the content of all this is
+not strictly rational. Every rational conception of God is in itself
+contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for God--we believe that God
+exists by force of wishing that He may exist, and it is born also,
+perhaps, of God's love for us. Reason does not prove to us that God
+exists, but neither does it prove that He cannot exist.
+
+But of this conception of faith in God as the personalization of the
+universe we shall have more to say presently.
+
+And recalling what has been said in another part of this work, we may
+say that material things, in so far as they are known to us, issue into
+knowledge through the agency of hunger, and out of hunger issues the
+sensible or material universe in which we conglomerate these things; and
+that ideal things issue out of love, and out of love issues God, in whom
+we conglomerate these ideal things as in the Consciousness of the
+Universe. It is social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct
+of perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see society
+in everything, and that shows us at last that all Nature is really an
+infinite Society. For my part, the feeling that Nature is a society has
+taken hold of me hundreds of times in walking through the woods
+possessed with a sense of solidarity with the oaks, a sense of their dim
+awareness of my presence.
+
+Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and
+anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes
+everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to
+supernaturalize Nature--that is to say, to make it divine by making it
+human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of
+reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.
+
+And just as a fruitful union is consummated between the individual--who
+is, in a certain sense, a society--and society, which is also an
+individual--the two being so inseparable from one another that it is
+impossible to say where the one begins and the other ends, for they are
+rather two aspects of a single essence--so also the spirit, the social
+element, which by relating us to others makes us conscious, unites with
+matter, the individual and individualizing element; similarly, reason or
+intelligence and imagination embrace in a mutually fruitful union, and
+the Universe merges into one with God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Is all this true? And what is truth? I in my turn will ask, as Pilate
+asked--not, however, only to turn away and wash my hands, without
+waiting for an answer.
+
+Is truth in reason, or above reason, or beneath reason, or outside of
+reason, in some way or another? Is only the rational true? May there not
+be a reality, by its very nature, unattainable by reason, and perhaps,
+by its very nature, opposed to reason? And how can we know this reality
+if reason alone holds the key to knowledge?
+
+Our desire of living, our need of life, asks that that may be true which
+urges us to self-preservation and self-perpetuation, which sustains man
+and society; it asks that the true water may be that which assuages our
+thirst, and because it assuages it, that the true bread may be that
+which satisfies our hunger, because it satisfies it.
+
+The senses are devoted to the service of the instinct of preservation,
+and everything that satisfies this need of preserving ourselves, even
+though it does not pass through the senses, is nevertheless a kind of
+intimate penetration of reality in us. Is the process of assimilating
+nutriment perhaps less real than the process of knowing the nutritive
+substance? It may be said that to eat a loaf of bread is not the same
+thing as seeing, touching, or tasting it; that in the one case it enters
+into our body, but not therefore into our consciousness. Is this true?
+Does not the loaf of bread that I have converted into my flesh and blood
+enter more into my consciousness than the other loaf which I see and
+touch, and of which I say: "This is mine"? And must I refuse objective
+reality to the bread that I have thus converted into my flesh and blood
+and made mine when I only touch it?
+
+There are some who live by air without knowing it. In the same way, it
+may be, we live by God and in God--in God the spirit and consciousness
+of society and of the whole Universe, in so far as the Universe is also
+a society.
+
+God is felt only in so far as He is lived; and man does not live by
+bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God
+(Matt. iv. 4; Deut. viii. 3).
+
+And this personalization of the all, of the Universe, to which we are
+led by love, by pity, is the personalization of a person who embraces
+and comprehends within himself the other persons of which he is
+composed.
+
+The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.
+For where there is no consciousness there is no finality, finality
+presupposing a purpose. And, as we shall see, faith in God is based
+simply upon the vital need of giving finality to existence, of making it
+answer to a purpose. We need God, not in order to understand the _why_,
+but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate _wherefore_, to give a
+meaning to the Universe.
+
+And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that this
+consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the
+consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the
+consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it
+remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it.
+Only thus is it possible to understand how in God we live, move, and
+have our being. That great visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, saw or caught
+a glimpse of this in his book on Heaven and Hell _(De Coelo et Inferno_,
+lii.), when he tells us: "An entire angelic society appears sometimes in
+the form of a single angel, which also it hath been granted me by the
+Lord to see. When the Lord Himself appears in the midst of the angels,
+He doth not appear as encompassed by a multitude, but as a single being
+in angelic form. Hence it is that the Lord in the Word is called an
+angel, and likewise that on entire society is so called. Michael,
+Gabriel, and Raphael are nothing but angelical societies, which are so
+named from their functions."
+
+May we not perhaps live and love--that is, suffer and pity--in this
+all-enveloping Supreme Person--we, all the persons who suffer and pity
+and all the beings that strive to achieve personality, to acquire
+consciousness of their suffering and their limitation? And are we not,
+perhaps, ideas of this total Grand Consciousness, which by thinking of
+us as existing confers existence upon us? Does not our existence consist
+in being perceived and felt by God? And, further on, this same visionary
+tells us, under the form of images, that each angel, each society of
+angels, and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed, appear in
+human form, and in virtue of this human form the Lord rules them as one
+man.
+
+"God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal,"
+wrote Kierkegaard (_Afslutende uvidens-kabelige Efterskrift_); but
+perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian
+city, that "God is great because His thought is action" (_Ai giovani
+d'ltalia_), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives
+existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of
+thinking it, and the impossible is the unthinkable by God. Is it not
+written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word--that is to
+say, with His thought--and that by this, by His Word, He made everything
+that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not
+be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme
+Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all
+existence eternalized?
+
+Our longing to save consciousness, to give personal and human finality
+to the Universe and to existence, is such that even in the midst of a
+supreme, an agonizing and lacerating sacrifice, we should still hear the
+voice that assured us that if our consciousness disappears, it is that
+the infinite and eternal Consciousness may be enriched thereby, that our
+souls may serve as nutriment to the Universal Soul. Yes, I enrich God,
+because before I existed He did not think of me as existing, because I
+am one more--one more even though among an infinity of others--who,
+having really lived, really suffered, and really loved, abide in His
+bosom. It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to
+make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God,
+to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To create Him,
+yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist.
+For to believe in God is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He
+first creates us.[37] It is He who in us is continually creating
+Himself.
+
+We have created God in order to save the Universe from nothingness, for
+all that is not consciousness and eternal consciousness, conscious of
+its eternity and eternally conscious, is nothing more than appearance.
+There is nothing truly real save that which feels, suffers, pities,
+loves, and desires, save consciousness; there is nothing substantial but
+consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in
+order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know
+the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it. Love is
+a contradiction if there is no God.
+
+Let us now consider this idea of God, of the logical God or the Supreme
+Reason, and of the vital God or the God of the heart--that is, Supreme
+Love.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[36] _Todo lo humaniza, y aun lo humana_.
+
+[37] In the translation it is impossible to retain the play upon the
+verbs _crear_, to create, and _creer_, to believe: _"Porque creer en
+Dios es en cierto modo crearle, aunque El nos cree antes."_--J.E.C.F.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+FROM GOD TO GOD
+
+
+To affirm that the religious sense is a sense of divinity and that it is
+impossible without some abuse of the ordinary usages of human language
+to speak of an atheistic religion, is not, I think, to do violence to
+the truth; although it is clear that everything will depend upon the
+concept that we form of God, a concept which in its turn depends upon
+the concept of divinity.
+
+Our proper procedure, in effect, will be to begin with this sense of
+divinity, before prefixing to the concept of this quality the definite
+article and the capital letter and so converting it into "the
+Divinity"--that is, into God. For man has not deduced the divine from
+God, but rather he has reached God through the divine.
+
+In the course of these somewhat wandering but at the same time urgent
+reflections upon the tragic sense of life, I have already alluded to the
+_timor fecit deos_ of Statius with the object of limiting and correcting
+it. It is not my intention to trace yet once again the historical
+processes by which peoples have arrived at the consciousness and concept
+of a personal God like the God of Christianity. And I say peoples and
+not isolated individuals, for if there is any feeling or concept that is
+truly collective and social it is the feeling and concept of God,
+although the individual subsequently individualizes it. Philosophy may,
+and in fact does, possess an individual origin; theology is necessarily
+collective.
+
+Schleiermacher's theory, which attributes the origin, or rather the
+essence, of the religious sense to the immediate and simple feeling of
+dependency, appears to be the most profound and exact explanation.
+Primitive man, living in society, feels himself to be dependent upon the
+mysterious forces invisibly environing him; he feels himself to be in
+social communion, not only with beings like himself, his fellow-men, but
+with the whole of Nature, animate and inanimate, which simply means, in
+other words, that he personalizes everything. Not only does he possess a
+consciousness of the world, but he imagines that the world, like
+himself, possesses consciousness also. Just as a child talks to his doll
+or his dog as if it understood what he was saying, so the savage
+believes that his fetich hears him when he speaks to it, and that the
+angry storm-cloud is aware of him and deliberately pursues him. For the
+newly born mind of the primitive natural man has not yet wholly severed
+itself from the cords which still bind it to the womb of Nature, neither
+has it clearly marked out the boundary that separates dreaming from
+waking, imagination from reality.
+
+The divine, therefore, was not originally something objective, but was
+rather the subjectivity of consciousness projected exteriorly, the
+personalization of the world. The concept of divinity arose out of the
+feeling of divinity, and the feeling of divinity is simply the dim and
+nascent feeling of personality vented upon the outside world. And
+strictly speaking it is not possible to speak of outside and inside,
+objective and subjective, when no such distinction was actually felt;
+indeed it is precisely from this lack of distinction that the feeling
+and concept of divinity proceed. The clearer our consciousness of the
+distinction between the objective and the subjective, the more obscure
+is the feeling of divinity in us.
+
+It has been said, and very justly so it would appear, that Hellenic
+paganism was not so much polytheistic as pantheistic. I do not know that
+the belief in a multitude of gods, taking the concept of God in the
+sense in which we understand it to-day, has ever really existed in any
+human mind. And if by pantheism is understood the doctrine, not that
+everything and each individual thing is God--a proposition which I find
+unthinkable--but that everything is divine, then it may be said without
+any great abuse of language that paganism was pantheistic. Its gods not
+only mixed among men but intermixed with them; they begat gods upon
+mortal women and upon goddesses mortal men begat demi-gods. And if
+demi-gods, that is, demi-men, were believed to exist, it was because the
+divine and the human were viewed as different aspects of the same
+reality. The divinization of everything was simply its humanization. To
+say that the sun was a god was equivalent to saying that it was a man, a
+human consciousness, more or less, aggrandized and sublimated. And this
+is true of all beliefs from fetichism to Hellenic paganism.
+
+The real distinction between gods and men consisted in the fact that the
+former were immortal. A god came to be identical with an immortal man
+and a man was deified, reputed as a god, when it was deemed that at his
+death he had not really died. Of certain heroes it was believed that
+they were alive in the kingdom of the dead. And this is a point of great
+importance in estimating the value of the concept of the divine.
+
+In those republics of gods there was always some predominating god, some
+real monarch. It was through the agency of this divine monarchy that
+primitive peoples were led from monocultism to monotheism. Hence
+monarchy and monotheism are twin brethren. Zeus, Jupiter, was in process
+of being converted into an only god, just as Jahwé originally one god
+among many others, came to be converted into an only god, first the god
+of the people of Israel, then the god of humanity, and finally the god
+of the whole universe.
+
+Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march
+and in time of war," says Robertson Smith in _The Prophets of
+Israel_,[38] "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central
+authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national
+organization, centring in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought
+of mainly as the host of Jehovah. The very name of Israel is martial,
+and means 'God (_El_) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is
+Iahwè Çebäôth--the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the
+battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in
+primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in
+time of peace."
+
+God, the only God, issued, therefore, from man's sense of divinity as a
+warlike, monarchical and social God. He revealed himself to the people
+as a whole, not to the individual. He was the God of a people and he
+jealously exacted that worship should be rendered to him alone. The
+transition from this monocultism to monotheism was effected largely by
+the individual action, more philosophical perhaps than theological, of
+the prophets. It was, in fact, the individual activity of the prophets
+that individualized the divinity. And above all by making the divinity
+ethical.
+
+Subsequently reason--that is, philosophy--took possession of this God
+who had arisen in the human consciousness as a consequence of the sense
+of divinity in man, and tended to define him and convert him into an
+idea. For to define a thing is to idealize it, a process which
+necessitates the abstraction from it of its incommensurable or
+irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of feeling, the
+divinity felt as a unique person and consciousness external to us,
+although at the same time enveloping and sustaining us, was converted
+into the idea of God.
+
+The logical, rational God, the _ens summum_, the _primum movens_, the
+Supreme Being of theological philosophy, the God who is reached by the
+three famous ways of negation, eminence and causality, _viæ negationis,
+eminentiæ, causalitatis_, is nothing but an idea of God, a dead thing.
+The traditional and much debated proofs of his existence are, at bottom,
+merely a vain attempt to determine his essence; for as Vinet has very
+well observed, existence is deduced from essence; and to say that God
+exists, without saying what God is and how he is, is equivalent to
+saying nothing at all.
+
+And this God, arrived at by the methods of eminence and negation or
+abstraction of finite qualities, ends by becoming an unthinkable God, a
+pure idea, a God of whom, by the very fact of his ideal excellence, we
+can say that he is nothing, as indeed he has been defined by Scotus
+Erigena: _Deus propter excellentiam non inmerito nihil vocatur_. Or in
+the words of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in his fifth Epistle,
+"The divine darkness is the inaccessible light in which God is said to
+dwell." The anthropomorphic God, the God who is felt, in being purified
+of human, and as such finite, relative and temporal, attributes,
+evaporates into the God of deism or of pantheism.
+
+The traditional so-called proofs of the existence of God all refer to
+this God-Idea, to this logical God, the God by abstraction, and hence
+they really prove nothing, or rather, they prove nothing more than the
+existence of this idea of God.
+
+In my early youth, when first I began to be puzzled by these eternal
+problems, I read in a book, the author of which I have no wish to
+recall,[39] this sentence: "God is the great X placed over the ultimate
+barrier of human knowledge; in the measure in which science advances,
+the barrier recedes." And I wrote in the margin, "On this side of the
+barrier, everything is explained without Him; on the further side,
+nothing is explained, either with Him or without Him; God therefore is
+superfluous." And so far as concerns the God-Idea, the God of the
+proofs, I continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace is said to have
+stated that he had not found the hypothesis of God necessary in order to
+construct his scheme of the origin of the Universe, and it is very true.
+In no way whatever does the idea of God help us to understand better the
+existence, the essence and the finality of the Universe.
+
+That there is a Supreme Being, infinite, absolute and eternal, whose
+existence is unknown to us, and who has created the Universe, is not
+more conceivable than that the material basis of the Universe itself,
+its matter, is eternal and infinite and absolute. We do not understand
+the existence of the world one whit the better by telling ourselves that
+God created it. It is a begging of the question, or a merely verbal
+solution, intended to cover up our ignorance. In strict truth, we deduce
+the existence of the Creator from the fact that the thing created
+exists, a process which does not justify rationally His existence. You
+cannot deduce a necessity from a fact, or else everything were
+necessary.
+
+And if from the nature of the Universe we pass to what is called its
+order, which is supposed to necessitate an Ordainer, we may say that
+order is what there is, and we do not conceive of any other. This
+deduction of God's existence from the order of the Universe implies a
+transition from the ideal to the real order, an outward projection of
+our mind, a supposition that the rational explanation of a thing
+produces the thing itself. Human art, instructed by Nature, possesses a
+conscious creative faculty, by means of which it apprehends the process
+of creation, and we proceed to transfer this conscious and artistic
+creative faculty to the consciousness of an artist-creator, but from
+what nature he in his turn learnt his art we cannot tell.
+
+The traditional analogy of the watch and the watchmaker is inapplicable
+to a Being absolute, infinite and eternal. It is, moreover, only another
+way of explaining nothing. For to say that the world is as it is and not
+otherwise because God made it so, while at the same time we do not know
+for what reason He made it so, is to say nothing. And if we knew for
+what reason God made it so, then God is superfluous and the reason
+itself suffices. If everything were mathematics, if there were no
+irrational element, we should not have had recourse to this explanatory
+theory of a Supreme Ordainer, who is nothing but the reason of the
+irrational, and so merely another cloak for our ignorance. And let us
+not discuss here that absurd proposition that, if all the type in a
+printing-press were printed at random, the result could not possibly be
+the composition of _Don Quixote_. Something would be composed which
+would be as good as _Don Quixote_ for those who would have to be content
+with it and would grow in it and would form part of it.
+
+In effect, this traditional supposed proof of God's existence resolves
+itself fundamentally into hypostatizing or substantivating the
+explanation or reason of a phenomenon; it amounts to saying that
+Mechanics is the cause of movement, Biology of life, Philology of
+language, Chemistry of bodies, by simply adding the capital letter to
+the science and converting it into a force distinct from the phenomena
+from which we derive it and distinct from our mind which effects the
+derivation. But the God who is the result of this process, a God who is
+nothing but reason hypostatized and projected towards the infinite,
+cannot possibly be felt as something living and real, nor yet be
+conceived of save as a mere idea which will die with us.
+
+The question arises, on the other hand, whether a thing the idea of
+which has been conceived but which has no real existence, does not exist
+because God wills that it should not exist, or whether God does not will
+it to exist because, in fact, it does not exist; and, with regard to the
+impossible, whether a thing is impossible because God wills it so, or
+whether God wills it so because, in itself and by the very fact of its
+own inherent absurdity, it is impossible. God has to submit to the
+logical law of contradiction, and He cannot, according to the
+theologians, cause two and two to make either more or less than four.
+Either the law of necessity is above Him or He Himself is the law of
+necessity. And in the moral order the question arises whether falsehood,
+or homicide, or adultery, are wrong because He has so decreed it, or
+whether He has so decreed it because they are wrong. If the former, then
+God is a capricious and unreasonable God, who decrees one law when He
+might equally well have decreed another, or, if the latter, He obeys an
+intrinsic nature and essence which exists in things themselves
+independently of Him--that is to say, independently of His sovereign
+will; and if this is the case, if He obeys the innate reason of things,
+this reason, if we could but know it, would suffice us without any
+further need of God, and since we do not know it, God explains nothing.
+This reason would be above God. Neither is it of any avail to say that
+this reason is God Himself, the supreme reason of things. A reason of
+this kind, a necessary reason, is not a personal something. It is will
+that gives personality. And it is because of this problem of the
+relations between God's reason, necessarily necessary, and His will,
+necessarily free, that the logical and Aristotelian God will always be a
+contradictory God.
+
+The scholastic theologians never succeeded in disentangling themselves
+from the difficulties in which they found themselves involved when they
+attempted to reconcile human liberty with divine prescience and with the
+knowledge that God possesses of the free and contingent future; and that
+is strictly the reason why the rational God is wholly inapplicable to
+the contingent, for the notion of contingency is fundamentally the same
+as the notion of irrationality. The rational God is necessarily
+necessary in His being and in His working; in every single case He
+cannot do other than the best, and a number of different things cannot
+all equally be the best, for among infinite possibilities there is only
+one that is best accommodated to its end, just as among the infinite
+number of lines that can be drawn from one point to another, there is
+only one straight line. And the rational God, the God of reason, cannot
+but follow in each case the straight line, the line that leads most
+directly to the end proposed, a necessary end, just as the only straight
+line that leads to it is a necessary line. And thus for the divinity of
+God is substituted His necessity. And in the necessity of God, His free
+will--that is to say, His conscious personality--perishes. The God of
+our heart's desire, the God who shall save our soul from nothingness,
+must needs be an arbitrary God.
+
+Not because He thinks can God be God, but because He works, because He
+creates; He is not a contemplative but an active God. A God-Reason, a
+theoretical or contemplative God, such as is this God of theological
+rationalism, is a God that is diluted in His own contemplation. With
+this God corresponds, as we shall see, the beatific vision, understood
+as the supreme expression of human felicity. A quietist God, in short,
+as reason, by its very essence, is quietist.
+
+There remains the other famous proof of God's existence, that of the
+supposed unanimous consent in a belief in Him among all peoples. But
+this proof is not strictly rational, neither is it an argument in favour
+of the rational God who explains the Universe, but of the God of the
+heart, who makes us live. We should be justified in calling it a
+rational proof only on the supposition that we believed that reason was
+identical with a more or less unanimous agreement among all peoples,
+that it corresponded with the verdict of a universal suffrage, only on
+the supposition that we held that _vox populi_, which is said to be _vox
+Dei_, was actually the voice of reason.
+
+Such was, indeed, the belief of Lamennais, that tragic and ardent
+spirit, who affirmed that life and truth were essentially one and the
+same thing--would that they were!--and that reason was one, universal,
+everlasting and holy (_Essai sur l'indifférence_, partie iv., chap,
+viii.). He invoked the _aut omnibus credendum est aut nemini_ of
+Lactantius--we must believe all or none--and the saying of Heraclitus
+that every individual opinion is fallible, and that of Aristotle that
+the strongest proof consists in the general agreement of mankind, and
+above all that of Pliny (_Paneg. Trajani_, lxii.), to the effect that
+one man cannot deceive all men or be deceived by all--_nemo omnes,
+neminem omnes fefellerunt_. Would that it were so! And so he concludes
+with the dictum of Cicero (_De natura deorum_, lib. iii., cap. ii., 5
+and 6), that we must believe the tradition of our ancestors even though
+they fail to render us a reason--_maioribus autem nostris, etiam nulla
+ratione reddita credere_.
+
+Let us suppose that this belief of the ancients in the divine
+interpenetration of the whole of Nature is universal and constant, and
+that it is, as Aristotle calls it, an ancestral dogma (_patrios doxa_)
+(_Metaphysica_, lib. vii., cap. vii.); this would prove only that there
+is a motive impelling peoples and individuals--that is to say, all or
+almost all or a majority of them--to believe in a God. But may it not be
+that there are illusions and fallacies rooted in human nature itself? Do
+not all peoples begin by believing that the sun turns round the earth?
+And do we not all naturally incline to believe that which satisfies our
+desires? Shall we say with Hermann[40] that, "if there is a God, He has
+not left us without some indication of Himself, and if is His will that
+we should find Him."
+
+A pious desire, no doubt, but we cannot strictly call it a reason,
+unless we apply to it the Augustinian sentence, but which again is not
+a reason, "Since thou seekest Me, it must be that thou hast found Me,"
+believing that God is the cause of our seeking Him.
+
+This famous argument from the supposed unanimity of mankind's belief in
+God, the argument which with a sure instinct was seized upon by the
+ancients, is in its essence identical with the so-called moral proof
+which Kant employed in his _Critique of Practical Reason_, transposing
+its application from mankind collectively to the individual, the proof
+which he derives from our conscience, or rather from our feeling of
+divinity. It is not a proof strictly or specifically rational, but
+vital; it cannot be applied to the logical God, the _ens summum_, the
+essentially simple and abstract Being, the immobile and impassible prime
+mover, the God-Reason, in a word, but to the biotic God, to the Being
+essentially complex and concrete, to the suffering God who suffers and
+desires in us and with us, to the Father of Christ who is only to be
+approached through Man, through His Son (John xiv. 6), and whose
+revelation is historical, or if you like, anecdotical, but not
+philosophical or categorical.
+
+The unanimous consent of mankind (let us suppose the unanimity) or, in
+other words, this universal longing of all human souls who have arrived
+at the consciousness of their humanity, which desires to be the end and
+meaning of the Universe, this longing, which is nothing but that very
+essence of the soul which consists in its effort to persist eternally
+and without a break in the continuity of consciousness, leads us to the
+human, anthropomorphic God, the projection of our consciousness to the
+Consciousness of the Universe; it leads us to the God who confers human
+meaning and finality upon the Universe and who is not the _ens summum_,
+the _primum movens_, nor the Creator of the Universe, nor merely the
+Idea-God. It leads us to the living, subjective God, for He is simply
+subjectivity objectified or personality universalized--He is more than a
+mere idea, and He is will rather than reason. God is Love--that is,
+Will. Reason, the Word, derives from Him, but He, the Father, is, above
+all, Will.
+
+"There can be no doubt whatever," Ritschl says (_Rechtfertigung und
+Versöhnung_, iii., chap. v.), "that a very imperfect view was taken of
+God's spiritual personality in the older theology, when the functions of
+knowing and willing alone were employed to illustrate it. Religious
+thought plainly ascribes to God affections of feeling as well. The older
+theology, however, laboured under the impression that feeling and
+emotion were characteristic only of limited and created personality; it
+transformed, _e.g._, the religious idea of the Divine blessedness into
+eternal self-knowledge, and that of the Divine wrath into a fixed
+purpose to punish sin." Yes, this logical God, arrived at by the _via
+negationis_, was a God who, strictly speaking, neither loved nor hated,
+because He neither enjoyed nor suffered, an inhuman God, and His justice
+was a rational or mathematical justice--that is, an injustice.
+
+The attributes of the living God, of the Father of Christ, must be
+deduced from His historical revelation in the Gospel and in the
+conscience of every Christian believer, and not from metaphysical
+reasonings which lead only to the Nothing-God of Scotus Erigena, to the
+rational or pantheistic God, to the atheist God--in short, to the
+de-personalized Divinity.
+
+Not by the way of reason, but only by the way of love and of suffering,
+do we come to the living God, the human God. Reason rather separates us
+from Him. We cannot first know Him in order that afterwards we may love
+Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering after Him,
+before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God,
+and this knowledge has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God
+is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within
+the limits of our mind--that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we
+attempt to define Him, there rises up before us--Nothingness.
+
+The idea of God, formulated by a theodicy that claims to be rational, is
+simply an hypothesis, like the hypotheses of ether, for example.
+
+Ether is, in effect, a merely hypothetical entity, valuable only in so
+far as it explains that which by means of it we endeavour to
+explain--light, electricity or universal gravitation--and only in so far
+as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. In like manner the
+idea of God is also an hypothesis, valuable only in so far as it enables
+us to explain that which by means of if we endeavour to explain--the
+essence and existence of the Universe--and only so long as these cannot
+be explained in any other way. And since in reality we explain the
+Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the
+idea of God, the supreme _petitio principii_, is valueless.
+
+But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air, on
+the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even though it did
+not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless
+always be directly aware of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in
+moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself,
+not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and
+even though the idea of Him does not enable us to explain either the
+existence or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct
+feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this
+feeling--mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic
+sense of life is founded upon this--this feeling is a feeling of hunger
+for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first
+instance, as we shall see, to wish that there may be a God, to be unable
+to live without Him.
+
+So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason in search of God,
+I could not find Him, for I was not deluded by the idea of God, neither
+could I take an idea for God, and it was then, as I wandered among the
+wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought to seek no other
+consolation than the truth, meaning thereby reason, and yet for all that
+I was not comforted. But as I sank deeper and deeper into rational
+scepticism on the one hand and into heart's despair on the other, the
+hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation of spirit made me
+feel the want of God, and with the want of Him, His reality. And I
+wished that there might be a God, that God might exist. And God does not
+exist, but rather super-exists, and He is sustaining our existence,
+existing us _(existiéndonos)_.
+
+God, who is Love, the Father of Love, is the son of love in us. There
+are men of a facile and external habit of mind, slaves of reason, that
+reason which externalizes us, who think it a shrewd comment to say that
+so far from God having made man in His image and likeness, it is rather
+man who has made his gods or his God in his own image and likeness,[41]
+and so superficial are they that they do not pause to consider that if
+the second of these propositions be true, as in fact it is, it is owing
+to the fact that the first is not less true. God and man, in effect,
+mutually create one another; God creates or reveals Himself in man and
+man creates himself in God. God is His own maker, _Deus ipse se facit_,
+said Lactantius (_Divinarum Institutionum_, ii., 8), and we may say that
+He is making Himself continually both in man and by man. And if each of
+us, impelled by his love, by his hunger for divinity, creates for
+himself an image of God according to his own desire, and if according to
+His desire God creates Himself for each of us, then there is a
+collective, social, human God, the resultant of all the human
+imaginations that imagine Him. For God is and reveals Himself in
+collectivity. And God is the richest and most personal of human
+conceptions.
+
+The Master of divinity has bidden us be perfect as our Father who is in
+heaven is perfect (Matt. v. 48), and in the sphere of thought and
+feeling our perfection consists in the zeal with which we endeavour to
+equate our imagination with the total imagination of the humanity of
+which in God we form a part.
+
+The logical theory of the opposition between the extension and the
+comprehension of a concept, the one increasing in the ratio in which the
+other diminishes, is well known. The concept that is most extensive and
+at the same time least comprehensive is that of being or of thing, which
+embraces everything that exists and possesses no other distinguishing
+quality than that of being; while the concept that is most comprehensive
+and least extensive is that of the Universe, which is only applicable to
+itself and comprehends all existing qualities. And the logical or
+rational God, the God obtained by way of negation, the absolute entity,
+merges, like reality itself, into nothingness; for, as Hegel pointed
+out, pure being and pure nothingness are identical. And the God of the
+heart, the God who is felt, the God of living men, is the Universe
+itself conceived as personality, is the consciousness of the Universe. A
+God universal and personal, altogether different from the individual God
+of a rigid metaphysical monotheism.
+
+I must advert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists
+between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the
+one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the
+continent or thing which contains, personality the content or thing
+contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my
+comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself--which
+is in a certain way the whole Universe--and that my individuality is my
+extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite. A hundred jars of
+hard earthenware are strongly individualized, but it is possible for
+them to be all equally empty or all equally full of the same homogeneous
+liquid, whereas two bladders of so delicate a membrane as to admit of
+the action of osmosis and exosmosis may be strongly differentiated and
+contain liquids of a very mixed composition. And thus a man, in so far
+as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort
+of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating
+content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more
+personality a man has and the greater his interior richness and the more
+he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from
+his fellows. In the same way the rigid God of deism, of Aristotelian
+monotheism, the _ens summum_, is a being in whom individuality, or
+rather simplicity, stifles personality. Definition kills him, for to
+define is to impose boundaries, it is to limit, and it is impossible to
+define the absolutely indefinable. This God lacks interior richness; he
+is not a society in himself. And this the vital revelation obviated by
+the belief in the Trinity, which makes God a society and even a family
+in himself and no longer a pure individual. The God of faith is
+personal; He is a person because He includes three persons, for
+personality is not sensible of itself in isolation. An isolated person
+ceases to be a person, for whom should he love? And if he does not love,
+he is not a person. Nor can a simple being love himself without his love
+expanding him into a compound being.
+
+It was because God was felt as a Father that the belief in the Trinity
+arose. For a God-Father cannot be a single, that is, a solitary, God. A
+father is always the father of a family. And the fact that God was felt
+as a father acted as a continual incentive to conceive Him not merely
+anthropomorphically--that is to say, as a man, _anthropos_--but
+andromorphically, as a male, _anêr_. In the popular Christian
+imagination, in effect, God the Father is conceived of as a male. And
+the reason is that man, _homo_, _anthropos_, as we know him, is
+necessarily either a male, _vir_, _anêr_, or a female, _mulier_, _gynê_. And
+to these may be added the child, who is neuter. And hence in order to
+satisfy imaginatively this necessity of feeling God as a perfect
+man--that is, as a family--arose the cult of the God-Mother, the Virgin
+Mary, and the cult of the Child Jesus.
+
+The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which, by the gradual elevation of
+the divine element in the Virgin has led almost to her deification,
+answers merely to the demand of the feeling that God should be a perfect
+man, that God should include in His nature the feminine element. The
+progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety,
+having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, _theotokos_,
+_deipara_, has culminated in attributing to her the status of
+co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without
+the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a position between
+Humanity and Divinity and nearer Divinity than Humanity. And it has been
+surmised that in course of time she may perhaps even come to be regarded
+as yet another personal manifestation of the Godhead.
+
+And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion of the Trinity
+into a Quaternity. If _pneuma_, in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter
+had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already
+have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? That
+fervent piety which always knows how to mould theological speculation in
+accordance with its own desires would have found sufficient warranty for
+such a doctrine in the text of the Gospel, in Luke's narrative of the
+Annunciation where the angel Gabriel hails Mary with the words, "The
+Holy Spirit shall come upon thee," _pneuma agion epeleusetai epi se_ (Luke
+i. 35). And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel
+to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification
+with the Word.
+
+In any case the cult of the Virgin, of the eternal feminine, or rather
+of the divine feminine, of the divine maternity, helps to complete the
+personalization of God by constituting Him a family.
+
+In one of my books (_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_, part ii., chap.
+lxvii.) I have said that "God was and is, in our mind, masculine. In His
+mode of judging and condemning men, He acts as a male, not as a human
+person above the limitation of sex; He acts as a father. And to
+counterbalance this, the Mother element was required, the Mother who
+always forgives, the Mother whose arms are always open to the child when
+he flies from the frowning brow or uplifted hand of the angry father;
+the Mother in whose bosom we seek the dim, comforting memory of that
+warmth and peace of our pre-natal unconsciousness, of that milky
+sweetness that soothed our dreams of innocence; the Mother who knows no
+justice but that of forgiveness, no law but that of love. Our weak and
+imperfect conception of God as a God with a long beard and a voice of
+thunder, of a God who promulgates laws and pronounces dooms, of a God
+who is the Master of a household, a Roman Paterfamilias, required
+counterpoise and complement, and since fundamentally we are unable to
+conceive of the personal and living God as exalted above human and even
+masculine characteristics, and still less as a neutral or hermaphrodite
+God, we have recourse to providing Him with a feminine God, and by the
+side of the God-Father we have placed the Goddess-Mother, she who always
+forgives, because, since she sees with love-blind eyes, she sees always
+the hidden cause of the fault and in that hidden cause the only justice
+of forgiveness ..."
+
+And to this I must now add that not only are we unable to conceive of
+the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to
+conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I,
+an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living I is an
+I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of
+other, and by other I's; I am sprung, from a multitude of ancestors, I
+carry them within me in extract, and at the same time I carry within me,
+potentially, a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection of my I
+to the infinite--or rather I, the projection of God to the finite--must
+also be multitude. Hence, in order to save the personality of God--that
+is to say, in order to save the living God--faith's need--the need of
+the feeling and the imagination--of conceiving Him and; feeling Him as
+possessed of a certain internal multiplicity.
+
+This need the pagan feeling of a living divinity obviated by polytheism.
+It is the agglomeration of its gods, the republic of them, that really
+constitutes its Divinity. The real God of Hellenic paganism is not so
+much Father Zeus (_Jupiter_) as the whole society of gods and demi-gods.
+Hence the solemnity of the invocation of Demosthenes when he invoked all
+the gods and all the goddesses: _tois theohis euchomai pasi kahi pasais_.
+And when the rationalizers converted the term god, _theos_, which is
+properly an adjective, a quality predicated of each one of the gods,
+into a substantive, and added the definite article to it, they produced
+_the_ god, _o theos_, the dead and abstract god of philosophical
+rationalism, a substantivized quality and therefore void of personality.
+For the masculine concrete god (_el_ dios) is nothing but the neuter
+abstract divine quality (_lo_ divino). Now the transition from feeling
+the divinity in all things to substantivating it and converting the
+Divinity into God, cannot be achieved without feeling undergoing a
+certain risk. And the Aristotelian God, the God of the logical proofs,
+is nothing more than the Divinity, a concept and not a living person who
+can be felt and with whom through love man can communicate. This God is
+merely a substantivized adjective; He is a constitutional God who
+reigns but does not govern, and Knowledge is His constitutional charter.
+
+And even in Greco-Latin paganism itself the tendency towards a living
+monotheism is apparent in the fact that Zeus was conceived of and felt
+as a father, _Zeus patêr_, as Homer calls him, the _Ju-piter_ or
+_Ju-pater_ of the Latins, and as a father of a whole widely extended
+family of gods and goddesses who together with him constituted the
+Divinity.
+
+The conjunction of pagan polytheism with Judaic monotheism, which had
+endeavoured by other means to save the personality of God, gave birth to
+the feeling of the Catholic God, a God who is a society, as the pagan
+God of whom I have spoken was a society, and who at the same time is
+one, as the God of Israel finally became one. Such is the Christian
+Trinity, whose deepest sense rationalistic deism has scarcely ever
+succeeded in understanding, that deism, which though more or less
+impregnated with Christianity, always remains Unitarian or Socinian.
+
+And the truth is that we feel God less as a superhuman consciousness
+than as the actual consciousness of the whole human race, past, present,
+and future, as the collective consciousness of the whole race, and still
+more, as the total and infinite consciousness which embraces and
+sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human, and perhaps,
+super-human. The divinity that there is in everything, from the
+lowest--that is to say, from the least conscious--of living forms, to
+the highest, including our own human consciousness, this divinity we
+feel to be personalized, conscious of itself, in God. And this gradation
+of consciousnesses, this sense of the gulf between the human and the
+fully divine, the universal, consciousness, finds its counterpart in the
+belief in angels with their different hierarchies, as intermediaries
+between our human consciousness and that of God. And these gradations a
+faith consistent with itself must believe to be infinite, for only by an
+infinite number of degrees is it possible to pass from the finite to the
+infinite.
+
+Deistic rationalism conceives God as the Reason of the Universe, but its
+logic compels it to conceive Him as an impersonal reason--that is to
+say, as an idea--while deistic vitalism feels and imagines God as
+Consciousness, and therefore as a person or rather as a society of
+persons. The consciousness of each one of us, in effect, is a society of
+persons; in me there are various I's and even the I's of those among
+whom I live, live in me.
+
+The God of deistic rationalism, in effect, the God of the logical proofs
+of His existence, the _ens realissimum_ and the immobile prime mover, is
+nothing more than a Supreme Reason, but in the same sense in which we
+can call the law of universal gravitation the reason of the falling of
+bodies, this law being merely the explanation of the phenomenon. But
+will anyone say that that which we call the law of universal
+gravitation, or any other law or mathematical principle, is a true and
+independent reality, that it is an angel, that it is something which
+possesses consciousness of itself and others, that it is a person? No,
+it is nothing but an idea without any reality outside of the mind of him
+who conceives it. And similarly this God-Reason either possesses
+consciousness of himself or he possesses no reality outside the mind
+that conceives him. And if he possesses consciousness of himself, he
+becomes a personal reason, and then all the value of the traditional
+proofs disappears, for these proofs only proved a reason, but not a
+supreme consciousness. Mathematics prove an order, a constancy, a reason
+in the series of mechanical phenomena, but they 'do not prove that this
+reason is conscious of itself. This reason is a logical necessity, but
+the logical necessity does not prove the teleological or finalist
+necessity. And where there is no finality there is no personality, there
+is no consciousness.
+
+The rational God, therefore--that is to say, the God who is simply the
+Reason of the Universe and nothing more--consummates his own
+destruction, is destroyed in our mind in so far as he is such a God, and
+is only born again in us when we feel him in our heart as a living
+person, as Consciousness, and no longer merely as the impersonal and
+objective Reason of the Universe. If we wish for a rational explanation
+of the construction of a machine, all that we require to know is the
+mechanical science of its constructor; but if we would have a reason for
+the existence of such a machine, then, since it is the work not of
+Nature but of man, we must suppose a conscious, constructive being. But
+the second part of this reasoning is not applicable to God, even though
+it be said that in Him the mechanical science and the mechanician, by
+means of which the machine was constructed, are one and the same thing.
+From the rational point of view this identification is merely a begging
+of the question. And thus it is that reason destroys this Supreme
+Reason, in so far as the latter is a person.
+
+The human reason, in effect, is a reason that is based upon the
+irrational, upon the total vital consciousness, upon will and feeling;
+our human reason is not a reason that can prove to us the existence of a
+Supreme Reason, which in its turn would have to be based upon the
+Supreme Irrational, upon the Universal Consciousness. And the revelation
+of this Supreme Consciousness in our feeling and imagination, by love,
+by faith, by the process of personalization, is that which leads us to
+believe in the living God.
+
+And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you,
+lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And He is
+in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is
+Himself creating the longing for Himself. And He is the God of the
+humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of
+the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to
+confound the things which are mighty (i Cor. i. 27). And God is in each
+one of us in the measure in which each one feels Him and loves Him. "If
+of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without
+sincerity of heart, and the other prays to an idol with all the passion
+of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to an idol,
+while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that
+the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires.
+And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in
+theology. The venerable Father of the long beard and white locks who
+appears among the clouds carrying the globe of the world in his hand is
+more living and more real than the _ens realissimum_ of theodicy.
+
+Reason is an analytical, that is, a dissolving force, whenever it
+transfers its activity from the form of intuitions, whether those of the
+individual instinct of preservation or those of the social instinct of
+perpetuation, and applies it to the essence and matter of them. Reason
+orders the sensible perceptions which give us the material world; but
+when its analysis is exercised upon the reality of the perceptions
+themselves, it dissolves them and plunges us into a world of
+appearances, a world of shadows without consistency, for outside the
+domain of the formal, reason is nihilist and annihilating. And it
+performs the same terrible office when we withdraw it from its proper
+domain and apply it to the scrutiny of the imaginative intuitions which
+give us the spiritual world. For reason annihilates and imagination
+completes, integrates or totalizes; reason by itself alone kills, and it
+is imagination that gives life. If it is true that imagination by itself
+alone, in giving us life without limit, leads us to lose our identity in
+the All and also kills us as individuals, it kills us by excess of life.
+Reason, the head, speaks to us the word Nothing! imagination, the heart,
+the word All! and between all and nothing, by the fusion of the all and
+the nothing within us, we live in God, who is All, and God lives in us
+who, without Him, are nothing. Reason reiterates, Vanity of vanities!
+all is vanity! And imagination answers, Plenitude of plenitudes! all is
+plenitude! And thus we live the vanity of plenitude or the plenitude of
+vanity.
+
+And so deeply rooted in the depths of man's being is this vital need of
+living a world[42] illogical, irrational, personal or divine, that those
+who do not believe in God, or believe that they do not believe in Him,
+believe nevertheless in some little pocket god or even devil of their
+own, or in an omen, or in a horseshoe picked up by chance on the
+roadside and carried about with them to bring them good luck and defend
+them from that very reason whose loyal and devoted henchmen they imagine
+themselves to be.
+
+The God whom we hunger after is the God to whom we pray, the God of the
+_Pater Noster_, of the Lord's Prayer; the God whom we beseech, before
+all and above all, and whether we are aware of it or not, to instil
+faith into us, to make us believe in Him, to make Himself in us, the God
+to whom we pray that His name may be hallowed and that His will may be
+done--His will, not His reason--on earth as it is in heaven; but feeling
+that His will cannot be other than the essence of our will, the desire
+to persist eternally.
+
+And such a God is the God of love--_how_ He is it profits us not to ask,
+but rather let each consult his own heart and give his imagination leave
+to picture Him in the remoteness of the Universe, gazing down upon him
+with those myriad eyes of His that shine in the night-darkened heavens.
+He in whom you believe, reader, He is your God, He who has lived with
+you and within you, who was born with you, who was a child when you were
+a child, who became a man according as you became a man, who will vanish
+when you yourself vanish, and who is your principle of continuity in
+the spiritual life, for He is the principle of solidarity among all men
+and in each man and between men and the Universe, and He is, as you are,
+a person. And if you believe in God, God believes in you, and believing
+in you He creates you continually. For in your essence you are nothing
+but the idea that God possesses of you--but a living idea, because the
+idea of a God who is living and conscious of Himself, of a
+God-Consciousness, and apart from what you are in the society of God you
+are nothing.
+
+How to define God? Yes, that is our longing. That was the longing of the
+man Jacob, when, after wrestling all the night until the breaking of the
+day with that divine visitant, he cried, "Tell me, I pray thee, thy
+name!" (Gen. xxxii. 29). Listen to the words of that great Christian
+preacher, Frederick William Robertson, in a sermon preached in Trinity
+Chapel, Brighton, on the 10th of June, 1849: "And this is our
+struggle--_the_ struggle. Let any true man go down into the deeps of his
+own being, and answer us--what is the cry that comes from the most real
+part of his nature? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for that
+in his _first_ communing with God--preservation, safety. Is it even
+this--to be forgiven our sins? Jacob had a sin to be forgiven, and in
+that most solemn moment of his existence he did not say a syllable about
+it. Or is it this--'Hallowed be Thy name'? No, my brethren. Out of our
+frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the earthlier
+hours of our religion may be this--'Save my soul'; but in the most
+unearthly moments it is this--'Tell me thy name.' We move through a
+world of mystery; and the deepest question is, What is the being that is
+ever near, sometimes felt, never seen; that which has haunted us from
+childhood with a dream of something surpassingly fair, which has never
+yet been realized; that which sweeps through the soul at times as a
+desolation, like the blast from the wings of the Angel of Death,
+leaving us stricken and silent in our loneliness; that which has
+touched us in our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with
+agony, and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain; that
+which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness and conceptions of
+superhuman excellence? Shall we say It or He? What is It? Who is He?
+Those anticipations of Immortality and God--what are they? Are they the
+mere throbbings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living
+something beside me? Are they the sound of my own wishes, echoing
+through the vast void of Nothingness? or shall I call them God, Father,
+Spirit, Love? A living Being within me or outside me? Tell me Thy name,
+thou awful mystery of Loveliness! This is the struggle of all earnest
+life."[43]
+
+Thus Robertson. To which I must add this comment, that Tell me thy name
+is essentially the same as Save my soul! We ask Him His name in order
+that He may save our soul, that He may save the human soul, that He may
+save the human finality of the Universe. And if they tell us that He is
+called He, that He is the _ens realissimum_ or the Supreme Being or any
+other metaphysical name, we are not contented, for we know that every
+metaphysical name is an X, and we go on asking Him His name. And there
+is only one name that satisfies our longing, and that is the name
+Saviour, Jesus. God is the love that saves. As Browning said in his
+_Christmas Eve and Easter Day_,
+
+    For the loving worm within its clod,
+    Were diviner than a loveless God
+    Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.
+
+The essence of the divine is Love, Will that personalizes and
+eternalizes, that feels the hunger for eternity and infinity.
+
+It is ourselves, it is our eternity that we seek in God, it is our
+divinization. It was Browning again who said, in _Saul_,
+
+    'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh that I seek
+    In the Godhead!
+
+But this God who saves us, this personal God, the Consciousness of the
+Universe who envelops and sustains our consciousnesses, this God who
+gives human finality to the whole creation--does He exist? Have we
+proofs of His existence?
+
+This question leads in the first place to an enquiry into the cleaning
+of this notion of existence. What is it to exist and in what sense do we
+speak of things as not existing?
+
+In its etymological signification to exist is to be outside of
+ourselves, outside of our mind: _ex-sistere_. But is there anything
+outside of our mind, outside of our consciousness which embraces the sum
+of the known? Undoubtedly there is. The matter of knowledge comes to us
+from without. And what is the mode of this matter? It is impossible for
+us to know, for to know is to clothe matter with form, and hence we
+cannot know the formless as formless. To do so would be tantamount to
+investing chaos with order.
+
+This problem of the existence of God, a problem that is rationally
+insoluble, is really identical with the problem of consciousness, of the
+_ex-sistentia_ and not of the _in-sistentia_ of consciousness, it is
+none other than the problem of the substantial existence of the soul,
+the problem of the perpetuity of the human soul, the problem of the
+human finality of the Universe itself. To believe in a living and
+personal God, in an eternal and universal consciousness that knows and
+loves us, is to believe that the Universe exists _for_ man. For man, or
+for a consciousness of the same order as the human consciousness, of the
+same nature, although sublimated, a consciousness that is capable of
+knowing us, in the depth of whose being our memory may live for ever.
+Perhaps, as I have said before, by a supreme and desperate effort of
+resignation we might succeed in making the sacrifice of our personality
+provided that we knew that at our death it would go to enrich a Supreme
+Personality; provided that we knew that the Universal Soul was nourished
+by our souls and had need of them. We might perhaps meet death with a
+desperate resignation or with a resigned despair, delivering up our soul
+to the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the work that bears
+the impress of our person, if it were certain that this humanity were
+destined to bequeath its soul in its turn to another soul, when at long
+last consciousness shall have become extinct upon this desire-tormented
+Earth. But is it certain?
+
+And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human collective
+consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe,
+and if this Consciousness is eternal, why must our own individual
+consciousness--yours, reader, mine--be not eternal?
+
+In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly--a
+consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined
+to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat,
+a merely transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity that
+inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by
+living organisms, by consciousnesses akin to our own, and a profound
+longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to
+star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of
+transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe
+that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less
+degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves,
+but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His
+finality as we feel it.
+
+What would a universe be without any consciousness capable of reflecting
+it and knowing it? What would objectified reason be without will and
+feeling? For us it would be equivalent to nothing--a thousand times more
+dreadful than nothing.
+
+If such a supposition is reality, our life is deprived of sense and
+value.
+
+It is not, therefore, rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels
+us to believe in God. And to believe in God--I must reiterate it yet
+again--is, before all and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger
+for divinity, to be sensible of His lack and absence, to wish that God
+may exist. And it is to wish to save the human finality of the Universe.
+For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if
+it be that our consciousness is based upon a Consciousness, if
+consciousness is the end of the Universe.
+
+"The wicked man hath said in his heart, There is no God." And this is
+truth. For in his head the righteous man may say to himself, God does
+not exist! But only the wicked can say it in his heart. Not to believe
+that there is a God or to believe that there is not a God, is one thing;
+to resign oneself to there not being a God is another thing, and it is a
+terrible and inhuman thing; but not to wish that there be a God exceeds
+every other moral monstrosity; although, as a matter of fact, those who
+deny God deny Him because of their despair at not finding Him.
+
+And now reason once again confronts us with the Sphinx-like
+question--the Sphinx, in effect, is reason--Does God exist? This eternal
+and eternalizing person who gives meaning--and I will add, a human
+meaning, for there is none other--to the Universe, is it a substantial
+something, existing independently of our consciousness, independently of
+our desire? Here we arrive at the insoluble, and it is best that it
+should be so. Let it suffice for reason that it cannot prove the
+impossibility of His existence.
+
+To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to
+act as if He existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the
+inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets
+hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this
+divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.
+
+Let us see how this may be.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] Lecture I., p. 36. London, 1895, Black.
+
+[39] _No quiero acordarme_, a phrase that is always associated in
+Spanish literature with the opening sentence of _Don Quijote: En an
+lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme_.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[40] W. Hermann, _Christlich systematische Dogmatik_, in the volume
+entitled _Systematische christliche Religion. Die Kultur der Gegenwart_
+series, published by P. Hinneberg.
+
+[41] _Dieu a fait l'homme à son image, mais l'homme le lui a bien
+rendu_, Voltaire.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[42] _Vivir un mundo_.
+
+[43] _Sermons_, by the Rev. Frederick W. Robertson. First series, sermon
+iii., "Jacob's Wrestling." Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübuer and Co., London,
+1898.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY
+
+Sanctius ac reverentius visum de actis deorum credere quam
+scire.--TACITUS: _Germania_, 34.
+
+
+The road that leads us to the living God, the God of the heart, and that
+leads us back to Him when we have left Him for the lifeless God of
+logic, is the road of faith, not of rational or mathematical conviction.
+
+And what is faith?
+
+This is the question propounded in the Catechism of Christian Doctrine
+that was taught us at school, and the answer runs: Faith is believing
+what we have not seen.
+
+This, in an essay written some twelve years ago, I amended as follows:
+"Believing what we have not seen, no! but creating what we do not see."
+And I have already told you that believing in God is, in the first
+instance at least, wishing that God may be, longing for the existence of
+God.
+
+The theological virtue of faith, according to the Apostle Paul, whose
+definition serves as the basis of the traditional Christian
+disquisitions upon it, is "the substance of things hoped for, the
+evidence of things not seen," _elpizomevôn hupostasis, pragmatôn
+elegchos ou blepomenôn_ (Heb. xi. 1).
+
+The substance, or rather the support and basis, of hope, the guarantee
+of it. That which connects, or, rather than connects, subordinates,
+faith to hope. And in fact we do not hope because we believe, but rather
+we believe because we hope. It is hope in God, it is the ardent longing
+that there may be a God who guarantees the eternity of consciousness,
+that leads us to believe in Him.
+
+But faith, which after all is something compound, comprising a
+cognitive, logical, or rational element together with an affective,
+biotic, sentimental, and strictly irrational element, is presented to us
+under the form of knowledge. And hence the insuperable difficulty of
+separating it from some dogma or other. Pure faith, free from dogmas,
+about which I wrote a great deal years ago, is a phantasm. Neither is
+the difficulty overcome by inventing the theory of faith in faith
+itself. Faith needs a matter to work upon.
+
+Believing is a form of knowing, even if it be no more than a knowing and
+even a formulating of our vital longing. In ordinary language the term
+"believing," however, is used in a double and even a contradictory
+sense. It may express, on the one hand, the highest degree of the mind's
+conviction of the truth of a thing, and, on the other hand, it may imply
+merely a weak and hesitating persuasion of its truth. For if in one
+sense believing expresses the firmest kind of assent we are capable of
+giving, the expression "I believe that it is so, although I am not sure
+of it," is nevertheless common in ordinary speech.
+
+And this agrees with what we have said above with respect to uncertainty
+as the basis of faith. The most robust faith, in so far as it is
+distinguished from all other knowledge that is not _pistic_ or of
+faith--faithful, as we might say--is based on uncertainty. And this is
+because faith, the guarantee of things hoped for, is not so much
+rational adhesion to a theoretical principle as trust in a person who
+assures us of something. Faith supposes an objective, personal element.
+We do not so much believe something as believe someone who promises us
+or assures us of this or the other thing. We believe in a person and in
+God in so far as He is a person and a personalization of the Universe.
+
+This personal or religious element in faith is evident. Faith, it is
+said, is in itself neither theoretical knowledge nor rational adhesion
+to a truth, nor yet is its essence sufficiently explained by defining it
+as trust in God. Seeberg says of faith that it is "the inward submission
+to the spiritual authority of God, immediate obedience. And in so far as
+this obedience is the means of attaining a rational principle, faith is
+a personal conviction."[44]
+
+The faith which St. Paul defined, _pistis_ in Greek, is better
+translated as trust, confidence. The word _pistis_ is derived from the
+verb _peithô_, which in its active voice means to persuade and in its
+middle voice to trust in someone, to esteem him as worthy of trust, to
+place confidence in him, to obey. And _fidare se_, to trust, is derived
+from the root _fid_--whence _fides_, faith, and also confidence. The
+Greek root _pith_ and the Latin _fid_ are twin brothers. In the root of
+the word "faith" itself, therefore, there is implicit the idea of
+confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence
+is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we conceive as
+something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something
+impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the
+person who gives us hope, that we believe, not directly and immediately
+in truth itself or in hope itself.
+
+And this personal or rather personifying element in faith extends even
+to the lowest forms of it, for it is this that produces faith in
+pseudo-revelation, in inspiration, in miracle. There is a story of a
+Parisian doctor, who, when he found that a quack-healer was drawing away
+his clientèle, removed to a quarter of the city as distant as possible
+from his former abode, where he was totally unknown, and here he gave
+himself out as a quack-healer and conducted himself as such. When he was
+denounced as an illegal practitioner he produced his doctor's
+certificate, and explained his action more or less as follows: "I am
+indeed a doctor, but if I had announced myself as such I should not
+have had as large a clientèle as I have as a quack-healer. Now that all
+my clients know that I have studied medicine, however, and that I am a
+properly qualified medical man, they will desert me in favour of some
+quack who can assure them that he has never studied, but cures simply by
+inspiration." And true it is that a doctor is discredited when it is
+proved that he has never studied medicine and possesses no qualifying
+certificate, and that a quack is discredited when it is proved that he
+has studied and is a qualified practitioner. For some believe in science
+and in study, while others believe in the person, in inspiration, and
+even in ignorance.
+
+"There is one distinction in the world's geography which comes
+immediately to our minds when we thus state the different thoughts and
+desires of men concerning their religion. We remember how the whole
+world is in general divided into two hemispheres upon this matter. One
+half of the world--the great dim East--is mystic. It insists upon not
+seeing anything too clearly. Make any one of the great ideas of life
+distinct and clear, and immediately it seems to the Oriental to be
+untrue. He has an instinct which tells him that the vastest thoughts are
+too vast for the human mind, and that if they are made to present
+themselves in forms of statement which the human mind can comprehend,
+their nature is violated and their strength is lost.
+
+"On the other hand, the Occidental, the man of the West, demands
+clearness and is impatient with mystery. He loves a definite statement
+as much as his brother of the East dislikes it. He insists on knowing
+what the eternal and infinite forces mean to his personal life, how they
+will make him personally happier and better, almost how they will build
+the house over his head, and cook the dinner on his hearth. This is the
+difference between the East and the West, between man on the banks of
+the Ganges and man on the banks of the Mississippi. Plenty of
+exceptions, of course, there are--mystics in Boston and St. Louis,
+hard-headed men of facts in Bombay and Calcutta. The two great
+dispositions cannot be shut off from one another by an ocean or a range
+of mountains. In some nations and places--as, for instance, among the
+Jews and in our own New England--they notably commingle. But in general
+they thus divide the world between them. The East lives in the moonlight
+of mystery, the West in the sunlight of scientific fact. The East cries
+out to the Eternal for vague impulses. The West seizes the present with
+light hands, and will not let it go till it has furnished it with
+reasonable, intelligible motives. Each misunderstands, distrusts, and in
+large degree despises the other. But the two hemispheres together, and
+not either one by itself, make up the total world." Thus, in one of his
+sermons, spoke the great Unitarian preacher Phillips Brooks, late Bishop
+of Massachusetts (_The Mystery of Iniquity and Other Sermons_, sermon
+xvi.).
+
+We might rather say that throughout the whole world, in the East as well
+as in the West, rationalists seek definition and believe in the concept,
+while vitalists seek inspiration and believe in the person. The former
+scrutinize the Universe in order that they may wrest its secrets from
+it; the latter pray to the Consciousness of the Universe, strive to
+place themselves in immediate relationship with the Soul of the World,
+with God, in order that they may find the guarantee or substance of what
+they hope for, which is not to die, and the evidence of what they do not
+see.
+
+And since a person is a will, and will always has reference to the
+future, he who believes, believes in what is to come--that is, in what
+he hopes for. We do not believe, strictly speaking, in what is or in
+what was, except as the guarantee, as the substance, of what will be.
+For the Christian, to believe in the resurrection of Christ--that is to
+say, in tradition and in the Gospel, which assure him that Christ has
+risen, both of them personal forces--is to believe that he himself will
+one day rise again by the grace of Christ. And even scientific
+faith--for such there is--refers to the future and is an act of trust.
+The man of science believes that at a certain future date an eclipse of
+the sun will take place; he believes that the laws which have governed
+the world hitherto will continue to govern it.
+
+To believe, I repeat, is to place confidence in someone, and it has
+reference to a person. I say that I know that there is an animal called
+the horse, and that it has such and such characteristics, because I have
+seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or the
+ornithorhyncus, and that it possesses such and such qualities, because I
+believe those who assure me that they have seen it. And hence the
+element of uncertainty attached to faith, for it is possible that a
+person may be deceived or that he may deceive us.
+
+But, on the other hand, this personal element in belief gives it an
+effective and loving character, and above all, in religious faith, a
+reference to what is hoped for. Perhaps there is nobody who would
+sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of
+a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does
+not demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand, there are
+many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their
+religious faith. Indeed it is truer to say that martyrs make faith than
+that faith makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the
+intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a
+theoretical truth, a process in which the will merely sets in motion our
+faculty of comprehension; faith is an act of the will--it is a movement
+of the soul towards a practical truth, towards a person, towards
+something that makes us not merely comprehend life, but that makes us
+live.[45]
+
+Faith makes us live by showing us that life, although it is dependent
+upon reason, has its well-spring and source of power elsewhere, in
+something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man
+of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind, has said
+that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that
+gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of the
+reason lead to nothing but affliction of spirit (_Traité de
+l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans
+l'histoire_, § 329). And in truth we wish to live.
+
+But, although we have said that faith is a thing of the will, it would
+perhaps be better to say that it is will itself--the will not to die,
+or, rather, that it is some other psychic force distinct from
+intelligence, will, and feeling. We should thus have feeling, knowing,
+willing, and believing or creating. For neither feeling, nor
+intelligence, nor will creates; they operate upon a material already
+given, upon the material given them by faith. Faith is the creative
+power in man. But since it has a more intimate relation with the will
+than with any other of his faculties, we conceive it under the form of
+volition. It should be borne in mind, however, that wishing to
+believe--that is to say, wishing to create--is not precisely the same as
+believing or creating, although it is its starting-point.
+
+Faith, therefore, if not a creative force, is the fruit of the will, and
+its function is to create. Faith, in a certain sense, creates its
+object. And faith in God consists in creating God; and since it is God
+who gives us faith in Himself, it is God who is continually creating
+Himself in us. Therefore St. Augustine said: "I will seek Thee, Lord, by
+calling upon Thee, and I will call upon Thee by believing in Thee. My
+faith calls upon Thee, Lord, the faith which Thou hast given me, with
+which Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy Son, through the
+ministry of Thy preacher" (_Confessions_, book i., chap. i.). The power
+of creating God in our own image and likeness, of personalizing the
+Universe, simply means that we carry God within us, as the substance of
+what we hope for, and that God is continually creating us in His own
+image and likeness.
+
+And we create God--that is to say, God creates Himself in us--by
+compassion, by love. To believe in God is to love Him, and in our love
+to fear Him; and we begin by loving Him even before knowing Him, and by
+loving Him we come at last to see and discover Him in all things.
+
+Those who say that they believe in God and yet neither love nor fear
+Him, do not in fact believe in Him but in those who have taught them
+that God exists, and these in their turn often enough do not believe in
+Him either. Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any
+passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty,
+without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation,
+believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself. And just as belief in
+God is born of love, so also it may be born of fear, and even of hate,
+and of such kind was the belief of Vanni Fucci, the thief, whom Dante
+depicts insulting God with obscene gestures in Hell (_Inf._, xxv., 1-3).
+For the devils also believe in God, and not a few atheists.
+
+Is it not perhaps a mode of believing in God, this fury with which those
+deny and even insult Him, who, because they cannot bring themselves to
+believe in Him, wish that He may not exist? Like those who believe,
+they, too, wish that God may exist; but being men of a weak and passive
+or of an evil disposition, in whom reason is stronger than will, they
+feel themselves caught in the grip of reason and haled along in their
+own despite, and they fall into despair, and because of their despair
+they deny, and in their denial they affirm and create the thing that
+they deny, and God reveals Himself in them, affirming Himself by their
+very denial of Him.
+
+But it will be objected to all this that to demonstrate that faith
+creates its own object is to demonstrate that this object is an object
+for faith alone, that outside faith it has no objective reality; just
+as, on the other hand, to maintain that faith is necessary because it
+affords consolation to the masses of the people, or imposes a wholesome
+restraint upon them, is to declare that the object of faith is illusory.
+What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before
+all and above all, wishing that God may exist.
+
+Wishing that God may exist, and acting and feeling as if He did exist.
+And desiring God's existence and acting conformably with this desire, is
+the means whereby we create God--that is, whereby God creates Himself in
+us, manifests Himself to us, opens and reveals Himself to us. For God
+goes out to meet him who seeks Him with love and by love, and hides
+Himself from him who searches for Him with the cold and loveless reason.
+God wills that the heart should have rest, but not the head, reversing
+the order of the physical life in which the head sleeps and rests at
+times while the heart wakes and works unceasingly. And thus knowledge
+without love leads us away from God; and love, even without knowledge,
+and perhaps better without it, leads us to God, and through God to
+wisdom. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!
+
+And if you should ask me how I believe in God--that is to say, how God
+creates Himself in me and reveals Himself to me--my answer may, perhaps,
+provoke your smiles or your laughter, or it may even scandalize you.
+
+I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
+of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
+leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a
+particular providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the
+course of my own destiny. And the concept of law--it is nothing but a
+concept after all!--tells me nothing and teaches me nothing.
+
+Once and again in my life I have seen myself suspended in a trance over
+the abyss; once and again I have found myself at the cross-roads,
+confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in choosing one I should
+be renouncing all the others--for there is no turning back upon these
+roads of life; and once and again in such unique moments as these I have
+felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious, sovereign, and loving.
+And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens out the way of the
+Lord.
+
+It is possible for a man to feel the Universe calling to him and guiding
+him as one person guides and calls to another, to hear within him its
+voice speaking without words and saying: "Go and preach to all peoples!"
+How do you know that the man you see before you possesses a
+consciousness like you, and that an animal also possesses such a
+consciousness, more or less dimly, but not a stone? Because the man acts
+towards you like a man, like a being made in your likeness, and because
+the stone does not act towards you at all, but suffers you to act upon
+it. And in the same way I believe that the Universe possesses a certain
+consciousness like myself, because its action towards me is a human
+action, and I feel that it is a personality that environs me.
+
+Here is a formless mass; it appears to be a kind of animal; it is
+impossible to distinguish its members; I only see two eyes, eyes which
+gaze at me with a human gaze, the gaze of a fellow-being, a gaze which
+asks for pity; and I hear it breathing. I conclude that in this formless
+mass there is a consciousness. In just such a way and none other, the
+starry-eyed heavens gaze down upon the believer, with a superhuman, a
+divine, gaze, a gaze that asks for supreme pity and supreme love, and in
+the serenity of the night he hears the breathing of God, and God touches
+him in his heart of hearts and reveals Himself to him. It is the
+Universe, living, suffering, loving, and asking for love.
+
+From loving little trifling material things, which lightly come and
+lightly go, having no deep root in our affections, we come to love the
+more lasting things, the things which our hands cannot grasp; from
+loving goods we come to love the Good; from loving beautiful things we
+come to love Beauty; from loving the true we come to love the Truth;
+from loving pleasures we come to love Happiness; and, last of all, we
+come to love Love. We emerge from ourselves in order to penetrate
+further into our supreme I; individual consciousness emerges from us in
+order to submerge itself in the total Consciousness of which we form a
+part, but without being dissolved in it. And God is simply the Love that
+springs from universal suffering and becomes consciousness.
+
+But this, it will be said, is merely to revolve in an iron ring, for
+such a God is not objective. And at this point it may not be out of
+place to give reason its due and to examine exactly what is meant by a
+thing existing, being objective.
+
+What is it, in effect, to exist? and when do we say that a thing exists?
+A thing exists when it is placed outside us, and in such a way that it
+shall have preceded our perception of it and be capable of continuing to
+subsist outside us after we have disappeared. But have I any certainty
+that anything has preceded me or that anything must survive me? Can my
+consciousness know that there is anything outside it? Everything that I
+know or can know is within my consciousness. We will not entangle
+ourselves, therefore, in the insoluble problem of an objectivity outside
+our perceptions. Things exist in so far as they act. To exist is to act.
+
+But now it will be said that it is not God, but the idea of God, that
+acts in us. To which we shall reply that it is sometimes God acting by
+His idea, but still very often it is rather God acting in us by Himself.
+And the retort will be a demand for proofs of the objective truth of the
+existence of God, since we ask for signs. And we shall have to answer
+with Pilate: What is truth?
+
+And having asked this question, Pilate turned away without waiting for
+an answer and proceeded to wash his hands in order that he might
+exculpate himself for having allowed Christ to be condemned to death.
+And there are many who ask this question, What is truth? but without any
+intention of waiting for the answer, and solely in order that they may
+turn away and wash their hands of the crime of having helped to kill and
+eject God from their own consciousness or from the consciousness of
+others.
+
+What is truth? There are two kinds of truth--the logical or objective,
+the opposite of which is error, and the moral or subjective, the
+opposite of which is falsehood. And in a previous essay I have
+endeavoured to show that error is the fruit of falsehood.[46]
+
+Moral truth, the road that leads to intellectual truth, which also is
+moral, inculcates the study of science, which is over and above all a
+school of sincerity and humility. Science teaches us, in effect, to
+submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they
+are--that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would
+have them be. In a religiously scientific investigation, it is the data
+of reality themselves, it is the perceptions which we receive from the
+outside world, that formulate themselves in our mind as laws--it is not
+we ourselves who thus formulate them. It is the numbers themselves which
+in our mind create mathematics. Science is the most intimate school of
+resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly
+most insignificant of facts. And it is the gateway of religion; but
+within the temple itself its function ceases.
+
+And just as there is logical truth, opposed to error, and moral truth,
+opposed to falsehood, so there is also esthetic truth or verisimilitude,
+which is opposed to extravagance, and religious truth or hope, which is
+opposed to the inquietude of absolute despair. For esthetic
+verisimilitude, the expression of which is sensible, differs from
+logical truth, the demonstration of which is rational; and religious
+truth, the truth of faith, the substance of things hoped for, is not
+equivalent to moral truth, but superimposes itself upon it. He who
+affirms a faith built upon a basis of uncertainty does not and cannot
+lie.
+
+And not only do we not believe with reason, nor yet above reason nor
+below reason, but we believe against reason. Religious faith, it must be
+repeated yet again, is not only irrational, it is contra-rational.
+Kierkegaard says: "Poetry is illusion before knowledge; religion
+illusion after knowledge. Between poetry and religion the worldly wisdom
+of living plays its comedy. Every individual who does not live either
+poetically or religiously is a fool" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig
+Efterskrift_, chap. iv., sect. 2a, § 2). The same writer tells us that
+Christianity is a desperate sortie (_salida_). Even so, but it is only
+by the very desperateness of this sortie that we can win through to
+hope, to that hope whose vitalizing illusion is of more force than all
+rational knowledge, and which assures us that there is always something
+that cannot be reduced to reason. And of reason the same may be said as
+was said of Christ: that he who is not with it is against it. That which
+is not rational is contra-rational; and such is hope.
+
+By this circuitous route we always arrive at hope in the end.
+
+To the mystery of love, which is the mystery of suffering, belongs a
+mysterious form, and this form is time. We join yesterday to to-morrow
+with links of longing, and the now is, strictly, nothing but the
+endeavour of the before to make itself the after; the present is simply
+the determination of the past to become the future. The now is a point
+which, if not sharply articulated, vanishes; and, nevertheless, in this
+point is all eternity, the substance of time.
+
+Everything that has been can be only as it was, and everything that is
+can be only as it is; the possible is always relegated to the future,
+the sole domain of liberty, wherein imagination, the creative and
+liberating energy, the incarnation of faith, has space to roam at large.
+
+Love ever looks and tends to the future, for its work is the work of our
+perpetuation; the property of love is to hope, and only upon hopes does
+it nourish itself. And thus when love sees the fruition of its desire it
+becomes sad, for it then discovers that what it desired was not its true
+end, and that God gave it this desire merely as a lure to spur it to
+action; it discovers that its end is further on, and it sets out again
+upon its toilsome pilgrimage through life, revolving through a constant
+cycle of illusions and disillusions. And continually it transforms its
+frustrated hopes into memories, and from these memories it draws fresh
+hopes. From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jewelled
+visions of our future; imagination shapes our remembrances into hopes.
+And humanity is like a young girl full of longings, hungering for life
+and thirsting for love, who weaves her days with dreams, and hopes,
+hopes ever, hopes without ceasing, for the eternal and predestined
+lover, for him who, because he was destined for her from the beginning,
+from before the dawn of her remotest memory, from before her
+cradle-days, shall live with her and for her into the illimitable
+future, beyond the stretch of her furthest hopes, beyond the grave
+itself. And for this poor lovelorn humanity, as for the girl ever
+awaiting her lover, there is no kinder wish than that when the winter of
+life shall come it may find the sweet dreams of its spring changed into
+memories sweeter still, and memories that shall burgeon into new hopes.
+In the days when our summer is over, what a flow of calm felicity, of
+resignation to destiny, must come from remembering hopes which have
+never been realized and which, because they have never been realized,
+preserve their pristine purity.
+
+Love hopes, hopes ever and never wearies of hoping; and love of God, our
+faith in God, is, above all, hope in Him. For God dies not, and he who
+hopes in God shall live for ever. And our fundamental hope, the root and
+stem of all our hopes, is the hope of eternal life.
+
+And if faith is the substance of hope, hope in its turn is the form of
+faith. Until it gives us hope, our faith is a formless faith, vague,
+chaotic, potential; it is but the possibility of believing, the longing
+to believe. But we must needs believe in something, and we believe in
+what we hope for, we believe in hope. We remember the past, we know the
+present, we only believe in the future. To believe what we have not seen
+is to believe what we shall see. Faith, then, I repeat once again, is
+faith in hope; we believe what we hope for.
+
+Love makes us believe in God, in whom we hope and from whom we hope to
+receive life to come; love makes us believe in that which the dream of
+hope creates for us.
+
+Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and hope is God's
+longing, the longing of the eternal, of the divine in us, which advances
+to meet our faith and uplifts us. Man aspires to God by faith and cries
+to Him: "I believe--give me, Lord, wherein to believe!" And God, the
+divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order that he may
+believe in it. Hope is the reward of faith. Only he who believes truly
+hopes; and only he who truly hopes believes. We only believe what we
+hope, and we only hope what we believe.
+
+It was hope that called God by the name of Father; and this name, so
+comforting yet so mysterious, is still bestowed upon Him by hope. The
+father gave us life and gives bread wherewith to sustain it, and we ask
+the father to preserve our life for us. And if Christ was he who, with
+the fullest heart and purest mouth, named with the name of Father his
+Father and ours, if the noblest feeling of Christianity is the feeling
+of the Fatherhood of God, it is because in Christ the human race
+sublimated its hunger for eternity.
+
+It may perhaps be said that this longing of faith, that this hope, is
+more than anything else an esthetic feeling. Possibly the esthetic
+feeling enters into it, but without completely satisfying it.
+
+We seek in art an image of eternalization. If for a brief moment our
+spirit finds peace and rest and assuagement in the contemplation of the
+beautiful, even though it finds therein no real cure for its distress,
+it is because the beautiful is the revelation of the eternal, of the
+divine in things, and beauty but the perpetuation of momentaneity. Just
+as truth is the goal of rational knowledge, so beauty is the goal of
+hope, which is perhaps in its essence irrational.
+
+Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another
+everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time,
+returns to eternity. The temporal world has its roots in eternity, and
+in eternity yesterday is united with to-day and to-morrow. The scenes of
+life pass before us as in a cinematograph show, but on the further side
+of time the film is one and indivisible.
+
+Physicists affirm that not a single particle of matter nor a single
+tremor of energy is lost, but that each is transformed and transmitted
+and persists. And can it be that any form, however fugitive it may be,
+is lost? We must needs believe--believe and hope!--that it is not, but
+that somewhere it remains archived and perpetuated, and that there is
+some mirror of eternity in which, without losing themselves in one
+another, all the images that pass through time are received. Every
+impression that reaches me remains stored up in my brain even though it
+may be so deep or so weak that it is buried in the depths of my
+subconsciousness; but from these depths it animates my life; and if the
+whole of my spirit, the total content of my soul, were to awake to full
+consciousness, all these dimly perceived and forgotten fugitive
+impressions would come to life again, including even those which I had
+never been aware of. I carry within me everything that has passed before
+me, and I perpetuate it with myself, and it may be that it all goes into
+my germs, and that all my ancestors live undiminished in me and will
+continue so to live, united with me, in my descendants. And perhaps I,
+the whole I, with all this universe of mine, enter into each one of my
+actions, or, at all events, that which is essential in me enters into
+them--that which makes me myself, my individual essence.
+
+And how is this individual essence in each several thing--that which
+makes it itself and not another--revealed to us save as beauty? What is
+the beauty of anything but its eternal essence, that which unites its
+past with its future, that element of it that rests and abides in the
+womb of eternity? or, rather, what is it but the revelation of its
+divinity?
+
+And this beauty, which is the root of eternity, is revealed to us by
+love; it is the supreme revelation of the love of God and the token of
+our ultimate victory over time. It is love that reveals to us the
+eternal in us and in our neighbours.
+
+Is it the beautiful, the eternal, in things, that awakens and kindles
+our love for them, or is it our love for things that reveals to us the
+beautiful, the eternal, in them? Is not beauty perhaps a creation of
+love, in the same way and in the same sense that the sensible world is a
+creation of the instinct of preservation and the supersensible world of
+that of perpetuation? Is not beauty, and together with beauty eternity,
+a creation of love? "Though our outward man perish," says the Apostle,
+"yet the inward man is renewed day by day" (2 Cor. iv. 16). The man of
+passing appearances perishes and passes away with them; the man of
+reality remains and grows. "For our light affliction, which is but for a
+moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory"
+(ver. 17). Our suffering causes us anguish, and this anguish, bursting
+because of its own fullness, seems to us consolation. "While we look not
+at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for
+the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not
+seen are eternal" (ver. 18).
+
+This suffering gives hope, which is the beautiful in life, the supreme
+beauty, or the supreme consolation. And since love is full of suffering,
+since love is compassion and pity, beauty springs from compassion and is
+simply the temporal consolation that compassion seeks. A tragic
+consolation! And the supreme beauty is that of tragedy. The
+consciousness that everything passes away, that we ourselves pass away,
+and that everything that is ours and everything that environs us passes
+away, fills us with anguish, and this anguish itself reveals to us the
+consolation of that which does not pass away, of the eternal, of the
+beautiful.
+
+And this beauty thus revealed, this perpetuation of momentaneity, only
+realizes itself practically, only lives through the work of charity.
+Hope in action is charity, and beauty in action is goodness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Charity, which eternalizes everything it loves, and in giving us the
+goodness of it brings to light its hidden beauty, has its root in the
+love of God, or, if you like, in charity towards God, in pity for God.
+Love, pity, personalizes everything, we have said; in discovering the
+suffering in everything and in personalizing everything, it personalizes
+the Universe itself as well--for the Universe also suffers--and it
+discovers God to us. For God is revealed to us because He suffers and
+because we suffer; because He suffers He demands our love, and because
+we suffer He gives us His love, and He covers our anguish with the
+eternal and infinite anguish.
+
+This was the scandal of Christianity among Jews and Greeks, among
+Pharisees and Stoics, and this, which was its scandal of old, the
+scandal of the Cross, is still its scandal to-day, and will continue to
+be so, even among Christians themselves--the scandal of a God who
+becomes man in order that He may suffer and die and rise again, because
+He has suffered and died, the scandal of a God subject to suffering and
+death. And this truth that God suffers--a truth that appals the mind of
+man--is the revelation of the very heart of the Universe and of its
+mystery, the revelation that God revealed to us when He sent His Son in
+order that he might redeem us by suffering and dying. It was the
+revelation of the divine in suffering, for only that which suffers is
+divine.
+
+And men made a god of this Christ who suffered, and through him they
+discovered the eternal essence of a living, human God--that is, of a God
+who suffers--it is only the dead, the inhuman, that does not suffer--a
+God who loves and thirsts for love, for pity, a God who is a person.
+Whosoever knows not the Son will never know the Father, and the Father
+is only known through the Son; whosoever knows not the Son of Man--he
+who suffers bloody anguish and the pangs of a breaking heart, whose soul
+is heavy within him even unto death, who suffers the pain that kills and
+brings to life again--will never know the Father, and can know nothing
+of the suffering God.
+
+He who does not suffer, and who does not suffer because he does not
+live, is that logical and frozen _ens realissimum_, the _primum movens_,
+that impassive entity, which because of its impassivity is nothing but a
+pure idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or
+exist as a person. And how is the world to derive its origin and life
+from an impassive idea? Such a world would be but the idea of the world.
+But the world suffers, and suffering is the sense of the flesh of
+reality; it is the spirit's sense of its mass and substance; it is the
+self's sense of its own tangibility; it is immediate reality.
+
+Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it
+is only suffering that makes us persons. And suffering is universal,
+suffering is that which unites all us living beings together; it is the
+universal or divine blood that flows through us all. That which we call
+will, what is it but suffering?
+
+And suffering has its degrees, according to the depth of its
+penetration, from the suffering that floats upon the sea of appearances
+to the eternal anguish, the source of the tragic sense of life, which
+seeks a habitation in the depths of the eternal and there awakens
+consolation; from the physical suffering that contorts our bodies to the
+religious anguish that flings us upon the bosom of God, there to be
+watered by the divine tears.
+
+Anguish is something far deeper, more intimate, and more spiritual than
+suffering. We are wont to feel the touch of anguish even in the midst of
+that which we call happiness, and even because of this happiness itself,
+to which we cannot resign ourselves and before which we tremble. The
+happy who resign themselves to their apparent happiness, to a transitory
+happiness, seem to be as men without substance, or, at any rate, men who
+have not discovered this substance in themselves, who have not touched
+it. Such men are usually incapable of loving or of being loved, and they
+go through life without really knowing either pain or bliss.
+
+There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to
+choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. And love leads us
+to no other happiness than that of love itself and its tragic
+consolation of uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and
+satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love. The
+satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near
+neighbour to annihilation. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to
+be. Man is the more man--that is, the more divine--the greater his
+capacity for suffering, or, rather, for anguish.
+
+At our coming into the world it is given to us to choose between love
+and happiness, and we wish--poor fools!--for both: the happiness of
+loving and the love of happiness. But we ought to ask for the gift of
+love and not of happiness, and to be preserved from dozing away into
+habit, lest we should fall into a fast sleep, a sleep without waking,
+and so lose our consciousness beyond power of recovery. We ought to ask
+God to make us conscious of ourselves in ourselves, in our suffering.
+
+What is Fate, what is Fatality, but the brotherhood of love and
+suffering? What is it but that terrible mystery in virtue of which love
+dies as soon as it touches the happiness towards which it reaches out,
+and true happiness dies with it? Love and suffering mutually engender
+one another, and love is charity and compassion, and the love that is
+not charitable and compassionate is not love. Love, in a word, is
+resigned despair.
+
+That which the mathematicians call the problem of maxima and minima,
+which is also called the law of economy, is the formula for all
+existential--that is, passional--activity. In material mechanics and in
+social mechanics, in industry and in political economy, every problem
+resolves itself into an attempt to obtain the greatest possible
+resulting utility with the least possible effort, the greatest income
+with the least expenditure, the most pleasure with the least pain. And
+the terrible and tragic formula of the inner, spiritual life is either
+to obtain the most happiness with the least love, or the most love with
+the least happiness. And it is necessary to choose between the one and
+the other, and to know that he who approaches the infinite of love, the
+love that is infinite, approaches the zero of happiness, the supreme
+anguish. And in reaching this zero he is beyond the reach of the misery
+that kills. "Be not, and thou shalt be mightier than aught that is,"
+said Brother Juan de los Angeles in one of his _Diálogos de la conquista
+del reino de Dios_ (Dial. iii. 8).
+
+And there is something still more anguishing than suffering. A man about
+to receive a much-dreaded blow expects to have to suffer so severely
+that he may even succumb to the suffering, and when the blow falls he
+feels scarcely any pain; but afterwards, when he has come to himself and
+is conscious of his insensibility, he is seized with terror, a tragic
+terror, the most terrible of all, and choking with anguish he cries out:
+"Can it be that I no longer exist?" Which would you find most
+appalling--to feel such a pain as would deprive you of your senses on
+being pierced through with a white-hot iron, or to see yourself thus
+pierced through without feeling any pain? Have you never felt the
+horrible terror of feeling yourself incapable of suffering and of tears?
+Suffering tells us that we exist; suffering tells us that those whom we
+love exist; suffering tells us that the world in which we live exists;
+and suffering tells us that God exists and suffers; but it is the
+suffering of anguish, the anguish of surviving and being eternal.
+Anguish discovers God to us and makes us love Him.
+
+To believe in God is to love Him, and to love Him is to feel Him
+suffering, to pity Him.
+
+It may perhaps appear blasphemous to say that God suffers, for suffering
+implies limitation. Nevertheless, God, the Consciousness of the
+Universe, is limited by the brute matter in which He lives, by the
+unconscious, from which He seeks to liberate Himself and to liberate us.
+And we, in our turn, must seek to liberate Him. God suffers in each and
+all of us, in each and all of the consciousnesses imprisoned in
+transitory matter, and we all suffer in Him. Religious anguish is but
+the divine suffering, the feeling that God suffers in me and that I
+suffer in Him.
+
+The universal suffering is the anguish of all in seeking to be all else
+but without power to achieve it, the anguish of each in being he that he
+is, being at the same time all that he is not, and being so for ever.
+The essence of a being is not only its endeavour to persist for ever, as
+Spinoza taught us, but also its endeavour to universalize itself; it is
+the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity. Every created being
+tends not only to preserve itself in itself, but to perpetuate itself,
+and, moreover, to invade all other beings, to be others without ceasing
+to be itself, to extend its limits to the infinite, but without breaking
+them. It does not wish to throw down its walls and leave everything laid
+flat, common and undefended, confounding and losing its own
+individuality, but it wishes to carry its walls to the extreme limits of
+creation and to embrace everything within them. It seeks the maximum of
+individuality with the maximum also of personality; it aspires to the
+identification of the Universe with itself; it aspires to God.
+
+And this vast I, within which each individual I seeks to put the
+Universe--what is it but God? And because I aspire to God, I love Him;
+and this aspiration of mine towards God is my love for Him, and just as
+I suffer in being He, He also suffers in being I, and in being each one
+of us.
+
+I am well aware that in spite of my warning that I am attempting here to
+give a logical form to a system of a-logical feelings, I shall be
+scandalizing not a few of my readers in speaking of a God who suffers,
+and in applying to God Himself, as God, the passion of Christ. The God
+of so-called rational theology excludes in effect all suffering. And the
+reader will no doubt think that this idea of suffering can have only a
+metaphorical value when applied to God, similar to that which is
+supposed to attach to those passages in the Old Testament which
+describe the human passions of the God of Israel. For anger, wrath, and
+vengeance are impossible without suffering. And as for saying that God
+suffers through being bound by matter, I shall be told that, in the
+words of Plotinus (_Second Ennead_, ix., 7), the Universal Soul cannot
+be bound by the very thing--namely, bodies or matter--which is bound by
+It.
+
+Herein is involved the whole problem of the origin of evil, the evil of
+sin no less than the evil of pain, for if God does not suffer, He causes
+suffering; and if His life, since God lives, is not a process of
+realizing in Himself a total consciousness which is continually becoming
+fuller--that is to say, which is continually becoming more and more
+God--it is a process of drawing all things towards Himself, of imparting
+Himself to all, of constraining the consciousness of each part to enter
+into the consciousness of the All, which is He Himself, until at last He
+comes to be all in all--_panta en paot_, according to the expression of
+St. Paul, the first Christian mystic. We will discuss this more fully,
+however, in the next chapter on the apocatastasis or beatific union.
+
+For the present let it suffice to say that there is a vast current of
+suffering urging living beings towards one another, constraining them to
+love one another and to seek one another, and to endeavour to complete
+one another, and to be each himself and others at the same time. In God
+everything lives, and in His suffering everything suffers, and in loving
+God we love His creatures in Him, just as in loving and pitying His
+creatures we love and pity God in them. No single soul can be free so
+long as there is anything enslaved in God's world, neither can God
+Himself, who lives in the soul of each one of us, be free so long as our
+soul is not free.
+
+My most immediate sensation is the sense and love of my own misery, my
+anguish, the compassion I feel for myself, the love I bear for myself.
+And when this compassion is vital and superabundant, it overflows from
+me upon others, and from the excess of my own compassion I come to have
+compassion for my neighbours. My own misery is so great that the
+compassion for myself which it awakens within me soon overflows and
+reveals to me the universal misery.
+
+And what is charity but the overflow of pity? What is it but reflected
+pity that overflows and pours itself out in a flood of pity for the woes
+of others and in the exercise of charity?
+
+When the overplus of our pity leads us to the consciousness of God
+within us, it fills us with so great anguish for the misery shed abroad
+in all things, that we have to pour our pity abroad, and this we do in
+the form of charity. And in this pouring abroad of our pity we
+experience relief and the painful sweetness of goodness. This is what
+Teresa de Jesús, the mystical doctor, called "sweet-tasting suffering"
+(_dolor sabroso_), and she knew also the lore of suffering loves. It is
+as when one looks upon some thing of beauty and feels the necessity of
+making others sharers in it. For the creative impulse, in which charity
+consists, is the work of suffering love.
+
+We feel, in effect, a satisfaction in doing good when good superabounds
+within us, when we are swollen with pity; and we are swollen with pity
+when God, filling our soul, gives us the suffering sensation of
+universal life, of the universal longing for eternal divinization. For
+we are not merely placed side by side with others in the world, having
+no common root with them, neither is their lot indifferent to us, but
+their pain hurts us, their anguish fills us with anguish, and we feel
+our community of origin and of suffering even without knowing it.
+Suffering, and pity which is born of suffering, are what reveal to us
+the brotherhood of every existing thing that possesses life and more or
+less of consciousness. "Brother Wolf" St. Francis of Assisi called the
+poor wolf that feels a painful hunger for the sheep, and feels, too,
+perhaps, the pain of having to devour them; and this brotherhood reveals
+to us the Fatherhood of God, reveals to us that God is a Father and that
+He exists. And as a Father He shelters our common misery.
+
+Charity, then, is the impulse to liberate myself and all my fellows from
+suffering, and to liberate God, who embraces us all.
+
+Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of
+consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order
+that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never
+known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely
+possess consciousness of himself. The child first cries at birth when
+the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seems to say to him:
+You have to breathe me in order that you may live!
+
+We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us,
+that the material or sensible world which the senses create for us
+exists solely in order to embody and sustain that other spiritual or
+imaginable world which the imagination creates for us. Consciousness
+tends to be ever more and more consciousness, to intensify its
+consciousness, to acquire full consciousness of its complete self, of
+the whole of its content. We must needs believe with faith, whatever
+counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in
+animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the
+Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire
+consciousness of itself, to be itself--for to be oneself is to know
+oneself--to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means
+of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at
+the same time that it remains the prisoner of it. The face can only see
+itself when portrayed in the mirror, but in order to see itself it must
+remain the prisoner of the mirror in which it sees itself, and the image
+which it sees therein is as the mirror distorts it; and if the mirror
+breaks, the image is broken; and if the mirror is blurred, the image is
+blurred.
+
+Spirit finds itself limited by the matter in which it has to live and
+acquire consciousness of itself, just as thought is limited by the word
+in which as a social medium it is incarnated. Without matter there is no
+spirit, but matter makes spirit suffer by limiting it. And suffering is
+simply the obstacle which matter opposes to spirit; it is the clash of
+the conscious with the unconscious.
+
+Suffering is, in effect, the barrier which unconsciousness, matter, sets
+up against consciousness, spirit; it is the resistance to will, the
+limit which the visible universe imposes upon God; it is the wall that
+consciousness runs up against when it seeks to extend itself at the
+expense of unconsciousness; it is the resistance which unconsciousness
+opposes to its penetration by consciousness.
+
+Although in deference to authority we may believe, we do not in fact
+know, that we possess heart, stomach, or lungs so long as they do not
+cause us discomfort, suffering, or anguish. Physical suffering, or even
+discomfort, is what reveals to us our own internal core. And the same is
+true of spiritual suffering and anguish, for we do not take account of
+the fact that we possess a soul until it hurts us.
+
+Anguish is that which makes consciousness return upon itself. He who
+knows no anguish knows what he does and what he thinks, but he does not
+truly know that he does it and that he thinks it. He thinks, but he does
+not think that he thinks, and his thoughts are as if they were not his.
+Neither does he properly belong to himself. For it is only anguish, it
+is only the passionate longing never to die, that makes a human spirit
+master of itself.
+
+Pain, which is a kind of dissolution, makes us discover our internal
+core; and in the supreme dissolution, which is death, we shall, at last,
+through the pain of annihilation, arrive at the core of our temporal
+core--at God, whom in our spiritual anguish we breathe and learn to
+love.
+
+Even so must we believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give
+us.
+
+The origin of evil, as many discovered of old, is nothing other than
+what is called by another name the inertia of matter, and, as applied to
+the things of the spirit, sloth. And not without truth has it been said
+that sloth is the mother of all vices, not forgetting that the supreme
+sloth is that of not longing madly for immortality.
+
+Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of
+eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God--these are never
+satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and to be all other
+consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself: it seeks to be God. And
+matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing,
+its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and
+matter answers: I wish not to be!
+
+And in the order of human life, the individual would tend, under the
+sole instigation of the instinct of preservation, the creator of the
+material world, to destruction, to annihilation, if it were not for
+society, which, in implanting in him the instinct of perpetuation, the
+creator of the spiritual world, lifts and impels him towards the All,
+towards immortalization. And everything that man does as a mere
+individual, opposed to society, for the sake of his own preservation,
+and at the expense of society, if need be, is bad; and everything that
+he does as a social person, for the sake of the society in which he
+himself is included, for the sake of its perpetuation and of the
+perpetuation of himself in it, is good. And many of those who seem to be
+the greatest egoists, trampling everything under their feet in their
+zeal to bring their work to a successful issue, are in reality men
+whose souls are aflame and overflowing with charity, for they subject
+and subordinate their petty personal I to the social I that has a
+mission to accomplish.
+
+He who would tie the working of love, of spiritualization, of
+liberation, to transitory and individual forms, crucifies God in matter;
+he crucifies God who makes the ideal subservient to his own temporal
+interests or worldly glory. And such a one is a deicide.
+
+The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavour to liberate God
+from brute matter, to endeavour to give consciousness to everything, to
+spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very
+rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this
+dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious,
+that the Word may become life.
+
+We have but to look at the eucharistic symbol to see an instance of it.
+The Word has been imprisoned in a piece of material bread, and it has
+been imprisoned therein to the end that we may eat it, and in eating it
+make it our own, part and parcel of our body in which the spirit dwells,
+and that it may beat in our heart and think in our brain and be
+consciousness. It has been imprisoned in this bread in order that, after
+being buried in our body, it may come to life again in our spirit.
+
+And we must spiritualize everything. And this we shall accomplish by
+giving our spirit, which grows the more the more it is distributed, to
+all men and to all things. And we give our spirit when we invade other
+spirits and make ourselves the master of them.
+
+All this is to be believed with faith, whatever counsels reason may give
+us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now we are about to see what practical consequences all these more
+or less fantastical doctrines may have in regard to logic, to esthetics,
+and, above all, to ethics--their religious concretion, in a word. And
+perhaps then they will gain more justification in the eyes of the
+reader who, in spite of my warnings, has hitherto been looking for the
+scientific or even philosophic development of an irrational system.
+
+I think it may not be superfluous to recall to the reader once again
+what I said at the conclusion of the sixth chapter, that entitled "In
+the Depths of the Abyss"; but we now approach the practical or
+pragmatical part of this treatise. First, however, we must see how the
+religious sense may become concrete in the hopeful vision of another
+life.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[44] Reinold Seeberg, _Christliche-protestantische Ethik_ in
+_Systematische christliche Religion_, in _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_
+series.
+
+[45] _Cf._ St. Thomas Aquinas, _Summa_, secunda secundæ, quæstio iv.,
+art. 2.
+
+[46] "_Qué es Verdad?_" ("What is truth?"), published in _La España
+Moderna_, March, 1906, vol. 207 (reprinted in the edition of collected
+_Ensayos_, vol. vi., Madrid, 1918).
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND AND THE APOCATASTASIS
+
+_Kai gar isôs kai malista prepei mellonta echeise apodêmein diaskopein te
+kai muthologein peri tês apodêmias tês echei, poian tina autên oiometha
+einai._--PLATO: _Phædo_.
+
+
+Religion is founded upon faith, hope, and charity, which in their turn
+are founded upon the feeling of divinity and of God. Of faith in God is
+born our faith in men, of hope in God hope in men, and of charity or
+piety towards God--for as Cicero said,[47] _est enim pietas iustitia
+adversum deos_--charity towards men. In God is resumed not only
+Humanity, but the whole Universe, and the Universe spiritualized and
+penetrated with consciousness, for as the Christian Faith teaches, God
+shall at last be all in all. St. Teresa said, and Miguel de Molinos
+repeated with a harsher and more despairing inflection, that the soul
+must realize that nothing exists but itself and God.
+
+And this relation with God, this more or less intimate union with Him,
+is what we call religion.
+
+What is religion? In what does it differ from the religious sense and
+how are the two related? Every man's definition of religion is based
+upon his own inward experience of it rather than upon his observation of
+it in others, nor indeed is it possible to define it without in some way
+or another experiencing it. Tacitus said (_Hist._ v. 4), speaking of the
+Jews, that they regarded as profane everything that the Romans held to
+be sacred, and that what was sacred to them was to the Romans impure:
+_profana illic omnia quæ apud nos sacra, rursum conversa apud illos quæ
+nobis incesta_. Therefore he, the Roman, describes the Jews as a people
+dominated by superstition and hostile to religion, _gens superstitioni
+obnoxia, religionibus adversa_, while as regards Christianity, with
+which he was very imperfectly acquainted, scarcely distinguishing it
+from Judaism, he deemed it to be a pernicious superstition, _existialis
+superstitio_, inspired by a hatred of mankind, _odium generis humani_
+(_Ab excessu Aug._, xv., 44). And there have been many others who have
+shared his opinion. But where does religion end and superstition begin,
+or perhaps rather we should say at what point does superstition merge
+into religion? What is the criterion by means of which we discriminate
+between them?
+
+It would be of little profit to recapitulate here, even summarily, the
+principal definitions, each bearing the impress of the personal feeling
+of its definer, which have been given of religion. Religion is better
+described than defined and better felt than described. But if there is
+any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of
+Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple
+feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a
+desire to establish relations with this mysterious power. Nor is there
+much amiss with the statement of W. Hermann[48] that the religious
+longing of man is a desire for truth concerning his human existence. And
+to cut short these extraneous citations, I will end with one from the
+judicious and perspicacious Cournot: "Religious manifestations are the
+necessary consequence of man's predisposition to believe in the
+existence of an invisible, supernatural and miraculous world, a
+predisposition which it has been possible to consider sometimes as a
+reminiscence of an anterior state, sometimes as an intimation of a
+future destiny" (_Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans
+les sciences et dans l'histoire_, § 396). And it is this problem of
+human destiny, of eternal life, or of the human finality of the Universe
+or of God, that we have now reached. All the highways of religion lead
+up to this, for it is the very essence of all religion.
+
+Beginning with the savage's personalization of the whole Universe in his
+fetich, religion has its roots in the vital necessity of giving human
+finality to the Universe, to God, and this necessity obliges it,
+therefore, to attribute to the Universe, to God, consciousness of self
+and of purpose. And it may be said that religion is simply union with
+God, each one interpreting God according to his own sense of Him. God
+gives transcendent meaning and finality to life; but He gives it
+relatively to each one of us who believe in Him. And thus God is for man
+as much as man is for God, for God in becoming man, in becoming human,
+has given Himself to man because of His love of him.
+
+And this religious longing for union with God is a longing for a union
+that cannot be consummated in science or in art, but only in life. "He
+who possesses science and art, has religion; he who possesses neither
+science nor art, let him get religion," said Goethe in one of his
+frequent accesses of paganism. And yet in spite of what he said, he
+himself, Goethe...?
+
+And to wish that we may be united with God is not to wish that we may be
+lost and submerged in Him, for this loss and submersion of self ends at
+last in the complete dissolution of self in the dreamless sleep of
+Nirvana; it is to wish to possess Him rather than to be possessed by
+Him. When his disciples, amazed at his saying that it was impossible for
+a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, asked Jesus who then
+could be saved, the Master replied that with men it was impossible but
+not with God; and then said Peter, "Behold, we have forsaken all and
+followed thee; what shall we have therefore?" And the reply of Jesus
+was, not that they should be absorbed in the Father, but that they
+should sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel
+(Matt. xix. 23-26).
+
+It was a Spaniard, and very emphatically a Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos,
+who said in his _Guía Espiritual_[49] that "he who would attain to the
+mystical science must abandon and be detached from five things: first,
+from creatures; second, from temporal things; third, from the very gifts
+of the Holy Spirit; fourth, from himself; and fifth, he must be detached
+even from God." And he adds that "this last is the completest of all,
+because that soul only that knows how to be so detached is that which
+attains to being lost in God, and only the soul that attains to being so
+lost succeeds in finding itself." Emphatically a true Spaniard, Molinos,
+and truly Spanish is this paradoxical expression of quietism or rather
+of nihilism--for he himself elsewhere speaks of annihilation--and not
+less Spanish, nay, perhaps even more Spanish, were the Jesuits who
+attacked him, upholding the prerogatives of the All against the claims
+of Nothingness. For religion is not the longing for self-annihilation,
+but for self-completion, it is the longing not for death but for life.
+"The eternal religion of the inward essence of man ... the individual
+dream of the heart, is the worship of his own being, the adoration of
+life," as the tortured soul of Flaubert was intimately aware (_Par les
+champs et par les grèves_, vii.).
+
+When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance,
+the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took concrete form in
+the knightly ideal with its codes of love and honour. But it was a
+paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman--_la donna_--was the divinity
+enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the
+memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full
+force and purity; the Universe is woman. And so it was in Germany, in
+France, in Provence, in Spain, in Italy, at the beginning of the modern
+age. History was cast in this mould; Trojans and Romans were conceived
+as knights-errant, and so too were Arabs, Saracens, Turks, the Sultan
+and Saladin.... In this universal fraternity mingle angels, saints,
+miracles and paradise, strangely blended with the fantasy and
+voluptuousness of the Oriental world, and all baptized in the name of
+Chivalry." Thus, in his _Storia della Letteratura italiana_, ii., writes
+Francesco de Sanctis, and in an earlier passage he informs us that for
+that breed of men "in paradise itself the lover's delight was to look
+upon his lady--_Madonna_--and that he had no desire to go thither if he
+might not go in his lady's company." What, in fact, was Chivalry--which
+Cervantes, intending to kill it, afterwards purified and Christianized
+in _Don Quixote_--but a real though distorted religion, a hybrid between
+paganism and Christianity, whose gospel perhaps was the legend of
+Tristan and Iseult? And did not even the Christianity of the
+mystics--those knights-errant of the spirit--possibly reach its
+culminating-point in the worship of the divine woman, the Virgin Mary?
+What else was the Mariolatry of a St. Bonaventura, the troubadour of
+Mary? And this sentiment found its inspiration in love of the fountain
+of life, of that which saves us from death.
+
+But as the Renaissance advanced men turned from the religion of woman to
+the religion of science; desire, the foundation of which was curiosity,
+ended in curiosity, in eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of
+good and evil. Europe flocked to the University of Bologna in search of
+learning. Chivalry was succeeded by Platonism. Men sought to discover
+the mystery of the world and of life. But it was really in order to save
+life, which they had also sought to save in the worship of woman. Human
+consciousness sought to penetrate the Universal Consciousness, but its
+real object, whether it was aware of it or not, was to save itself.
+
+For the truth is that we feel and imagine the Universal
+Consciousness--and in this feeling and imagination religious experience
+consists--simply in order that thereby we may save our own individual
+consciousnesses. And how?
+
+Once again I must repeat that the longing for the immortality of the
+soul, for the permanence, in some form or another, of our personal and
+individual consciousness, is as much of the essence of religion as is
+the longing that there may be a God. The one does not exist apart from
+the other, the reason being that fundamentally they are one and the same
+thing. But as soon as we attempt to give a concrete and rational form to
+this longing for immortality and permanence, to define it to ourselves,
+we encounter even more difficulties than we encountered in our attempt
+to rationalize God.
+
+The universal consent of mankind has again been invoked as a means of
+justifying this immortal longing for immortality to our own feeble
+reason. _Permanere animos arbitratur consensu nationum omnium_, said
+Cicero, echoing the opinion of the ancients (_Tuscul. Quæst._, xvi.,
+36). But this same recorder of his own feelings confessed that, although
+when he read the arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul in
+the _Phædo_ of Plato he was compelled to assent to them, as soon as he
+put the book aside and began to revolve the problem in his own mind, all
+his previous assent melted away, _assentio omnis illa illabitur_ (cap.
+xi., 25). And what happened to Cicero happens to us all, and it happened
+likewise to Swedenborg, the most daring visionary of the other world.
+Swedenborg admitted that he who discourses of life after death, putting
+aside all erudite notions concerning the soul and its mode of union with
+the body, believes that after death he shall live in a glorious joy and
+vision, as a man among angels; but when he begins to reflect upon the
+doctrine of the union of the soul with the body, or upon the
+hypothetical opinion concerning the soul, doubts arise in him as to
+whether the soul is thus or otherwise, and when these doubts arise, his
+former idea is dissipated (_De cælo et inferno_, § 183). Nevertheless,
+as Cournot says, "it is the destiny that awaits me, _me_ or my _person_,
+that moves, perturbs and consoles me, that makes me capable of
+abnegation and sacrifice, whatever be the origin, the nature or the
+essence of this inexplicable bond of union, in the absence of which the
+philosophers are pleased to determine that my person must disappear"
+(_Traité_, etc., § 297).
+
+Must we then embrace the pure and naked faith in an eternal life without
+trying to represent it to ourselves? This is impossible; it is beyond
+our power to bring ourselves or accustom ourselves to do so. And
+nevertheless there are some who call themselves Christians and yet leave
+almost altogether on one side this question of representation. Take any
+work of theology informed by the most enlightened--that is, the most
+rationalistic and liberal--Protestantism; take, for instance, the
+_Dogmatik_ of Dr. Julius Kaftan, and of the 668 pages of which the sixth
+edition, that of 1909, consists, you will find only one, the last, that
+is devoted to this problem. And in this page, after affirming that
+Christ is not only the beginning and middle but also the end and
+consummation of History, and that those who are in Christ will attain to
+fullness of life, the eternal life of those who are in Christ, not a
+single word as to what that life may be. Half a dozen words at most
+about eternal death, that is, hell, "for its existence is demanded by
+the moral character of faith and of Christian hope." Its moral
+character, eh? not its religious character, for I am not aware that the
+latter knows any such exigency. And all this inspired by a prudent
+agnostic parsimony.
+
+Yes, the prudent, the rational, and, some will say, the pious,
+attitude, is not to seek to penetrate into mysteries that are hidden
+from our knowledge, not to insist upon shaping a plastic representation
+of eternal glory, such as that of the _Divina Commedia_. True faith,
+true Christian piety, we shall be told, consists in resting upon the
+confidence that God, by the grace of Christ, will, in some way or
+another, make us live in Him, in His Son; that, as our destiny is in His
+almighty hands, we should surrender ourselves to Him, in the full
+assurance that He will do with us what is best for the ultimate end of
+life, of spirit and of the universe. Such is the teaching that has
+traversed many centuries, and was notably prominent in the period
+between Luther and Kant.
+
+And nevertheless men have not ceased endeavouring to imagine to
+themselves what this eternal life may be, nor will they cease their
+endeavours so long as they are men and not merely thinking machines.
+There are books of theology--or of what passes for theology--full of
+disquisitions upon the conditions under which the blessed dead live in
+paradise, upon their mode of enjoyment, upon the properties of the
+glorious body, for without some form of body the soul cannot be
+conceived.
+
+And to this same necessity, the real necessity of forming to ourselves a
+concrete representation of what this other life may be, must in great
+part be referred the indestructible vitality of doctrines such as those
+of spiritualism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from star
+to star, and the like; doctrines which as often as they are pronounced
+to be defeated and dead, are found to have come to life again, clothed
+in some more or less new form. And it is merely supine to be content to
+ignore them and not to seek to discover their permanent and living
+essence. Man will never willingly abandon his attempt to form a concrete
+representation of the other life.
+
+But is an eternal and endless life after death indeed thinkable? How
+can we conceive the life of a disembodied spirit? How can we conceive
+such a spirit? How can we conceive a pure consciousness, without a
+corporal organism? Descartes divided the world into thought and
+extension, a dualism which was imposed upon him by the Christian dogma
+of the immortality of the soul. But is extension, is matter, that which
+thinks and is spiritualized, or is thought that which is extended and
+materialized? The weightiest questions of metaphysics arise practically
+out of our desire to arrive at an understanding of the possibility of
+our immortality--from this fact they derive their value and cease to be
+merely the idle discussions of fruitless curiosity. For the truth is
+that metaphysics has no value save in so far as it attempts to explain
+in what way our vital longing can or cannot be realized. And thus it is
+that there is and always will be a rational metaphysic and a vital
+metaphysic, in perennial conflict with one another, the one setting out
+from the notion of cause, the other from the notion of substance.
+
+And even if we were to succeed in imagining personal immortality, might
+we not possibly feel it to be something no less terrible than its
+negation? "Calypso was inconsolable at the departure of Ulysses; in her
+sorrow she was dismayed at being immortal," said the gentle, the
+mystical Fénelon at the beginning of his _Télémaque_. Was it not a kind
+of doom that the ancient gods, no less than the demons, were subject
+to--the deprivation of the power to commit suicide?
+
+When Jesus took Peter and James and John up into a high mountain and was
+transfigured before them, his raiment shining as white as snow, and
+Moses and Elias appeared and talked with him, Peter said to the Master:
+"Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three
+tabernacles; one for thee and one for Moses and one for Elias," for he
+wished to eternalize that moment. And as they came down from the
+mountain, Jesus charged them that they should tell no man what they had
+seen until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead. And they,
+keeping this saying to themselves, questioned one with another what this
+rising from the dead should mean, as men not understanding the purport
+of it. And it was after this that Jesus met the father whose son was
+possessed with a dumb spirit and who cried out to him, "Lord, I believe;
+help thou mine unbelief" (Mark ix.).
+
+Those three apostles did not understand what this rising from the dead
+meant. Neither did those Sadducees who asked the Master whose wife she
+should be in the resurrection who in this life had had seven husbands
+(Matt. xxii.); and it was then that Jesus said that God is not the God
+of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is not, in fact,
+thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and
+transitory life. Nor is the mystery at all clarified by that metaphor of
+the grain and the wheat that it bears, with which Paul answers the
+question, "How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?"
+(1 Cor. xv. 35).
+
+How can a human soul live and enjoy God eternally without losing its
+individual personality--that is to say, without losing itself? What is
+it to enjoy God? What is eternity as opposed to time? Does the soul
+change or does it not change in the other life? If it does not change,
+how does it live? And if it changes, how does it preserve its
+individuality through so vast a period of time? For though the other
+life may exclude space, it cannot exclude time, as Cournot observes in
+the work quoted above.
+
+If there is life in heaven there is change. Swedenborg remarked that the
+angels change, because the delight of the celestial life would gradually
+lose its value if they always enjoyed it in its fullness, and because
+angels, like men, love themselves, and he who loves himself experiences
+changes of state; and he adds further that at times the angels are sad,
+and that he, Swedenborg, discoursed with some when they were sad (_De
+Cælo et Inferno_, §§ 158, 160). In any case, it is impossible for us to
+conceive life without change, change of growth or of diminution, of
+sadness or of joy, of love or of hate.
+
+In effect, an eternal life is unthinkable and an eternal life of
+absolute felicity, of beatific vision, is more unthinkable still.
+
+And what precisely is this beatific vision? We observe in the first
+place that it is called vision and not action, something passive being
+therefore presupposed. And does not this beatific vision suppose loss of
+personal consciousness? A saint in heaven, says Bossuet, is a being who
+is scarcely sensible of himself, so completely is he possessed by God
+and immerged in His glory.... Our attention cannot stay on the saint,
+because one finds him outside of himself, and subject by an unchangeable
+love to the source of his being and his happiness (_Du culte qui est dû
+à Dieu_). And these are the words of Bossuet, the antiquietist. This
+loving vision of God supposes an absorption in Him. He who in a state of
+blessedness enjoys God in His fullness must perforce neither think of
+himself, nor remember himself, nor have any consciousness of himself,
+but be in perpetual ecstasy (_ekstasis_) outside of himself, in a
+condition of alienation. And the ecstasy that the mystics describe is a
+prelude of this vision.
+
+He who sees God shall die, say the Scriptures (Judg. xiii. 22); and may
+it not be that the eternal vision of God is an eternal death, a swooning
+away of the personality? But St. Teresa, in her description of the last
+state of prayer, the rapture, transport, flight, or ecstasy of the soul,
+tells us that the soul is borne as upon a cloud or a mighty eagle, "but
+you see yourself carried away and know not whither," and it is "with
+delight," and "if you do not resist, the senses are not lost, at least I
+was so much myself as to be able to perceive that I was being lifted up
+"--that is to say, without losing consciousness. And God "appears to be
+not content with thus attracting the soul to Himself in so real a way,
+but wishes to have the body also, though it be mortal and of earth so
+foul." "Ofttimes the soul is absorbed--or, to speak more correctly, the
+Lord absorbs it in Himself; and when He has held it thus for a moment,
+the will alone remains in union with Him"--not the intelligence alone.
+We see, therefore, that it is not so much vision as a union of the will,
+and meanwhile, "the understanding and memory are distraught ... like one
+who has slept long and dreamed and is hardly yet awake." It is "a soft
+flight, a delicious flight, a noiseless flight." And in this delicious
+flight the consciousness of self is preserved, the awareness of
+distinction from God with whom one is united. And one is raised to this
+rapture, according to the Spanish mystic, by the contemplation of the
+Humanity of Christ--that is to say, of something concrete and human; it
+is the vision of the living God, not of the idea of God. And in the 28th
+chapter she tells us that "though there were nothing else to delight the
+sight in heaven but the great beauty of the glorified bodies, that would
+be an excessive bliss, particularly the vision of the Humanity of Jesus
+Christ our Lord...." "This vision," she continues, "though imaginary, I
+did never see with my bodily eyes, nor, indeed, any other, but only with
+the eyes of the soul." And thus it is that in heaven the soul does not
+see God only, but everything in God, or rather it sees that everything
+is God, for God embraces all things. And this idea is further emphasized
+by Jacob Böhme. The saint tells us in the _Moradas Setimas_ (vii. 2)
+that "this secret union takes place in the innermost centre of the soul,
+where God Himself must dwell." And she goes on to say that "the soul, I
+mean the spirit of the soul, is made one with God ..."; and this union
+may be likened to "two wax candles, the tips of which touch each other
+so closely that there is but one light; or again, the wick, the wax,
+and the light become one, but the one candle can again be separated from
+the other, and the two candles remain distinct; or the wick may be
+withdrawn from the wax." But there is another more intimate union, and
+this is "like rain falling from heaven into a river or stream, becoming
+one and the same liquid, so that the river and the rain-water cannot be
+divided; or it resembles a streamlet flowing into the sea, which cannot
+afterwards be disunited from it; or it may be likened to a room into
+which a bright light enters through two windows--though divided when it
+enters, the light becomes one and the same." And what difference is
+there between this and the internal and mystical silence of Miguel de
+Molinos, the third and most perfect degree of which is the silence of
+thought? (_Guía Espiritual_, book i., chap. xvii., § 128). Do we not
+here very closely approach the view that "nothingness is the way to
+attain to that high state of a mind reformed"? (book iii., chap. xx., §
+196). And what marvel is it that Amiel in his _Journal Intime_ should
+twice have made use of the Spanish word _nada_, nothing, doubtless
+because he found none more expressive in any other language? And
+nevertheless, if we read our mystical doctor, St. Teresa, with care, we
+shall see that the sensitive element is never excluded, the element of
+delight--that is to say, the element of personal consciousness. The soul
+allows itself to be absorbed in God in order that it may absorb Him, in
+order that it may acquire consciousness of its own divinity.
+
+A beatific vision, a loving contemplation in which the soul is absorbed
+in God and, as it were, lost in Him, appears either as an annihilation
+of self or as a prolonged tedium to our natural way of feeling. And
+hence a certain feeling which we not infrequently observe and which has
+more than once expressed itself in satires, not altogether free from
+irreverence or perhaps impiety, with reference to the heaven of eternal
+glory as a place of eternal boredom. And it is useless to despise
+feelings such as these, so wholly natural and spontaneous.
+
+It is clear that those who feel thus have failed to take note of the
+fact that man's highest pleasure consists in acquiring and intensifying
+consciousness. Not the pleasure of knowing, exactly, but rather that of
+learning. In knowing a thing we tend to forget it, to convert it, if the
+expression may be allowed, into unconscious knowledge. Man's pleasure,
+his purest delight, is allied with the act of learning, of getting at
+the truth of things, of acquiring knowledge with differentiation. And
+hence the famous saying of Lessing which I have already quoted. There is
+a story told of an ancient Spaniard who accompanied Vasco Núñez de
+Balboa when he climbed that peak in Darien from which both the Atlantic
+and the Pacific are visible. On beholding the two oceans the old man
+fell on his knees and exclaimed, "I thank Thee, God, that Thou didst not
+let me die without having seen so great a wonder." But if this man had
+stayed there, very soon the wonder would have ceased to be wonderful,
+and with the wonder the pleasure, too, would have vanished. His joy was
+the joy of discovery. And perhaps the joy of the beatific vision may be
+not exactly that of the contemplation of the supreme Truth, whole and
+entire (for this the soul could not endure), but rather that of a
+continual discovery of the Truth, of a ceaseless act of learning
+involving an effort which keeps the sense of personal consciousness
+continually active.
+
+It is difficult for us to conceive a beatific vision of mental quiet, of
+full knowledge and not of gradual apprehension, as in any way different
+from a kind of Nirvana, a spiritual diffusion, a dissipation of energy
+in the essence of God, a return to unconsciousness induced by the
+absence of shock, of difference--in a word, of activity.
+
+May it not be that the very condition which makes our eternal union with
+God thinkable destroys our longing? What difference is there between
+being absorbed by God and absorbing Him in ourself? Is it the stream
+that is lost in the sea or the sea that is lost in the stream? It is all
+the same.
+
+Our fundamental feeling is our longing not to lose the sense of the
+continuity of our consciousness, not to break the concatenation of our
+memories, the feeling of our own personal concrete identity, even though
+we may be gradually being absorbed in God, enriching Him. Who at eighty
+years of age remembers the child that he was at eight, conscious though
+he may be of the unbroken chain connecting the two? And it may be said
+that the problem for feeling resolves itself into the question as to
+whether there is a God, whether there is a human finality to the
+Universe. But what is finality? For just as it is always possible to ask
+the why of every why, so it is also always possible to ask the wherefore
+of every wherefore. Supposing that there is a God, then wherefore God?
+For Himself, it will be said. And someone is sure to reply: What is the
+difference between this consciousness and no-consciousness? But it will
+always be true, as Plotinus has said (_Enn_., ii., ix., 8), that to ask
+why God made the world is the same as to ask why there is a soul. Or
+rather, not why, but wherefore (_dia ti_).
+
+For him who places himself outside himself, in an objective hypothetical
+position--which is as much as to say in an inhuman position--the
+ultimate wherefore is as inaccessible--and strictly, as absurd--as the
+ultimate why. What difference in effect does it make if there is not any
+finality? What logical contradiction is involved in the Universe not
+being destined to any finality, either human or superhuman? What
+objection is there in reason to there being no other purpose in the sum
+of things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and happen? For
+him who places himself outside himself, none; but for him who lives and
+suffers and desires within himself--for him it is a question of life or
+death. Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself, does not one
+find one's own nothingness? "Having become a sinner in seeking himself,
+man has become wretched in finding himself," said Bossuet (_Traité de la
+Concupiscence_, chap. xi.). "Seek thyself" begins with "Know thyself."
+To which Carlyle answers (_Past and Present_, book iii., chap. xi.):
+"The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know
+thyself': long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou
+wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this
+of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou
+canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules. That will be thy better
+plan."
+
+Yes, but what I work at, will not that too be lost in the end? And if it
+be lost, wherefore should I work at it? Yes, yes, it may be that to
+accomplish my work--and what is my work?--without thinking about myself,
+is to love God. And what is it to love God?
+
+And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am I not loving myself
+more than God, am I not loving myself in God?
+
+What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this
+same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium, and without
+death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his _Consolatio
+ad Marciam_ (xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again: _ista
+moliri_. And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to see God in the flesh,
+not in the spirit. And what but that is the meaning of that comic
+conception of _eternal recurrence_ which issued from the tragic soul of
+poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?
+
+And this beatific vision which is the primary Catholic solution of the
+problem, how can it be realized, I ask again, without obliteration of
+the consciousness of self? Will it not be like a sleep in which we
+dream without knowing what we dream? Who would wish for an eternal life
+like that? To think without knowing that we think is not to be sensible
+of ourselves, it is not to be ourselves. And is not eternal life perhaps
+eternal consciousness, not only seeing God, but seeing that we see Him,
+seeing ourselves at the same time and ourselves as distinct from Him? He
+who sleeps lives, but he has no consciousness of himself; and would
+anyone wish for an eternal sleep? When Circe advised Ulysses to descend
+to the abode of the dead in order to consult the soothsayer Teiresias,
+she told him that Teiresias alone among the shades of the dead was
+possessed of understanding, for all the others flitted about like
+shadows (_Odyssey_, x., 487-495). And can it be said that the others,
+apart from Teiresias, had really overcome death? Is it to overcome death
+to flit about like shadows without understanding?
+
+And on the other hand, may we not imagine that possibly this earthly
+life of ours is to the other life what sleep is to waking? May not all
+our life be a dream and death an awakening? But an awakening to what?
+And supposing that everything is but the dream of God and that God one
+day will awaken? Will He remember His dream?
+
+Aristotle, the rationalist, tells in his _Ethics_ of the superior
+happiness of the contemplative life, _bios theôrêtikos_; and all
+rationalists are wont to place happiness in knowledge. And the
+conception of eternal happiness, of the enjoyment of God, as a beatific
+vision, as knowledge and comprehension of God, is a thing of rationalist
+origin, it is the kind of happiness that corresponds with the God-Idea
+of Aristotelianism. But the truth is that, in addition to vision,
+happiness demands delight, and this is a thing which has very little to
+do, with rationalism and is only attainable when we feel ourselves
+distinct from God.
+
+Our Aristotelian Catholic theologian, the author of the endeavour to
+rationalize Catholic feeling, St. Thomas Aquinas, tells us in his
+_Summa_ (_prima secundæ partis, quæstio_ iv., _art_. i) that "delight is
+requisite for happiness. For delight is caused by the fact of desire
+resting in attained good. Hence, since happiness is nothing but the
+attainment of the Sovereign Good, there cannot be happiness without
+concomitant delight." But where is the delight of him who rests? To
+rest, _requiescere_--is not that to sleep and not to possess even the
+consciousness that one is resting? "Delight is caused by the vision of
+God itself," the theologian continues. But does the soul feel itself
+distinct from God? "The delight that accompanies the activity of the
+understanding does not impede, but rather strengthens that activity," he
+says later on. Obviously! for what happiness were it else? And in order
+to save delectation, delight, pleasure, which, like pain, has always
+something material in it, and which we conceive of only as existing in a
+soul incarnate in a body, it was necessary to suppose that the soul in a
+state of blessedness is united with its body. Apart from some kind of
+body, how is delight possible? The immortality of the pure soul, without
+some sort of body or spirit-covering, is not true immortality. And at
+bottom, what we long for is a prolongation of this life, this life and
+no other, this life of flesh and suffering, this life which we imprecate
+at times simply because it comes to an end. The majority of suicides
+would not take their lives if they had the assurance that they would
+never die on this earth. The self-slayer kills himself because he will
+not wait for death.
+
+When in the thirty-third canto of the _Paradiso_, Dante relates how he
+attained to the vision of God, he tells us that just as a man who
+beholds somewhat in his sleep retains on awakening nothing but the
+impression of the feeling in his mind, so it was with him, for when the
+vision had all but passed away the sweetness that sprang from it still
+distilled itself in his heart.
+
+    _Cotal son to, che quasi tutta cessa
+    mia visione ed ancor mi distilla
+    nel cuor lo dulce che nacque da essa_
+
+like snow that melts in the sun--
+
+    _cosi la neve al sol si disigilla_.
+
+That is to say, that the vision, the intellectual content, passes, and
+that which remains is the delight, the _passione impressa_, the
+emotional, the irrational--in a word, the corporeal.
+
+What we desire is not merely spiritual felicity, not merely vision, but
+delight, bodily happiness. The other happiness, the rationalist
+_beatitude_, the happiness of being submerged in understanding, can
+only--I will not say satisfy or deceive, for I do not believe that it
+ever satisfied or deceived even a Spinoza. At the conclusion of his
+_Ethic_, in propositions xxxv. and xxxvi. of the fifth part, Spinoza,
+affirms that God loves Himself with an infinite intellectual love; that
+the intellectual love of the mind towards God is the selfsame love with
+which God loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far
+as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind,
+considered under the form of eternity--that is to say, that the
+intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love
+with which God loves Himself. And after these tragic, these desolating
+propositions, we are told in the last proposition of the whole book,
+that which closes and crowns this tremendous tragedy of the _Ethic_,
+that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, and that
+our repression of our desires is not the cause of our enjoyment of
+virtue, but rather because we find enjoyment in virtue we are able to
+repress our desires. Intellectual love! intellectual love! what is this
+intellectual love? Something of the nature of a red flavour, or a bitter
+sound, or an aromatic colour, or rather something of the same sort as a
+love-stricken triangle or an enraged ellipse--a pure metaphor, but a
+tragic metaphor. And a metaphor corresponding tragically with that
+saying that the heart also has its reasons. Reasons of the heart! loves
+of the head! intellectual delight! delicious intellection!--tragedy,
+tragedy, tragedy!
+
+And nevertheless there is something which may be called intellectual
+love, and that is the love of understanding, that which Aristotle meant
+by the contemplative life, for there is something of action and of love
+in the act of understanding, and the beatific vision is the vision of
+the total truth. Is there not perhaps at the root of every passion
+something of curiosity? Did not our first parents, according to the
+Biblical story, fall because of their eagerness to taste of the fruit of
+the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and to be as gods, knowers
+of this knowledge? The vision of God--that is to say, the vision of the
+Universe itself, in its soul, in its inmost essence--would not that
+appease all our longing? And this vision can fail to satisfy only men of
+a gross mind who do not perceive that the greatest joy of man is to be
+more man--that is, more God--and that man is more God the more
+consciousness he has.
+
+And this intellectual love, which is nothing but the so-called platonic
+love, is a means to dominion and possession. There is, in fact, no more
+perfect dominion than knowledge; he who knows something, possesses it.
+Knowledge unites the knower with the known. "I contemplate thee and in
+contemplating thee I make thee mine"--such is the formula. And to know
+God, what can that be but to possess Him? He who knows God is thereby
+himself God.
+
+In _La Dégradation de l'énergie_ (iv^e partie, chap. xviii., 2) B.
+Brunhes relates a story concerning the great Catholic mathematician
+Cauchy, communicated to him by M. Sarrau, who had it from Père Gratry.
+While Cauchy and Père Gratry were walking in the gardens of the
+Luxumbourg, their conversation turned upon the happiness which those in
+heaven would have in knowing at last, without any obscurity or
+limitation, the truths which they had so long and so laboriously sought
+to investigate on earth. In allusion to the study which Cauchy had made
+of the mechanistic theory of the reflection of light, Père Gratry threw
+out the suggestion that one on the greatest intellectual joys of the
+great geometrician in the future life would be to penetrate into the
+secret of light. To which Cauchy replied that it did not appear to him
+to be possible to know more about this than he himself already knew,
+neither could he conceive how the most perfect intelligence could arrive
+at a clearer comprehension of the mystery of reflection than that
+manifested in his own explanation of it, seeing that he had furnished a
+mechanistic theory of the phenomenon. "His piety," Brunhes adds, "did
+not extend to a belief that God Himself could have created anything
+different or anything better."
+
+From this narrative two points of interest emerge. The first is the idea
+expressed in it as to what contemplation, intellectual love, or beatific
+vision, may mean for men of a superior order of intelligence, men whose
+ruling passion is knowledge; and the second is the implicit faith shown
+in the mechanistic explanation of the world.
+
+This mechanistic tendency of the intellect coheres with the well-known
+formula, "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is
+transformed"--a formula by means of which it has been sought to
+interpret the ambiguous principle of the conservation of energy,
+forgetting that practically, for us, for men, energy is utilizable
+energy, and that this is continually being lost, dissipated by the
+diffusion of heat, and degraded, its tendency being to arrive at a
+dead-level and homogeneity. That which has value, and more than value,
+reality, for us, is the differential, which is the qualitative; pure,
+undifferentiated quantity is for us as if it did not exist, for it does
+not act. And the material Universe, the body of the Universe, would
+appear to be gradually proceeding--unaffected by the retarding action of
+living organisms or even by the conscious action of man--towards a state
+of perfect stability, of homogeneity (_vide_ Brunhes, _op. cit._) For,
+while spirit tends towards concentration, material energy tends towards
+diffusion.
+
+And may not this have an intimate relation with our problem? May there
+not be a connection between this conclusion of scientific philosophy
+with respect to a final state of stability and homogeneity and the
+mystical dream of the apocatastasis? May not this death of the body of
+the Universe be the final triumph of its spirit, of God?
+
+It is manifest that there is an intimate relation between the religious
+need of an eternal life after death and the conclusions--always
+provisional--at which scientific philosophy arrives with respect to the
+probable future of the material or sensible Universe. And the fact is
+that just as there are theologians of God and the immortality of the
+soul, so there are also those whom Brunhes calls (_op. cit._, chap.
+xxvi., § 2) theologians of monism, and whom it would perhaps be better
+to call atheologians, people who pertinaciously adhere to the spirit of
+_a priori_ affirmation; and this becomes intolerable, Brunhes adds, when
+they harbour the pretension of despising theology. A notable type of
+these gentlemen may be found in Haeckel, who has succeeded in solving
+the riddles of Nature!
+
+These atheologians have seized upon the principle of the conservation of
+energy, the "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is
+transformed" formula, the theological origin of which is seen in
+Descartes, and have made use of it as a means whereby we are able to
+dispense with God. "The world built to last," Brunhes comments,
+"resisting all wear and tear, or rather automatically repairing the
+rents that appear in it--what a splendid theme for oratorical
+amplification! But these same amplifications which served in the
+seventeenth century to prove the wisdom of the Creator have been used in
+our days as arguments for those who presume to do without Him." It is
+the old story: so-called scientific philosophy, the origin and
+inspiration of which is fundamentally theological or religious, ending
+in an atheology or irreligion, which is itself nothing else but theology
+and religion. Let us call to mind the comments of Ritschl upon this
+head, already quoted in this work.
+
+To-day the last word of science, or rather of scientific philosophy,
+appears to be that, by virtue of the degradation of energy, of the
+predominance of irreversible phenomena, the material, sensible world is
+travelling towards a condition of ultimate levelness, a kind of final
+homogeneity. And this brings to our mind the hypothesis, not only so
+much used but abused by Spencer, of a primordial homogeneity, and his
+fantastic theory of the instability of the homogeneous. An instability
+that required the atheological agnosticism of Spencer in order to
+explain the inexplicable transition from the homogeneous to the
+heterogeneous. For how, without any action from without, can any
+heterogeneity emerge from perfect and absolute homogeneity? But as it
+was necessary to get rid of every kind of creation, "the unemployed
+engineer turned metaphysician," as Papini called him, invented the
+theory of the instability of the homogeneous, which is more ... what
+shall I say? more mystical, and even more mythological if you like, than
+the creative action of God.
+
+The Italian positivist, Roberto Ardigo, was nearer the mark when,
+objecting to Spencer's theory, he said that the most natural supposition
+was that things always were as they are now, that always there have been
+worlds in process of formation, in the nebulous stage, worlds
+completely formed and worlds in process of dissolution; that
+heterogeneity, in short, is eternal. Another way, it will be seen, of
+not solving the riddle.
+
+Is this perhaps the solution? But in that case the Universe would be
+infinite, and in reality we are unable to conceive a Universe that is
+both eternal and limited such as that which served as the basis of
+Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence. If the Universe must be
+eternal, if within it and as regards each of its component worlds,
+periods in which the movement is towards homogeneity, towards the
+degradation of energy, must alternate with other periods in which the
+movement is towards heterogeneity, then it is necessary that the
+Universe should be infinite, that there should be scope, always and in
+each world, for some action coming from without. And, in fact, the body
+of God cannot be other than eternal and infinite.
+
+But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual
+levelling-down--or, we might say, its death--appears to be proved. And
+how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with
+the degradation of the energy of our world and return to
+unconsciousness, or will it rather grow according as the utilizable
+energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to
+retard this degradation and to dominate Nature?--for this it is that
+constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its
+extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at
+the expense of the other?
+
+The fact is that the best of our scientific work, the best of our
+industry (that part of it I mean--and it is a large part--that does not
+tend to destruction), is directed towards retarding this fatal process
+of the degradation of energy. And organic life, the support of our
+consciousness, is itself an effort to avoid, so far as it is possible,
+this fatal period, to postpone it.
+
+It is useless to seek to deceive ourselves with pagan pæans in praise
+of Nature, for as Leopardi, that Christian atheist, said with profound
+truth in his stupendous poem _La Ginestra_, Nature "gives us life like a
+mother, but loves us like a step-mother." The origin of human
+companionship was opposition to Nature; it was horror of impious Nature
+that first linked men together in the bonds of society. It is human
+society, in effect, the source of reflective consciousness and of the
+craving for immortality, that inaugurates the state of grace upon the
+state of Nature; and it is man who, by humanizing and spiritualizing
+Nature by his industry, supernaturalizes her.
+
+In two amazing sonnets which he called _Redemption_, the tragic
+Portuguese poet, Antero de Quental, embodied his dream of a spirit
+imprisoned, not in atoms or ions or crystals, but--as is natural in a
+poet--in the sea, in trees, in the forest, in the mountains, in the
+wind, in all material individualities and forms; and he imagines that a
+day may come when all these captive souls, as yet in the limbo of
+existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought
+from the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these forms, the
+creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve like a baseless vision. It
+is a magnificent dream of the penetration of everything by
+consciousness.
+
+May it not be that the Universe, our Universe--who knows if there are
+others?--began with a zero of spirit--and zero is not the same as
+nothing--and an infinite of matter, and that its goal is to end with an
+infinite of spirit and a zero of matter? Dreams!
+
+May it be that everything has a soul and that this soul begs to be
+freed?
+
+    _Oh tierras de Alvargonzález,
+    en el corazón de España,
+    tierras pobres, tierras tristes,
+    tan tristes que tienen alma!_
+
+sings our poet Antonio Machado in his _Campos de Castilla_.[50] Is the
+sadness of the field in the fields themselves or in us who look upon
+them? Do they not suffer? But what can an individual soul in a world of
+matter actually be? Is it the rock or the mountain that is the
+individual? Is it the tree?
+
+And nevertheless the fact always remains that spirit and matter are at
+strife. This is the thought that Espronceda expressed when he wrote:
+
+    _Aquí, para vivir en santa calma,
+    o sobra la materia, o sobra el alma._[51]
+
+And is there not in the history of thought, or of human imagination if
+you prefer it, something that corresponds to this process of the
+reduction of matter, in the sense of a reduction of everything to
+consciousness?
+
+Yes, there is, and its author is the first Christian mystic, St. Paul of
+Tarsus, the Apostle of the Gentiles, he who because he had never with
+his bodily eyes looked upon the face of the fleshly and mortal Christ,
+the ethical Christ, created within himself an immortal and religious
+Christ--he who was caught up into the third heaven and there beheld
+secret and unspeakable things (2 Cor. xii.). And this first Christian
+mystic dreamed also of a final triumph of spirit, of consciousness, and
+this is what in theology is technically called the apocatastasis or
+restitution.
+
+In 1 Cor. xv. 26-28 he tells us that "the last enemy that shall be
+destroyed is death, for he hath put all things under his feet. But when
+he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is
+excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall
+be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto
+him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all": _hina hê
+ho theos panta en pasin_--that is to say, that the end is that God,
+Consciousness, will end by being all in all.
+
+This doctrine is completed by Paul's teaching, in his Epistle to the
+Ephesians, with regard to the end of the whole history of the world. In
+this Epistle, as you know, he represents Christ--by whom "were all
+things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and
+invisible" (Col. i. 16)--as the head over all things (Eph. i. 22), and
+in him, in this head, we all shall be raised up that we may live in the
+communion of saints and that we "may be able to comprehend with all
+saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to
+know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge" (Eph. iii. 18, 19).
+And this gathering of us together in Christ, who is the head and, as it
+were, the compendium, of Humanity, is what the Apostle calls the
+gathering or collecting together or recapitulating of all things in
+Christ, _anakephalaiôsthai ta panta en Christô_. And this
+recapitulation--_anakephalaiôsis_, anacefaleosis--the end of the world's
+history and of the human race, is merely another aspect of the
+apocatastasis. The apocatastasis, God's coming to be all in all, thus
+resolves itself into the anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all
+things in Christ, in Humanity--Humanity therefore being the end of
+creation. And does not this apocatastasis, this humanization or
+divinization of all things, do away with matter? But if matter, which is
+the principle of individuation, the scholastic _principium
+individuationis_, is once done away with, does not everything return to
+pure consciousness, which, in its pure purity, neither knows itself nor
+is it anything that can be conceived or felt? And if matter be
+abolished, what support is there left for spirit?
+
+Thus a different train of thought leads us to the same difficulties, the
+same unthinkabilities.
+
+It may be said, on the other hand, that the apocatastasis, God's coming
+to be all in all, presupposes that there was a time when He was not all
+in all. The supposition that all beings shall attain to the enjoyment of
+God implies the supposition that God shall attain to the enjoyment of
+all beings, for the beatific vision is mutual, and God is perfected in
+being better known, and His being is nourished and enriched with souls.
+
+Following up the track of these wild dreams, we might imagine an
+unconscious God, slumbering in matter, and gradually wakening into
+consciousness of everything, consciousness of His own divinity; we might
+imagine the whole Universe becoming conscious of itself as a whole and
+becoming conscious of each of its constituent consciousnesses, becoming
+God. But in that case, how did this unconscious God begin? Is He not
+matter itself? God would thus be not the beginning but the end of the
+Universe; but can that be the end which was not the beginning? Or can it
+be that outside time, in eternity, there is a difference between
+beginning and end? "The soul of all things cannot be bound by that very
+thing--that is, matter--which it itself has bound," says Plotinus
+(_Enn._ ii., ix. 7). Or is it not rather the Consciousness of the Whole
+that strives to become the consciousness of each part and to make each
+partial consciousness conscious of itself--that is, of the total
+consciousness? Is not this universal soul a monotheist or solitary God
+who is in process of becoming a pantheist God? And if it is not so, if
+matter and pain are alien to God, wherefore, it will be asked, did God
+create the world? For what purpose did He make matter and introduce
+pain? Would it not have been better if He had not made anything? What
+added glory does He gain by the creation of angels or of men whose fall
+He must punish with eternal torment? Did He perhaps create evil for the
+sake of remedying it? Or was redemption His design, redemption complete
+and absolute, redemption of all things and of all men? For this
+hypothesis is neither more rational nor more pious than the other.
+
+In so far as we attempt to represent eternal happiness to ourselves, we
+are confronted by a series of questions to which there is no
+satisfactory--that is, rational--answer, and it matters not whether the
+supposition from which we start be monotheist, or pantheist, or even
+panentheist.
+
+Let us return to the Pauline apocatastasis.
+
+Is it not possible that in becoming all in all God completes Himself,
+becomes at last fully God, an infinite consciousness embracing all
+consciousnesses? And what is an infinite consciousness? Since
+consciousness supposes limitation, or rather since consciousness is
+consciousness of limitation, of distinction, does it not thereby exclude
+infinitude? What value has the notion of infinitude applied to
+consciousness? What is a consciousness that is all consciousness,
+without anything outside it that is not consciousness? In such a case,
+of what is consciousness the consciousness? Of its content? Or may it
+not rather be that, starting from chaos, from absolute unconsciousness,
+in the eternity of the past, we continually approach the apocatastasis
+or final apotheosis without ever reaching it?
+
+May not this apocatastasis, this return of all things to God, be rather
+an ideal term to which we unceasingly approach--some of us with fleeter
+step than others--but which we are destined never to reach? May not the
+absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would
+die if it were to be realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope?
+And there is no place for hope when once possession has been realized,
+for hope, desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say, that
+all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others,
+but all having to pass some time through the same degree of growth,
+whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the
+infinite, at God, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal
+happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order
+that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness?
+
+Follow more questions to which there is no answer. "He shall be all in
+all," says the Apostle. But will His mode of being in each one be
+different or will it be the same for all alike? Will not God be wholly
+in one of the damned? Is He not in his soul? Is He not in what is called
+hell? And in what sense is He in hell?
+
+Whence arise new problems, those relating to the opposition between
+heaven and hell, between eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness.
+
+May it not be that in the end all shall be saved, including Cain and
+Judas and Satan himself, as Origen's development of the Pauline
+apocatastasis led him to hope?
+
+When our Catholic theologians seek to justify rationally--or in other
+words, ethically--the dogma of the eternity of the pains of hell, they
+put forward reasons so specious, ridiculous, and childish, that it would
+appear impossible that they should ever have obtained currency. For to
+assert that since God is infinite, an offence committed against Him is
+infinite also and therefore demands an eternal punishment, is, apart
+from the inconceivability of an infinite offence, to be unaware that, in
+human ethics, if not in the human police system, the gravity of the
+offence is measured not by the dignity of the injured person but by the
+intention of the injurer, and that to speak of an infinite culpable
+intention is sheer nonsense, and nothing else. In this connection those
+words which Christ addressed to His Father are capable of application:
+"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and no man who
+commits an offence against God or his neighbour knows what he does. In
+human ethics, or if you like in human police regulations--that which is
+called penal law and is anything but law[52] eternal punishment is a
+meaningless phrase.
+
+"God is just and punishes us; that is all we need to know; as far as we
+are concerned the rest is merely curiosity." Such was the conclusion of
+Lamennais (_Essai_, etc., iv^e partie, chap, vii.), an opinion shared by
+many others. Calvin also held the same view. But is there anyone who is
+content with this? Pure curiosity!--to call this load that wellnigh
+crushes our heart pure curiosity!
+
+May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he
+wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to
+eternalize himself because he was evil? May we not say that it is not
+believing in the other life that makes a man good, but rather that being
+good makes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil?
+These states pertain to the sphere of ethics, not of religion: or,
+rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and
+the being good though doing evil to religion?
+
+Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner
+suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to
+sin?--for the damned sin without ceasing. This, however, is no solution
+of the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that
+punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as
+correction, has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples.
+And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police
+institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the
+worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to
+be shut up.
+
+But, on the other hand, as a religious conception and veiled in mystery,
+why not--although the idea revolts our feelings--an eternity of
+suffering? why not a God who is nourished by our suffering? Is our
+happiness the end of the Universe? or may we possibly sustain with our
+suffering some alien happiness? Let us read again in the _Eumenides_ of
+that terrible tragedian, Æschylus, those choruses of the Furies in
+which they curse the new gods for overturning the ancient laws and
+snatching Orestes from their hands--impassioned invectives against the
+Apollinian redemption. Does not redemption tear man, their captive and
+plaything, from the hands of the gods, who delight and amuse themselves
+in his sufferings, like children, as the tragic poet says, torturing
+beetles? And let us remember the cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou
+forsaken me?"
+
+Yes, why not an eternity of suffering? Hell is an eternalization of the
+soul, even though it be an eternity of pain. Is not pain essential to
+life?
+
+Men go on inventing theories to explain what they call the origin of
+evil. And why not the origin of good? Why suppose that it is good that
+is positive and original, and evil that is negative and derivatory?
+"Everything that is, in so far as it is, is good," St. Augustine
+affirmed. But why? What does "being good" mean? Good is good for
+something, conducive to an end, and to say that everything is good is
+equivalent to saying that everything is making for its end. But what is
+its end? Our desire is to eternalize ourselves, to persist, and we call
+good everything that conspires to this end and bad everything that tends
+to lessen or destroy our consciousness. We suppose that human
+consciousness is an end and not a means to something else which may not
+be consciousness, whether human or superhuman.
+
+All metaphysical optimism, such as that of Leibnitz, and all
+metaphysical pessimism, such as that of Schopenhauer, have no other
+foundation than this. For Leibnitz this world is the best because it
+conspires to perpetuate consciousness, and, together with consciousness,
+will, because intelligence increases will and perfects it, because the
+end of man is the contemplation of God; while for Schopenhauer this
+world is the worst of all possible worlds, because it conspires to
+destroy will, because intelligence, representation, nullifies the will
+that begot it.
+
+And similarly Franklin, who believed in another life, asserted that he
+was willing to live this life over again, the life that he had actually
+lived, "from its beginning to the end"; while Leopardi, who did not
+believe in another life, asserted that nobody would consent to live his
+life over again. These two views of life are not merely ethical, but
+religious; and the feeling of moral good, in so far as it is a
+teleological value, is of religious origin also.
+
+And to return to our interrogations: Shall not all be saved, shall not
+all be made eternal, and eternal not in suffering but in happiness,
+those whom we call good and those whom we call bad alike?
+
+And as regards this question of good and evil, does not the malice of
+him who judges enter in? Is the badness in the intention of him who does
+the deed or is it not rather in that of him who judges it to be bad? But
+the terrible thing is that man judges himself, creates himself his own
+judge.
+
+Who then shall be saved? And now the imagination puts forth another
+possibility--neither more nor less rational than all those which have
+just been put forward interrogatively--and that is that only those are
+saved who have longed to be saved, that only those are eternalized who
+have lived in an agony of hunger for eternity and for eternalization. He
+who desires never to die and believes that he shall never die in the
+spirit, desires it because he deserves it, or rather, only he desires
+personal immortality who carries his immortality within him. The man who
+does not long passionately, and with a passion that triumphs over all
+the dictates of reason, for his own immortality, is the man who does not
+deserve it, and because he does not deserve it he does not long for it.
+And it is no injustice not to give a man that which he does not know how
+to desire, for "ask, and it shall be given you." It may be that to each
+will be given that which he desired. And perhaps the sin against the
+Holy Ghost--for which, according to the Evangelist, there is no
+remission--is none other than that of not desiring God, not longing to
+be made eternal.
+
+    As is your sort of mind
+    So is your sort of search; you'll find
+    What you desire, and that's to be
+    A Christian,
+
+said Robert Browning in _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_.
+
+In his _Inferno_ Dante condemned the Epicureans, those who did not
+believe in another life, to something more terrible than the not having
+it, and that is the consciousness of not having it, and this he
+expressed in plastic form by picturing them shut up in their tombs for
+all eternity, without light, without air, without fire, without
+movement, without life (_Inferno_, x., 10-15).
+
+What cruelty is there in denying to a man that which he did not or could
+not desire? In the sixth book of his _Æneid_ (426-429) the gentle Virgil
+makes us hear the plaintive voices and sobbing of the babes who weep
+upon the threshold of Hades,
+
+    _Continuo àuditæ voces, vagitus et ingens,
+    Infantumque animæ flentes in limine primo,_
+
+unhappy in that they had but entered upon life and never known the
+sweetness of it, and whom, torn from their mothers' breasts, a dark day
+had cut off and drowned in bitter death--
+
+    _Quos dulcis vitæ exsortes et at ubere raptos
+    Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo._
+
+But what life did they lose, if they neither knew life nor longed for
+it? And yet is it true that they never longed for it?
+
+It may be said that others craved life on their behalf, that their
+parents longed for them to be eternal to the end that they might be
+gladdened by them in paradise. And so a fresh field is opened up for the
+imagination--namely, the consideration of the solidarity and
+representivity of eternal salvation.
+
+There are many, indeed, who imagine the human race as one being, a
+collective and solidary individual, in whom each member may represent or
+may come to represent the total collectivity; and they imagine salvation
+as something collective. As something collective also, merit, and as
+something collective sin, and redemption. According to this mode of
+feeling and imagining, either all are saved or none is saved; redemption
+is total and it is mutual; each man is his neighbour's Christ.
+
+And is there not perhaps a hint of this in the popular Catholic belief
+with regard to souls in purgatory, the belief that the living may devote
+suffrages and apply merits to the souls of their dead? This sense of the
+transmission of merits, both to the living and the dead, is general in
+popular Catholic piety.
+
+Nor should it be forgotten that in the history of man's religious
+thought there has often presented itself the idea of an immortality
+restricted to a certain number of the elect, spirits representative of
+the rest and in a certain sense including them; an idea of pagan
+derivation--for such were the heroes and demi-gods--which sometimes
+shelters itself behind the pronouncement that there are many that are
+called and few that are chosen.
+
+Recently, while I was engaged upon this essay, there came into my hands
+the third edition of the _Dialogue sur la vie et sur la mort_, by
+Charles Bonnefon, a book in which imaginative conceptions similar to
+those that I have been setting forth find succinct and suggestive
+expression. The soul cannot live without the body, Bonnefon says, nor
+the body without the soul, and thus neither birth nor death has any real
+existence--strictly speaking, there is no body, no soul, no birth, no
+death, all of which are abstractions and appearances, but only a
+thinking life, of which we form part and which can neither be born nor
+die. Hence he is led to deny human individuality and to assert that no
+one can say "I am" but only "we are," or, more correctly, "there is in
+us." It is humanity, the species, that thinks and loves in us. And souls
+are transmitted in the same way that bodies are transmitted. "The living
+thought or the thinking life which we are will find itself again
+immediately in a form analogous to that which was our origin and
+corresponding with our being in the womb of a pregnant woman." Each of
+us, therefore, has lived before and will live again, although he does
+not know it. "If humanity is gradually raised above itself, when the
+last man dies, the man who will contain all the rest of mankind in
+himself, who shall say that he may not have arrived at that higher order
+of humanity such as exists elsewhere, in heaven?... As we are all bound
+together in solidarity, we shall all, little by little, gather the
+fruits of our travail." According to this mode of imagining and
+thinking, since nobody is born, nobody dies, no single soul has finished
+its struggle but many times has been plunged into the midst of the human
+struggle "ever since the type of embryo corresponding with the same
+consciousness was represented in the succession of human phenomena." It
+is obvious that since Bonnefon begins by denying personal individuality,
+he leaves out of account our real longing, which is to save our
+individuality; but on the other hand, since he, Bonnefon, is a personal
+individual and feels this longing, he has recourse to the distinction
+between the called and the chosen, and to the idea of representative
+spirits, and he concedes to a certain number of men this representative
+individual immortality. Of these elect he says that "they will be
+somewhat more necessary to God than we ourselves." And he closes this
+splendid dream by supposing that "it is not impossible that we shall
+arrive by a series of ascensions at the supreme happiness, and that our
+life shall be merged in the perfect Life as a drop of water in the sea.
+Then we shall understand," he continues, "that everything was
+necessary, that every philosophy and every religion had its hour of
+truth, and that in all our wanderings and errors and in the darkest
+moments of our history we discerned the light of the distant beacon, and
+that we were all predestined to participate in the Eternal Light. And if
+the God whom we shall find again possesses a body--and we cannot
+conceive a living God without a body--we, together with each of the
+myriads of races that the myriads of suns have brought forth, shall be
+the conscious cells of his body. If this dream should be fulfilled, an
+ocean of love would beat upon our shores and the end of every life would
+be to add a drop of water to this ocean's infinity." And what is this
+cosmic dream of Bonnefon's but the plastic representation of the Pauline
+apocatastasis?
+
+Yes, this dream, which has its origin far back in the dawn of
+Christianity, is fundamentally the same as the Pauline anacefaleosis,
+the fusion of all men in Man, in the whole of Humanity embodied in a
+Person, who is Christ, and the fusion not only of all men but of all
+things, and the subsequent subjection of all things to God, in order
+that God, Consciousness, may be all in all. And this supposes a
+collective redemption and a society beyond the grave.
+
+In the middle of the eighteenth century, two pietists of Protestant
+origin, Johann Jakob Moser and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, gave a new
+force and value to the Pauline anacefaleosis. Moser "declared that his
+religion consisted not in holding certain doctrines to be true and in
+living a virtuous life conformably therewith, but in being reunited to
+God through Christ. But this demands the thorough knowledge--a knowledge
+that goes on increasing until the end of life--of one's own sins and
+also of the mercy and patience of God, the transformation of all natural
+feelings, the appropriation of the atonement wrought by the death of
+Christ, the enjoyment of peace with God in the permanent witness of the
+Holy Spirit to the remission of sins, the ordering of life according to
+the pattern of Christ, which is the fruit of faith alone, the drawing
+near to God and the intercourse of the soul with Him, the disposition to
+die in grace and the joyful expectation of the Judgement which will
+bestow blessedness in the more intimate enjoyment of God and in the
+_commerce with all the saints_" (Ritschl, _Geschichte des Pietismus_,
+vol. iii., § 43). The commerce with all the saints--that is to say, the
+eternal human society. And for his part, Oetinger considers eternal
+happiness not as the contemplation of God in His infinitude, but, taking
+the Epistle to the Ephesians as his authority, as the contemplation of
+God in the harmony of the creature with Christ. The commerce with all
+the saints was, according to him, essential to the content of eternal
+happiness. It was the realization of the kingdom of God, which thus
+comes to be the kingdom of Man. And in his exposition of these doctrines
+of the two pietists, Ritschl confesses _(op. cit._, iii., § 46) that
+both witnesses have with these doctrines contributed something to
+Protestantism that is of like value with the theological method of
+Spener, another pietist.
+
+We see, therefore, that the Christian, mystical, inward longing ever
+since St. Paul, has been to give human finality, or divine finality, to
+the Universe, to save human consciousness, and to save it by converting
+all humanity into a person. This longing is expressed in the
+anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things, all things in earth
+and in heaven, the visible and the invisible, in Christ, and also in the
+apocatastasis, the return of all things to God, to consciousness, in
+order that God may be all in all. And does not God's being all in all
+mean that all things shall acquire consciousness and that in this
+consciousness everything that has happened will come to life again, and
+that everything that has existed in time will be eternalized? And within
+the all, all individual consciousnesses, those which have been, those
+that are, and those that will be, and as they have been, as they are,
+and as they will be, will exist in a condition of society and
+solidarity.
+
+But does not this awakening to consciousness of everything that has
+been, necessarily involve a fusion of the identical, an amalgamation of
+like things? In this conversion of the human race into a true society in
+Christ, a communion of saints, a kingdom of heaven, will not individual
+differences, tainted as they are with deceit and even with sin, be
+obliterated, and in the perfect society will that alone remain of each
+man which was the essential part of him? Would it not perhaps result,
+according to Bonnefon's supposition, that this consciousness that lived
+in the twentieth century in this corner of this earth would feel itself
+to be the same with other such consciousnesses as have lived in other
+centuries and perhaps in other worlds?
+
+And how can we conceive of an effective and real union, a substantial
+and intimate union, soul with soul, of all those who have been?
+
+    If any two creatures grew into one
+    They would do more than the world has done,
+
+said Browning in _The Flight of the Duchess_; and Christ has told us
+that where two or three are gathered together in His name, there is He
+in the midst of them.
+
+Heaven, then, so it is believed by many, is society, a more perfect
+society than that of this world; it is human society fused into a
+person. And there are not wanting some who believe that the tendency of
+all human progress is the conversion of our species into one collective
+being with real consciousness--is not perhaps an individual human
+organism a kind of confederation of cells?--and that when it shall have
+acquired full consciousness, all those who have existed will come to
+life again in it.
+
+Heaven, so many think, is society. Just as no one can live in isolation,
+so no one can survive in isolation. No one can enjoy God in heaven who
+sees his brother suffering in hell, for the sin and the merit were
+common to both. We think with the thoughts of others and we feel with
+the feelings of others. To see God when God shall be all in all is to
+see all things in God and to live in God with all things.
+
+This splendid dream of the final solidarity of mankind is the Pauline
+anacefaleosis and apocatastasis. We Christians, said the Apostle (I Cor.
+xii. 27) are the body of Christ, members of Him, flesh of His flesh and
+bone of His bone (Eph. v. 30), branches of the vine.
+
+But in this final solidarization, in this true and supreme
+_Christination_ of all creatures, what becomes of each individual
+consciousness? what becomes of Me, of this poor fragile I, this I that
+is the slave of time and space, this I which reason tells me is a mere
+passing accident, but for the saving of which I live and suffer and hope
+and believe? Granting that the human finality of the Universe is saved,
+that consciousness is saved, would I resign myself to make the sacrifice
+of this poor I, by which and by which alone I know this finality and
+this consciousness?
+
+And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we reach the summit
+of the tragedy, the very heart of it--the sacrifice of our own
+individual consciousness upon the altar of the perfected Human
+Consciousness, of the Divine Consciousness.
+
+But is there really a tragedy? If we could attain to a clear vision of
+this anacefaleosis, if we could succeed in understanding and feeling
+that we were going to enrich Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in
+surrendering ourselves utterly to Him? Would the stream that flows into
+the sea, and feels in the freshness of its waters the bitterness of the
+salt of the ocean, wish to flow back to its source? would it wish to
+return to the cloud which drew its life from the sea? is not its joy to
+feel itself absorbed?
+
+And yet....
+
+Yes, in spite of everything, this is the climax of the tragedy.
+
+And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not
+absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to
+approach and never to arrive, it longs for a never-ending longing, for
+an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled.
+And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something
+and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows
+without ceasing in consciousness and in longing. Do not write upon the
+gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of
+hell, _Lasciate ogni speranza!_ Do not destroy time! Our life is a hope
+which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its
+turn begets hope. Give us leave to live! The eternity that is like an
+eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death. Thus do
+ideas exist, but not thus do men live. Thus do ideas exist in the
+God-Idea, but not thus can men live in the living God, in the God-Man.
+
+An eternal purgatory, then, rather than a heaven of glory; an eternal
+ascent. If there is an end of all suffering, however pure and
+spiritualized we may suppose it to be, if there is an end of all desire,
+what is it that makes the blessed in paradise go on living? If in
+paradise they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love Him?
+And if even there, in the heaven of glory, while they behold God little
+by little and closer and closer, yet without ever wholly attaining to
+Him, there does not always remain something more for them to know and
+desire, if there does not always remain a substratum of doubt, how shall
+they not fall asleep?
+
+Or, to sum up, if in heaven there does not remain something of this
+innermost tragedy of the soul, what sort of a life is that? Is there
+perhaps any greater joy than that of remembering misery--and to remember
+it is to feel it--in time of felicity? Does not the prison haunt the
+freed prisoner? Does he not miss his former dreams of liberty?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mythological dreams! it will be said. And I have not pretended that they
+are anything else. But has not the mythological dream its content of
+truth? Are not dream and myth perhaps revelations of an inexpressible
+truth, of an irrational truth, of a truth that cannot be proven?
+
+Mythology! Perhaps; but, as in the days of Plato, we must needs
+mythologize when we come to deal with the other life. But we have just
+seen that whenever we seek to give a form that is concrete, conceivable,
+or in other words, rational, to our primary, primordial, and fundamental
+longing for an eternal life conscious of itself and of its personal
+individuality, esthetic, logical, and ethical absurdities are multiplied
+and there is no way of conceiving the beatific vision and the
+apocatastasis that is free from contradictions and inconsistencies.
+
+And nevertheless!...
+
+Nevertheless, yes, we must needs long for it, however absurd it may
+appear to us; nay, more, we must needs believe in it, in some way or
+another, in order that we may live. In order that we may live, eh? not
+in order that we may understand the Universe. We must needs believe in
+it, and to believe in it is to be religious. Christianity, the only
+religion which we Europeans of the twentieth century are really capable
+of feeling, is, as Kierkegaard said, a desperate sortie (_Afsluttende
+uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, ii., i., cap. i.), a sortie which can be
+successful only by means of the martyrdom of faith, which is, according
+to this same tragic thinker, the crucifixion of reason.
+
+Not without reason did he who had the right to do so speak of the
+foolishness of the cross. Foolishness, without doubt, foolishness. And
+the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was not altogether wide of
+the mark in making one of the characters in his ingenious conversations
+say that he thought better of those who were confined in a lunatic
+asylum on account of religious mania than of those who, while professing
+the same religious principles, kept their wits and appeared to enjoy
+life very well outside of the asylums.[53] But those who are at large,
+are they not really, thanks to God, mad too? Are there not mild
+madnesses, which not only permit us to mix with our neighbours without
+danger to society, but which rather enable us to do so, for by means of
+them we are able to attribute a meaning and finality to life and society
+themselves?
+
+And after all, what is madness and how can we distinguish it from
+reason, unless we place ourselves outside both the one and the other,
+which for us is impossible?
+
+Madness perhaps it is, and great madness, to seek to penetrate into the
+mystery of the Beyond; madness to seek to superimpose the
+self-contradictory dreams of our imagination upon the dictates of a sane
+reason. And a sane reason tells us that nothing can be built up without
+foundations, and that it is not merely an idle but a subversive task to
+fill the void of the unknown with fantasies. And nevertheless....
+
+We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the
+grave, and in an individual and personal life, in a life in which each
+one of us may feel his consciousness and fed that it is united, without
+being confounded, with all other consciousnesses in the Supreme
+Consciousness, in God; we must needs believe in that other life in order
+that we may live this life, and endure it, and give it meaning and
+finality. And we must needs believe in that other life, perhaps, in
+order that we may deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may
+be that he neither deserves it nor will obtain it who does not
+passionately desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason.
+
+And above all, we must feel and act as if an endless continuation of
+our earthly life awaited us after death; and if it be that nothingness
+is the fate that awaits us we must not, in the words of _Obermann_, so
+act that it shall be a just fate.
+
+And this leads us directly to the examination of the practical or
+ethical aspect of our sole problem.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[47] _De natura deorum_, lib. i., cap. 41.
+
+[48] _Op. cit._
+
+[49] _Guía Espiritual que desembaraza al alma y la conduce por el
+interior camino para alcanzar la perfecta contemplación y el rico tesoro
+de la paz interior_, book iii., chap. xviii., § 185.
+
+[50]
+
+    O land of Alvargonzález,
+    In the heart of Spain,
+    Sad land, poor land,
+    So sad that it has a soul!
+
+[51]
+
+    To living a life of blessed quiet here on earth,
+    Either matter or soul is a hindrance.
+
+[52] Eso que llaman derecho penal, y que es todo menos derecho.
+
+[53] _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table._
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM
+
+     L'homme est périssable. II se peut; mais périssons en résistant,
+     et, si le néant nous est reservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une
+     justice.--SÉNANCOUR: _Obermann_, lettre xc.
+
+
+Several times in the devious course of these essays I have defined, in
+spite of my horror of definitions, my own position with regard to the
+problem that I have been examining; but I know there will always be some
+dissatisfied reader, educated in some dogmatism or other, who will say:
+"This man comes to no conclusion, he vacillates--now he seems to affirm
+one thing and then its contrary--he is full of contradictions--I can't
+label him. What is he?" Just this--one who affirms contraries, a man of
+contradiction and strife, as Jeremiah said of himself; one who says one
+thing with his heart and the contrary with his head, and for whom this
+conflict is the very stuff of life. And that is as clear as the water
+that flows from the melted snow upon the mountain tops.
+
+I shall be told that this is an untenable position, that a foundation
+must be laid upon which to build our action and our works, that it is
+impossible to live by contradictions, that unity and clarity are
+essential conditions of life and thought, and that it is necessary to
+unify thought. And this leaves us as we were before. For it is precisely
+this inner contradiction that unifies my life and gives it its practical
+purpose.
+
+Or rather it is the conflict itself, it is this self-same passionate
+uncertainty, that unifies my action and makes me live and work.
+
+We think in order that we may live, I have said; but perhaps it were
+more correct to say that we think because we live, and the form of our
+thought corresponds with that of our life. Once more I must repeat that
+our ethical and philosophical doctrines in general are usually merely
+the justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, of our actions. Our
+doctrines are usually the means we seek in order to explain and justify
+to others and to ourselves our own mode of action. And this, be it
+observed, not merely for others, but for ourselves. The man who does not
+really know why he acts as he does and not otherwise, feels the
+necessity of explaining to himself the motive of his action and so he
+forges a motive. What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are
+usually but the pretexts for it. The very same reason which one man may
+regard as a motive for taking care to prolong his life may be regarded
+by another man as a motive for shooting himself.
+
+Nevertheless it cannot be denied that reasons, ideas, have an influence
+upon human actions, and sometimes even determine them, by a process
+analogous to that of suggestion upon a hypnotized person, and this is so
+because of the tendency in every idea to resolve itself into action--an
+idea being simply an inchoate or abortive act. It was this notion that
+suggested to Fouillée his theory of idea-forces. But ordinarily ideas
+are forces which we accommodate to other forces, deeper and much less
+conscious.
+
+But putting all this aside for the present, what I wish to establish is
+that uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our
+final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable
+dogmatic foundation, may be the basis of an ethic.
+
+He who bases or thinks that he bases his conduct--his inward or his
+outward conduct, his feeling or his action--upon a dogma or theoretical
+principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a
+fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or
+shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If, the earth that he
+thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for
+we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains
+undaunted among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily the
+stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him. For if a man
+should tell you that he does not defraud or cuckold his best friend only
+because he is afraid of hell, you may depend upon it that neither would
+he do so even if he were to cease to believe in hell, but that he would
+invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the honour of the
+human race.
+
+But he who believes that he is sailing, perhaps without a set course, on
+an unstable and sinkable raft, must not be dismayed if the raft gives
+way beneath his feet and threatens to sink. Such a one thinks that he
+acts, not because he deems his principle of action to be true, but in
+order to make it true, in order to prove its truth, in order to create
+his own spiritual world.
+
+My conduct must be the best proof, the moral proof, of my supreme
+desire; and if I do not end by convincing myself, within the bounds of
+the ultimate and irremediable uncertainty, of the truth of what I hope
+for, it is because my conduct is not sufficiently pure. Virtue,
+therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not
+faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith. There is no
+security or repose--so far as security and repose are obtainable in this
+life, so essentially insecure and unreposeful--save in conduct that is
+passionately good.
+
+Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory. "If any man will do
+His will--the will of Him that sent me," said Jesus, "he shall know of
+the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself" (John
+vii. 17); and there is a well-known saying of Pascal: "Begin by taking
+holy water and you will end by becoming a believer." And pursuing a
+similar train of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the
+opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to regard the
+Christian religion as void of truth so long as he had not put it to the
+proof by keeping its precepts and commandments (Ritschl, _Geschichte des
+Pietismus_, book vii., 43).
+
+What is our heart's truth, anti-rational though it be? The immortality
+of the human soul, the truth of the persistence of our consciousness
+without any termination whatsoever, the truth of the human finality of
+the Universe. And what is its moral proof? We may formulate it thus: Act
+so that in your own judgement and in the judgement of others you may
+merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that
+you may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you were to die
+to-morrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. The end of
+morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to
+discover the finality that belongs to it--if indeed it has any
+finality--and to discover it by acting.
+
+More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that series that
+constitutes the immense monody of his _Obermann_, Sénancour wrote the
+words which I have put at the head of this chapter--and of all the
+spiritual descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, Sénancour was the
+most profound and the most intense; of all the men of heart and feeling
+that France has produced, not excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic.
+"Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it
+is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a
+just fate." Change this sentence from its negative to the positive
+form--"And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it
+shall be an unjust fate"--and you get the firmest basis of action for
+the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.
+
+That which is irreligious and demoniacal, that which incapacitates us
+for action and leaves us without any ideal defence against our evil
+tendencies, is the pessimism that Goethe puts into the mouth of
+Mephistopheles when he makes him say, "All that has achieved existence
+deserves to be destroyed" (_denn alles was ensteht ist wert doss es
+zugrunde geht_). This is the pessimism which we men call evil, and not
+that other pessimism that consists in lamenting what it fears to be true
+and struggling against this fear--namely, that everything is doomed to
+annihilation in the end. Mephistopheles asserts that everything that
+exists deserves to be destroyed, annihilated, but not that everything
+will be destroyed or annihilated; and we assert that everything that
+exists deserves to be exalted and eternalized, even though no such fate
+is in store for it. The moral attitude is the reverse of this.
+
+Yes, everything deserves to be eternalized, absolutely everything, even
+evil itself, for that which we call evil would lose its evilness in
+being eternalized, because it would lose its temporal nature. For the
+essence of evil consists in its temporal nature, in its not applying
+itself to any ultimate and permanent end.
+
+And it might not be superfluous here to say something about that
+distinction, more overlaid with confusion than any other, between what
+we are accustomed to call optimism and pessimism, a confusion not less
+than that which exists with regard to the distinction between
+individualism and socialism. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to form a
+clear idea as to what pessimism really is.
+
+I have just this very day read in the _Nation_ (July 6, 1912) an
+article, entitled "A Dramatic Inferno," that deals with an English
+translation of the works of Strindberg, and it opens with the following
+judicious observations: "If there were in the world a sincere and total
+pessimism, it would of necessity be silent. The despair which finds a
+voice is a social mood, it is the cry of misery which brother utters to
+brother when both are stumbling through a valley of shadows which is
+peopled with--comrades. In its anguish it bears witness to something
+that is good in life, for it presupposes sympathy ... The real gloom,
+the sincere despair, is dumb and blind; it writes no books, and feels no
+impulse to burden an intolerable universe with a monument more lasting
+than brass." Doubtless there is something of sophistry in this
+criticism, for the man who is really in pain weeps and even cries aloud,
+even if he is alone and there is nobody to hear him, simply as a means
+of alleviating his pain, although this perhaps may be a result of social
+habits. But does not the lion, alone in the desert, roar if he has an
+aching tooth? But apart from this, it cannot be denied that there is a
+substance of truth underlying these remarks. The pessimism that protests
+and defends itself cannot be truly said to be pessimism. And, in truth,
+still less is it pessimism to hold that nothing ought to perish although
+all things may be doomed to annihilation, while on the other hand it is
+pessimism to affirm that all things ought to be annihilated even though
+nothing may perish.
+
+Pessimism, moreover, may possess different values. There is a
+eudemonistic or economic pessimism, that which denies happiness; there
+is an ethical pessimism, that which denies the triumph of moral good;
+and there is a religious pessimism, that which despairs of the human
+finality of the Universe, of the eternal salvation of the individual
+soul.
+
+All men deserve to be saved, but, as I have said in the previous
+chapter, he above all deserves immortality who desires it passionately
+and even in the face of reason. An English writer, H.G. Wells, who has
+taken upon himself the rôle of the prophet (a thing not uncommon in his
+country), tells us in _Anticipations_ that "active and capable men of
+all forms of religious profession tend in practice to disregard the
+question of immortality altogether." And this is because the religious
+professions of these active and capable men to whom Wells refers are
+usually simply a lie, and their lives are a lie, too, if they seek to
+base them upon religion. But it may be that at bottom there is not so
+much truth in what Wells asserts as he and others imagine. These active
+and capable men live in the midst of a society imbued with Christian
+principles, surrounded by institutions and social feelings that are the
+product of Christianity, and faith in the immortality of the soul exists
+deep down in their own souls like a subterranean river, neither seen nor
+heard, but watering the roots of their deeds and their motives.
+
+It must be admitted that there exists in truth no more solid foundation
+for morality than the foundation of the Catholic ethic. The end of man
+is eternal happiness, which consists in the vision and enjoyment of God
+_in sæcula sæculorum_. Where it errs, however, is in the choice of the
+means conducive to this end; for to make the attainment of eternal
+happiness dependent upon believing or not believing in the Procession of
+the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son and not from the Father
+alone, or in the Divinity of Jesus, or in the theory of the Hypostatic
+Union, or even in the existence of God, is, as a moment's reflection
+will show, nothing less than monstrous. A human God--and that is the
+only kind of God we are able to conceive--would never reject him who was
+unable to believe in Him with his head, and it is not in his head but in
+his heart that the wicked man says that there is no God, which is
+equivalent to saying that he wishes that there may not be a God. If any
+belief could be bound up with the attainment of eternal happiness it
+would be the belief in this happiness itself and in the possibility of
+it.
+
+And what shall we say of that other proposition of the king of pedants,
+to the effect that we have not come into the world to be happy but to
+fulfil our duty (_Wir sind nicht auf der Welt, um glücklich zu sein,
+sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu tun_)? If we are in the world _for_
+something (_um etwas_), whence can this _for_ be derived but from the
+very essence of our own will, which asks for happiness and not duty as
+the ultimate end? And if it is sought to attribute some other value to
+this _for_, an objective value, as some Sadducean pedant would say, then
+it must be recognized that the objective reality, that which would
+remain even though humanity should disappear, is as indifferent to our
+duty as to our happiness, is as little concerned with our morality as
+with our felicity. I am not aware that Jupiter, Uranus, or Sirius would
+allow their course to be affected by the fact that we are or are not
+fulfilling our duty any more than by the fact that we are or are not
+happy.
+
+Such considerations must appear to these pedants to be characterized by
+a ridiculous vulgarity and a dilettante superficiality. (The
+intellectual world is divided into two classes--dilettanti on the one
+hand, and pedants on the other.) What choice, then, have we? The modern
+man is he who resigns himself to the truth and is content to be ignorant
+of the synthesis of culture--witness what Windelband says on this head
+in his study of the fate of Hölderlin (_Praeludien_, i.). Yes, these men
+of culture are resigned, but there remain a few poor savages like
+ourselves for whom resignation is impossible. We do not resign ourselves
+to the idea of having one day to disappear, and the criticism of the
+great Pedant does not console us.
+
+The quintessence of common sense was expressed by Galileo Galilei when
+he said: "Some perhaps will say that the bitterest pain is the loss of
+life, but I say that there are others more bitter; for whosoever is
+deprived of life is deprived at the same time of the power to lament,
+not only this, but any other loss whatsoever." Whether Galileo was
+conscious or not of the humour of this sentence I do not know, but it is
+a tragic humour.
+
+But, to turn back, I repeat that if the attainment of eternal happiness
+could be bound up with any particular belief, it would be with the
+belief in the possibility of its realization. And yet, strictly
+speaking, not even with this. The reasonable man says in his head,
+"There is no other life after this," but only the wicked says it in his
+heart. But since the wicked man is possibly only a man who has been
+driven to despair, will a human God condemn him because of his despair?
+His despair alone is misfortune enough.
+
+But in any event let us adopt the Calderónian formula in _La Vida es
+Sueño_:
+
+    _Que estoy soñando y que quiero
+    obrar hacer bien, pues no se pierde
+    el hacer bien aun en sueños_[54]
+
+But are good deeds really not lost? Did Calderón know? And he added:
+
+    _Acudamos a lo eterno
+    que es la fama vividora
+    donde ni duermen las dichas
+    no las grandezas reposan_[55]
+
+Is it really so? Did Calderón know?
+
+Calderón had faith, robust Catholic faith; but for him who lacks faith,
+for him who cannot believe in what Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca
+believed, there always remains the attitude of _Obermann_.
+
+If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let
+us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory; let us
+fight against it quixotically.
+
+And not only do we fight against destiny in longing for what is
+irrational, but in acting in such a way that we make ourselves
+irreplaceable, in impressing our seal and mark upon others, in acting
+upon our neighbours in order to dominate them, in giving ourselves to
+them in order that we may eternalize ourselves so far as we can.
+
+Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make
+the theoretical fact--if this expression does not involve a
+contradiction in terms--the fact that each one of us is unique and
+irreplaceable, that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when
+we die, a practical truth.
+
+For in fact each man is unique and irreplaceable; there cannot be any
+other I; each one of us--our soul, that is, not our life--is worth the
+whole Universe. I say the spirit and not the life, for the ridiculously
+exaggerated value which those attach to human life who, not really
+believing in the spirit--that is to say, in their personal
+immortality--tirade against war and the death penalty, for example, is a
+value which they attach to it precisely because they do not really
+believe in the spirit of which life is the servant. For life is of use
+only in so far as it serves its lord and master, spirit, and if the
+master perishes with the servant, neither the one nor the other is of
+any great value.
+
+And to act in such a way as to make our annihilation an injustice, in
+such a way as to make our brothers, our sons, and our brothers' sons,
+and their sons' sons, feel that we ought not to have died, is something
+that is within the reach of all.
+
+The essence of the doctrine of the Christian redemption is in the fact
+that he who suffered agony and death was the unique man--that is, Man,
+the Son of Man, or the Son of God; that he, because he was sinless, did
+not deserve to have died; and that this propitiatory divine victim died
+in order that he might rise again and that he might raise us up from the
+dead, in order that he might deliver us from death by applying his
+merits to us and showing us the way of life. And the Christ who gave
+himself for his brothers in humanity with an absolute self-abnegation is
+the pattern for our action to shape itself on.
+
+All of us, each one of us, can and ought to determine to give as much
+of himself as he possibly can--nay, to give more than he can, to exceed
+himself, to go beyond himself, to make himself irreplaceable, to give
+himself to others in order that he may receive himself back again from
+them. And each one in his own civil calling or office. The word office,
+_officium_, means obligation, debt, but in the concrete, and that is
+what it always ought to mean in practice. We ought not so much to try to
+seek that particular calling which we think most fitting and suitable
+for ourselves, as to make a calling of that employment in which chance,
+Providence, or our own will has placed us.
+
+Perhaps Luther rendered no greater service to Christian civilization
+than that of establishing the religious value of the civil occupation,
+of shattering the monastic and medieval idea of the religious calling,
+an idea involved in the mist of human passions and imaginations and the
+cause of terrible life tragedies. If we could but enter into the
+cloister and examine the religious vocation of those whom the
+self-interest of their parents had forced as children into a novice's
+cell and who had suddenly awakened to the life of the world--if indeed
+they ever do awake!--or of those whom their own self-delusions had led
+into it! Luther saw this life of the cloister at close quarters and
+suffered it himself, and therefore he was able to understand and feel
+the religious value of the civil calling, to which no man is bound by
+perpetual vows.
+
+All that the Apostle said in the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the
+Ephesians with regard to the respective functions of Christians in the
+Church must be transferred and applied to the civil or
+non-ecclesiastical life, for to-day among ourselves the
+Christian--whether he know it or not, and whether he like it or not--is
+the citizen, and just as the Apostle exclaimed, "I am a Roman citizen!"
+each one of us, even the atheist, might exclaim "I am a Christian!" And
+this demands the _civilizing_, in the sense of dis-ecclesiasticizing, of
+Christianity, which was Luther's task, although he himself eventually
+became the founder of a Church.
+
+There is a common English phrase, "the right man in the right place." To
+which we might rejoin, "Cobbler, to thy last!" Who knows what is the
+post that suits him best and for which he is most fitted? Does a man
+himself know it better than others or do they know it better than he?
+Who can measure capacities and aptitudes? The religious attitude,
+undoubtedly, is to endeavour to make the occupation in which we find
+ourselves our vocation, and only in the last resort to change it for
+another.
+
+This question of the proper vocation is possibly the gravest and most
+deep-seated of social problems, that which is at the root of all the
+others. That which is known _par excellence_ as the social question is
+perhaps not so much a problem of the distribution of wealth, of the
+products of labour, as a problem of the distribution of avocations, of
+the modes of production. It is not aptitude--a thing impossible to
+ascertain without first putting it to the test and not always clearly
+indicated in a man, for with regard to the majority of callings a man is
+not born but made--it is not special aptitude, but rather social,
+political, and customary reasons that determine a man's occupation. At
+certain times and in certain countries it is caste and heredity; at
+other times and in other places, the guild or corporation; in later
+times machinery--in almost all cases necessity; liberty scarcely ever.
+And the tragedy of it culminates in those occupations, pandering to
+evil, in which the soul is sacrificed for the sake of the livelihood, in
+which the workman works with the consciousness, not of the uselessness
+merely, but of the social perversity, of his work, manufacturing the
+poison that will kill him, the weapon, perchance, with which his
+children will be murdered. This, and not the question of wages, is the
+gravest problem.
+
+I shall never forget a scene of which I was a witness that took place
+on the banks of the river that flows through Bilbao, my native town. A
+workman was hammering at something in a shipwright's yard, working
+without putting his heart into his work, as if he lacked energy or
+worked merely for the sake of getting a wage, when suddenly a woman's
+voice was heard crying, "Help! help!" A child had fallen into the river.
+Instantly the man was transformed. With an admirable energy,
+promptitude, and sang-froid he threw off his clothes and plunged into
+the water to rescue the drowning infant.
+
+Possibly the reason why there is less bitterness in the agrarian
+socialist movement than in that of the towns is that the field labourer,
+although his wages and his standard of living are no better than those
+of the miner or artisan, has a clearer consciousness of the social value
+of his work. Sowing corn is a different thing from extracting diamonds
+from the earth.
+
+And it may be that the greatest social progress consists in a certain
+indifferentiation of labour, in the facility for exchanging one kind of
+work for another, and that other not perhaps a more lucrative, but a
+nobler one--for there are degrees of nobility in labour. But unhappily
+it is only too seldom that a man who keeps to one occupation without
+changing is concerned with making a religious vocation of it, or that
+the man who changes his occupation for another does so from any
+religious motive.
+
+And do you not know cases in which a man, justifying his action on the
+ground that the professional organism to which he belongs and in which
+he works is badly organized and does not function as it ought, will
+evade the strict performance of his duty on the pretext that he is
+thereby fulfilling a higher duty? Is not this insistence upon the
+literal carrying out of orders called disciplinarianism, and do not
+people speak disparagingly of bureaucracy and the Pharisaism of public
+officials? And cases occur not unlike that of an intelligent and
+studious military officer who should discover the deficiencies of his
+country's military organization and denounce them to his superiors and
+perhaps to the public--thereby fulfilling his duty--and who, when on
+active service, should refuse to carry out an operation which he was
+ordered to undertake, believing that there was but scant probability of
+success or rather certainty of failure, so long as these deficiencies
+remained unremedied. He would deserve to be shot. And as for this
+question of Pharisaism ...
+
+And there is always a way of obeying an order while yet retaining the
+command, a way of carrying out what one believes to be an absurd
+operation while correcting its absurdity, even though it involve one's
+own death. When in my bureaucratic capacity I have come across some
+legislative ordinance that has fallen into desuetude because of its
+manifest absurdity, I have always endeavoured to apply it. There is
+nothing worse than a loaded pistol which nobody uses left lying in some
+corner of the house; a child finds it, begins to play with it, and kills
+its own father. Laws that have fallen into desuetude are the most
+terrible of all laws, when the cause of the desuetude is the badness of
+the law.
+
+And these are not groundless suppositions, and least of all in our
+country. For there are many who, while they go about looking out for I
+know not what ideal--that is to say, fictitious duties and
+responsibilities--neglect the duty of putting their whole soul into the
+immediate and concrete business which furnishes them with a living; and
+the rest, the immense majority, perform their task perfunctorily, merely
+for the sake of nominally complying with their duty--_para cumplir_, a
+terribly immoral phrase--in order to get themselves out of a difficulty,
+to get the job done, to qualify for their wages without earning them,
+whether these wages be pecuniary or otherwise.
+
+Here you have a shoemaker who lives by making shoes, and makes them with
+just enough care and attention to keep his clientèle together without
+losing custom. Another shoemaker lives on a somewhat higher spiritual
+plane, for he has a proper love for his work, and out of pride or a
+sense of honour strives for the reputation of being the best shoemaker
+in the town or in the kingdom, even though this reputation brings him no
+increase of custom or profit, but only renown and prestige. But there is
+a still higher degree of moral perfection in this business of
+shoemaking, and that is for the shoemaker to aspire to become for his
+fellow-townsmen the one and only shoemaker, indispensable and
+irreplaceable, the shoemaker who looks after their footgear so well that
+they will feel a definite loss when he dies--when he is "dead to them,"
+not merely "dead"[56]--and they will feel that he ought not to have
+died. And this will result from the fact that in working for them he was
+anxious to spare them any discomfort and to make sure that it should not
+be any preoccupation with their feet that should prevent them from being
+at leisure to contemplate the higher truths; he shod them for the love
+of them and for the love of God in them--he shod them religiously.
+
+I have chosen this example deliberately, although it may perhaps appear
+to you somewhat pedestrian. For the fact is that in this business of
+shoemaking, the religious, as opposed to the ethical, sense is at a very
+low ebb.
+
+Working men group themselves in associations, they form co-operative
+societies and unions for defence, they fight very justly and nobly for
+the betterment of their class; but it is not clear that these
+associations have any great influence on their moral attitude towards
+their work. They have succeeded in compelling employers to employ only
+such workmen, and no others, as the respective unions shall designate in
+each particular case; but in the selection of those designated they pay
+little heed to their technical fitness. Often the employer finds it
+almost impossible to dismiss an inefficient workman on account of his
+inefficiency, for his fellow-workers take his part. Their work,
+moreover, is often perfunctory, performed merely as a pretext for
+receiving a wage, and instances even occur when they deliberately
+mishandle it in order to injure their employer.
+
+In attempting to justify this state of things, it may be said that the
+employers are a hundred times more blameworthy than the workmen, for
+they are not concerned to give a better wage to the man who does better
+work, or to foster the general education and technical proficiency of
+the workman, or to ensure the intrinsic goodness of the article
+produced. The improvement of the product--which, apart from reasons of
+industrial and mercantile competition, ought to be in itself and for the
+good of the consumers, for charity's sake, the chief end of the
+business--is not so regarded either by employers or employed, and this
+is because neither the one nor the other have any religious sense of
+their social function. Neither of them seek to make themselves
+irreplaceable. The evil is aggravated when the business takes the
+unhappy form of the impersonal limited company, for where there is no
+longer any personal signature there is no longer any of that pride which
+seeks to give the signature prestige, a pride which in its way is a
+substitute for the craving for eternalization. With the disappearance of
+the concrete individuality, the basis of all religion, the religious
+sense of the business calling disappears also.
+
+And what has been said of employers and workmen applies still more to
+members of the liberal professions and public functionaries. There is
+scarcely a single servant of the State who feels the religious bearing
+of his official and public duties. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory,
+nothing more confused, than the feeling among our people with regard to
+their duties towards the State, and this sense of duty is still further
+obliterated by the attitude of the Catholic Church, whose action so far
+as the State is concerned is in strict truth anarchical. It is no
+uncommon thing to find among its ministers upholders of the moral
+lawfulness of smuggling and contraband as if in disobeying the legally
+constituted authority the smuggler and contrabandist did not sin against
+the Fourth Commandment of the law of God, which in commanding us to
+honour our father and mother commands us to obey all lawful authority in
+so far as the ordinances of such authority are not contrary (and the
+levying of these contributions is certainly not contrary) to the law of
+God.
+
+There are many who, since it is written "In the sweat of thy face shalt
+thou eat bread," regard work as a punishment, and therefore they
+attribute merely an economico-political, or at best an esthetic, value
+to the work of everyday life. For those who take this view--and it is
+the view principally held by the Jesuits--the business of life is
+twofold: there is the inferior and transitory business of winning a
+livelihood, of winning bread for ourselves and our children in an
+honourable, manner--and the elasticity of this honour is well known; and
+there is the grand business of our salvation, of winning eternal glory.
+This inferior or worldly business is to be undertaken not only so as to
+permit us, without deceiving or seriously injuring our neighbours, to
+live decently in accordance with our social position, but also so as to
+afford us the greatest possible amount of time for attending to the
+other main business of our life. And there are others who, rising
+somewhat above this conception of the work of our civil occupation, a
+conception which is economical rather than ethical, attain to an
+esthetic conception and sense of it, and this involves endeavouring to
+acquire distinction and renown in our occupation, the converting of it
+into an art for art's sake, for beauty's sake. But it is necessary to
+rise still higher than this, to attain to an ethical sense of our civil
+calling, to a sense which derives from our religious sense, from our
+hunger of eternalization. To work at our ordinary civil occupation, with
+eyes fixed on God, for the love of God, which is equivalent to saying
+for the love of our eternalization, is to make of this work a work of
+religion.
+
+That saying, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," does not
+mean that God condemned man to work, but to the painfulness of it. It
+would have been no condemnation to have condemned man to work itself,
+for work is the only practical consolation for having been born. And,
+for a Christian, the proof that God did not condemn man to work itself
+consists in the saying of the Scripture that, before the Fall, while he
+was still in a state of innocence, God took man and put him in the
+garden "to dress it and to keep it" (Gen. ii. 15). And how, in fact,
+would man have passed his time in Paradise if he had had no work to do
+in keeping it in order? And may it not be that the beatific vision
+itself is a kind of work?
+
+And even if work were our punishment, we ought to strive to make it, the
+punishment itself, our consolation and our redemption; and if we must
+needs embrace some cross or other, there is for each one of us no better
+cross than the cross of our own civil calling. For Christ did not say,
+"Take up my cross and follow me," but "Take up thy cross and follow me":
+every man his own cross, for the Saviour's cross the Saviour alone can
+bear. And the imitation of Christ, therefore, does not consist in that
+monastic ideal so shiningly set forth in the book that commonly bears
+the name of à Kempis, an ideal only applicable to a very limited number
+of persons and therefore anti-Christian; but to imitate Christ is to
+take up each one his own cross, the cross of his own civil
+occupation--civil and not merely religions--as Christ took up his cross,
+the cross of his calling, and to embrace it and carry it, looking
+towards God and striving to make each act of this calling a true prayer.
+In making shoes and because he makes them a man can gain heaven,
+provided that the shoemaker strives to be perfect, as a shoemaker, as
+our Father in heaven is perfect.
+
+Fourier, the socialist dreamer, dreamed of making work attractive in his
+phalansteries by the free choice of vocations and in other ways. There
+is no other way than that of liberty. Wherein consists the charm of the
+game of chance, which is a kind of work, if not in the voluntary
+submission of the player to the liberty of Nature--that is, to chance?
+But do not let us lose ourselves in a comparison between work and play.
+
+And the sense of making ourselves irreplaceable, of not meriting death,
+of making our annihilation, if it is annihilation that awaits us, an
+injustice, ought to impel us not only to perform our own occupation
+religiously, from love of God and love of our eternity and
+eternalization, but to perform it passionately, tragically if you like.
+It ought to impel us to endeavour to stamp others with our seal, to
+perpetuate ourselves in them and in their children by dominating them,
+to leave on all things the imperishable impress of our signature. The
+most fruitful ethic is the ethic of mutual imposition.
+
+Above all, we must recast in a positive form the negative commandments
+which we have inherited from the Ancient Law. Thus where it is written,
+"Thou shalt not lie!" let us understand, "Thou shalt always speak the
+truth, in season and out of season!" although it is we ourselves, and
+not others, who are judges in each case of this seasonableness. And for
+"Thou shalt not kill!" let us understand, "Thou shalt give life and
+increase it!" And for "Thou shalt not steal!" let us say, "Thou shalt
+increase the general wealth!" And for "Thou shalt not commit adultery!"
+"Thou shalt give children, healthy, strong, and good, to thy country and
+to heaven!" And thus with all the other commandments.
+
+He who does not lose his life shall not find it. Give yourself then to
+others, but in order to give yourself to them, first dominate them. For
+it is not possible to dominate except by being dominated. Everyone
+nourishes himself upon the flesh of that which he devours. In order that
+you may dominate your neighbour you must know and love him. It is by
+attempting to impose my ideas upon him that I become the recipient of
+his ideas. To love my neighbour is to wish that he may be like me, that
+he may be another I--that is to say, it is to wish that I may be he; it
+is to wish to obliterate the division between him and me, to suppress
+the evil. My endeavour to impose myself upon another, to be and live in
+him and by him, to make him mine--which is the same as making myself
+his--is that which gives religious meaning to human collectivity, to
+human solidarity.
+
+The feeling of solidarity originates in myself; since I am a society, I
+feel the need of making myself master of human society; since I am a
+social product, I must socialize myself, and from myself I proceed to
+God--who is I projected to the All--and from God to each of my
+neighbours.
+
+My immediate first impulse is to protest against the inquisitor and to
+prefer the merchant who comes to offer me his wares. But when my
+impressions are clarified by reflection, I begin to see that the
+inquisitor, when he acts from a right motive, treats me as a man, as an
+end in myself, and if he molests me it is from a charitable wish to save
+my soul; while the merchant, on the other hand, regards me merely as a
+customer, as a means to an end, and his indulgence and tolerance is at
+bottom nothing but a supreme indifference to my destiny. There is much
+more humanity in the inquisitor.
+
+Similarly there is much more humanity in war than in peace.
+Non-resistance to evil implies resistance to good, and to take the
+offensive, leaving the defensive out of the question, is perhaps the
+divinest thing in humanity. War is the school of fraternity and the bond
+of love; it is war that has brought peoples into touch with one
+another, by mutual aggression and collision, and has been the cause of
+their knowing and loving one another. Human love knows no purer embrace,
+or one more fruitful in its consequences, than that between victor and
+vanquished on the battlefield. And even the purified hate that springs
+from war is fruitful. War is, in its strictest sense, the sanctification
+of homicide; Cain is redeemed as a leader of armies. And if Cain had not
+killed his brother Abel, perhaps he would have died by the hand of Abel.
+God revealed Himself above all in war; He began by being the God of
+battles; and one of the greatest services of the Cross is that, in the
+form of the sword-hilt, it protects the hand that wields the sword.
+
+The enemies of the State say that Cain, the fratricide, was the founder
+of the State. And we must accept the fact and turn it to the glory of
+the State, the child of war. Civilization began on the day on which one
+man, by subjecting another to his will and compelling him to do the work
+of two, was enabled to devote himself to the contemplation of the world
+and to set his captive upon works of luxury. It was slavery that enabled
+Plato to speculate upon the ideal republic, and it was war that brought
+slavery about. Not without reason was Athena the goddess of war and of
+wisdom. But is there any need to repeat once again these obvious truths,
+which, though they have continually been forgotten, are continually
+rediscovered?
+
+And the supreme commandment that arises out of love towards God, and the
+foundation of all morality, is this: Yield yourself up entirely, give
+your spirit to the end that you may save it, that you may eternalize it.
+Such is the sacrifice of life.
+
+The individual _quâ_ individual, the wretched captive of the instinct of
+preservation and of the senses, cares only about preserving himself, and
+all his concern is that others should not force their way into his
+sphere, should not disturb him, should not interrupt his idleness; and
+in return for their abstention or for the sake of example he refrains
+from forcing himself upon them, from interrupting their idleness, from
+disturbing them, from taking possession of them. "Do not do unto others
+what you would not have them do unto you," he translates thus: I do not
+interfere with others--let them not interfere with me. And he shrinks
+and pines and perishes in this spiritual avarice and this repellent
+ethic of anarchic individualism: each one for himself. And as each one
+is not himself, he can hardly live for himself.
+
+But as soon as the individual feels himself in society, he feels himself
+in God, and kindled by the instinct of perpetuation he glows with love
+towards God, and with a dominating charity he seeks to perpetuate
+himself in others, to perennialize his spirit, to eternalize it, to
+unnail God, and his sole desire is to seal his spirit upon other spirits
+and to receive their impress in return. He has shaken off the yoke of
+his spiritual sloth and avarice.
+
+Sloth, it is said, is the mother of all the vices; and in fact sloth
+does engender two vices--avarice and envy--which in their turn are the
+source of all the rest. Sloth is the weight of matter, in itself inert,
+within us, and this sloth, while it professes to preserve us by
+economizing our forces, in reality attenuates us and reduces us to
+nothing.
+
+In man there is either too much matter or too much spirit, or to put it
+better, either he feels a hunger for spirit--that is, for eternity--or
+he feels a hunger for matter--that is, submission to annihilation. When
+spirit is in excess and he feels a hunger for yet more of it, he pours
+it forth and scatters it abroad, and in scattering it abroad he
+amplifies it with that of others; and on the contrary, when a man is
+avaricious of himself and thinks that he will preserve himself better by
+withdrawing within himself, he ends by losing all--he is like the man
+who received the single talent: he buried it in order that he might not
+lose it, and in the end he was bereft of it. For to him that hath shall
+be given, but from him that hath but a little shall be taken away even
+the little that he hath.
+
+Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect, we are bidden,
+and this terrible precept--terrible because for us the infinite
+perfection of the Father is unattainable--must be our supreme rule of
+conduct. Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he
+achieves will be scarcely worth the trouble of achieving. It behoves us
+to aspire to the impossible, to the absolute and infinite perfection,
+and to say to the Father, "Father, I cannot--help Thou my impotence."
+And He acting in us will achieve it for us.
+
+And to be perfect is to be all, it is to be myself and to be all else,
+it is to be humanity, it is to be the Universe. And there is no other
+way of being all but to give oneself to all, and when all shall be in
+all, all will be in each one of us. The apocatastasis is more than a
+mystical dream: it is a rule of action, it is a beacon beckoning us to
+high exploits.
+
+And from it springs the ethic of invasion, of domination, of aggression,
+of inquisition if you like. For true charity is a kind of invasion--it
+consists in putting my spirit into other spirits, in giving them my
+suffering as the food and consolation for their sufferings, in awakening
+their unrest with my unrest, in sharpening their hunger for God with my
+hunger for God. It is not charity to rock and lull our brothers to sleep
+in the inertia and drowsiness of matter, but rather to awaken them to
+the uneasiness and torment of spirit.
+
+To the fourteen works of mercy which we learnt in the Catechism of
+Christian Doctrine there should sometimes be added yet another, that of
+awakening the sleeper. Sometimes, at any rate, and surely when the
+sleeper sleeps on the brink of a precipice, it is much more merciful to
+awaken him than to bury him after he is dead--let us leave the dead to
+bury their dead. It has been well said, "Whosoever loves thee dearly
+will make thee weep," and charity often causes weeping. "The love that
+does not mortify does not deserve so divine a name," said that ardent
+Portuguese apostle, Fr. Thomé de Jesús,[57] who was also the author of
+this ejaculation--"O infinite fire, O eternal love, who weepest when
+thou hast naught to embrace and feed upon and many hearts to burn!" He
+who loves his neighbour burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood,
+in burning groans and distils itself in tears.
+
+And to do this is generosity, one of the two mother virtues which are
+born when inertia, sloth, is overcome. Most of our miseries come from
+spiritual avarice.
+
+The cure for suffering--which, as we have said, is the collision of
+consciousness with unconsciousness--is not to be submerged in
+unconsciousness, but to be raised to consciousness and to suffer more.
+The evil of suffering is cured by more suffering, by higher suffering.
+Do not take opium, but put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for
+when you sleep and no longer feel the suffering, you are not. And to be,
+that is imperative. Do not then close your eyes to the agonizing Sphinx,
+but look her in the face and let her seize you in her mouth and crunch
+you with her hundred thousand poisonous teeth and swallow you. And when
+she has swallowed you, you will know the sweetness of the taste of
+suffering.
+
+The way thereto in practice is by the ethic of mutual imposition. Men
+should strive to impose themselves upon one another, to give their
+spirits to one another, to seal one another's souls.
+
+There is matter for thought in the fact that the Christian ethic has
+been called an ethic of slaves. By whom? By anarchists! It is anarchism
+that is an ethic of slaves, for it is only the slave that chants the
+praises of anarchical liberty. Anarchism, no! but _panarchism_; not the
+creed of "Nor God nor master!" but that of "All gods and all masters!"
+all striving to become gods, to become immortal, and achieving this by
+dominating others.
+
+And there are so many ways of dominating. There is even a passive way,
+or one at least that is apparently passive, of fulfilling at times this
+law of life. Adaptation to environment, imitation, putting oneself in
+another's place, sympathy, in a word, besides being a manifestation of
+the unity of the species, is a mode of self-expansion, of being another.
+To be conquered, or at least to seem to be conquered, is often to
+conquer; to take what is another's is a way of living in him.
+
+And in speaking of domination, I do not mean the domination of the
+tiger. The fox also dominates by cunning, and the hare by flight, and
+the viper by poison, and the mosquito by its smallness, and the squid by
+the inky fluid with which it darkens the water and under cover of which
+it escapes. And no one is scandalized at this, for the same universal
+Father who gave its fierceness, its talons, and its jaws to the tiger,
+gave cunning to the fox, swift feet to the hare, poison to the viper,
+diminutiveness to the mosquito, and its inky fluid to the squid. And
+nobleness or ignobleness does not consist in the weapons we use, for
+every species and even every individual possesses its own, but rather in
+the way in which we use them, and above all in the cause in which we
+wield them.
+
+And among the weapons of conquest must be included the weapon of
+patience and of resignation, but a passionate patience and a passionate
+resignation, containing within itself an active principle and antecedent
+longings. You remember that famous sonnet of Milton--Milton, the great
+fighter, the great Puritan disturber of the spiritual peace, the singer
+of Satan--who, when he considered how his light was spent and that one
+talent which it is death to hide lodged with him useless, heard the
+voice of Patience saying to him,
+
+                        God doth not need
+    Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best
+    Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best: his state
+    Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
+    And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
+    They also serve who only stand and wait.
+
+They also serve who only stand and wait--yes, but it is when they wait
+for Him passionately, hungeringly, full of longing for immortality in
+Him.
+
+And we must impose ourselves, even though it be by our patience. "My cup
+is small, but I drink out of my cup," said the egoistical poet of an
+avaricious people.[58] No, out of my cup all drink, for I wish all to
+drink out of it; I offer it to them, and my cup grows according to the
+number of those who drink out of it, and all, in putting it to their
+lips, leave in it something of their spirit. And while they drink out of
+my cup, I also drink out of theirs. For the more I belong to myself, and
+the more I am myself, the more I belong to others; out of the fullness
+of myself I overflow upon my brothers, and as I overflow upon them they
+enter into me.
+
+"Be ye perfect, as your Father is perfect," we are bidden, and our
+Father is perfect because He is Himself and because He is in each one of
+His children who live and move and have their being in Him. And the end
+of perfection is that we all may be one (John xvii. 21), all one body in
+Christ (Rom. xii. 5), and that, at the last, when all things are subdued
+unto the Son, the Son himself may be subject to Him that put all things
+under him, that God may be all in all. And this is to make the Universe
+consciousness, to make Nature a society, and a human society. And then
+shall we be able confidently to call God Father.
+
+I am aware that those who say that ethics is a science will say that
+all this commentary of mine is nothing but rhetoric; but each man has
+his own language and his own passion--that is to say, each man who knows
+what passion is--and as for the man who knows it not, nothing will it
+avail him to know science.
+
+And the passion that finds its expression in this rhetoric, the devotees
+of ethical science call egotism. But this egotism is the only true
+remedy for egoism, spiritual avarice, the vice of preserving and
+reserving oneself and of not striving to perennialize oneself by giving
+oneself.
+
+"Be not, and ye shall be mightier than all that is," said Fr. Juan de
+los Angeles in one of his _Diálogos de la Conquista del Reina de Dios_
+(_Dial._, iii., 8); but what does this "Be not" mean? May it not mean
+paradoxically--and such a mode of expression is common with the
+mystics--the contrary of that which, at a first and literal reading, it
+would appear to mean? Is not the whole ethic of submission and quietism
+an immense paradox, or rather a great tragic contradiction? Is not the
+monastic, the strictly monastic, ethic an absurdity? And by the monastic
+ethic I mean that of the solitary Carthusian, that of the hermit, who
+flees from the world--perhaps carrying it with him nevertheless--in
+order that he may live quite alone with a God who is lonely as himself;
+not that of the Dominican inquisitor who scoured Provence in search of
+Albigensian hearts to burn.
+
+"Let God do it all," someone will say; but if man folds his arms, God
+will go to sleep.
+
+This Carthusian ethic and that scientific ethic which is derived from
+ethical science--oh, this science of ethics! rational and rationalistic
+ethics! pedantry of pedantry, all is pedantry!--yes, this perhaps is
+egoism and coldness of heart.
+
+There are some who say that they isolate themselves with God in order
+that they may the better work out their salvation, their redemption; but
+since sin is collective, redemption must be collective also. "The
+religious is the determination of the whole, and everything outside this
+is an illusion of the senses, and that is why the greatest criminal is
+at bottom innocent, a good-natured man and a saint" (Kierkegaard,
+_Afsluttende_, etc., ii., ii., cap. iv., sect. 2, _a_).
+
+Are we to understand, on the other hand, that men seek to gain the
+other, the eternal life, by renouncing this the temporal life? If the
+other life is anything, it must be a continuation of this, and only as
+such a continuation, more or less purified, is it mirrored in our
+desire; and if this is so, such as is this life of time, so will be the
+life of eternity.
+
+"This world and the other are like the two wives of one husband--if he
+pleases one he makes the other envious," said an Arab thinker, quoted by
+Windelband (_Das Heilige_, in vol. ii. of _Präludien_); but such a
+thought could only have arisen in the mind of one who had failed to
+resolve the tragic conflict between his spirit and the world in a
+fruitful warfare, a practical contradiction. "Thy kingdom come" to us;
+so Christ taught us to pray to the Father, not "May we come to Thy
+kingdom"; and according to the primitive Christian belief the eternal
+life was to be realized on this earth itself and as a continuation of
+the earthly life. We were made men and not angels in order that we might
+seek our happiness through the medium of this life, and the Christ of
+the Christian Faith became, not an angelic, but a human, being,
+redeeming us by taking upon himself a real and effective body and not an
+appearance of one merely. And according to this same Faith, even the
+highest of the angelical hierarchy adore the Virgin, the supreme symbol
+of terrestrial Humanity. The angelical ideal, therefore, is not the
+Christian ideal, and still less is it the human ideal, nor can it be. An
+angel, moreover, is a neutral being, without sex and without country.
+
+It is impossible for us to feel the other life, the eternal life, I have
+already repeated more than once, as a life of angelical contemplation;
+it must be a life of action. Goethe said that "man must believe in
+immortality, since in his nature he has a right to it." And he added:
+"The conviction of our persistence arises in me from the concept of
+activity. If I work without ceasing to the end, Nature is obliged (_so
+ist die Natur verpflichtet_) to provide me with another form of
+existence, since my actual spirit can bear no more." Change Nature to
+God, and you have a thought that remains Christian in character, for the
+first Fathers of the Church did not believe that the immortality of the
+soul was a natural gift--that is to say, something rational--but a
+divine gift of grace. And that which is of grace is usually, in its
+essence, of justice, since justice is divine and gratuitous, not
+natural. And Goethe added: "I could begin nothing with an eternal
+happiness before me, unless new tasks and new difficulties were given me
+to overcome." And true it is that there is no happiness in a vacuity of
+contemplation.
+
+But may there not be some justification for the morality of the hermit,
+of the Carthusian, the ethic of the Thebaid? Might we not say, perhaps,
+that it is necessary to preserve these exceptional types in order that
+they may stand as everlasting patterns for mankind? Do not men breed
+racehorses, which are useless for any practical kind of work, but which
+preserve the purity of the breed and become the sires of excellent
+hackneys and hunters? Is there not a luxury of ethics, not less
+justifiable than any other sort of luxury? But, on the other hand, is
+not all this substantially esthetics, and not ethics, still less
+religion? May not the contemplative, medieval, monastic ideal be
+esthetical, and not religious nor even ethical? And after all, those of
+the seekers after solitude who have related to us their conversation
+when they were alone with God have performed an eternalizing work, they
+have concerned themselves with the souls of others. And by this alone,
+that it has given us an Eckhart, a Seuse, a Tauler, a Ruysbroek, a Juan
+de la Cruz, a Catherine of Siena, an Angela of Foligno, a Teresa de
+Jesús, is the cloister justified.
+
+But the chief of our Spanish Orders are the Predicadores, founded by
+Domingo de Guzmán for the aggressive work of extirpating heresy; the
+Company of Jesus, a militia with the world as its field of operations
+(which explains its history); the order of the Escuelas Pías, also
+devoted to a work of an aggressive or invasive nature, that of
+instruction. I shall certainly be reminded that the reform of the
+contemplative Order of the Carmelites which Teresa de Jesús undertook
+was a Spanish work. Yes, Spanish it was, and in it men sought liberty.
+
+It was, in fact, the yearning for liberty, for inward liberty, which, in
+the troubled days of the Inquisition, led many choice spirits to the
+cloister. They imprisoned themselves in order that they might be more
+free. "Is it not a fine thing that a poor nun of San José can attain to
+sovereignty over the whole earth and the elements?" said St. Teresa in
+her _Life_. It was the Pauline yearning for liberty, the longing to
+shake off the bondage of the external law, which was then very severe,
+and, as Maestro Fray Luis de León said, very stubborn.
+
+But did they actually find liberty in the cloister? It is very doubtful
+if they did, and to-day it is impossible. For true liberty is not to rid
+oneself of the external law; liberty is consciousness of the law. Not he
+who has shaken off the yoke of the law is free, but he who has made
+himself master of the law. Liberty must be sought in the midst of the
+world, which is the domain of the law, and of sin, the offspring of the
+law. That which we must be freed from is sin, which is collective.
+
+Instead of renouncing the world in order that we may dominate it--and
+who does not know the collective instinct of domination of those
+religious Orders whose members renounce the world?--what we ought to do
+is to dominate the world in order that we may be able to renounce it.
+Not to seek poverty and submission, but to seek wealth in order that we
+may use it to increase human consciousness, and to seek power for the
+same end.
+
+It is curious that monks and anarchists should be at enmity with each
+other, when fundamentally they both profess the same ethic and are
+related by close ties of kinship. Anarchism tends to become a kind of
+atheistic monachism and a religious, rather than an ethical or
+economico-social, doctrine. The one party starts from the assumption
+that man is naturally evil, born in original sin, and that it is through
+grace that he becomes good, if indeed he ever does become good; and the
+other from the assumption that man is naturally good and is subsequently
+perverted by society. And these two theories really amount to the same
+thing, for in both the individual is opposed to society, as if the
+individual had preceded society and therefore were destined to survive
+it. And both ethics are ethics of the cloister.
+
+And the fact that guilt is collective must not actuate me to throw mine
+upon the shoulders of others, but rather to take upon myself the burden
+of the guilt of others, the guilt of all men; not to merge and sink my
+guilt in the total mass of guilt, but to make this total guilt my own;
+not to dismiss and banish my own guilt, but to open the doors of my
+heart to the guilt of all men, to centre it within myself and
+appropriate it to myself. And each one of us ought to help to remedy the
+guilt, and just because others do not do so. The fact that society is
+guilty aggravates the guilt of each member of it. "Someone ought to do
+it, but why should I? is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed
+amiability. Someone ought to do it, so why not I? is the cry of some
+earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous
+duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral
+evolution." Thus spoke Mrs. Annie Besant in her autobiography. Thus
+spoke theosophy.
+
+The fact that society is guilty aggravates the guilt of each one, and he
+is most guilty who most is sensible of the guilt. Christ, the innocent,
+since he best knew the intensity of the guilt, was in a certain sense
+the most guilty. In him the culpability, together with the divinity, of
+humanity arrived at the consciousness of itself. Many are wont to be
+amused when they read how, because of the most trifling faults, faults
+at which a man of the world would merely smile, the greatest saints
+counted themselves the greatest sinners. But the intensity of the fault
+is not measured by the external act, but by the consciousness of it, and
+an act for which the conscience of one man suffers acutely makes
+scarcely any impression on the conscience of another. And in a saint,
+conscience may be developed so fully and to such a degree of
+sensitiveness that the slightest sin may cause him more remorse than his
+crime causes the greatest criminal. And sin rests upon our consciousness
+of it, it is in him who judges and in so far as he judges. When a man
+commits a vicious act believing in good faith that he is doing a
+virtuous action, we cannot hold him morally guilty, while on the other
+hand that man is guilty who commits an act which he believes to be
+wrong, even though in itself the act is indifferent or perhaps
+beneficent. The act passes away, the intention remains, and the evil of
+the evil act is that it corrupts the intention, that in knowingly doing
+wrong a man is predisposed to go on doing it, that it blurs the
+conscience. And doing evil is not the same as being evil. Evil blurs the
+conscience, and not only the moral conscience but the general, psychical
+consciousness. And everything that exalts and expands consciousness is
+good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.
+
+And here we might raise the question which, according to Plato, was
+propounded by Socrates, as to whether virtue is knowledge, which is
+equivalent to asking whether virtue is rational.
+
+The ethicists--those who maintain that ethics is a science, those whom
+the reading of these divagations will provoke to exclaim, "Rhetoric,
+rhetoric, rhetoric!"--would appear to think that virtue is the fruit of
+knowledge, of rational study, and that even mathematics help us to be
+better men. I do not know, but for my part I feel that virtue, like
+religion, like the longing never to die--and all these are fundamentally
+the same thing--is the fruit of passion.
+
+But, I shall be asked, What then is passion? I do not know, or rather, I
+know full well, because I feel it, and since I feel it there is no need
+for me to define it to myself. Nay, more; I fear that if I were to
+arrive at a definition of it, I should cease to feel it and to possess
+it. Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object.
+It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something
+combustible to find the fire.
+
+That this may appear empty and sophistical well I know. And I shall also
+be told that there is the science of passion and the passion of science,
+and that it is in the moral sphere that reason and life unite together.
+
+I do not know, I do not know, I do not know.... And perhaps I may be
+saying fundamentally the same thing, although more confusedly, that my
+imaginary adversaries say, only more clearly, more definitely, and more
+rationally, those adversaries whom I imagine in order that I may have
+someone to fight. I do not know, I do not know.... But what they say
+freezes me and sounds to me as though it proceeded from emptiness of
+feeling.
+
+And, returning to our former question, Is virtue knowledge?--Is
+knowledge virtue? For they are two distinct questions. Virtue may be a
+science, the science of acting rightly, without every other science
+being therefore virtue. The virtue of Machiavelli is a science, and it
+cannot be said that his _virtu_ is always moral virtue It is well known,
+moreover, that the cleverest and the most learned men are not the best.
+
+No, no, no! Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to
+discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics
+how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be
+hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be the pedantry of logic, or of
+esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy.
+
+Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make
+either heroes or saints. Perhaps the saint is he who does good not for
+good's sake, but for God's sake, for the sake of eternalization.
+
+Perhaps, on the other hand, culture, or as I should say Culture--oh,
+this culture!--which is primarily the work of philosophers and men of
+science, is a thing which neither heroes nor saints have had any share
+in the making of. For saints have concerned themselves very little with
+the progress of human culture; they have concerned themselves rather
+with the salvation of the individual souls of those amongst whom they
+lived. Of what account in the history of human culture is our San Juan
+de la Cruz, for example--that fiery little monk, as culture, in perhaps
+somewhat uncultured phrase, has called him--compared with Descartes?
+
+All those saints, burning with religious charity towards their
+neighbours, hungering for their own and others' eternalization, who went
+about burning hearts, inquisitors, it may be--what have all those saints
+done for the progress of the science of ethics? Did any of them discover
+the categorical imperative, like the old bachelor of Königsberg, who, if
+he was not a saint, deserved to be one?
+
+The son of a famous professor of ethics, one who scarcely ever opened
+his lips without mentioning the categorical imperative, was lamenting to
+me one day the fact that he lived in a desolating dryness of spirit, in
+a state of inward emptiness. And I was constrained to answer him thus:
+"My friend, your father had a subterranean river flowing through his
+spirit, a fresh current fed by the beliefs of his early childhood, by
+hopes in the beyond; and while he thought that he was nourishing his
+soul with this categorical imperative or something of that sort, he was
+in reality nourishing it with those waters which had their spring in his
+childish days. And it may be that to you he has given the flower of his
+spirit, his rational doctrines of ethics, but not the root, not the
+subterranean source, not the irrational substratum."
+
+How was it that Krausism took root here in Spain, while Kantism and
+Hegelianism did not, although the two latter systems are much more
+profound, morally and philosophically, than the first? Because in
+transplanting the first, its roots were transplanted with it. The
+philosophical thought of a people or a period is, as it were, the
+flower, the thing that is external and above ground; but this flower, or
+fruit if you prefer it, draws its sap from the root of the plant, and
+this root, which is in and under the ground, is the religious sense. The
+philosophical thought of Kant, the supreme flower of the mental
+evolution of the Germanic people, has its roots in the religious feeling
+of Luther, and it is not possible for Kantism, especially the practical
+part of it, to take root and bring forth flower and fruit in peoples who
+have not undergone the experience of the Reformation and who perhaps
+were incapable of experiencing it. Kantism is Protestant, and we
+Spaniards are fundamentally Catholic. And if Krause struck some roots
+here--more numerous and more permanent than is commonly supposed--it is
+because Krause had roots in pietism, and pietism, as Ritschl has
+demonstrated in his _Geschichte des Pietismus_, has specifically
+Catholic roots and may be described as the irruption, or rather the
+persistence, of Catholic mysticism in the heart of Protestant
+rationalism. And this explains why not a few Catholic thinkers in Spain
+became followers of Krause.
+
+And since we Spaniards are Catholic--whether we know it or not, and
+whether we like it or not--and although some of us may claim to be
+rationalists or atheists, perhaps the greatest service we can render to
+the cause of culture, and of what is of more value than culture,
+religiousness--if indeed they are not the same thing--is in endeavouring
+to formulate clearly to ourselves this subconscious, social, or popular
+Catholicism of ours. And that is what I have attempted to do in this
+work.
+
+What I call the tragic sense of life in men and peoples is at any rate
+our tragic sense of life, that of Spaniards and the Spanish people, as
+it is reflected in my consciousness, which is a Spanish consciousness,
+made in Spain. And this tragic sense of life is essentially the Catholic
+sense of it, for Catholicism, and above all popular Catholicism, is
+tragic. The people abhors comedy. When Pilate--the type of the refined
+gentleman, the superior person, the esthete, the rationalist if you
+like--proposes to give the people comedy and mockingly presents Christ
+to them, saying, "Behold the man!" the people mutinies and shouts
+"Crucify him! Crucify him!" The people does not want comedy but tragedy.
+And that which Dante, the great Catholic, called the Divine Comedy, is
+the most tragical tragedy that has ever been written.
+
+And as I have endeavoured in these essays to exhibit the soul of a
+Spaniard, and therewithal the Spanish soul, I have curtailed the number
+of quotations from Spanish writers, while scattering with perhaps too
+lavish a hand those from the writers of other countries. For all human
+souls are brother-souls.
+
+And there is one figure, a comically tragic figure, a figure in which
+is revealed all that is profoundly tragic in the human comedy, the
+figure of Our Lord Don Quixote, the Spanish Christ, who resumes and
+includes in himself the immortal soul of my people. Perhaps the passion
+and death of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is the passion and
+death of the Spanish people, its death and resurrection. And there is a
+Quixotesque philosophy and even a Quixotesque metaphysic, there is a
+Quixotesque logic, and also a Quixotesque ethic and a Quixotesque
+religious sense--the religious sense of Spanish Catholicism. This is the
+philosophy, this is the logic, this is the ethic, this is the religious
+sense, that I have endeavoured to outline, to suggest rather than to
+develop, in this work. To develop it rationally, no; the Quixotesque
+madness does not submit to scientific logic.
+
+And now, before concluding and bidding my readers farewell, it remains
+for me to speak of the rôle that is reserved for Don Quixote in the
+modern European tragi-comedy.
+
+Let us see, in the next and last essay, what this may be.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[54] Act II., Scene 4: "I am dreaming and I wish to act rightly, for
+good deeds are not lost, though they be wrought in dreams."
+
+[55] Act III., Scene 10: "Let us aim at the eternal, the glory that does
+not wane, where bliss slumbers not and where greatness does not repose."
+
+[56] "Se _les_ muera," y no sólo "se muera."
+
+[57] _Trabalhos de Jesus_, part i.
+
+[58] De Musset.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN TRAGI-COMEDY
+
+"A voice crying in the wilderness!"--ISA. xl. 3.
+
+
+Need is that I bring to a conclusion, for the present at any rate, these
+essays that threaten to become like a tale that has no ending. They have
+gone straight from my hands to the press in the form of a kind of
+improvization upon notes collected during a number of years, and in
+writing each essay I have not had before me any of those that preceded
+it. And thus they will go forth full of inward contradictions--apparent
+contradictions, at any rate--like life and like me myself.
+
+My sin, if any, has been that I have embellished them to excess with
+foreign quotations, many of which will appear to have been dragged in
+with a certain degree of violence. But I will explain this another time.
+
+A few years after Our Lord Don Quixote had journeyed through Spain,
+Jacob Böhme declared in his _Aurora_ (chap xi., § 142) that he did not
+write a story or history related to him by others, but that he himself
+had had to stand in the battle, which he found to be full of heavy
+strivings, and wherein he was often struck down to the ground like all
+other men; and a little further on (§ 152) he adds: "Although I must
+become a spectacle of scorn to the world and the devil, yet my hope is
+in God concerning the life to come; in Him will I venture to hazard it
+and not resist or strive against the Spirit. Amen." And like this
+Quixote of the German intellectual world, neither will I resist the
+Spirit.
+
+And therefore I cry with the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and
+I send forth my cry from this University of Salamanca, a University that
+arrogantly styled itself _omnium scientiarum princeps_, and which
+Carlyle called a stronghold of ignorance and which a French man of
+letters recently called a phantom University; I send it forth from this
+Spain--"the land of dreams that become realities, the rampart of Europe,
+the home of the knightly ideal," to quote from a letter which the
+American poet Archer M. Huntington sent me the other day--from this
+Spain which was the head and front of the Counter-Reformation in the
+sixteenth century. And well they repay her for it!
+
+In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence of Catholicism. And
+the chief factors in _de-essentializing_ it--that is, in
+de-Catholicizing Europe--have been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and
+the Revolution, which for the ideal of an eternal, ultra-terrestrial
+life, have substituted the ideal of progress, of reason, of science, or,
+rather, of Science with the capital letter. And last of all, the
+dominant ideal of to-day, comes Culture.
+
+And in the second half of the nineteenth century, an age essentially
+unphilosophical and technical, dominated by a myopic specialism and by
+historical materialism, this ideal took a practical form, not so much in
+the popularization as in the vulgarization of science--or, rather, of
+pseudo-science--venting itself in a flood of cheap, popular, and
+propagandist literature. Science sought to popularize itself as if it
+were its function to come down to the people and subserve their
+passions, and not the duty of the people to rise to science and through
+science to rise to higher heights, to new and profounder aspirations.
+
+All this led Brunetière to proclaim the bankruptcy of science, and this
+science--if you like to call it science--did in effect become bankrupt.
+And as it failed to satisfy, men continued their quest for happiness,
+but without finding it, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or in power,
+or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good conscience, or in
+culture. And the result was pessimism.
+
+Neither did the gospel of progress satisfy. What end did progress serve?
+Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the _Kulturkampf_ did
+not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I
+call the final finality is the real _hontôs hon_. And the famous _maladie
+du siècle_, which announced itself in Rousseau and was exhibited more
+plainly in Sénancour's _Obermann_ than in any other character, neither
+was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the
+soul, in the human finality of the Universe.
+
+The truest symbol of it is to be found in a creation of fiction, Dr.
+Faustus.
+
+This immortal Dr. Faustus, the product of the Renaissance and the
+Reformation, first comes into our ken at the beginning of the
+seventeenth century, when in 1604 he is introduced to us by Christopher
+Marlowe. This is the same character that Goethe was to rediscover two
+centuries later, although in certain respects the earlier Faust was the
+fresher and more spontaneous. And side by side with him Mephistopheles
+appears, of whom Faust asks: "What good will my soul do thy lord?"
+"Enlarge his kingdom," Mephistopheles replies. "Is that the reason why
+he tempts us thus?" the Doctor asks again, and the evil spirit answers:
+"_Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris_," which, mistranslated into
+Romance, is the equivalent of our proverb--"The misfortune of many is
+the consolation of fools." "Where we are is hell, and where hell is
+there must we ever be," Mephistopheles continues, to which Faust answers
+that he thinks hell's a fable and asks him who made the world. And
+finally this tragic Doctor, tortured with our torture, meets Helen, who,
+although no doubt Marlowe never suspected it, is none other than
+renascent Culture. And in Marlowe's _Faust_ there is a scene that is
+worth the whole of the second part of the _Faust_ of Goethe. Faust says
+to Helen: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss"--and he kisses
+her--
+
+    Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!
+    Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
+    Here will I dwell, for Helen is in these lips,
+    And all is dross that is not Helena.
+
+Give me my soul again!--the cry of Faust, the Doctor, when, after having
+kissed Helen, he is about to be lost eternally. For the primitive Faust
+has no ingenuous Margaret to save him. This idea of his salvation was
+the invention of Goethe. And is there not a Faust whom we all know, our
+own Faust? This Faust has studied Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine,
+and even Theology, only to find that we can know nothing, and he has
+sought escape in the open country (_hinaus ins weite Land_) and has
+encountered Mephistopheles, the embodiment of that force which, ever
+willing evil, ever achieves good in its own despite. This Faust has been
+led by Mephistopheles to the arms of Margaret, child of the
+simple-hearted people, she whom Faust, the overwise, had lost. And
+thanks to her--for she gave herself to him--this Faust is saved,
+redeemed by the people that believes with a simple faith. But there was
+a second part, for that Faust was the anecdotical Faust and not the
+categorical Faust of Goethe, and he gave himself again to Culture, to
+Helen, and begot Euphorion upon her, and everything ends among mystical
+choruses with the discovery of the eternal feminine. Poor Euphorion!
+
+And this Helen is the spouse of the fair Menelaus, the Helen whom Paris
+bore away, who was the cause of the war of Troy, and of whom the ancient
+Trojans said that no one should be incensed because men fought for a
+woman who bore so terrible a likeness to the immortal gods. But I
+rather think that Faust's Helen was that other Helen who accompanied
+Simon Magus, and whom he declared to be the divine wisdom. And Faust can
+say to her: Give me my soul again!
+
+For Helen with her kisses takes away our soul. And what we long for and
+have need of is soul--soul of bulk and substance.
+
+But the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution came, bringing
+Helen to us, or, rather, urged on by Helen, and now they talk to us
+about Culture and Europe.
+
+Europe! This idea of Europe, primarily and immediately of geographical
+significance, has been converted for us by some magical process into a
+kind of metaphysical category. Who can say to-day--in Spain, at any
+rate--what Europe is? I only know that it is a shibboleth (_vide_ my
+_Tres Ensayos_). And when I proceed to examine what it is that our
+Europeanizers call Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its
+periphery remains outside of it--Spain, of course, and also England,
+Italy, Scandinavia, Russia--and hence it is reduced to the central
+portion, Franco-Germany, with its annexes and dependencies.
+
+All this is the consequence, I repeat, of the Renaissance and the
+Reformation, which, although apparently they lived in a state of
+internecine war, were twin-brothers. The Italians of the Renaissance
+were all of them Socinians; the humanists, with Erasmus at their head,
+regarded Luther, the German monk, as a barbarian, who derived his
+driving force from the cloister, as did Bruno and Campanella. But this
+barbarian was their twin-brother, and though their antagonist he was
+also the antagonist of the common enemy. All this, I say, is due to the
+Renaissance and the Reformation, and to what was the offspring of these
+two, the Revolution, and to them we owe also a new Inquisition, that of
+science or culture, which turns against those who refuse to submit to
+its orthodoxy the weapons of ridicule and contempt.
+
+When Galileo sent his treatise on the earth's motion to the Grand Duke
+of Tuscany, he told him that it was meet that that which the higher
+authorities had determined should be believed and obeyed, and that he
+considered his treatise "as poetry or as a dream, and as such I desire
+your highness to receive it." And at other times he calls it a "chimera"
+or a "mathematical caprice." And in the same way in these essays, for
+fear also--why not confess it?--of the Inquisition, of the modern, the
+scientific, Inquisition, I offer as a poetry, dream, chimera, mystical
+caprice, that which springs from what is deepest in me. And I say with
+Galileo, _Eppur si muove!_ But is it only because of this fear? Ah, no!
+for there is another, more tragic Inquisition, and that is the
+Inquisition which the modern man, the man of culture, the European--and
+such am I, whether I will or not--carries within him. There is a more
+terrible ridicule, and that is the ridicule with which a man
+contemplates his own self. It is my reason that laughs at my faith and
+despises it.
+
+And it is here that I must betake me to my Lord Don Quixote in order
+that I may learn of him how to confront ridicule and overcome it, and a
+ridicule which perhaps--who knows?--he never knew.
+
+Yes, yes--how shall my reason not smile at these dilettantesque,
+would-be mystical, pseudo-philosophical interpretations, in which there
+is anything rather than patient study and--shall I say
+scientific?--objectivity and method? And nevertheless ... _eppur si
+muove!_
+
+_Eppur si muove!_ And I take refuge in dilettantism, in what a pedant
+would call _demi-mondaine_ philosophy, as a shelter against the pedantry
+of specialists, against the philosophy of the professional philosophers.
+And who knows?... Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there
+is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and
+the theology of the theologians.
+
+Let them talk to us of Europe! The civilization of Thibet is parallel
+with ours, and men who disappear like ourselves have lived and are
+living by it. And over all civilizations there hovers the shadow of
+Ecclesiastes, with his admonition, "How dieth the wise man?--as the
+fool" (ii. 16).
+
+Among the people of my country there is an admirable reply to the
+customary interrogation, "How are you?"[59] and it is "Living." And that
+is the truth--we are living, and living as much as all the rest. What
+can a man ask for more? And who does not recollect the verse?--
+
+    _Coda vez que considero
+    que me tengo de morir,
+    tiendo la capa en el suelo
+    y no me harto de dormir._[60]
+
+But no, not sleeping, but dreaming--dreaming life, since life is a
+dream.
+
+Among us Spaniards another phrase has very rapidly passed into current
+usage, the expression "It's a question of passing the time," or "killing
+the time." And, in fact, we make time in order to kill it. But there is
+something that has always preoccupied us as much as or more than passing
+the time--a formula which denotes an esthetical attitude--and that is,
+gaining eternity, which is the formula of the religious attitude. The
+truth is, we leap from the esthetic and the economic to the religious,
+passing over the logical and the ethical; we jump from art to religion.
+
+One of our younger novelists, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, in his recent novel,
+_La Pata de la Raposa_, has told us that the idea of death is the trap,
+and spirit the fox or the wary virtue with which to circumvent the
+ambushes set by fatality, and he continues: "Caught in the trap, weak
+men and weak peoples lie prone on the ground ...; to robust spirits and
+strong peoples the rude shock of danger gives clear-sightedness; they
+quickly penetrate into the heart of the immeasurable beauty of life, and
+renouncing for ever their original hastiness and folly, emerge from the
+trap with muscles taut for action and with the soul's vigour, power, and
+efficiency increased a hundredfold." But let us see; weak men ... weak
+peoples ... robust spirits ... strong peoples ... what does all this
+mean? I do not know. What I think I know is that some individuals and
+peoples have not yet really thought about death and immortality, have
+not felt them, and that others have ceased to think about them, or
+rather ceased to feel them. And the fact that they have never passed
+through the religious period is not, I think, a matter for either men or
+peoples to boast about.
+
+The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to write about, and
+there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to it and accept it as it
+is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the
+"trap." But it has been said by Calderón that "to seek to persuade a man
+that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not
+console him for them, but is another misfortune in addition."[61] And,
+furthermore, "only the heart can speak to the heart," as Fray Diego de
+Estella said (_Vanidad del Mundo_, cap. xxi.).
+
+A short time ago a reply that I made to those who reproached us
+Spaniards for our scientific incapacity appeared to scandalize some
+people. After having remarked that the electric light and the steam
+engine function here in Spain just as well as in the countries where
+they were invented, and that we make use of logarithms as much as they
+do in the country where the idea of them was first conceived, I
+exclaimed, "Let others invent!"--a paradoxical expression which I do not
+retract. We Spaniards ought to appropriate to ourselves some of those
+sage counsels which Count Joseph de Maistre gave to the Russians, a
+people not unlike ourselves. In his admirable letters to Count
+Rasoumowski on public education in Russia, he said that a nation should
+not think the worse of itself because it was not made for science; that
+the Romans had no understanding of the arts, neither did they possess a
+mathematician, which, however, did not prevent them from playing their
+part in the world; and in particular we should take to heart everything
+that he said about that crowd of arrogant sciolists who idolize the
+tastes, the fashions, and the languages of foreign countries, and are
+ever ready to pull down whatever they despise--and they despise
+everything.
+
+We have not the scientific spirit? And what of that, if we have some
+other spirit? And who can tell if the spirit that we have is or is not
+compatible with the scientific spirit?
+
+But in saying "Let others invent!" I did not mean to imply that we must
+be content with playing a passive rôle. No. For them their science, by
+which we shall profit; for us, our own work. It is not enough to be on
+the defensive, we must attack.
+
+But we must attack wisely and cautiously. Reason must be our weapon. It
+is the weapon even of the fool. Our sublime fool and our exemplar, Don
+Quixote, after he had destroyed with two strokes of his sword that
+pasteboard visor "which he had fitted to his head-piece, made it anew,
+placing certain iron bars within it, in such a manner that he rested
+satisfied with its solidity, and without wishing to make a second trial
+of it, he deputed and held it in estimation of a most excellent
+visor."[62] And with the pasteboard visor on his head he made himself
+immortal--that is to say, he made himself ridiculous. For it was by
+making himself ridiculous that Don Quixote achieved his immortality.
+
+And there are so many ways of making ourselves ridiculous I ... Cournot
+said _(Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales_, etc., § 510):
+"It is best not to speak to either princes or peoples of the
+probabilities of death; princes will punish this temerity with disgrace;
+the public will revenge itself with ridicule." True, and therefore it is
+said that we must live as the age lives. _Corrumpere et corrumpi sæculum
+vocatur_ (Tacitus: _Germania_ 19).
+
+It is necessary to know how to make ourselves ridiculous, and not only
+to others but to ourselves. And more than ever to-day, when there is so
+much chatter about our backwardness compared with other civilized
+peoples, to-day when a parcel of shallow-brained critics say that we
+have had no science, no art, no philosophy, no Renaissance, (of this we
+had perhaps too much), no anything, these same critics being ignorant of
+our real history, a history that remains yet to be written, the first
+task being to undo the web of calumniation and protest that has been
+woven around it.
+
+Carducci, the author of the phrase about the _contorcimenti
+dell'affannosa grandiositá spagnola_, has written (in _Mosche Cochiere_)
+that "even Spain, which never attained the hegemony of the world of
+thought, had her Cervantes." But was Cervantes a solitary and isolated
+phenomenon, without roots, without ancestry, without a foundation? That
+an Italian rationalist, remembering that it was Spain that reacted
+against the Renaissance in his country, should say that Spain _non ebbe
+egemonia mai di pensiero_ is, however, readily comprehended. Was there
+no importance, was there nothing akin to cultural hegemony, in the
+Counter-Reformation, of which Spain was the champion, and which in point
+of fact began with the sack of Rome by the Spaniards, a providential
+chastisement of the city of the pagan popes of the pagan Renaissance?
+Apart from the question as to whether the Counter-Reformation was good
+or bad, was there nothing akin to hegemony in Loyola or the Council of
+Trent? Previous to this Council, Italy witnessed a nefarious and
+unnatural union between Christianity and Paganism, or rather, between
+immortalism and mortalism, a union to which even some of the Popes
+themselves consented in their souls; theological error was philosophical
+truth, and all difficulties were solved by the accommodating formula
+_salva fide_. But it was otherwise after the Council; after the Council
+came the open and avowed struggle between reason and faith, science and
+religion. And does not the fact that this change was brought about,
+thanks principally to Spanish obstinacy, point to something akin to
+hegemony?
+
+Without the Counter-Reformation, would the Reformation have followed the
+course that it did actually follow? Without the Counter-Reformation
+might not the Reformation, deprived of the support of pietism, have
+perished in the gross rationalism of the _Aufklärung_, of the age of
+Enlightenment? Would nothing have been changed had there been no Charles
+I., no Philip II., our great Philip?
+
+A negative achievement, it will be said. But what is that? What is
+negative? what is positive? At what point in time--a line always
+continuing in the same direction, from the past to the future--does the
+zero occur which denotes the boundary between the positive and the
+negative? Spain, which is said to be the land of knights and rogues--and
+all of them rogues--has been the country most slandered by history
+precisely because it championed the Counter-Reformation. And because
+its arrogance has prevented it from stepping down into the public
+forum, into the world's vanity fair, and publishing its own
+justification.
+
+Let us leave on one side Spain's eight centuries of warfare against the
+Moors, during which she defended Europe from Mohammedanism, her work of
+internal unification, her discovery of America and the Indies--for this
+was the achievement of Spain and Portugal, and not of Columbus and Vasco
+da Gama--let us leave all this, and more than this, on one side, and it
+is not a little thing. Is it not a cultural achievement to have created
+a score of nations, reserving nothing for herself, and to have begotten,
+as the Conquistadores did, free men on poor Indian slaves? Apart from
+all this, does our mysticism count for nothing in the world of thought?
+Perhaps the peoples whose souls Helen will ravish away with her kisses
+may some day have to return to this mysticism to find their souls again.
+
+But, as everybody knows, Culture is composed of ideas and only of ideas,
+and man is only Culture's instrument. Man for the idea, and not the idea
+for man; the substance for the shadow. The end of man is to create
+science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to God
+in order, as I wrote years ago in my novel, _Amor y Pedagogia_. Man,
+apparently, is not even an idea. And at the end of all, the human race
+will fall exhausted at the foot of a pile of libraries--whole woods
+rased to the ground to provide the paper that is stored away in
+them--museums, machines, factories, laboratories ... in order to
+bequeath them--to whom? For God will surely not accept them.
+
+That horrible regenerationist literature, almost all of it an imposture,
+which the loss of our last American colonies provoked, led us into the
+pedantry of extolling persevering and silent effort--and this with great
+vociferation, vociferating silence--of extolling prudence, exactitude,
+moderation, spiritual fortitude, synteresis, equanimity, the social
+virtues, and the chiefest advocates of them were those of us who lacked
+them most. Almost all of us Spaniards fell into this ridiculous mode of
+literature, some more and some less. And so it befell that that
+arch-Spaniard Joaquín Costa, one of the least European spirits we ever
+had, invented his famous saying that we must Europeanize Spain, and,
+while proclaiming that we must lock up the sepulchre of the Cid with a
+sevenfold lock, Cid-like urged us to--conquer Africa! And I myself
+uttered the cry, "Down with Don Quixote!" and from this blasphemy, which
+meant the very opposite of what it said--such was the fashion of the
+hour--sprang my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_ and my cult of Quixotism
+as the national religion.
+
+I wrote that book in order to rethink _Don Quixote_ in opposition to the
+Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what
+was and still is for the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to
+me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he
+actually did put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover
+in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and
+under and over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to hunt down
+our philosophy in it.
+
+For the conviction continually grows upon me that our philosophy, the
+Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our
+life, in our action, in our mysticism, above all, and not in
+philosophical systems. It is concrete. And is there not perhaps as much
+philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel? The poetry of
+Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, _Don Quijote_, _La Vida es Sueño_, the
+_Subida al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept
+of life (_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_). And it was difficult for
+this philosophy of ours to formulate itself in the second half of the
+nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist,
+technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period
+essentially materialist and pessimist.
+
+Our language itself, like every cultured language, contains within
+itself an implicit philosophy.
+
+A language, in effect, is a potential philosophy. Platonism is the Greek
+language which discourses in Plato, unfolding its secular metaphors;
+scholasticism is the philosophy of the dead Latin of the Middle Ages
+wrestling with the popular tongues; the French language discourses in
+Descartes, the German in Kant and in Hegel, and the English in Hume and
+in Stuart Mill. For the truth is that the logical starting-point of all
+philosophical speculation is not the I, neither is it representation
+(_Vorstellung_), nor the world as it presents itself immediately to the
+senses; but it is mediate or historical representation, humanly
+elaborated and such as it is given to us principally in the language by
+means of which we know the world; it is not psychical but spiritual
+representation. When we think, we are obliged to set out, whether we
+know it not and whether we will or not, from what has been thought by
+others who came before us and who environ us. Thought is an inheritance.
+Kant thought in German, and into German he translated Hume and Rousseau,
+who thought in English and French respectively. And did not Spinoza
+think in Judeo-Portuguese, obstructed by and contending with Dutch?
+
+Thought rests upon prejudgements, and prejudgements pass into language.
+To language Bacon rightly ascribed not a few of the errors of the _idola
+fori_. But is it possible to philosophize in pure algebra or even in
+Esperanto? In order to see the result of such an attempt one has only to
+read the work of Avenarius on the criticism of pure experience (_reine
+Erfahrung_), of this prehuman or inhuman experience. And even Avenarius,
+who was obliged to invent a language, invented one that was based upon
+the Latin tradition, with roots which carry in their metaphorical
+implications a content of impure experience, of human social experience.
+
+All philosophy is, therefore, at bottom philology. And philology, with
+its great and fruitful law of analogical formations, opens wide the door
+to chance, to the irrational, to the absolutely incommensurable. History
+is not mathematics, neither is philosophy. And how many philosophical
+ideas are not strictly owing to something akin to rhyme, to the
+necessity of rightly placing a consonant! In Kant himself there is a
+great deal of this, of esthetic symmetry, rhyme.
+
+Representation is, therefore, like language, like reason itself--which
+is simply internal language--a social and racial product, and race, the
+blood of the spirit, is language, as Oliver Wendell Holmes has said, and
+as I have often repeated.
+
+It was in Athens and with Socrates that our Western philosophy first
+became mature, conscious of itself, and it arrived at this consciousness
+by means of the dialogue, of social conversation. And it is profoundly
+significant that the doctrine of innate ideas, of the objective and
+normative value of ideas, of what Scholasticism afterwards knew as
+Realism, should have formulated itself in dialogues. And these ideas,
+which constitute reality, are names, as Nominalism showed. Not that they
+may not be more than names (_flatus vocis_), but that they are nothing
+less than names. Language is that which gives us reality, and not as a
+mere vehicle of reality, but as its true flesh, of which all the rest,
+dumb or inarticulate representation, is merely the skeleton. And thus
+logic operates upon esthetics, the concept upon the expression, upon the
+word, and not upon the brute perception.
+
+And this is true even in the matter of love. Love does not discover that
+it is love until it speaks, until it says, I love thee! In Stendhal's
+novel, _La Chartreuse de Parme_, it is with a very profound intuition
+that Count Mosca, furious with jealousy because of the love which he
+believes unites the Duchess of Sanseverina with his nephew Fabrice, is
+made to say, "I must be calm; if my manner is violent the duchess,
+simply because her vanity is piqued, is capable of following Belgirate,
+and then, during the journey, chance may lead to a word which will give
+a name to the feelings they bear towards each other, and thereupon in a
+moment all the consequences will follow."
+
+Even so--all things were made by the word, and the word was in the
+beginning.
+
+Thought, reason--that is, living language--is an inheritance, and the
+solitary thinker of Aben Tofail, the Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as
+absurd as the ego of Descartes. The real and concrete truth, not the
+methodical and ideal, is: _homo sum, ergo cogito_. To feel oneself a man
+is more immediate than to think. But, on the other hand, History, the
+process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only
+in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man,
+each individual. _Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de
+Unamuno_. The individual is the end of the Universe.
+
+And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end
+of the Universe. The introspective individuality of the Spaniard was
+pointed out by Martin A.S. Hume in a passage in _The Spanish
+People_,[63] upon which I commented in an essay published in _La España
+Moderna_.[64]
+
+And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has not
+permitted the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical--or,
+rather, metaphysical--systems. And this in spite of Suárez, whose formal
+subtilties do not merit the name of philosophy.
+
+Our metaphysics, if we can be said to possess such a thing, has been
+metanthropics, and our metaphysicians have been philologists--or,
+rather, humanists--in the most comprehensive sense of the term.
+
+Menéndez de Pelayo, as Benedetto Croce very truly said (_Estetica_,
+bibliographical appendix), was inclined towards metaphysical idealism,
+but he appeared to wish to take something from other systems, even from
+empirical theories. For this reason Croce considers that his work
+(referring to his _Historia de las ideas estéticas de España_) suffers
+from a certain uncertainty, from the theoretical point of view of its
+author, Menéndez de Pelayo, which was that of a perfervid Spanish
+humanist, who, not wishing to disown the Renaissance, invented what he
+called Vivism, the philosophy of Luis Vives, and perhaps for no other
+reason than because he himself, like Vives, was an eclectic Spaniard of
+the Renaissance. And it is true that Menéndez de Pelayo, whose
+philosophy is certainly all uncertainty, educated in Barcelona in the
+timidities of the Scottish philosophy as it had been imported into the
+Catalan spirit--that creeping philosophy of common sense, which was
+anxious not to compromise itself and yet was all compromise, and which
+is so well exemplified in Balmes--always shunned all strenuous inward
+combat and formed his consciousness upon compromises.
+
+Angel Ganivet, a man all divination and instinct, was more happily
+inspired, in my opinion, when he proclaimed that the Spanish philosophy
+was that of Seneca, the pagan Stoic of Cordoba, whom not a few
+Christians regarded as one of themselves, a philosophy lacking in
+originality of thought but speaking with great dignity of tone and
+accent. His accent was a Spanish, Latino-African accent, not Hellenic,
+and there are echoes of him in Tertullian--Spanish, too, at heart--who
+believed in the corporal and substantial nature of God and the soul, and
+who was a kind of Don Quixote in the world of Christian thought in the
+second century.
+
+But perhaps we must look for the hero of Spanish thought, not in any
+actual flesh-and-bone philosopher, but in a creation of fiction, a man
+of action, who is more real than all the philosophers--Don Quixote.
+There is undoubtedly a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also a
+Quixotic philosophy. May it not perhaps be that the philosophy of the
+Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and above all, in
+the order of abstract but deeply felt thought, that of our mystics, was,
+in its essence, none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John
+of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the divine warfare?
+
+And the philosophy of Don Quixote cannot strictly be called idealism; he
+did not fight for ideas. It was of the spiritual order; he fought for
+the spirit.
+
+Imagine Don Quixote turning his heart to religious speculation--as he
+himself once dreamed of doing when he met those images in bas-relief
+which certain peasants were carrying to set up in the retablo of their
+village church[65]--imagine Don Quixote given up to meditation upon
+eternal truths, and see him ascending Mount Carmel in the middle of the
+dark night of the soul, to watch from its summit the rising of that sun
+which never sets, and, like the eagle that was St. John's companion in
+the isle of Patmos, to gaze upon it face to face and scrutinize its
+spots. He leaves to Athena's owl--the goddess with the glaucous, or
+owl-like, eyes, who sees in the dark but who is dazzled by the light of
+noon--he leaves to the owl that accompanied Athena in Olympus the task
+of searching with keen eyes in the shadows for the prey wherewith to
+feed its young.
+
+And the speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like the practical
+Quixotism, madness, a daughter-madness to the madness of the Cross. And
+therefore it is despised by the reason. At bottom, philosophy abhors
+Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it.
+
+The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross.
+Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, by making a mockery of it,
+sought to convert it into a comedy; he conceived the farcical idea of
+the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, and cried "Behold
+the man!" But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts
+for tragedy, shouted, "Crucify him! crucify him!" And the human, the
+intra-human, tragedy is the tragedy of Don Quixote, whose face was
+daubed with soap in order that he might make sport for the servants of
+the dukes and for the dukes themselves, as servile as their servants.
+"Behold the madman!" they would have said. And the comic, the
+irrational, tragedy is the tragedy of suffering caused by ridicule and
+contempt.
+
+The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people,
+can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to
+make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.
+
+I have already spoken of the forceful sonnets of that tragic Portuguese,
+Antero de Quental, who died by his own hand. Feeling acutely for the
+plight of his country on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890,
+he wrote as follows:[66] "An English statesman of the last century, who
+was also undoubtedly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace
+Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy
+for those who think. Very well, then, if we are destined to end
+tragically, we Portuguese, we who _feel_, we would far rather prefer
+this terrible, but noble, destiny, to that which is reserved, and
+perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that
+_thinks_ and _calculates_, whose destiny it is to finish miserably and
+comically." We may leave on one side the assertion that the English are
+a thinking and calculating people, implying thereby their lack of
+feeling, the injustice of which is explained by the occasion which
+provoked it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying
+that they do not think or calculate--for we twin-brothers of the
+Atlantic seaboard have always been distinguished by a certain pedantry
+of feeling; but there remains a basis of truth underlying this terrible
+idea--namely, that some peoples, those who put thought above feeling, I
+should say reason above faith, die comically, while those die tragically
+who put faith above reason. For the mockers are those who die comically,
+and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of
+tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery.
+
+The mockery that underlies the career of Don Quixote is what we must
+endeavour to discover.
+
+And shall we be told yet again that there has never been any Spanish
+philosophy in the technical sense of the word? I will answer by asking,
+What is this sense? What does philosophy mean? Windelband, the historian
+of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (_Was ist
+Philosophie_? in the first volume of his _Präludien_) tells us that "the
+history of the word 'philosophy' is the history of the cultural
+significance of science." He continues: "When scientific thought attains
+an independent existence as a desire for knowledge for the sake of
+knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently knowledge
+as a whole divides into its various branches, philosophy is the general
+knowledge of the world that embraces all other knowledge. As soon as
+scientific thought stoops again to becoming a means to ethics or
+religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of life
+or into a formulation of religious beliefs. And when afterwards the
+scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its
+character as an independent knowledge of the world, and in so far as it
+abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory
+of knowledge itself." Here you have a brief recapitulation of the
+history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval
+scholasticism upon which it endeavoured to establish religious beliefs.
+But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be
+to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been
+studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith,
+between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this
+conflict?
+
+Later on Windelband says: "By philosophy in the systematic, not in the
+historical, sense, I understand the critical knowledge of values of
+universal validity (_allgemeingiltigen Werten_)." But what values are
+there of more universal validity than that of the human will seeking
+before all else the personal, individual, and concrete immortality of
+the soul--or, in other words, the human finality of the Universe--and
+that of the human reason denying the rationality and even the
+possibility of this desire? What values are there of more universal
+validity than the rational or mathematical value and the volitional or
+teleological value of the Universe in conflict with one another?
+
+For Windelband, as for Kantians and neo-Kantians in general, there are
+only three normative categories, three universal norms--those of the
+true or the false, the beautiful or the ugly, and the morally good or
+evil. Philosophy is reduced to logics, esthetics, and ethics,
+accordingly as it studies science, art, or morality. Another category
+remains excluded--namely, that of the pleasing and the unpleasing, or
+the agreeable and the disagreeable: in other words, the hedonic. The
+hedonic cannot, according to them, pretend to universal validity, it
+cannot be normative. "Whosoever throws upon philosophy," wrote
+Windelband, "the burden of deciding the question of optimism and
+pessimism, whosoever demands that philosophy should pronounce judgement
+on the question as to whether the world is more adapted to produce pain
+than pleasure, or _vice versa_--such a one, if his attitude is not
+merely that of a dilettante, sets himself the fantastic task of finding
+an absolute determination in a region in which no reasonable man has
+ever looked for one." It remains to be seen, nevertheless, whether this
+is as clear as it seems, in the case of a man like myself, who am at the
+same time reasonable and yet nothing but a dilettante, which of course
+would be the abomination of desolation.
+
+It was with a very profound insight that Benedetto Croce, in his
+philosophy of the spirit in relation to esthetics as the science of
+expression and to logic as the science of pure concept, divided
+practical philosophy into two branches--economics and ethics. He
+recognizes, in effect, the existence of a practical grade of spirit,
+purely economical, directed towards the singular and unconcerned with
+the universal. Its types of perfection, of economic genius, are Iago and
+Napoleon, and this grade remains outside morality. And every man passes
+through this grade, because before all else he must wish to be himself,
+as an individual, and without this grade morality would be inexplicable,
+just as without esthetics logic would lack meaning. And the discovery of
+the normative value of the economic grade, which seeks the hedonic, was
+not unnaturally the work of an Italian, a disciple of Machiavelli, who
+speculated so fearlessly with regard to _virtù_, practical efficiency,
+which is not exactly the same as moral virtue.
+
+But at bottom this economic grade is but the rudimentary state of the
+religious grade. The religious is the transcendental economic or
+hedonic. Religion is a transcendental economy and hedonistic. That which
+man seeks in religion, in religious faith, is to save his own
+individuality, to eternalize it, which he achieves neither by science,
+nor by art, nor by ethics. God is a necessity neither for science, nor
+art, nor ethics; what necessitates God is religion. And with an insight
+that amounts to genius our Jesuits speak of the grand business of our
+salvation. Business--yes, business; something belonging to the economic,
+hedonistic order, although transcendental. We do not need God in order
+that He may teach us the truth of things, or the beauty of them, or in
+order that He may safeguard morality by means of a system of penalties
+and punishments, but in order that He may save us, in order that He may
+not let us die utterly. And because this unique longing is the longing
+of each and every normal man--those who are abnormal by reason of their
+barbarism or their hyperculture may be left out of the reckoning--it is
+universal and normative.
+
+Religion, therefore, is a transcendental economy, or, if you like,
+metaphysic. Together with its logical, esthetic, and ethical values, the
+Universe has for man an economic value also, which, when thus made
+universal and normative, is the religious value. We are not concerned
+only with truth, beauty, and goodness: we are concerned also and above
+all with the salvation of the individual, with perpetuation, which those
+norms do not secure for us. That science of economy which is called
+political teaches us the most adequate, the most economical way of
+satisfying our needs, whether these needs are rational or irrational,
+beautiful or ugly, moral or immoral--a business economically good may be
+a swindle, something that in the long run kills the soul--and the
+supreme human _need_ is the need of not dying, the need of enjoying for
+ever the plenitude of our own individual limitation. And if the Catholic
+eucharistic doctrine teaches that the substance of the body of Jesus
+Christ is present whole and entire in the consecrated Host, and in each
+part of it, this means that God is wholly and entirely in the whole
+Universe and also in each one of the individuals that compose it. And
+this is, fundamentally, not a logical, nor an esthetic, nor an ethical
+principle, but a transcendental economic or religious principle. And
+with this norm, philosophy is able to judge of optimism and pessimism.
+_If the human soul is immortal, the world is economically or
+hedonistically good; if not, it is bad_. And the meaning which pessimism
+and optimism give to the categories of good and evil is not an ethical
+sense, but an economic or hedonistic sense. Good is that which satisfies
+our vital longing and evil is that which does not satisfy it.
+
+Philosophy, therefore, is also the science of the tragedy of life, a
+reflection upon the tragic sense of it. An essay in this philosophy,
+with its inevitable internal contradictions and antinomies, is what I
+have attempted in these essays. And the reader must not overlook the
+fact that I have been operating upon myself; that this work partakes of
+the nature of a piece of self-surgery, and without any other anesthetic
+than that of the work itself. The enjoyment of operating upon myself has
+ennobled the pain of being operated upon.
+
+And as for my other claim--the claim that this is a Spanish philosophy,
+perhaps _the_ Spanish philosophy, that if it was an Italian who
+discovered the normative and universal value of the economic grade, it
+is a Spaniard who announces that this grade is merely the beginning of
+the religious grade, and that the essence of our religion, of our
+Spanish Catholicism, consists precisely in its being neither a science,
+nor an art, nor an ethic, but an economy of things eternal--that is to
+say, of things divine: as for this claim that all this is Spanish, I
+must leave the task of substantiating it to another and an historical
+work. But leaving aside the external and written tradition, that which
+can be demonstrated by reference to historical documents, is there not
+some present justification of this claim in the fact that I am a
+Spaniard--and a Spaniard who has scarcely ever been outside Spain; a
+product, therefore, of the Spanish tradition of the living tradition, of
+the tradition which is transmitted in feelings and ideas that dream, and
+not in texts that sleep?
+
+The philosophy in the soul of my people appears to me as the expression
+of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don
+Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between what the world is as
+scientific reason shows it to be, and what we wish that it might be, as
+our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be
+found the explanation of what is usually said about us--namely, that we
+are fundamentally irreducible to _Kultur_--or, in other words, that we
+refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either
+to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to
+morality or ethics.
+
+"And the upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by
+more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing
+will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been
+accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so! And what
+then?
+
+Yes, I know, I know very well, that it is madness to seek to turn the
+waters of the river back to their source, and that it is only the
+ignorant who seek to find in the past a remedy for their present ills;
+but I know too that everyone who fights for any ideal whatever, although
+his ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world on to the
+future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at
+home in the present. Every supposed restoration of the past is a
+creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is
+a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better. The march, as
+ever, is towards the future, and he who marches is getting there, even
+though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the
+better way!...
+
+I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the
+soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the
+Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution--learning from them,
+yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the
+spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark
+Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle
+between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance which was the offspring of
+the Middle Ages.
+
+And if some accuse me of subserving the cause of Catholic reaction,
+others perhaps, the official Catholics.... But these, in Spain, trouble
+themselves little about anything, and are interested only in their own
+quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor folk, they have neither eyes
+nor ears!
+
+But the truth is that my work--I was going to say my mission--is to
+shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in
+affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and
+this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all
+those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to
+agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and
+passionate desire.
+
+Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the
+immediate apparential efficacy of his work? It is very doubtful, and at
+any rate he did not by any chance put his visor to the test by slashing
+it a second time. And many passages in his history show that he did not
+look with much confidence to the immediate success of his design to
+restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter to him so long as thus
+he lived and immortalized himself? And he must have surmised, and did in
+fact surmise, that his work would have another and higher efficacy, and
+that was that it would ferment in the minds of all those who in a pious
+spirit read of his exploits.
+
+Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic
+ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self
+to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's
+battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul
+to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure
+of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho, at his
+side, inward and heroical too--and tell me if you find anything comic in
+the tragedy.
+
+And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left
+himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and
+all philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books;
+we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any _Critique
+of Pure Reason_.
+
+But Don Quixote was converted. Yes--and died, poor soul. But the other,
+the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives amongst us,
+animating us with his spirit--this Don Quixote was not converted, this
+Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this
+Don Quixote must never die. And the conversion of the other Don
+Quixote--he who was converted only to die--was possible because he was
+mad, and it was his madness, and not his death nor his conversion that
+immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for the crime of having been
+born.[67] _Felix culpa!_ And neither was his madness cured, but only
+transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he
+stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.
+
+This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered
+lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he had freed the galley
+slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that
+Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live
+hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at
+him, he went to heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this
+divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.
+
+And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with
+desperation. And does he not fight out of despair? How is it that among
+the words that English has borrowed from our language, such as _siesta,
+camarilla, guerrilla_, there is to be found this word _desperdo_? Is not
+this inward Don Quixote that I spoke of, conscious of his own tragic
+comicness, a man of despair (_desesperado_). A _desperado_--yes, like
+Pizarro and like Loyola. But "despair is the master of impossibilities,"
+as we learn from Salazar y Torres (_Elegir al enemigo_, Act I.), and it
+is despair and despair alone that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad
+hope. _Spero quia absurdum_, it ought to have been said, rather than
+_credo_.
+
+And Don Quixote, who lived in solitude, sought more solitude still; he
+sought the solitudes of the Peña Pobre, in order that there, alone,
+without witnesses, he might give himself up to greater follies with
+which to assuage his soul. But he was not quite alone, for Sancho
+accompanied him--Sancho the good, Sancho the believing, Sancho the
+simple. If, as some say, in Spain Don Quixote is dead and Sancho lives,
+then we are saved, for Sancho, his master dead, will become a
+knight-errant himself. And at any rate he is waiting for some other mad
+knight to follow again.
+
+And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other Sancho, the Sancho who
+journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote--it is not certain that he died,
+although some think that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his lance
+and believing in the truth of all those things which his dying and
+converted master had denounced and abominated as lies. But neither is it
+certain that the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, or the curate, or the barber,
+or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with these that the
+heroical Sancho has to contend.
+
+Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude.
+And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers, creating for
+ourselves a Quixotesque Spain which only exists in our imagination?
+
+And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote bequeathed to
+_Kultur_? I answer: Quixotism, and that is no little thing! It is a
+whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole esthetic, a whole logic, a
+whole ethic--above all, a whole religion--that is to say, a whole
+economy of things eternal and things divine, a whole hope in what is
+rationally absurd.
+
+For what did Don Quixote fight? For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for
+survival. Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice,
+who is theology; not for Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen, who
+is culture. He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives.
+
+And the greatest thing about him was his having been mocked and
+vanquished, for it was in being overcome that he overcame; he overcame
+the world by giving the world cause to laugh at him.
+
+And to-day? To-day he feels his own comicness and the vanity of his
+endeavours so far as their temporal results are concerned; he sees
+himself from without--culture has taught him to objectify himself, to
+alienate himself from himself instead of entering into himself--and in
+seeing himself from without he laughs at himself, but with a bitter
+laughter. Perhaps the most tragic character would be that of a Margutte
+of the inner man, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die of
+laughter, but of laughter at himself. _E riderá in eterno_, he will
+laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte. Do you not
+hear the laughter of God?
+
+The mortal Don Quixote, in dying, realized his own comicness and bewept
+his sins; but the immortal Quixote, realizing his own comicness,
+superimposes himself upon it and triumphs over it without renouncing it.
+
+And Don Quixote does not surrender, because he is not a pessimist, and
+he fights on. He is not a pessimist, because pessimism is begotten by
+vanity, it is a matter of fashion, pure intellectual snobbism, and Don
+Quixote is neither vain nor modern with any sort of modernity (still
+less is he a modernist), and he does not understand the meaning of the
+word "snob" unless it be explained to him in old Christian Spanish. Don
+Quixote is not a pessimist, for since he does not understand what is
+meant by the _joie de vivre_ he does not understand its opposite.
+Neither does he understand futurist fooleries. In spite of
+Clavileño,[68] he has not got as far as the aeroplane, which seems to
+tend to put not a few fools at a still greater distance from heaven. Don
+Quixote has not arrived at the age of the tedium of life, a condition
+that not infrequently takes the form of that topophobia so
+characteristic of many modern spirits, who pass their lives running at
+top speed from one place to another, not from any love of the place to
+which they are going, but from hatred of the place they are leaving
+behind, and so flying from all places: which is one of the forms of
+despair.
+
+But Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine laughter,
+and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in life eternal, he
+has to fight, attacking the modern, scientific, inquisitorial orthodoxy
+in order to bring in a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic,
+contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola, an Italian Quixote of
+the end of the fifteenth century, he fights against this Modern Age that
+began with Machiavelli and that will end comically. He fights against
+the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of mind,
+reconciliation between reason and faith--this, thanks to the providence
+of God, is no longer possible. The world must be as Don Quixote wishes
+it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight with it and will,
+to all appearances, be vanquished, but he will triumph by making himself
+ridiculous. And he will triumph by laughing at himself and making
+himself the object of his own laughter.
+
+"Reason speaks and feeling bites" said Petrarch; but reason also bites
+and bites in the inmost heart. And more light does not make more warmth.
+"Light, light, more light!" they tell us that the dying Goethe cried.
+No, warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we die of cold and not of darkness.
+It is not the night kills, but the frost. We must liberate the enchanted
+princess and destroy the stage of Master Peter.[69]
+
+But God! may there not be pedantry too in thinking ourselves the objects
+of mockery and in making Don Quixotes of ourselves? Kierkegaard said
+that the regenerate (_Opvakte_) desire that the wicked world should mock
+at them for the better assurance of their own regeneracy, for the
+enjoyment of being able to bemoan the wickedness of the world
+(_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, ii., Afsnit ii., cap. 4,
+sect. 2, b).
+
+The question is, how to avoid the one or the other pedantry, or the one
+or the other affectation, if the natural man is only a myth and we are
+all artificial.
+
+Romanticism! Yes, perhaps that is partly the word. And there is an
+advantage in its very lack of precision. Against romanticism the forces
+of rationalist and classicist pedantry, especially in France, have
+latterly been unchained. Romanticism itself is merely another form of
+pedantry, the pedantry of sentiment? Perhaps. In this world a man of
+culture is either a dilettante or a pedant: you have to take your
+choice. Yes, René and Adolphe and Obermann and Lara, perhaps they were
+all pedants.... The question is to seek consolation in disconsolation.
+
+The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration,
+essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a
+_demi-mondaine_ philosophy. Leave out the _demi_; call it _mondaine_,
+mundane. Mundane--yes, a philosophy for the world and not for
+philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The
+world desires illusion (_mundus vult decipi_)--either the illusion
+antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to
+reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever
+wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed
+are they who are easily befooled! A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, said
+that it was the privilege of his countrymen _n'être pas dupe_--not to be
+taken in. A sorry privilege!
+
+Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. "Then let him
+not make the demand," it will be said, "let him resign himself, let him
+accept life and truth as they are." But he does not accept them as they
+are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho, who stands by his
+side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those
+understand who talk thus to him, those who succeed in resigning
+themselves and accepting rational life and rational truth. No, it is
+that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows!...
+
+And in this critical century, Don Quixote, who has also contaminated
+himself with criticism, has to attack his own self, the victim of
+intellectualism and of sentimentalism, and when he wishes to be most
+spontaneous he appears to be most affected. And he wishes, unhappy man,
+to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he
+sinks into the despair of the critical century whose two greatest
+victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through this despair he reaches
+the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke--that intellectual Don
+Quixote who escaped from the cloister--and becomes an awakener of
+sleeping souls (_dormitantium animorum excubitor_), as the ex-Dominican
+said of himself--he who wrote: "Heroic love is the property of those
+superior natures who are called insane (_insano_) not because they do
+not know (_no sanno_), but because they over-know (_soprasanno_)."
+
+But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines; at any rate the
+inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, opposite
+the Vatican, states that it has been dedicated to him by the age which
+he had foretold (_il secolo da lui divinato_). But our Don Quixote, the
+inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does
+not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they
+are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the
+world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the
+mountain, fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as
+Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the
+loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the title
+of king for the inscription written over the Cross.
+
+What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote, to-day, in this world? To
+cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But though men hear not, the
+wilderness hears, and one day it will be transformed into a resounding
+forest, and this solitary voice that goes scattering over the wilderness
+like seed, will fructify into a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred
+thousand tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of
+death.
+
+And now to you, the younger generation, bachelor Carrascos of a
+Europeanizing regenerationism, you who are working after the best
+European fashion, with scientific method and criticism, to you I say:
+Create wealth, create nationality, create art, create science, create
+ethics, above all create--or rather, translate--_Kultur_, and thus kill
+in yourselves both life and death. Little will it all last you!...
+
+And with this I conclude--high time that I did!--for the present at any
+rate, these essays on the tragic sense of life in men and in peoples, or
+at least in myself--who am a man--and in the soul of my people as it is
+reflected in mine.
+
+I hope, reader, that some time while our tragedy is still playing, in
+some interval between the acts, we shall meet again. And we shall
+recognize one another. And forgive me if I have troubled you more than
+was needful and inevitable, more than I intended to do when I took up my
+pen proposing to distract you for a while from your distractions. And
+may God deny you peace, but give you glory!
+
+SALAMANCA, _In the year of grace_ 1912.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[59] "Que tal?" o "como va?" y es aquella que responde: "se vive!"
+
+[60] Whenever I consider that I needs must die, I stretch my cloak upon
+the ground and am not surfeited with sleeping.
+
+[61] No es consuelo de desdichas--es otra desdicha aparte--querer a
+quien las padece--persuadir que no son tales (_Gustos y diogustos no son
+niés que imaginatión_, Act I., Scene 4).
+
+[62] _Don Quijote_, part i., chap, i.
+
+[63] Preface.
+
+[64] _El individualismo español_, in vol. clxxi., March 1, 1903.
+
+[65] See _El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha_, part ii.,
+chap. lviii., and the corresponding chapter in my _Vida de Don Quijote y
+Sancho_.
+
+[66] In an article which was to have been published on the occasion of
+the ultimatum, and of which the original is in the possession of the
+Conde do Ameal. This fragment appeared in the Portuguese review, _A
+Aguía_ (No. 3), March, 1912.
+
+[67] An allusion to the phrase in Calderón's _La Vida es Sueño_, "Que
+delito cometí contra vosotros naciendo?"--J.E.C.F.
+
+[68] The wooden horse upon which Don Quixote imagined that he and Sancho
+had been carried in the air. See _Don Quijote_, part ii., chaps. 40 and
+41.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[69] _Don Quijote_, part ii., chap. 26.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Æschylus, 246
+Alexander of Aphrodisias, 88
+Amiel, 18, 68, 228
+Anaxagoras, 143
+Angelo of Foligno, 289
+Antero de Quintal, 240, 315
+Ardigo, Roberto, 238
+Aristotle, 1, 21, 80, 144, 165, 171, 232, 235
+Arnold, Matthew, 103
+Athanasius, 63-65
+Avenarius, Richard, 144, 310
+de Ayala, Ramón Pérez, 303
+
+Bacon, 310
+Balfour, A.J., 27
+Balmes, 84, 85
+Bergson, 144, 328
+Berkeley, Bishop, 87, 146
+Besant, Mrs. A., 291
+Boccaccio, 52
+Böhme, Jacob, 227, 297
+Bonnefon, 250, 254
+Bossuet, 226, 231
+Brooks, Phillips, 76, 190
+Browning, Robert, 112, 181, 249, 254
+Brunetière, 103, 298
+Brunhes, B., 235, 237, 238
+Bruno, 301, 329
+Büchner, 95
+Butler, Joseph, 5, 6, 87
+Byron, Lord, 94, 102, 103, 132
+
+Calderón, 39, 268, 323
+Calvin, 121, 246
+Campanella, 301
+Carducci, 102, 306
+Carlyle, 231, 298
+Catherine of Sienna, 289
+Cauchy, 236
+Cervantes, 220, 306
+Channing, W.E., 78
+Cicero, 165, 216, 221
+Clement of Alexandria, 32
+Cortés, Donoso, 74
+Costa, Joaquin, 309
+Cournot, 192, 217, 222, 306
+Cowper, 43
+Croce, Benedetto, 313, 318
+
+Dante, 42, 51, 140, 223, 233, 256, 295
+Darwin, 72, 147
+Descartes, 34, 86, 107, 224, 237, 293, 310, 312
+Diderot, 99
+Diego de Estella, 304
+Dionysius the Areopagite, 160
+Domingo de Guzmán, 289
+Duns Scotus, 76
+
+Eckhart, 289
+Empedocles, 61
+Erasmus, 112, 301
+Erigena, 160, 167
+
+Fénelon, 224
+Fichte, 8, 29
+Flaubert, 94, 219
+Fouillée, 261
+Fourier, 278
+Francesco de Sanctis, 220
+Francke, August, 120
+Franklin, 248
+
+Galileo, 72, 267, 302
+Ganivet, Angel, 313
+de Gaultier, Jules, 328
+Goethe, 218, 264, 288, 299, 309
+Gounod, 56
+Gratry, Père, 236
+
+Haeckel, 95
+Harnack, 59, 64, 65, 69, 75
+Hartmann, 146
+Hegel, 5, 111, 170, 294, 309, 310
+Heraclitus, 165
+Hermann, 69, 70, 77, 165, 217
+Herodotus, 140
+Hippocrates, 143
+Hodgson, S.H., 30
+Holberg, 109
+Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 257, 311
+Hume, David, 79, 86, 104, 310
+Hume, Martin A.S., 312
+Huntingdon, A.M., 298
+
+James, William, 5, 81, 86
+Jansen, 121
+Juan de los Angeles, 1, 207, 286
+Juan de la Cruz, 67, 289, 293
+Justin Martyr, 63
+
+Kaftan, 68, 222
+Kant, Immanuel, 3, 4, 11, 13, 67, 68, 73, 79, 114, 143, 166, 294, 310,
+    311, 317
+à Kempis, 51, 99, 277
+Kierkegaard, 3, 109, 115, 123, 153, 178, 198, 257, 287, 327
+Krause, 294
+
+Lactantius, 59, 74, 165, 169
+Lamarck, 147
+Lamennais, 74, 117, 165, 246
+Laplace, 161
+Leibnitz, 247
+Leo XIII., 75
+Leopardi, 44, 47, 123, 132, 240, 248
+Le Roy, 73
+Lessing, 229
+Linnæus, 1
+Loisy, 72
+Loyola, 122, 307, 314, 324
+Loyson, Hyacinthe, 116
+Lucretius, 94, 102
+Luis de León, 289
+Luther, 3, 121, 270, 294, 301
+
+Mach, Dr. E., 114
+Machado, Antonio, 241
+Machiavelli, 296, 326, 328
+de Maistre, Count Joseph, 74, 305
+Malebranche, 63
+Malón de Chaide, 66
+Manrique, Jorge, 309
+Marcus Aurelius, 315
+Marlowe, Christopher, 299
+Martins, Oliveira, 68
+Mazzini, 153
+Melanchthon, 69
+Menéndez de Pelayo, 313
+Michelet, 45
+Miguel de Molinos, 216, 219, 228
+Mill, Stuart, 104, 310
+Milton, 284
+Moser, Johann Jacob, 252, 263
+Myers, W.H., 88
+
+Nietzsche, 50, 61, 100, 231, 239, 328
+Nimesius, 59
+
+Obermann, 11, 47, 259, 263, 268
+Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph, 252, 253
+Ordóñez de Lara, 56
+Origen, 245
+
+Papini, 238
+Pascal, 40, 45, 74, 262, 263
+Petrarch, 327
+Pfleiderer, 61
+Pius IX., 72
+Pizarro, 324
+Plato, 38, 45, 48, 61, 90, 125, 143, 216, 217, 221, 292, 310
+Pliny, 165
+Plotinus, 209, 230, 243
+Pohle, Joseph, 77
+Pomponazzi, Pietro, 88
+
+Renan, 51, 68
+Ritschl, Albrecht, 68, 114, 121, 167, 238, 253, 263, 294
+Robertson, F.W., 180
+Robespierre, 41
+Rohde, Erwin, 60, 61
+Rousseau, 53, 263, 299, 310
+Ruysbroek, 289
+
+Saint Augustine, 74, 192, 247
+Saint Bonaventura, 220
+Saint Francis of Assissi, 52, 210
+Saint Paul, 48, 49, 62, 94, 112, 188, 209, 225, 241, 253, 255, 270
+Saint Teresa, 67, 75, 210, 226, 228, 289, 323
+Saint Thomas Aquinas, 83, 92, 233
+Salazar y Torres, 324
+Schleiermacher, 89, 156, 217
+Schopenhauer, 146, 147, 247
+Seeberg, Reinold, 188
+Sénancour, 43, 47, 260, 263, 299
+Seneca, 231, 313
+Seuse, Heinrich, 75, 289
+Shakespeare, 39
+Socrates, 29, 143, 145
+Solon, 17
+Soloviev, 95
+Spencer, Herbert, 89, 124, 238, 253
+Spener, 253
+Spinoza, Benedict, 6, 7, 22, 24, 31, 38, 40, 89, 97-99, 101, 208, 234,
+    310
+Stanley, Dean, 91
+Stendhal, 311
+Stirmer, Max, 29
+Suárez, 312
+Swedenborg, 153, 221, 225
+
+Tacitus, 56, 94, 142, 216, 306
+Tauler, 289
+Tennyson, Lord, 33, 103
+Tertullian, 74, 94, 104
+Thales of Miletus, 143, 317
+Thomé de Jesús, 283
+Tolstoi, 328
+Troeltsch, Ernst, 70, 112
+
+Velasquez, 70
+Vico, Giovanni Baptista, 142, 143
+Vinet, A., 93, 113, 160
+Virchow, 95
+Virgil, 249
+Vives, Luis, 313
+Vogt, 95
+
+Walpole, Horace, 315
+Weizsäcker, 62, 77
+Wells, H.G., 265
+Whitman, Walt, 125
+Windelband, 267, 316, 317
+
+Xenophon, 29, 143
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Tragic Sense Of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tragic Sense Of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Tragic Sense Of Life
+
+Author: Miguel de Unamuno
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2005 [EBook #14636]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Starner, Martin Pettit and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE</h1>
+
+<h2>MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO</h2>
+
+<h3>translator, J.E. CRAWFORD FLITCH</h3>
+
+
+<h3>DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC</h3>
+
+<h3>New York</h3>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class='center'>This Dover edition, first published in 1954, is an
+unabridged and unaltered republication of the
+English translation originally published by Macmillan
+and Company, Ltd., in 1921. This edition
+is published by special arrangement with Macmillan
+and Company, Ltd.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>The publisher is grateful to the Library of the
+University of Pennsylvania for supplying a copy of
+this work for the purpose of reproduction.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><p class='center'><i>Standard Book Number: 486-20257-7<br />
+Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 54-4730</i></p>
+
+<p class='center'>Manufactured in the United States of America<br />
+Dover Publications, Inc.<br />
+180 Varick Street<br />
+New York, N.Y. 10014</p></blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS" />CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<h3><a href="#INTRODUCTORY_ESSAY">INTRODUCTORY ESSAY</a></h3>
+<h3><a href="#AUTHORS_PREFACE">AUTHOR'S PREFACE</a></h3>
+<h3><a href="#I">I</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Philosophy and the concrete man&mdash;The man Kant, the man
+Butler, and the man Spinoza&mdash;Unity and continuity of the
+person&mdash;Man an end not a means&mdash;Intellectual necessities
+and necessities of the heart and the will&mdash;Tragic sense of
+life in men and in peoples</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#II">II</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>THE STARTING-POINT</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Tragedy of Paradise&mdash;Disease an element of progress&mdash;Necessity
+of knowing in order to live&mdash;Instinct of preservation and
+instinct of perpetuation&mdash;The sensible world and the ideal
+world&mdash;Practical starting-point of all philosophy&mdash;Knowledge
+an end in itself?&mdash;The man Descartes&mdash;The longing
+not to die</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#III">III</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>THE HUNGER OF IMMORTALITY</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Thirst of being&mdash;Cult of immortality&mdash;Plato's &quot;glorious risk&quot;&mdash;
+Materialism&mdash;Paul's discourse to the Athenians&mdash;Intolerance
+of the intellectuals&mdash;Craving for fame&mdash;Struggle
+for survival</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#IV">IV</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Immortality and resurrection&mdash;Development of idea of immortality
+in Judaic and Hellenic religions&mdash;Paul and the
+dogma of the resurrection&mdash;Athanasius&mdash;Sacrament of the
+Eucharist&mdash;Lutheranism&mdash;Modernism&mdash;The Catholic
+ethic&mdash;Scholasticism&mdash;The Catholic solution</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#V">V</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Materialism&mdash;Concept of substance&mdash;Substantiality of the
+soul&mdash;Berkeley&mdash;Myers&mdash;Spencer&mdash;Combat of life with
+reason&mdash;Theological advocacy&mdash;<i>Odium anti-theologicum</i>&mdash;The
+rationalist attitude&mdash;Spinoza&mdash;Nietzsche&mdash;Truth and consolation</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#VI">VI</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Passionate doubt and Cartesian doubt&mdash;Irrationality of the
+problem of immortality&mdash;Will and intelligence&mdash;Vitalism
+and rationalism&mdash;Uncertainty as basis of faith&mdash;The ethic
+of despair&mdash;Pragmatical justification of despair&mdash;Summary
+of preceding criticism</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#VII">VII</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>LOVE, SUFFERING, PITY, AND PERSONALITY</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Sexual love&mdash;Spiritual love&mdash;Tragic love&mdash;Love and pity&mdash;Personalizing
+faculty of love&mdash;God the Personalization of
+the All&mdash;Anthropomorphic tendency&mdash;Consciousness of the
+Universe&mdash;What is Truth?&mdash;Finality of the Universe</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#VIII">VIII</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>FROM GOD TO GOD</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Concept and feeling of Divinity&mdash;Pantheism&mdash;Monotheism&mdash;The
+rational God&mdash;Proofs of God's existence&mdash;Law of
+necessity&mdash;Argument from <i>Consensus gentium</i>&mdash;The living
+God&mdash;Individuality and personality&mdash;God a multiplicity&mdash;The
+God of Reason&mdash;The God of Love&mdash;Existence of God</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#IX">IX</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Personal element in faith&mdash;Creative power of faith&mdash;Wishing
+that God may exist&mdash;Hope the form of faith&mdash;Love and
+suffering&mdash;The suffering God&mdash;Consciousness revealed
+through suffering&mdash;Spiritualization of matter</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#X">X</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND,
+AND THE APOCATASTASIS</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>What is religion?&mdash;The longing for immortality&mdash;Concrete
+representation of a future life&mdash;Beatific vision&mdash;St.
+Teresa&mdash;Delight requisite for happiness&mdash;Degradation of
+energy&mdash;Apocatastasis&mdash;Climax of the tragedy&mdash;Mystery of the
+Beyond</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#XI">XI</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Conflict as basis of conduct&mdash;Injustice of annihilation&mdash;Making
+ourselves irreplaceable&mdash;Religious value of the civil occupation&mdash;Business
+of religion and religion of business&mdash;Ethic
+of domination&mdash;Ethic of the cloister&mdash;Passion and
+culture&mdash;The Spanish soul</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#CONCLUSION">CONCLUSION</a></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY
+EUROPEAN TRAGI-COMEDY</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Culture&mdash;Faust&mdash;The modern Inquisition&mdash;Spain and the
+scientific spirit&mdash;Cultural achievement of Spain&mdash;Thought
+and language&mdash;Don Quixote the hero of Spanish thought&mdash;Religion
+a transcendental economy&mdash;Tragic ridicule&mdash;Quixotesque
+philosophy&mdash;Mission of Don Quixote
+to-day</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></h3>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTORY_ESSAY" id="INTRODUCTORY_ESSAY" />INTRODUCTORY ESSAY</h2>
+
+<h3>DON MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO</h3>
+
+
+<p>I sat, several years ago, at the Welsh National Eisteddfod,
+under the vast tent in which the Bard of Wales was being
+crowned. After the small golden crown had been placed
+in unsteady equilibrium on the head of a clever-looking
+pressman, several Welsh bards came on the platform
+and recited little epigrams. A Welsh bard is, if young,
+a pressman, and if of maturer years, a divine. In this
+case, as England was at war, they were all of the
+maturer kind, and, while I listened to the music of their
+ditties&mdash;the sense thereof being, alas! beyond my reach&mdash;I
+was struck by the fact that all of them, though
+different, closely resembled Don Miguel de Unamuno.
+It is not my purpose to enter into the wasp-nest of racial
+disquisitions. If there is a race in the world over which
+more sense and more nonsense can be freely said for lack
+of definite information than the Welsh, it is surely
+this ancient Basque people, whose greatest contemporary
+figure is perhaps Don Miguel de Unamuno. I am
+merely setting down that intuitional fact for what it may
+be worth, though I do not hide my opinion that such
+promptings of the inner, untutored man are worth more
+than cavefuls of bones and tombfuls of undecipherable
+papers.</p>
+
+<p>This reminiscence, moreover, which springs up into
+the light of my memory every time I think of Don
+Miguel de Unamuno, has to my mind a further value in
+that in it the image of Don Miguel does not appear as
+evoked by one man, but by many, though many of one
+species, many who in depth are but one man, one type,
+the Welsh divine. Now, this unity underlying a multiplicity,
+these many faces, moods, and movements, traceable
+to one only type, I find deeply connected in my
+mind with Unamuno's person and with what he signifies
+in Spanish life and letters. And when I further delve
+into my impression, I first realize an undoubtedly
+physical relation between the many-one Welsh divines
+and the many-one Unamuno. A tall, broad-shouldered,
+bony man, with high cheeks, a beak-like nose, pointed
+grey beard, and a complexion the colour of the red
+hematites on which Bilbao, his native town, is built,
+and which Bilbao ruthlessly plucks from its very body
+to exchange for gold in the markets of England&mdash;and in
+the deep sockets under the high aggressive forehead
+prolonged by short iron-grey hair, two eyes like gimlets
+eagerly watching the world through spectacles which
+seem to be purposely pointed at the object like microscopes;
+a fighting expression, but of noble fighting,
+above the prizes of the passing world, the contempt for
+which is shown in a peculiar attire whose blackness invades
+even that little triangle of white which worldly men
+leave on their breast for the necktie of frivolity and the
+decorations of vanity, and, blinding it, leaves but the
+thinnest rim of white collar to emphasize, rather than
+relieve, the priestly effect of the whole. Such is Don
+Miguel de Unamuno.</p>
+
+<p>Such is, rather, his photograph. For Unamuno himself
+is ever changing. A talker, as all good Spaniards
+are nowadays, but a talker in earnest and with his heart
+in it, he is varied, like the subjects of his conversation,
+and, still more, like the passions which they awake in
+him. And here I find an unsought reason in intellectual
+support of that intuitional observation which I noted
+down in starting&mdash;that Unamuno resembles the Welsh
+in that he is not ashamed of showing his passions&mdash;a
+thing which he has often to do, for he is very much alive
+and feels therefore plenty of them. But a word of
+caution may here be necessary, since that term, &quot;passion,&quot;
+having been diminished&mdash;that is, made meaner&mdash;by
+the world, an erroneous impression might be
+conveyed by what precedes, of the life and ways of
+Unamuno. So that it may not be superfluous to say
+that Don Miguel de Unamuno is a Professor of Greek
+in the University of Salamanca, an ex-Rector of it who
+left behind the reputation of being a strong ruler; a
+father of a numerous family, and a man who has sung
+the quiet and deep joys of married life with a restraint,
+a vigour, and a nobility which it would be difficult to
+match in any literature. <i>Yet</i> a passionate man&mdash;or, as
+he would perhaps prefer to say, <i>therefore</i> a passionate
+man. But in a major, not in a minor key; of strong,
+not of weak passions.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between the two lies perhaps in that the
+man with strong passions lives them, while the man with
+weak passions is lived by them, so that while weak
+passions paralyze the will, strong passions urge man to
+action. It is such an urge towards life, such a vitality
+ever awake, which inspires Unamuno's multifarious
+activities in the realm of the mind. The duties of his
+chair of Greek are the first claim upon his time. But
+then, his reading is prodigious, as any reader of this
+book will realize for himself. Not only is he familiar
+with the stock-in-trade of every intellectual worker&mdash;the
+Biblical, Greek, Roman, and Italian cultures&mdash;but there
+is hardly anything worth reading in Europe and America
+which he has not read, and, but for the Slav languages,
+in the original. Though never out of Spain, and
+seldom out of Salamanca, he has succeeded in establishing
+direct connections with most of the intellectual
+leaders of the world, and in gathering an astonishingly
+accurate knowledge of the spirit and literature of foreign
+peoples. It was in his library at Salamanca that he once
+explained to an Englishman the meaning of a particular
+Scotticism in Robert Burns; and it was there that he
+congratulated another Englishman on his having read
+<i>Rural Rides</i>, &quot;the hall-mark,&quot; he said, &quot;of the man of
+letters who is no mere man of letters, but also a man.&quot;
+From that corner of Castile, he has poured out his spirit
+in essays, poetry, criticism, novels, philosophy, lectures,
+and public meetings, and that daily toil of press article
+writing which is the duty rather than the privilege of
+most present-day writers in Spain. Such are the many
+faces, moods, and movements in which Unamuno
+appears before Spain and the world. And yet, despite
+this multiplicity and this dispersion, the dominant impression
+which his personality leaves behind is that of
+a vigorous unity, an unswerving concentration both of
+mind and purpose. Bagaria, the national caricaturist,
+a genius of rhythm and character which the war revealed,
+but who was too good not to be overshadowed by the
+facile art of Raemaekers (imagine Goya overshadowed
+by Reynolds!), once represented Unamuno as an owl.
+A marvellous thrust at the heart of Unamuno's character.
+For all this vitality and ever-moving activity of
+mind is shot through by the absolute immobility of
+two owlish eyes piercing the darkness of spiritual night.
+And this intense gaze into the mystery is the steel axis
+round which his spirit revolves and revolves in desperation;
+the unity under his multiplicity; the one fire under
+his passions and the inspiration of his whole work and
+life.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>It was Unamuno himself who once said that the
+Basque is the alkaloid of the Spaniard. The saying is
+true, so far as it goes. But it would be more accurate
+to say &quot;one of the two alkaloids.&quot; It is probable that
+if the Spanish character were analyzed&mdash;always provided
+that the Mediterranean aspect of it be left
+aside as a thing apart&mdash;two main principles would be
+recognized in it&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, the Basque, richer in concentration,
+substance, strength; and the Andalusian, more
+given to observation, grace, form. The two types
+are to this day socially opposed. The Andalusian is a
+people which has lived down many civilizations, and in
+which even illiterate peasants possess a kind of innate
+education. The Basques are a primitive people of
+mountaineers and fishermen, in which even scholars
+have a peasant-like roughness not unlike the roughness
+of Scotch tweeds&mdash;or character. It is the even balancing
+of these two elements&mdash;the force of the Northerner with
+the grace of the Southerner&mdash;which gives the Castilian
+his admirable poise and explains the graceful virility of
+men such as Fray Luis de Le&oacute;n and the feminine
+strength of women such as Queen Isabel and Santa
+Teresa. We are therefore led to expect in so forcible a
+representative of the Basque race as Unamuno the more
+substantial and earnest features of the Spanish spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Our expectation is not disappointed. And to begin
+with it appears in that very concentration of his mind
+and soul on the mystery of man's destiny on earth.
+Unamuno is in earnest, in dead earnest, as to this
+matter. This earnestness is a distinct Spanish, nay,
+Basque feature in him. There is something of the stern
+attitude of Loyola about his &quot;tragic sense of life,&quot; and
+on this subject&mdash;under one form or another, his only
+subject&mdash;he admits no joke, no flippancy, no subterfuge.
+A true heir of those great Spanish saints and mystics
+whose lifework was devoted to the exploration of the
+kingdoms of faith, he is more human than they in that
+he has lost hold of the firm ground where they had stuck
+their anchor. Yet, though loose in the modern world,
+he refuses to be drawn away from the main business of
+the Christian, the saving of his soul, which, in his interpretation,
+means the conquest of his immortality, his
+own immortality.</p>
+
+<p>An individualist. Certainly. And he proudly claims
+the title. Nothing more refreshing in these days of
+hoggish communistic cant than this great voice asserting
+the divine, the eternal rights of the individual. But it
+is not with political rights that he is concerned. Political
+individualism, when not a mere blind for the unlimited
+freedom of civil privateering, is but the outcome of that
+abstract idea of man which he so energetically condemns
+as pedantic&mdash;that is, inhuman. His opposition of the
+individual to society is not that of a puerile anarchist to
+a no less puerile socialist. There is nothing childish
+about Unamuno. His assertion that society is for the
+individual, not the individual for society, is made on a
+transcendental plane. It is not the argument of liberty
+against authority&mdash;which can be easily answered on the
+rationalistic plane by showing that authority is in its
+turn the liberty of the social or collective being, a higher,
+more complex, and longer-living &quot;individual&quot; than the
+individual pure and simple. It is rather the unanswerable
+argument of eternity against duration. Now that
+argument must rest on a religious basis. And it is on
+a religious basis that Unamuno founds his individualism.
+Hence the true Spanish flavour of his social theory,
+which will not allow itself to be set down and analyzed
+into principles of ethics and politics, with their inevitable
+tendency to degenerate into mere economics, but remains
+free and fluid and absolute, like the spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Such an individualism has therefore none of the
+features of that childish half-thinking which inspires
+most anarchists. It is, on the contrary, based on high
+thinking, the highest of all, that which refuses to dwell
+on anything less than man's origin and destination.
+We are here confronted with that humanistic tendency
+of the Spanish mind which can be observed as the
+dominant feature of her arts and literature. All races
+are of course predominantly concerned with man. But
+they all manifest their concern with a difference. Man
+is in Spain a concrete being, the man of flesh and bones,
+and the whole man. He is neither subtilized into an
+idea by pure thinking nor civilized into a gentleman by
+social laws and prejudices. Spanish art and letters deal
+with concrete, tangible persons. Now, there is no more
+concrete, no more tangible person for every one of us
+than ourself. Unamuno is therefore right in the line
+of Spanish tradition in dealing predominantly&mdash;one
+might almost say always&mdash;with his own person. The
+feeling of the awareness of one's own personality has
+seldom been more forcibly expressed than by Unamuno.
+This is primarily due to the fact that he is himself
+obsessed by it. But in his expression of it Unamuno
+derives also some strength from his own sense of matter
+and the material&mdash;again a typically Spanish element of
+his character. Thus his human beings are as much
+body as soul, or rather body and soul all in one, a union
+which he admirably renders by bold mixtures of physical
+and spiritual metaphors, as in <i>gozarse uno la carne del
+alma</i> (to enjoy the flesh of one's own soul).</p>
+
+<p>In fact, Unamuno, as a true Spaniard which he is,
+refuses to surrender life to ideas, and that is why he runs
+shy of abstractions, in which he sees but shrouds wherewith
+we cover dead thoughts. He is solely concerned
+with his own life, nothing but his life, and the whole of
+his life. An egotistical position? Perhaps. Unamuno,
+however, can and does answer the charge. We can
+only know and feel humanity in the one human being
+which we have at hand. It is by penetrating deep into
+ourselves that we find our brothers in us&mdash;branches of
+the same trunk which can only touch each other by
+seeking their common origin. This searching within,
+Unamuno has undertaken with a sincerity, a fearlessness
+which cannot be excelled. Nowhere will the reader find
+the inner contradictions of a modern human being, who
+is at the same time healthy and capable of thought set
+down with a greater respect for truth. Here the uncompromising
+tendency of the Spanish race, whose eyes
+never turn away from nature, however unwelcome the
+sight, is strengthened by that passion for life which
+burns in Unamuno. The suppression of the slightest
+thought or feeling for the sake of intellectual order would
+appear to him as a despicable worldly trick. Thus it is
+precisely because he does sincerely feel a passionate love
+of his own life that he thinks out with such scrupulous
+accuracy every argument which he finds in his mind&mdash;his
+own mind, a part of his life&mdash;against the possibility
+of life after death; but it is also because he feels that,
+despite such conclusive arguments, his will to live perseveres,
+that he refuses to his intellect the power to kill
+his faith. A knight-errant of the spirit, as he himself
+calls the Spanish mystics, he starts for his adventures
+after having, like Hern&aacute;n Cort&eacute;s, burnt his ships.
+But, is it necessary to enhance his figure by literary
+comparison? He is what he wants to be, a man&mdash;in
+the striking expression which he chose as a title for one
+of his short stories, <i>nothing less than a whole man</i>. Not
+a mere thinking machine, set to prove a theory, nor an
+actor on the world stage, singing a well-built poem, well
+built at the price of many a compromise; but a whole
+man, with all his affirmations and all his negations, all
+the pitiless thoughts of a penetrating mind that denies,
+and all the desperate self-assertions of a soul that yearns
+for eternal life.</p>
+
+<p>This strife between enemy truths, the truth thought
+and the truth felt, or, as he himself puts it, between
+veracity and sincerity, is Unamuno's <i>raison d'&ecirc;tre</i>. And
+it is because the &quot;<i>Tragic Sense of Life</i>&quot; is the most
+direct expression of it that this book is his masterpiece.
+The conflict is here seen as reflected in the person of the
+author. The book opens by a definition of the Spanish
+man, the &quot;man of flesh and bones,&quot; illustrated by the
+consideration of the real living men who stood behind
+the bookish figures of great philosophers and consciously
+or unconsciously shaped and misshaped their doctrines
+in order to satisfy their own vital yearnings. This is
+followed by the statement of the will to live or hunger
+for immortality, in the course of which the usual subterfuges
+with which this all-important issue is evaded in
+philosophy, theology, or mystic literature, are exposed
+and the real, concrete, &quot;flesh and bones&quot; character of
+the immortality which men desire is reaffirmed. The
+Catholic position is then explained as the <i>vital</i> attitude
+in the matter, summed up in Tertullian's <i>Credo quia
+absurdum</i>, and this is opposed to the critical attitude
+which denies the possibility of individual survival in the
+sense previously defined. Thus Unamuno leads us to
+his inner deadlock: his reason can rise no higher than
+scepticism, and, unable to become vital, dies sterile; his
+faith, exacting anti-rational affirmations and unable therefore
+to be apprehended by the logical mind, remains incommunicable.
+From the bottom of this abyss Unamuno
+builds up his theory of life. But is it a theory?
+Unamuno does not claim for it such an intellectual
+dignity. He knows too well that in the constructive
+part of his book his vital self takes the leading part and
+repeatedly warns his reader of the fact, lest critical
+objections might be raised against this or that assumption
+or self-contradiction. It is on the survival of his
+will to live, after all the onslaughts of his critical intellect,
+that he finds the basis for his belief&mdash;or rather for
+his effort to believe. Self-compassion leads to self-love,
+and this self-love, founded as it is on a universal conflict,
+widens into love of all that lives and therefore wants
+to survive. So, by an act of love, springing from our
+own hunger for immortality, we are led to give a conscience
+to the Universe&mdash;that is, to create God.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the process by which Unamuno, from the
+transcendental pessimism of his inner contradiction,
+extracts an everyday optimism founded on love. His
+symbol of this attitude is the figure of Don Quixote, of
+whom he truly says that his creed &quot;can hardly be called
+idealism, since he did not fight for ideas: it was
+spiritualism, for he fought for the spirit.&quot; Thus he
+opposes a synthetical to an analytical attitude; a religious
+to an ethico-scientific ideal; Spain, his Spain&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>,
+the spiritual manifestation of the Spanish race&mdash;to
+Europe, his Europe&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, the intellectual manifestation
+of the white race, which he sees in Franco-Germany;
+and heroic love, even when comically unpractical, to
+culture, which, in this book, written in 1912, is already
+prophetically spelt Kultura.</p>
+
+<p>This courageous work is written in a style which is the
+man&mdash;for Buffon's saying, seldom true, applies here to
+the letter. It is written as Carlyle wrote, not merely
+with the brain, but with the whole soul and the whole
+body of the man, and in such a vivid manner that one
+can without much effort imagine the eager gesticulation
+which now and then underlines, interprets, despises,
+argues, denies, and above all asserts. In his absolute
+subservience to the matter in hand this manner of writing
+has its great precedent in Santa Teresa. The
+differences, and they are considerable, are not of art,
+absent in either case, but of nature. They are such deep
+and obvious differences as obtain between the devout,
+ignorant, graceful nun of sixteenth-century Avila and
+the free-thinking, learned, wilful professor of twentieth-century
+Salamanca. In the one case, as in the other,
+the language is the most direct and simple required.
+It is also the least literary and the most popular.
+Unamuno, who lives in close touch with the people, has
+enriched the Spanish literary language by returning
+to it many a popular term. His vocabulary abounds in
+racy words of the soil, and his writings gain from them
+an almost peasant-like pith and directness which suits
+his own Basque primitive nature. His expression occurs
+simultaneously with the thoughts and feelings to be expressed,
+the flow of which, but loosely controlled by the
+critical mind, often breaks through the meshes of established
+diction and gives birth to new forms created under
+the pressure of the moment. This feature Unamuno has
+also in common with Santa Teresa, but what in the Saint
+was a self-ignorant charm becomes in Unamuno a
+deliberate manner inspired, partly by an acute sense of
+the symbolical and psychological value of word-connections,
+partly by that genuine need for expansion of the
+language which all true original thinkers or &quot;feelers&quot;
+must experience, but partly also by an acquired habit of
+juggling with words which is but natural in a philologist
+endowed with a vigorous imagination. Unamuno revels
+in words. He positively enjoys stretching them beyond
+their usual meaning, twisting them, composing, opposing,
+and transposing them in all sorts of possible ways.
+This game&mdash;not wholly unrewarded now and then by
+striking intellectual finds&mdash;seems to be the only relaxation
+which he allows his usually austere mind. It
+certainly is the only light feature of a style the merit of
+which lies in its being the close-fitting expression of a
+great mind earnestly concentrated on a great idea.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The earnestness, the intensity, and the oneness of his
+predominant passion are the main cause of the strength
+of Unamuno's philosophic work. They remain his
+main asset, yet become also the principal cause of his
+weakness, as a creative artist. Great art can only
+flourish in the temperate zone of the passions, on the
+return journey from the torrid. Unamuno, as a creator,
+has none of the failings of those artists who have never
+felt deeply. But he does show the limitations of those
+artists who cannot cool down. And the most striking
+of them is that at bottom he is seldom able to put himself
+in a purely esthetical mood. In this, as in many other
+features, Unamuno curiously resembles Wordsworth&mdash;whom,
+by the way, he is one of the few Spaniards to
+read and appreciate.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1" /><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Like him, Unamuno is an essentially
+purposeful and utilitarian mind. Of the two
+qualities which the work of art requires for its inception&mdash;earnestness
+and detachment&mdash;both Unamuno and
+Wordsworth possess the first; both are deficient in the
+second. Their interest in their respective leading
+thought&mdash;survival in the first, virtue in the second&mdash;is
+too direct, too pressing, to allow them the &quot;distance&quot;
+necessary for artistic work. Both are urged to work by
+a lofty utilitarianism&mdash;the search for God through the
+individual soul in Unamuno, the search for God through
+the social soul in Wordsworth&mdash;so that their thoughts
+and sensations are polarized and their spirit loses that
+impartial transparence for nature's lights without which
+no great art is possible. Once suggested, this parallel
+is too rich in sidelights to be lightly dropped. This
+single-mindedness which distinguishes them explains
+that both should have consciously or unconsciously
+chosen a life of semi-seclusion, for Unamuno lives in
+Salamanca very much as Wordsworth lived in the Lake
+District&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div class='i6'>in a still retreat</div>
+<div>Sheltered, but not to social duties lost,</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>hence in both a certain proclivity towards ploughing
+a solitary furrow and becoming self-centred. There
+are no doubt important differences. The Englishman's
+sense of nature is both keener and more concrete; while
+the Spaniard's knowledge of human nature is not barred
+by the subtle inhibitions and innate limitations which
+tend to blind its more unpleasant aspects to the eye
+of the Englishman. There is more courage and passion
+in the Spaniard; more harmony and goodwill in the
+Englishman; the one is more like fire, the other like
+light. For Wordsworth, a poem is above all an essay,
+a means for conveying a lesson in forcible and easily
+remembered terms to those who are in need of improvement.
+For Unamuno, a poem or a novel (and he holds
+that a novel is but a poem) is the outpouring of a man's
+passion, the overflow of the heart which cannot help
+itself and lets go. And it may be that the essential
+difference between the two is to be found in this difference
+between their respective purposes: Unamuno's
+purpose is more intimately personal and individual;
+Wordsworth's is more social and objective. Thus both
+miss the temperate zone, where emotion takes shape into
+the moulds of art; but while Wordsworth is driven
+by his ideal of social service this side of it, into the
+cold light of both moral and intellectual self-control,
+Unamuno remains beyond, where the molten metal is
+too near the fire of passion, and cannot cool down into
+shape.</p>
+
+<p>Unamuno is therefore not unlike Wordsworth in the
+insufficiency of his sense of form. We have just seen
+the essential cause of this insufficiency to lie in the nonesthetical
+attitude of his mind, and we have tried to show
+one of the roots of such an attitude in the very loftiness
+and earnestness of his purpose. Yet, there are others,
+for living nature is many-rooted as it is many-branched.
+It cannot be doubted that a certain refractoriness to form
+is a typical feature of the Basque character. The sense
+of form is closely in sympathy with the feminine element
+in human nature, and the Basque race is strongly masculine.
+The predominance of the masculine element&mdash;strength
+without grace&mdash;is as typical of Unamuno as
+it is of Wordsworth. The literary gifts which might
+for the sake of synthesis be symbolized in a smile are
+absent in both. There is as little humour in the one
+as in the other. Humour, however, sometimes occurs
+in Unamuno, but only in his ill-humoured moments, and
+then with a curious bite of its own which adds an unconscious
+element to its comic effect. Grace only visits
+them in moments of inspiration, and then it is of a noble
+character, enhanced as it is by the ever-present gift of
+strength. And as for the sense for rhythm and music,
+both Unamuno and Wordsworth seem to be limited to
+the most vigorous and masculine gaits. This feature
+is particularly pronounced in Unamuno, for while
+Wordsworth is painstaking, all-observant, and too good
+a &quot;teacher&quot; to underestimate the importance of pleasure
+in man's progress, Unamuno knows no compromise.
+His aim is not to please but to strike, and he deliberately
+seeks the naked, the forceful, even the brutal word for
+truth. There is in him, however, a cause of formlessness
+from which Wordsworth is free&mdash;namely, an eagerness
+for sincerity and veracity which brushes aside all
+preparation, ordering or planning of ideas as suspect of
+&quot;dishing up,&quot; intellectual trickery, and juggling with
+spontaneous truths.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Such qualities&mdash;both the positive and the negative&mdash;are
+apparent in his poetry. In it, the appeal of force
+and sincerity is usually stronger than that of art. This
+is particularly the case in his first volume (<i>Poes&iacute;as</i>, 1907),
+in which a lofty inspiration, a noble attitude of mind,
+a rich and racy vocabulary, a keen insight into the spirit
+of places, and above all the overflowing vitality of a
+strong man in the force of ripeness, contend against the
+still awkward gait of the Basque and a certain rebelliousness
+of rhyme. The dough of the poetic language is
+here seen heavily pounded by a powerful hand, bent on
+reducing its angularities and on improving its plasticity.
+Nor do we need to wait for further works in order to
+enjoy the reward of such efforts, for it is attained in this
+very volume more than once, as for instance in <i>Muere
+en el mar el ave que vol&oacute; del nido</i>, a beautiful poem in
+which emotion and thought are happily blended into
+exquisite form.</p>
+
+<p>In his last poem, <i>El Cristo de Vel&aacute;zquez</i> (1920),
+Unamuno undertakes the task of giving a poetical
+rendering of his tragic sense of life, in the form of a
+meditation on the Christ of Vel&aacute;zquez, the beautiful and
+pathetic picture in the Prado. Why Vel&aacute;zquez's and
+not Christ himself? The fact is that, though in his
+references to actual forms, Unamuno closely follows
+Vel&aacute;zquez's picture, the spiritual interpretation of it
+which he develops as the poem unfolds itself is wholly
+personal. It would be difficult to find two great
+Spaniards wider apart than Unamuno and Vel&aacute;zquez,
+for if Unamuno is the very incarnation of the masculine
+spirit of the North&mdash;all strength and substance&mdash;Vel&aacute;zquez
+is the image of the feminine spirit of the South&mdash;all
+grace and form. Vel&aacute;zquez is a limpid mirror, with
+a human depth, yet a mirror. That Unamuno has departed
+from the image of Christ which the great Sevillian
+reflected on his immortal canvas was therefore to be
+expected. But then Unamuno has, while speaking of
+Don Quixote, whom he has also freely and personally
+interpreted,<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2" /><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> taken great care to point out that a work of
+art is, for each of us, all that we see in it. And, moreover,
+Unamuno has not so much departed from Vel&aacute;zquez's
+image of Christ as delved into its depths, expanded,
+enlarged it, or, if you prefer, seen in its limpid surface
+the immense figure of his own inner Christ. However
+free and unorthodox in its wide scope of images and
+ideas, the poem is in its form a regular meditation in the
+manner approved by the Catholic Church, and it is
+therefore meet that it should rise from a concrete, tangible
+object as it is recommended to the faithful. To this
+concrete character of its origin, the poem owes much of
+its suggestiveness, as witness the following passage
+quoted here, with a translation sadly unworthy of the
+original, as being the clearest link between the poetical
+meditation and the main thought that underlies all the
+work and the life of Unamuno.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div class='i4'>NUBE NEGRA</div></div>
+
+
+<div class='stanza'><div>O es que una nube negra de los cielos</div>
+<div>ese negror le di&oacute; a tu cabellera</div>
+<div>de nazareno, cual de mustio sauce</div>
+<div>de una noche sin luna sobre el r&iacute;o?</div>
+<div>&iquest;Es la sombra del ala sin perfiles</div>
+<div>del &aacute;ngel de la nada negadora,</div>
+<div>de Luzbel, que en su ca&iacute;da inacabable</div>
+<div>&mdash;fondo no puede dar&mdash;su eterna cuita</div>
+<div>clava en tu frente, en tu raz&oacute;n? &iquest;Se vela,</div>
+<div>el claro Verbo en Ti con esa nube,</div>
+<div>negra cual de Luzbel las negras alas,</div>
+<div>mientras brilla el Amor, todo desnudo,</div>
+<div>con tu desnudo pecho por cendal?</div></div>
+
+
+<div class='stanza'><div class='i4'>BLACK CLOUD</div></div>
+
+<div class='stanza'><div>Or was it then that a black cloud from heaven</div>
+<div>Such blackness gave to your Nazarene's hair,</div>
+<div>As of a languid willow o'er the river</div>
+<div>Brooding in moonless night? Is it the shadow</div>
+<div>Of the profileless wing of Luzbel, the Angel</div>
+<div>Of denying nothingness, endlessly falling&mdash;</div>
+<div>Bottom he ne'er can touch&mdash;whose grief eternal</div>
+<div>He nails on to Thy forehead, to Thy reason?</div>
+<div>Is the clear Word in Thee with that cloud veiled</div>
+<div>&mdash;A cloud as black as the black wings of Luzbel&mdash;</div>
+<div>While Love shines naked within Thy naked breast?</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The poem, despite its length, easily maintains this
+lofty level throughout, and if he had written nothing
+else Unamuno would still remain as having given to
+Spanish letters the noblest and most sustained lyrical
+flight in the language. It abounds in passages of ample
+beauty and often strikes a note of primitive strength in
+the true Old Testament style. It is most distinctively a
+poem in a major key, in a group with <i>Paradise Lost</i>
+and <i>The Excursion</i>, but in a tone halfway between the
+two; and, as coming from the most Northern-minded
+and substantial poet that Spain ever had, wholly free
+from that tendency towards grandiloquence and Ciceronian
+drapery which blighted previous similar efforts
+in Spain. Its weakness lies in a certain monotony due to
+the interplay of Unamuno's two main limitations as an
+artist: the absolute surrender to one dominant thought
+and a certain deficiency of form bordering here on contempt.
+The plan is but a loose sequence of meditations
+on successive aspects of Christ as suggested by images
+or advocations of His divine person, or even of parts of
+His human body: Lion, Bull, Lily, Sword, Crown,
+Head, Knees. Each meditation is treated in a period
+of blank verse, usually of a beautiful texture, the splendour
+of which is due less to actual images than to the
+inner vigour of ideas and the eagerness with which even
+the simplest facts are interpreted into significant symbols.
+Yet, sometimes, this blank verse becomes hard and
+stony under the stubborn hammering of a too insistent
+mind, and the device of ending each meditation with a
+line accented on its last syllable tends but to increase the
+monotony of the whole.</p>
+
+<p>Blank verse is never the best medium for poets of a
+strong masculine inspiration, for it does not sufficiently
+correct their usual deficiency in form. Such poets are
+usually at their best when they bind themselves to the
+discipline of existing forms and particularly when they
+limit the movements of their muse to the &quot;sonnet's
+scanty plot of ground.&quot; Unamuno's best poetry, as
+Wordsworth's, is in his sonnets. His <i>Rosario de
+Sonetos L&iacute;ricos</i>, published in 1911, contains some of the
+finest sonnets in the Spanish language. There is variety
+in this volume&mdash;more at least than is usual in Unamuno:
+from comments on events of local politics (sonnet lii.)
+which savour of the more prosaic side of Wordsworth,
+to meditations on space and time such as that
+sonnet xxxvii., so reminiscent of Shelley's <i>Ozymandias
+of Egypt</i>; from a suggestive homily to a &quot;Don Juan of
+Ideas&quot; whose thirst for knowledge is &quot;not love of truth,
+but intellectual lust,&quot; and whose &quot;thought is therefore
+sterile&quot; (sonnet cvii.), to an exquisitely rendered moonlight
+love scene (sonnet civ.). The author's main theme
+itself, which of course occupies a prominent part in the
+series, appears treated under many different lights and
+in genuinely poetical moods which truly do justice to
+the inherent wealth of poetical inspiration which it contains.
+Many a sonnet might be quoted here, and in
+particular that sombre and fateful poem <i>Nihil Novum
+sub Sole</i> (cxxiii.), which defeats its own theme by the
+striking originality of its inspiration.</p>
+
+<p>So active, so positive is the inspiration of this poetry
+that the question of outside influences does not even arise.
+Unamuno is probably the Spanish contemporary poet
+whose manner owes least, if anything at all, to modern
+developments of poetry such as those which take their
+source in Baudelaire and Verlaine. These over-sensitive
+and over-refined artists have no doubt enriched the
+sensuous, the formal, the sentimental, even the intellectual
+aspects of verse with an admirable variety of
+exquisite shades, lacking which most poetry seems old-fashioned
+to the fastidious palate of modern men.
+Unamuno is too genuine a representative of the spiritual
+and masculine variety of Spanish genius, ever impervious
+to French, and generally, to intellectual, influences, to
+be affected by the esthetic excellence of this art. Yet,
+for all his disregard of the modern resources which it
+adds to the poetic craft, Unamuno loses none of his
+modernity. He is indeed more than modern. When,
+as he often does, he strikes the true poetic note, he is
+outside time. His appeal is not in complexity but in
+strength. He is not refined: he is final.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>In the Preface to his <i>Tres Novelas Ejemplares y un
+Pr&oacute;logo</i> (1921) Unamuno says: &quot; ... novelist&mdash;that is,
+poet ... a novel&mdash;that is, a poem.&quot; Thus, with characteristic
+decision, he sides with the lyrical conception
+of the novel. There is of course an infinite variety of
+types of novels. But they can probably all be reduced
+to two classes&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, the dramatic or objective, and the
+lyrical or subjective, according to the mood or inspiration
+which predominates in them. The present trend of
+the world points towards the dramatic or objective type.
+This type is more in tune with the detached and scientific
+character of the age. The novel is often nowadays considered
+as a document, a &quot;slice of life,&quot; a piece of information,
+a literary photograph representing places and
+people which purse or time prevents us from seeing with
+our own eyes. It is obvious, given what we now know
+of him, that such a view of the novel cannot appeal to
+Unamuno. He is a utilitarian, but not of worldly
+utilities. His utilitarianism transcends our daily wants
+and seeks to provide for our eternal ones. He is, moreover,
+a mind whose workings turn in spiral form towards
+a central idea and therefore feels an instinctive antagonism
+to the dispersive habits of thought and sensation
+which such detailed observation of life usually entails.
+For at bottom the opposition between the lyrical and the
+dramatic novel may be reduced to that between the poet
+and the dramatist. Both the dramatist and the poet
+create in order to link up their soul and the world in one
+complete circle of experience, but this circle is travelled
+in opposite directions. The poet goes inwards first, then
+out to nature full of his inner experience, and back home.
+The dramatist goes outwards first, then comes back to
+himself, his harvest of wisdom gathered in reality. It
+is the recognition of his own lyrical inward-looking
+nature which makes Unamuno pronounce the identity
+of the novel and the poem.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever we may think of it as a general theory, there
+is little doubt that this opinion is in the main sound in
+so far as it refers to Unamuno's own work. His novels
+are created within. They are&mdash;and their author is the
+first to declare it so&mdash;novels which happen in the kingdom
+of the spirit. Outward points of reference in time
+and space are sparingly given&mdash;in fact, reduced to a bare
+minimum. In some of them, as for instance <i>Niebla</i>
+(1914), the name of the town in which the action takes
+place is not given, and such scanty references to the
+topography and general features as are supplied would
+equally apply to any other provincial town of Spain.
+Action, in the current sense of the word, is correspondingly
+simplified, since the material and local elements on
+which it usually exerts itself are schematized, and in their
+turn made, as it were, spiritual. Thus a street, a river
+of colour for some, for others a series of accurately
+described shops and dwellings, becomes in Unamuno
+(see <i>Niebla</i>) a loom where the passions and desires of
+men and women cross and recross each other and weave
+the cloth of daily life. Even the physical description of
+characters is reduced to a standard of utmost simplicity.
+So that, in fine, Unamuno's novels, by eliminating all
+other material, appear, if the boldness of the metaphor
+be permitted, as the spiritual skeletons of novels, conflicts
+between souls.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is this the last stage in his deepening and narrowing
+of the creative furrow. For these souls are in their
+turn concentrated so that the whole of their vitality burns
+into one passion. If a somewhat fanciful comparison
+from another art may throw any light on this feature of
+his work we might say that his characters are to those of
+Gald&oacute;s, for instance, as counterpoint music to the complex
+modern symphony. Joaqu&iacute;n Monegro, the true
+hero of his <i>Abel S&aacute;nchez</i> (1917), is the personification of
+hatred. Raquel in <i>Dos Madres</i><a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3" /><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> and Catalina in <i>El
+Marqu&eacute;s de Lumbr&iacute;a</i> are two widely different but
+vigorous, almost barbarous, &quot;maternities.&quot; Alejandro,
+the hero of his powerful <i>Nada Menos que Todo un
+Hombre</i>, is masculine will, pure and unconquerable,
+save by death. Further still, in most if not all of his
+main characters, we can trace the dominant passion which
+is their whole being to a mere variety of the one and only
+passion which obsesses Unamuno himself, the hunger
+for life, a full life, here and after. Here is, for instance,
+<i>Abel S&aacute;nchez</i>, a sombre study of hatred, a modern paraphrase
+of the story of Cain. Joaqu&iacute;n Monegro, the Cain
+of the novel, has been reading Byron's poem, and writes
+in his diary: &quot;It was when I read how Lucifer declared
+to Cain that he, Cain, was immortal, that I began in
+terror to wonder whether I also was immortal and whether
+in me would be also immortal my hatred. 'Have I a
+soul?' I said to myself then. 'Is this my hatred soul?'
+And I came to think that it could not be otherwise, that
+such a hatred cannot be the function of a body....
+A corruptible organism could not hate as I hated.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Thus Joaqu&iacute;n Monegro, like every other main character
+in his work, appears preoccupied by the same
+central preoccupation of Unamuno. In one word, all
+Unamuno's characters are but incarnations of himself.
+But that is what we expected to find in a lyrical novelist.</p>
+
+<p>There are critics who conclude from this observation
+that these characters do not exist, that they are mere
+arguments on legs, personified ideas. Here and there,
+in Unamuno's novels, there are passages which lend
+some colour of plausibility to this view. Yet, it is in
+my opinion mistaken. Unamuno's characters may be
+schematized, stripped of their complexities, reduced to the
+mainspring of their nature; they may, moreover, reveal
+mainsprings made of the same steel. But that they are
+alive no one could deny who has a sense for life. The
+very restraint in the use of physical details which
+Unamuno has made a feature of his creative work may
+have led his critics to forget the intensity of those&mdash;admirably
+chosen&mdash;which are given. It is significant
+that the eyes play an important part in his description
+of characters and in his narrative too. His sense of the
+interpenetration of body and soul is so deep that he does
+not for one moment let us forget how bodily his &quot;souls&quot;
+are, and how pregnant with spiritual significance is every
+one of their words and gestures. No. These characters
+are not arguments on legs. They truly are men and
+women of &quot;flesh and bones,&quot; human, terribly human.</p>
+
+<p>In thus emphasizing a particular feature in their
+nature, Unamuno imparts to his creations a certain
+deformity which savours of romantic days. Yet
+Unamuno is not a romanticist, mainly because Romanticism
+was an esthetic attitude, and his attitude is seldom
+purely esthetic. For all their show of passion, true
+Romanticists seldom gave their real selves to their art.
+They created a stage double of their own selves for public
+exhibitions. They sought the picturesque. Their form
+was lyrical, but their substance was dramatic. Unamuno,
+on the contrary, even though he often seeks expression
+in dramatic form, is essentially lyrical. And if he is
+always intense, he never is exuberant. He follows the
+Spanish tradition for restraint&mdash;for there is one, along its
+opposite tradition for grandiloquence&mdash;and, true to the
+spirit of it, he seeks the maximum of effect through the
+minimum of means. Then, he never shouts. Here is
+an example of his quiet method, the rhythmical beauty
+of which is unfortunately almost untranslatable:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Y as&iacute; pasaron d&iacute;as de llanto y de negrura hasta que
+las l&aacute;grimas fueron y&eacute;ndose hacia adentro y la casa fu&eacute;
+derritiendo los negrores&quot; (<i>Niebla</i>) (And thus, days of
+weeping and mourning went by, till the tears began to
+flow inward and the blackness to melt in the home).</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Miguel de Unamuno is to-day the greatest literary
+figure of Spain. Baroja may surpass him in variety of
+external experience, Azor&iacute;n in delicate art, Ortega y
+Gasset in philosophical subtlety, Ayala in intellectual
+elegance, Valle Incl&aacute;n in rhythmical grace. Even in
+vitality he may have to yield the first place to that over-whelming
+athlete of literature, Blasco Ib&aacute;&ntilde;ez. But
+Unamuno is head and shoulders above them all in the
+highness of his purpose and in the earnestness and
+loyalty with which, Quixote-like, he has served all
+through his life his unattainable Dulcinea. Then there
+is another and most important reason which explains
+his position as first, <i>princeps</i>, of Spanish letters, and it
+is that Unamuno, by the cross which he has chosen to
+bear, incarnates the spirit of modern Spain. His eternal
+conflict between faith and reason, between life and
+thought, between spirit and intellect, between heaven
+and civilization, is the conflict of Spain herself. A
+border country, like Russia, in which East and West
+mix their spiritual waters, Spain wavers between two
+life-philosophies and cannot rest. In Russia, this conflict
+emerges in literature during the nineteenth century,
+when Dostoievsky and Tolstoy stand for the East while
+Turgeniev becomes the West's advocate. In Spain, a
+country less articulate, and, moreover, a country in which
+the blending of East and West is more intimate, for both
+found a common solvent in centuries of Latin civilization,
+the conflict is less clear, less on the surface. To-day
+Ortega y Gasset is our Turgeniev&mdash;not without
+mixture. Unamuno is our Dostoievsky, but painfully
+aware of the strength of the other side within him, and
+full of misgivings. Nor is it sure that when we speak of
+East in this connection we really mean East. There is
+a third country in Europe in which the &quot;Eastern&quot; view
+is as forcibly put and as deeply understood as the
+&quot;Western,&quot; a third border country&mdash;England. England,
+particularly in those of her racial elements conventionally
+named Celtic, is closely in sympathy with the
+&quot;East.&quot; Ireland is almost purely &quot;Eastern&quot; in this
+respect. That is perhaps why Unamuno feels so strong
+an attraction for the English language and its literature,
+and why, even to this day, he follows so closely the
+movements of English thought.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4" /><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> For his own nature,
+of a human being astride two enemy ideals, draws him
+instinctively towards minds equally placed in opposition,
+yet a co-operating opposition, to progress. Thus
+Unamuno, whose literary qualities and defects make him
+a genuine representative of the more masculine variety
+of the Spanish genius, becomes in his spiritual life the
+true living symbol of his country and his time. And
+that he is great enough to bear this incarnation is a sufficient
+measure of his greatness.</p>
+
+<p class='right'>S. DE MADARIAGA.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1" /><a href="#FNanchor_1_1">[1]</a> In what follows, I confess to refer not so much to the
+generally admitted opinion on Wordsworth as to my own views on him and
+his poetry, which I tried to explain in my essay: &quot;The Case of Wordsworth&quot;
+(<i>Shelley and Calder&oacute;n, and other Essays</i>, Constable and Co., 1920).</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2" /><a href="#FNanchor_2_2">[2]</a> <i>Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, explicada y comentada</i>, por M. de
+Unamuno: Madrid, Fernando F&eacute;, 1905.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3" /><a href="#FNanchor_3_3">[3]</a> These three novels appeared together as <i>Tres Novelas y un Pr&oacute;logo</i>
+Calpe, Madrid, 1921.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4" /><a href="#FNanchor_4_4">[4]</a> &quot;Me va interesando ese Dean Inge,&quot; he wrote to me last year.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="AUTHORS_PREFACE" id="AUTHORS_PREFACE" />AUTHOR'S PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>I intended at first to write a short Prologue to this
+English translation of my <i>Del Sentimiento Tr&aacute;gico de
+la Vida</i>, which has been undertaken by my friend
+Mr. J.E. Crawford Flitch. But upon further consideration
+I have abandoned the idea, for I reflected that after
+all I wrote this book not for Spaniards only, but for all
+civilized and Christian men&mdash;Christian in particular,
+whether consciously so or not&mdash;of whatever country they
+may be.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, if I were to set about writing an Introduction
+in the light of all that we see and feel now, after
+the Great War, and, still more, of what we foresee and
+forefeel, I should be led into writing yet another book.
+And that is a thing to be done with deliberation and only
+after having better digested this terrible peace, which is
+nothing else but the war's painful convalescence.</p>
+
+<p>As for many years my spirit has been nourished
+upon the very core of English literature&mdash;evidence of
+which the reader may discover in the following pages&mdash;the
+translator, in putting my <i>Sentimiento Tr&aacute;gico</i> into
+English, has merely converted not a few of the thoughts
+and feelings therein expressed back into their original
+form of expression. Or retranslated them, perhaps.
+Whereby they emerge other than they originally were,
+for an idea does not pass from one language to another
+without change.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that this English translation has been carefully
+revised here, in my house in this ancient city of
+Salamanca, by the translator and myself, implies not
+merely some guarantee of exactitude, but also something
+more&mdash;namely, a correction, in certain respects, of the
+original.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that, being an incorrigible Spaniard, I
+am naturally given to a kind of extemporization and to
+neglectfulness of a filed niceness in my works. For this
+reason my original work&mdash;and likewise the Italian and
+French translations of it&mdash;issued from the press with a
+certain number of errors, obscurities, and faulty references.
+The labour which my friend Mr. J.E. Crawford
+Flitch fortunately imposed upon me in making me revise
+his translation obliged me to correct these errors, to
+clarify some obscurities, and to give greater exactitude
+to certain quotations from foreign writers. Hence this
+English translation of my <i>Sentimiento Tr&aacute;gico</i> presents
+in some ways a more purged and correct text than that of
+the original Spanish. This perhaps compensates for what
+it may lose in the spontaneity of my Spanish thought,
+which at times, I believe, is scarcely translatable.</p>
+
+<p>It would advantage me greatly if this translation, in
+opening up to me a public of English-speaking readers,
+should some day lead to my writing something addressed
+to and concerned with this public. For just as a new
+friend enriches our spirit, not so much by what he gives
+us of himself, as by what he causes us to discover in our
+own selves, something which, if we had never known
+him, would have lain in us undeveloped, so it is with a
+new public. Perhaps there may be regions in my own
+Spanish spirit&mdash;my Basque spirit, and therefore doubly
+Spanish&mdash;unexplored by myself, some corner hitherto
+uncultivated, which I should have to cultivate in order
+to offer the flowers and fruits of it to the peoples of
+English speech.</p>
+
+<p>And now, no more.</p>
+
+<p>God give my English readers that inextinguishable
+thirst for truth which I desire for myself.</p>
+
+<p class='right'>MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO.</p>
+
+<p>SALAMANCA,<br />
+<i>April, 1921.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>TRANSLATOR'S NOTE</h3>
+
+<p>Footnotes added by the Translator, other than those which merely
+supplement references to writers or their works mentioned in the
+text, are distinguished by his initials.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I" /><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1" />I</h2>
+
+<h2>THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto</i>, said the
+Latin playwright. And I would rather say, <i>Nullum
+hominem a me alienum puto</i>: I am a man; no other
+man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective
+<i>humanus</i> is no less suspect than its abstract substantive
+<i>humanitas</i>, humanity. Neither &quot;the human&quot; nor
+&quot;humanity,&quot; neither the simple adjective nor the
+substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive&mdash;man.
+The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born,
+suffers, and dies&mdash;above all, who dies; the man who eats
+and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills;
+the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real
+brother.</p>
+
+<p>For there is another thing which is also called man,
+and he is the subject of not a few lucubrations, more or
+less scientific. He is the legendary featherless biped,
+the <i>&#950;&#969;&#959;&#957; &#960;&#959;&#955;&#953;&#964;&#953;&#954;&#959;&#957;</i> of Aristotle, the social contractor of
+Rousseau, the <i>homo economicus</i> of the Manchester
+school, the <i>homo sapiens</i> of Linn&aelig;us, or, if you like,
+the vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there,
+neither of this age nor of another, who has neither sex
+nor country, who is, in brief, merely an idea. That is
+to say, a no-man.</p>
+
+<p>The man we have to do with is the man of flesh and
+bone&mdash;I, you, reader of mine, the other man yonder, all
+of us who walk solidly on the earth.</p>
+
+<p>And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone,
+is at once the subject and the supreme object of all
+<a name="Page_2" id="Page_2" />philosophy, whether certain self-styled philosophers like
+it or not.</p>
+
+<p>In most of the histories of philosophy that I know,
+philosophic systems are presented to us as if growing
+out of one another spontaneously, and their authors,
+the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The
+inner biography of the philosophers, of the men who
+philosophized, occupies a secondary place. And yet it
+is precisely this inner biography that explains for us
+most things.</p>
+
+<p>It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies
+closer to poetry than to science. All philosophic systems
+which have been constructed as a supreme concord of
+the final results of the individual sciences have in every
+age possessed much less consistency and life than those
+which expressed the integral spiritual yearning of their
+authors.</p>
+
+<p>And, though they concern us so greatly, and are,
+indeed, indispensable for our life and thought, the
+sciences are in a certain sense more foreign to us than
+philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end&mdash;that is
+to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are
+fundamentally a matter of economics. A new scientific
+discovery, of the kind called theoretical, is, like a
+mechanical discovery&mdash;that of the steam-engine, the
+telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane&mdash;a thing
+which is useful for something else. Thus the telephone
+may be useful to us in enabling us to communicate at a
+distance with the woman we love. But she, wherefore is
+she useful to us? A man takes an electric tram to go to
+hear an opera, and asks himself, Which, in this case, is
+the more useful, the tram or the opera?</p>
+
+<p>Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete
+and unitary conception of the world and of life, and as a
+result of this conception, a feeling which gives birth to
+an inward attitude and even to outward action. But the
+fact is that this feeling, instead of being a consequence
+<a name="Page_3" id="Page_3" />of this conception, is the cause of it. Our philosophy&mdash;that
+is, our mode of understanding or not understanding
+the world and life&mdash;springs from our feeling towards life
+itself. And life, like everything affective, has roots in
+subconsciousness, perhaps in unconsciousness.</p>
+
+<p>It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or
+pessimists, but it is our optimism or our pessimism, of
+physiological or perhaps pathological origin, as much
+the one as the other, that makes our ideas.</p>
+
+<p>Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know
+why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling
+animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from
+other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often
+I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps
+it weeps or laughs inwardly&mdash;but then perhaps, also
+inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second
+degree.</p>
+
+<p>And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most
+concern us is the man.</p>
+
+<p>Take Kant, the man Immanuel Kant, who was born
+and lived at K&ouml;nigsberg, in the latter part of the eighteenth
+century and the beginning of the nineteenth. In
+the philosophy of this man Kant, a man of heart and head&mdash;that
+is to say, a man&mdash;there is a significant somersault,
+as Kierkegaard, another man&mdash;and what a man!&mdash;would
+have said, the somersault from the <i>Critique of Pure Reason</i>
+to the <i>Critique of Practical Reason</i>. He reconstructs in
+the latter what he destroyed in the former, in spite of what
+those may say who do not see the man himself. After
+having examined and pulverized with his analysis the
+traditional proofs of the existence of God, of the Aristotelian
+God, who is the God corresponding to the
+<i>&#950;&#969;&#959;&#957; &#960;&#959;&#955;&#953;&#964;&#953;&#954;&#959;&#957;</i>, the abstract God, the unmoved prime
+Mover, he reconstructs God anew; but the God of the
+conscience, the Author of the moral order&mdash;the Lutheran
+God, in short. This transition of Kant exists already in
+embryo in the Lutheran notion of faith.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4" />The first God, the rational God, is the projection to
+the outward infinite of man as he is by definition&mdash;that
+is to say, of the abstract man, of the man no-man; the
+other God, the God of feeling and volition, is the projection
+to the inward infinite of man as he is by life, of
+the concrete man, the man of flesh and bone.</p>
+
+<p>Kant reconstructed with the heart that which with the
+head he had overthrown. And we know, from the testimony
+of those who knew him and from his testimony
+in his letters and private declarations, that the man
+Kant, the more or less selfish old bachelor who professed
+philosophy at K&ouml;nigsberg at the end of the century of the
+Encyclopedia and the goddess of Reason, was a man
+much preoccupied with the problem&mdash;I mean with the
+only real vital problem, the problem that strikes at the
+very root of our being, the problem of our individual
+and personal destiny, of the immortality of the soul.
+The man Kant was not resigned to die utterly. And
+because he was not resigned to die utterly he made that
+leap, that immortal somersault,<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5" /><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> from the one Critique
+to the other.</p>
+
+<p>Whosoever reads the <i>Critique of Practical Reason</i>
+carefully and without blinkers will see that, in strict fact,
+the existence of God is therein deduced from the immortality
+of the soul, and not the immortality of the soul
+from the existence of God. The categorical imperative
+leads us to a moral postulate which necessitates in its
+turn, in the teleological or rather eschatological order,
+the immortality of the soul, and in order to sustain this
+immortality God is introduced. All the rest is the
+jugglery of the professional of philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>The man Kant felt that morality was the basis of
+eschatology, but the professor of philosophy inverted
+the terms.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5" />Another professor, the professor and man William
+James, has somewhere said that for the generality of
+men God is the provider of immortality. Yes, for the
+generality of men, including the man Kant, the man
+James, and the man who writes these lines which you,
+reader, are reading.</p>
+
+<p>Talking to a peasant one day, I proposed to him the
+hypothesis that there might indeed be a God who governs
+heaven and earth, a Consciousness<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6" /><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> of the Universe, but
+that for all that the soul of every man may not be
+immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. He
+replied: &quot;Then wherefore God?&quot; So answered, in the
+secret tribunal of their consciousness, the man Kant and
+the man James. Only in their capacity as professors
+they were compelled to justify rationally an attitude in
+itself so little rational. Which does not mean, of course,
+that the attitude is absurd.</p>
+
+<p>Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational
+is real and all the real rational; but there are many of us
+who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to believe that the
+real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon
+irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of definitions,
+attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe,
+like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were
+made by taking a hole and enclosing it with steel.</p>
+
+<p>Another man, the man Joseph Butler, the Anglican
+bishop who lived at the beginning of the eighteenth
+century and whom Cardinal Newman declared to be the
+greatest man in the Anglican Church, wrote, at the conclusion
+of the first chapter of his great work, <i>The Analogy
+of Religion</i>, the chapter which treats of a future life,
+these pregnant words: &quot;This credibility of a future life,
+which has been here insisted upon, how little soever it
+may satisfy our curiosity, seems to answer all the pur<a name="Page_6" id="Page_6" />poses
+of religion, in like manner as a demonstrative proof
+would. Indeed a proof, even a demonstrative one, of a
+future life, would not be a proof of religion. For, that
+we are to live hereafter, is just as reconcilable with the
+scheme of atheism, and as well to be accounted for by it,
+as that we are now alive is: and therefore nothing can be
+more absurd than to argue from that scheme that there
+can be no future state.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The man Butler, whose works were perhaps known to
+the man Kant, wished to save the belief in the immortality
+of the soul, and with this object he made it
+independent of belief in God. The first chapter of his
+<i>Analogy</i> treats, as I have said, of the future life, and
+the second of the government of God by rewards and
+punishments. And the fact is that, fundamentally, the
+good Anglican bishop deduces the existence of God from
+the immortality of the soul. And as this deduction was
+the good Anglican bishop's starting-point, he had not to
+make that somersault which at the close of the same
+century the good Lutheran philosopher had to make.
+Butler, the bishop, was one man and Kant, the professor,
+another man.</p>
+
+<p>To be a man is to be something concrete, unitary,
+and substantive; it is to be a thing&mdash;<i>res</i>. Now we know
+what another man, the man Benedict Spinoza, that Portuguese
+Jew who was born and lived in Holland in the
+middle of the seventeenth century, wrote about the nature
+of things. The sixth proposition of Part III. of his
+<i>Ethic</i> states: <i>unaquoeque res, quatenus in se est, in suo
+esse perseverare conatur</i>&mdash;that is, Everything, in so far
+as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being.
+Everything in so far as it is in itself&mdash;that is to say, in
+so far as it is substance, for according to him substance
+is <i>id quod in se est et per se concipitur</i>&mdash;that which is in
+itself and is conceived by itself. And in the following
+proposition, the seventh, of the same part, he adds:
+<i>conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare
+<a name="Page_7" id="Page_7" />conatur, nihil est proeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam</i>&mdash;that
+is, the endeavour wherewith everything endeavours
+to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual
+essence of the thing itself. This means that your essence,
+reader, mine, that of the man Spinoza, that of the man
+Butler, of the man Kant, and of every man who is a man,
+is nothing but the endeavour, the effort, which he makes
+to continue to be a man, not to die. And the other
+proposition which follows these two, the eighth, says:
+<i>conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare
+conatur, nullum tempus finitum, sed indefinitum involvit</i>&mdash;that
+is, The endeavour whereby each individual
+thing endeavours to persist involves no finite time but
+indefinite time. That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza
+wish never to die and that this longing of ours never to
+die is our actual essence. Nevertheless, this poor Portuguese
+Jew, exiled in the mists of Holland, could never
+attain to believing in his own personal immortality, and
+all his philosophy was but a consolation which he contrived
+for his lack of faith. Just as other men have a
+pain in hand or foot, heart-ache or head-ache, so he had
+God-ache. Unhappy man! And unhappy fellow-men!</p>
+
+<p>And man, this thing, is he a thing? How absurd
+soever the question may appear, there are some who have
+propounded it. Not long ago there went abroad a certain
+doctrine called Positivism, which did much good and
+much ill. And among other ills that it wrought was the
+introduction of a method of analysis whereby facts were
+pulverized, reduced to a dust of facts. Most of the facts
+labelled as such by Positivism were really only fragments
+of facts. In psychology its action was harmful. There
+were even scholastics meddling in literature&mdash;I will not
+say philosophers meddling in poetry, because poet and
+philosopher are twin brothers, if not even one and the
+same&mdash;who carried this Positivist psychological analysis
+into the novel and the drama, where the main business is
+to give act and motion to concrete men, men of flesh and
+<a name="Page_8" id="Page_8" />bone, and by dint of studying states of consciousness,
+consciousness itself disappeared. The same thing happened
+to them which is said often to happen in the
+examination and testing of certain complicated, organic,
+living chemical compounds, when the reagents destroy
+the very body which it was proposed to examine and all
+that is obtained is the products of its decomposition.</p>
+
+<p>Taking as their starting-point the evident fact that
+contradictory states pass through our consciousness, they
+did not succeed in envisaging consciousness itself, the
+&quot;I.&quot; To ask a man about his &quot;I&quot; is like asking him
+about his body. And note that in speaking of the &quot;I,&quot;
+I speak of the concrete and personal &quot;I,&quot; not of the &quot;I&quot;
+of Fichte, but of Fichte himself, the man Fichte.</p>
+
+<p>That which determines a man, that which makes him
+one man, one and not another, the man he is and not the
+man he is not, is a principle of unity and a principle of
+continuity. A principle of unity firstly in space, thanks
+to the body, and next in action and intention. When we
+walk, one foot does not go forward and the other backward,
+nor, when we look, if we are normal, does one eye
+look towards the north and the other towards the south.
+In each moment of our life we entertain some purpose,
+and to this purpose the synergy of our actions is directed.
+Notwithstanding the next moment we may change our
+purpose. And in a certain sense a man is so much the
+more a man the more unitary his action. Some there are
+who throughout their whole life follow but one single
+purpose, be it what it may.</p>
+
+<p>Also a principle of continuity in time. Without
+entering upon a discussion&mdash;an unprofitable discussion&mdash;as
+to whether I am or am not he who I was twenty years
+ago, it appears to me to be indisputable that he who I am
+to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness,
+from him who was in my body twenty years
+ago. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just
+as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a
+<a name="Page_9" id="Page_9" />people. We live in memory and by memory, and our
+spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory
+to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our
+past to transform itself into our future.</p>
+
+<p>All this, I know well, is sheer platitude; but in going
+about in the world one meets men who seem to have no
+feeling of their own personality. One of my best friends
+with whom I have walked and talked every day for many
+years, whenever I spoke to him of this sense of one's own
+personality, used to say: &quot;But I have no sense of
+myself; I don't know what that is.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>On a certain occasion this friend remarked to me:
+&quot;I should like to be So-and-so&quot; (naming someone), and I
+said: &quot;That is what I shall never be able to understand&mdash;that
+one should want to be someone else. (To want to be
+someone else is to want to cease to be he who one is.) I
+understand that one should wish to have what someone
+else has, his wealth or his knowledge; but to be someone
+else, that is a thing I cannot comprehend.&quot; It has often
+been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes
+prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather
+than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate
+men, when they preserve their normality in their misfortune&mdash;that
+is to say, when they endeavour to persist
+in their own being&mdash;prefer misfortune to non-existence.
+For myself I can say that as a youth, and even as a
+child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving
+pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me
+quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious
+hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for
+divinity, as one of our ascetics has put it.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7" /><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p>
+
+<p>To propose to a man that he should be someone else,
+that he should become someone else, is to propose to him
+that he should cease to be himself. Everyone defends his
+own personality, and only consents to a change in his
+mode of thinking or of feeling in so far as this change is
+<a name="Page_10" id="Page_10" />able to enter into the unity of his spirit and become
+involved in its continuity; in so far as this change can
+harmonize and integrate itself with all the rest of his
+mode of being, thinking and feeling, and can at the
+same time knit itself with his memories. Neither of a
+man nor of a people&mdash;which is, in a certain sense, also a
+man&mdash;can a change be demanded which breaks the unity
+and continuity of the person. A man can change greatly,
+almost completely even, but the change must take place
+within his continuity.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that in certain individuals there occur what
+are called changes of personality; but these are pathological
+cases, and as such are studied by alienists. In
+these changes of personality, memory, the basis of consciousness,
+is completely destroyed, and all that is left
+to the sufferer as the substratum of his individual continuity,
+which has now ceased to be personal, is the
+physical organism. For the subject who suffers it, such
+an infirmity is equivalent to death&mdash;it is not equivalent
+to death only for those who expect to inherit his fortune,
+if he possesses one! And this infirmity is nothing less
+than a revolution, a veritable revolution.</p>
+
+<p>A disease is, in a certain sense, an organic dissociation;
+it is a rebellion of some element or organ of the
+living body which breaks the vital synergy and seeks an
+end distinct from that which the other elements co-ordinated
+with it seek. Its end, considered in itself&mdash;that
+is to say, in the abstract&mdash;may be more elevated,
+more noble, more anything you like; but it is different.
+To fly and breathe in the air may be better than to swim
+and breathe in the water; but if the fins of a fish aimed
+at converting themselves into wings, the fish, as a fish,
+would perish. And it is useless to say that it would end
+by becoming a bird, if in this becoming there was not a
+process of continuity. I do not precisely know, but
+perhaps it may be possible for a fish to engender a bird,
+or another fish more akin to a bird than itself; but a fish,
+<a name="Page_11" id="Page_11" />this fish, cannot itself and during its own lifetime become
+a bird.</p>
+
+<p>Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and
+continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and consequently
+to destroy itself. Every individual in a people
+who conspires to break the spiritual unity and continuity
+of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself
+as a part of that people. What if some other people is
+better than our own? Very possibly, although perhaps
+we do not clearly understand what is meant by better or
+worse. Richer? Granted. More cultured? Granted
+likewise. Happier? Well, happiness ... but still, let
+it pass! A conquering people (or what is called conquering)
+while we are conquered? Well and good. All this
+is good&mdash;but it is something different. And that is
+enough. Because for me the becoming other than I am,
+the breaking of the unity and continuity of my life, is to
+cease to be he who I am&mdash;that is to say, it is simply to
+cease to be. And that&mdash;no! Anything rather than that!</p>
+
+<p>Another, you say, might play the part that I play as
+well or better? Another might fulfil my function in
+society? Yes, but it would not be I.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I, I, I, always I!&quot; some reader will exclaim; &quot;and
+who are you?&quot; I might reply in the words of Obermann,
+that tremendous man Obermann: &quot;For the universe,
+nothing&mdash;for myself, everything&quot;; but no, I would
+rather remind him of a doctrine of the man Kant&mdash;to
+wit, that we ought to think of our fellow-men not as
+means but as ends. For the question does not touch me
+alone, it touches you also, grumbling reader, it touches
+each and all. Singular judgments have the value of
+universal judgments, the logicians say. The singular is
+not particular, it is universal.</p>
+
+<p>Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses
+itself to man, to each man, to each I. What is that idol,
+call it Humanity or call it what you like, to which all
+men and each individual man must be sacrificed? For
+<a name="Page_12" id="Page_12" />I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen,
+for my children, and these sacrifice themselves
+in their turn for theirs, and theirs again for those
+that come after them, and so on in a never-ending series
+of generations. And who receives the fruit of this
+sacrifice?</p>
+
+<p>Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this
+dedication without an object, are wont to talk to us also
+about the right to live. What is this right to live? They
+tell me I am here to realize I know not what social end;
+but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here to
+realize myself, to live.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, yes, I see it all!&mdash;an enormous social activity, a
+mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of
+industry, of morality, and afterwards, when we have
+filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories,
+with roads, museums, and libraries, we shall fall
+exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist&mdash;for
+whom? Was man made for science or was science made
+for man?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why!&quot; the reader will exclaim again, &quot;we are
+coming back to what the Catechism says: '<i>Q</i>. For whom
+did God create the world? <i>A</i>. For man.'&quot; Well, why
+not?&mdash;so ought the man who is a man to reply. The
+ant, if it took account of these matters and were a person,
+would reply &quot;For the ant,&quot; and it would reply rightly.
+The world is made for consciousness, for each consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>A human soul is worth all the universe, someone&mdash;I
+know not whom&mdash;has said and said magnificently. A
+human soul, mind you! Not a human life. Not this
+life. And it happens that the less a man believes in the
+soul&mdash;that is to say in his conscious immortality, personal
+and concrete&mdash;the more he will exaggerate the worth of
+this poor transitory life. This is the source from which
+springs all that effeminate, sentimental ebullition against
+war. True, a man ought not to wish to die, but the
+<a name="Page_13" id="Page_13" />death to be renounced is the death of the soul. &quot;Whosoever
+will save his life shall lose it,&quot; says the Gospel;
+but it does not say &quot;whosoever will save his soul,&quot; the
+immortal soul&mdash;or, at any rate, which we believe and
+wish to be immortal.</p>
+
+<p>And what all the objectivists do not see, or rather do
+not wish to see, is that when a man affirms his &quot;I,&quot; his
+personal consciousness, he affirms man, man concrete
+and real, affirms the true humanism&mdash;the humanism of
+man, not of the things of man&mdash;and in affirming man he
+affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of
+which we have consciousness is that of man.</p>
+
+<p>The world is for consciousness. Or rather this <i>for</i>,
+this notion of finality, and feeling rather than notion,
+this teleological feeling, is born only where there is
+consciousness. Consciousness and finality are fundamentally
+the same thing.</p>
+
+<p>If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no
+doubt, that it lived in order to give light to the worlds;
+but it would also and above all think that the worlds
+existed in order that it might give them light and enjoy
+itself in giving them light and so live. And it would
+think well.</p>
+
+<p>And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this
+immortal craving for immortality which caused the man
+Kant to make that immortal leap of which I have
+spoken, all this is simply a fight for consciousness. If
+consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said,
+nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities
+of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>Some may espy a fundamental contradiction in everything
+that I am saying, now expressing a longing for
+unending life, now affirming that this earthly life does
+not possess the value that is given to it. Contradiction?
+To be sure! The contradiction of my heart that says
+Yes and of my head that says No! Of course there
+<a name="Page_14" id="Page_14" />is contradiction. Who does not recollect those words
+of the Gospel, &quot;Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief&quot;?
+Contradiction! Of course! Since we only
+live in and by contradictions, since life is tragedy and
+the tragedy is perpetual struggle, without victory or the
+hope of victory, life is contradiction.</p>
+
+<p>The values we are discussing are, as you see, values of
+the heart, and against values of the heart reasons do not
+avail. For reasons are only reasons&mdash;that is to say, they
+are not even truths. There is a class of pedantic label-mongers,
+pedants by nature and by grace, who remind
+me of that man who, purposing to console a father
+whose son has suddenly died in the flower of his years,
+says to him, &quot;Patience, my friend, we all must die!&quot;
+Would you think it strange if this father were offended
+at such an impertinence? For it is an impertinence.
+There are times when even an axiom can become an
+impertinence. How many times may it not be said&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Para pensar cual t&uacute;, s&oacute;lo es preciso</i></div>
+<div><i>no tener nada mas que inteligencia</i>.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8" /><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>There are, in fact, people who appear to think only
+with the brain, or with whatever may be the specific
+thinking organ; while others think with all the body and
+all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones,
+with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the
+life. And the people who think only with the brain
+develop into definition-mongers; they become the
+professionals of thought. And you know what a
+professional is? You know what a product of the
+differentiation of labour is?</p>
+
+<p>Take a professional boxer. He has learnt to hit with
+such economy of effort that, while concentrating all his
+strength in the blow, he only brings into play just those
+muscles that are required for the immediate and definite
+<a name="Page_15" id="Page_15" />object of his action&mdash;to knock out his opponent. A
+blow given by a non-professional will not have so much
+immediate, objective efficiency; but it will more greatly
+vitalize the striker, causing him to bring into play almost
+the whole of his body. The one is the blow of a boxer,
+the other that of a man. And it is notorious that the
+Hercules of the circus, the athletes of the ring, are not,
+as a rule, healthy. They knock out their opponents,
+they lift enormous weights, but they die of phthisis or
+dyspepsia.</p>
+
+<p>If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a
+philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is
+a caricature of a man. The cultivation of any branch
+of science&mdash;of chemistry, of physics, of geometry, of
+philology&mdash;may be a work of differentiated specialization,
+and even so only within very narrow limits and
+restrictions; but philosophy, like poetry, is a work of
+integration and synthesis, or else it is merely pseudo-philosophical
+erudition.</p>
+
+<p>All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowledge for
+the sake of knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but
+a dismal begging of the question. We learn something
+either for an immediate practical end, or in order to
+complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the knowledge
+that appears to us to be most theoretical&mdash;that is to say,
+of least immediate application to the non-intellectual
+necessities of life&mdash;answers to a necessity which is no less
+real because it is intellectual, to a reason of economy in
+thinking, to a principle of unity and continuity of consciousness.
+But just as a scientific fact has its finality
+in the rest of knowledge, so the philosophy that we would
+make our own has also its extrinsic object&mdash;it refers to
+our whole destiny, to our attitude in face of life and the
+universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy is
+to reconcile intellectual necessities with the necessities
+of the heart and the will. For it is on this rock that
+every philosophy that pretends to resolve the eternal and
+<a name="Page_16" id="Page_16" />tragic contradiction, the basis of our existence, breaks to
+pieces. But do all men face this contradiction squarely?</p>
+
+<p>Little can be hoped from a ruler, for example, who has
+not at some time or other been preoccupied, even if only
+confusedly, with the first beginning and the ultimate end
+of all things, and above all of man, with the &quot;why&quot; of
+his origin and the &quot;wherefore&quot; of his destiny.</p>
+
+<p>And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely
+rational, it must involve the heart. It is not enough to
+think about our destiny: it must be felt. And the
+would-be leader of men who affirms and proclaims that
+he pays no heed to the things of the spirit, is not worthy
+to lead them. By which I do not mean, of course, that
+any ready-made solution is to be required of him.
+Solution? Is there indeed any?</p>
+
+<p>So far as I am concerned, I will never willingly yield
+myself, nor entrust my confidence, to any popular leader
+who is not penetrated with the feeling that he who
+orders a people orders men, men of flesh and bone, men
+who are born, suffer, and, although they do not wish to
+die, die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely
+means; men who must be themselves and not others;
+men, in fine, who seek that which we call happiness.
+It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation
+of men to the generation which follows, without having
+any feeling for the destiny of those who are sacrificed,
+without having any regard, not for their memory, not
+for their names, but for them themselves.</p>
+
+<p>All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in
+his works, or in the universal consciousness, is but vague
+verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from
+affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be persons
+of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to
+possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet
+to be stupid as regards the feelings and even morally
+imbecile. There have been instances.</p>
+
+<p>These clever-witted, affectively stupid persons are wont
+<a name="Page_17" id="Page_17" />to say that it is useless to seek to delve in the unknowable
+or to kick against the pricks. It is as if one should
+say to a man whose leg has had to be amputated that it
+does not help him at all to think about it. And we all
+lack something; only some of us feel the lack and others
+do not. Or they pretend not to feel the lack, and then
+they are hypocrites.</p>
+
+<p>A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of
+a son said to him, &quot;Why do you weep thus, if weeping
+avails nothing?&quot; And the sage answered him, &quot;Precisely
+for that reason&mdash;because it does not avail.&quot; It
+is manifest that weeping avails something, even if only
+the alleviation of distress; but the deep sense of Solon's
+reply to the impertinent questioner is plainly seen.
+And I am convinced that we should solve many things
+if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our
+griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole
+common grief, and joined together in beweeping them
+and crying aloud to the heavens and calling upon God.
+And this, even though God should hear us not; but He
+would hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that
+it is a place to which men go to weep in common. A
+<i>miserere</i> sung in common by a multitude tormented by
+destiny has as much value as a philosophy. It is not
+enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for
+it. Yes, we must learn to weep! Perhaps that is the
+supreme wisdom. Why? Ask Solon.</p>
+
+<p>There is something which, for lack of a better name,
+we will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it
+a whole conception of life itself and of the universe, a
+whole philosophy more or less formulated, more or less
+conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is
+possessed, not only by individual men but by whole
+peoples. And this sense does not so much flow from
+ideas as determine them, even though afterwards, as is
+manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it.
+Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness&mdash;<a name="Page_18" id="Page_18" />dyspepsia,
+for example; but at other times it is constitutional.
+And it is useless to speak, as we shall see, of
+men who are healthy and men who are not healthy.
+Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of
+health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful
+by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of
+being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison
+with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness
+is a disease.</p>
+
+<p>Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical
+examples of those who possess this tragic sense of life.
+I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal,
+Rousseau, <i>Ren&eacute;, Obermann</i>, Thomson,<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9" /><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> Leopardi,
+Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard&mdash;men
+burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>And there are, I believe, peoples who possess this
+tragic sense of life also.</p>
+
+<p>It is to this that we must now turn our attention,
+beginning with this matter of health and disease.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5" /><a href="#FNanchor_5_5">[5]</a> &quot;<i>Salto inmortal</i>.&quot; There is a play here upon the term
+<i>salto mortal</i>, used to denote the dangerous aerial somersault of
+the acrobat, which cannot be rendered in English.&mdash;J.E.C.F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6" /><a href="#FNanchor_6_6">[6]</a> &quot;<i>Conciencia</i>.&quot; The same word is used in Spanish to denote both
+consciousness and conscience. If the latter is specifically intended, the
+qualifying adjective &quot;<i>moral</i>&quot; or &quot;<i>religiosa</i>&quot; is commonly
+added.&mdash;J.E.C.F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7" /><a href="#FNanchor_7_7">[7]</a> San Juan de los Angeles.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8" /><a href="#FNanchor_8_8">[8]</a> To be lacking in everything but intelligence is the necessary qualification
+for thinking like you.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9" /><a href="#FNanchor_9_9">[9]</a> James Thomson, author of <i>The City of Dreadful Night</i>.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19" /><a name="II" id="II" />II</h2>
+
+<h2>THE STARTING-POINT</h2>
+
+
+<p>To some, perhaps, the foregoing reflections may seem
+to possess a certain morbid character. Morbid? But
+what is disease precisely? And what is health?</p>
+
+<p>May not disease itself possibly be the essential condition
+of that which we call progress and progress itself a
+disease?</p>
+
+<p>Who does not know the mythical tragedy of Paradise?
+Therein dwelt our first parents in a state of perfect health
+and perfect innocence, and Jahw&eacute; gave them to eat of the
+tree of life and created all things for them; but he commanded
+them not to taste of the fruit of the tree of the
+knowledge of good and evil. But they, tempted by the
+serpent&mdash;Christ's type of prudence&mdash;tasted of the fruit
+of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and became
+subject to all diseases, and to death, which is their crown
+and consummation, and to labour and to progress. For
+progress, according to this legend, springs from original
+sin. And thus it was the curiosity of Eve, of woman, of
+her who is most thrall to the organic necessities of life
+and of the conservation of life, that occasioned the Fall
+and with the Fall the Redemption, and it was the Redemption
+that set our feet on the way to God and made
+it possible for us to attain to Him and to be in Him.</p>
+
+<p>Do you want another version of our origin? Very
+well then. According to this account, man is, strictly
+speaking, merely a species of gorilla, orang-outang,
+chimpanzee, or the like, more or less hydrocephalous.
+Once on a time an anthropoid monkey had a diseased
+offspring&mdash;diseased from the strictly animal or zoological
+<a name="Page_20" id="Page_20" />point of view, really diseased; and this disease, although
+a source of weakness, resulted in a positive gain in the
+struggle for survival. The only vertical mammal at last
+succeeded in standing erect&mdash;man. The upright position
+freed him from the necessity of using his hands as
+means of support in walking; he was able, therefore, to
+oppose the thumb to the other four fingers, to seize hold
+of objects and to fashion tools; and it is well known that
+the hands are great promoters of the intelligence. This
+same position gave to the lungs, trachea, larynx, and
+mouth an aptness for the production of articulate speech,
+and speech is intelligence. Moreover, this position,
+causing the head to weigh vertically upon the trunk,
+facilitated its development and increase of weight, and
+the head is the seat of the mind. But as this necessitated
+greater strength and resistance in the bones of the pelvis
+than in those of species whose head and trunk rest upon
+all four extremities, the burden fell upon woman, the
+author of the Fall according to Genesis, of bringing forth
+larger-headed offspring through a harder framework of
+bone. And Jahw&eacute; condemned her, for having sinned,
+to bring forth her children in sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>The gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-outang, and
+their kind, must look upon man as a feeble and infirm
+animal, whose strange custom it is to store up his dead.
+Wherefore?</p>
+
+<p>And this primary disease and all subsequent diseases&mdash;are
+they not perhaps the capital element of progress?
+Arthritis, for example, infects the blood and introduces
+into it scori&aelig;, a kind of refuse, of an imperfect organic
+combustion; but may not this very impurity happen to
+make the blood more stimulative? May not this impure
+blood promote a more active cerebration precisely because
+it is impure? Water that is chemically pure is undrinkable.
+And may not also blood that is physiologically
+pure be unfit for the brain of the vertical mammal
+that has to live by thought?</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21" />The history of medicine, moreover, teaches us that
+progress consists not so much in expelling the germs of
+disease, or rather diseases themselves, as in accommodating
+them to our organism and so perhaps enriching it,
+in dissolving them in our blood. What but this is the
+meaning of vaccination and all the serums, and immunity
+from infection through lapse of time?</p>
+
+<p>If this notion of absolute health were not an abstract
+category, something which does not strictly exist, we
+might say that a perfectly healthy man would be no
+longer a man, but an irrational animal. Irrational,
+because of the lack of some disease to set a spark to his
+reason. And this disease which gives us the appetite of
+knowing for the sole pleasure of knowing, for the delight
+of tasting of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good
+and evil, is a real disease and a tragic one.</p>
+
+<p><i>&#928;&#945;&#957;&#964;&#949;&#962; &#945;&#957;&#952;&#961;&#969;&#960;&#959;&#953;
+&#964;&#959;&#957; &#949;&#7985;&#948;&#949;&#957;&#945;&#953; &#959;&#961;&#949;&#947;&#959;&#957;&#964;&#945;&#953; &#966;&#965;&#963;&#949;&#953;
+</i>, &quot;all men
+naturally desire to know.&quot; Thus Aristotle begins his
+Metaphysic, and it has been repeated a thousand times
+since then that curiosity or the desire to know, which
+according to Genesis led our first mother to sin, is the
+origin of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>But it is necessary to distinguish here between the
+desire or appetite for knowing, apparently and at first
+sight for the love of knowledge itself, between the eagerness
+to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and
+the necessity of knowing for the sake of living. The
+latter, which gives us direct and immediate knowledge,
+and which in a certain sense might be called, if it does
+not seem too paradoxical, unconscious knowledge, is
+common both to men and animals, while that which
+distinguishes us from them is reflective knowledge, the
+knowing that we know.</p>
+
+<p>Man has debated at length and will continue to debate
+at length&mdash;the world having been assigned as a theatre
+for his debates&mdash;concerning the origin of knowledge;
+but, apart from the question as to what the real truth
+<a name="Page_22" id="Page_22" />about this origin may be, which we will leave until later,
+it is a certainly ascertained fact that in the apparential
+order of things, in the life of beings who are endowed
+with a certain more or less cloudy faculty of knowing
+and perceiving, or who at any rate appear to act as if
+they were so endowed, knowledge is exhibited to us as
+bound up with the necessity of living and of procuring
+the wherewithal to maintain life. It is a consequence of
+that very essence of being, which according to Spinoza
+consists in the effort to persist indefinitely in its own
+being. Speaking in terms in which concreteness verges
+upon grossness, it may be said that the brain, in so far as
+its function is concerned, depends upon the stomach.
+In beings which rank in the lowest scale of life, those
+actions which present the characteristics of will, those
+which appear to be connected with a more or less clear
+consciousness, are actions designed to procure nourishment
+for the being performing them.</p>
+
+<p>Such then is what we may call the historical origin of
+knowledge, whatever may be its origin from another
+point of view. Beings which appear to be endowed with
+perception, perceive in order to be able to live, and only
+perceive in so far as they require to do so in order to live.
+But perhaps this stored-up knowledge, the utility in
+which it had its origin being exhausted, has come to
+constitute a fund of knowledge far exceeding that required
+for the bare necessities of living.</p>
+
+<p>Thus we have, first, the necessity of knowing in order
+to live, and next, arising out of this, that other knowledge
+which we might call superfluous knowledge or
+knowledge <i>de luxe</i>, which may in its turn come to constitute
+a new necessity. Curiosity, the so-called innate
+desire of knowing, only awakes and becomes operative
+after the necessity of knowing for the sake of living is
+satisfied; and although sometimes in the conditions
+under which the human race is actually living it may not
+so befall, but curiosity may prevail over necessity and
+<a name="Page_23" id="Page_23" />knowledge over hunger, nevertheless the primordial
+fact is that curiosity sprang from the necessity of knowing
+in order to live, and this is the dead weight and
+gross matter carried in the matrix of science. Aspiring
+to be knowledge for the sake of knowledge, to know the
+truth for the sake of the truth itself, science is forced by
+the necessities of life to turn aside and put it itself at
+their service. While men believe themselves to be
+seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking
+life in truth. The variations of science depend upon
+the variations of human needs, and men of science are
+wont to work, willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or
+unwittingly, in the service of the powerful or in that of
+a people that demands from them the confirmation of its
+own desires.</p>
+
+<p>But is this really a dead weight that impedes the
+progress of science, or is it not rather its innermost
+redeeming essence? It is in fact the latter, and it is a
+gross stupidity to presume to rebel against the very
+condition of life.</p>
+
+<p>Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity
+of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of
+personal preservation. This necessity and this instinct
+have created in man the organs of knowledge and given
+them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears,
+touches, tastes, and smells that which it is necessary for
+him to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell in order to
+preserve his life. The decay or the loss of any of these
+senses increases the risks with which his life is environed,
+and if it increases them less in the state of society in
+which we are actually living, the reason is that some see,
+hear, touch, and smell for others. A blind man, by
+himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society
+is an additional sense; it is the true common sense.</p>
+
+<p>Man, then, in his quality of an isolated individual,
+only sees, hears, touches, tastes, and smells in so far as
+is necessary for living and self-preservation. If he does
+<a name="Page_24" id="Page_24" />not perceive colours below red or above violet, the reason
+perhaps is that the colours which he does perceive suffice
+for the purposes of self-preservation. And the senses
+themselves are simplifying apparati which eliminate
+from objective reality everything that it is not necessary
+to know in order to utilize objects for the purpose of
+preserving life. In complete darkness an animal, if it
+does not perish, ends by becoming blind. Parasites
+which live in the intestines of other animals upon the
+nutritive juices which they find ready prepared for them
+by these animals, as they do not need either to see or
+hear, do in fact neither see nor hear; they simply adhere,
+a kind of receptive bag, to the being upon whom they
+live. For these parasites the visible and audible world
+does not exist. It is enough for them that the animals,
+in whose intestines they live, see and hear.</p>
+
+<p>Knowledge, then, is primarily at the service of the
+instinct of self-preservation, which is indeed, as we have
+said with Spinoza, its very essence. And thus it may
+be said that it is the instinct of self-preservation that
+makes perceptible for us the reality and truth of the
+world; for it is this instinct that cuts out and separates
+that which exists for us from the unfathomable and
+illimitable region of the possible. In effect, that which
+has existence for us is precisely that which, in one way
+or another, we need to know in order to exist ourselves;
+objective existence, as we know it, is a dependence of
+our own personal existence. And nobody can deny that
+there may not exist, and perhaps do exist, aspects of
+reality unknown to us, to-day at any rate, and perhaps
+unknowable, because they are in no way necessary to us
+for the preservation of our own actual existence.</p>
+
+<p>But man does not live alone; he is not an isolated
+individual, but a member of society. There is not a little
+truth in the saying that the individual, like the atom, is
+an abstraction. Yes, the atom apart from the universe
+is as much an abstraction as the universe apart from the
+<a name="Page_25" id="Page_25" />atom. And if the individual maintains his existence
+by the instinct of self-preservation, society owes its
+being and maintenance to the individual's instinct of
+perpetuation. And from this instinct, or rather from
+society, springs reason.</p>
+
+<p>Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective
+knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is
+a social product.</p>
+
+<p>It owes its origin, perhaps, to language. We
+think articulately&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, reflectively&mdash;thanks to articulate
+language, and this language arose out of the need of
+communicating our thought to our neighbours. To
+think is to talk with oneself, and each one of us talks
+with himself, thanks to our having had to talk with one
+another. In everyday life it frequently happens that
+we hit upon an idea that we were seeking and succeed
+in giving it form&mdash;that is to say, we obtain the idea,
+drawing it forth from the mist of dim perceptions which
+it represents, thanks to the efforts which we make to
+present it to others. Thought is inward language, and
+the inward language originates in the outward. Hence
+it results that reason is social and common. A fact
+pregnant with consequences, as we shall have occasion
+to see.</p>
+
+<p>Now if there is a reality which, in so far as we have
+knowledge of it, is the creation of the instinct of personal
+preservation and of the senses at the service of this instinct,
+must there not be another reality, not less real than the
+former, the creation, in so far as we have knowledge of it,
+of the instinct of perpetuation, the instinct of the species,
+and of the senses at the service of this instinct? The
+instinct of preservation, hunger, is the foundation of the
+human individual; the instinct of perpetuation, love, in
+its most rudimentary and physiological form, is the
+foundation of human society. And just as man knows
+that which he needs to know in order that he may preserve
+his existence, so society, or man in so far as he is
+<a name="Page_26" id="Page_26" />a social being, knows that which he needs to know in
+order that he may perpetuate himself in society.</p>
+
+<p>There is a world, the sensible world, that is the child
+of hunger, and there is another world, the ideal world,
+that is the child of love. And just as there are senses
+employed in the service of the knowledge of the sensible
+world, so there are also senses, at present for the most
+part dormant, for social consciousness has scarcely
+awakened, employed in the service of the knowledge of
+the ideal world. And why must we deny objective
+reality to the creations of love, of the instinct of perpetuation,
+since we allow it to the creations of hunger or the
+instinct of preservation? For if it be said that the
+former creations are only the creations of our imagination,
+without objective value, may it not equally be said
+of the latter that they are only the creations of our
+senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible
+and intangible world, perceived by the inward sense that
+lives in the service of the instinct of perpetuation?</p>
+
+<p>Human society, as a society, possesses senses which
+the individual, but for his existence in society, would
+lack, just as the individual, man, who is in his turn a
+kind of society, possesses senses lacking in the cells of
+which he is composed. The blind cells of hearing, in
+their dim consciousness, must of necessity be unaware
+of the existence of the visible world, and if they should
+hear it spoken of they would perhaps deem it to be the
+arbitrary creation of the deaf cells of sight, while the
+latter in their turn would consider as illusion the audible
+world which the hearing cells create.</p>
+
+<p>We have remarked before that the parasites which
+live in the intestines of higher animals, feeding upon the
+nutritive juices which these animals supply, do not need
+either to see or hear, and therefore for them the visible
+and audible world does not exist. And if they possessed
+a certain degree of consciousness and took account of
+the fact that the animal at whose expense they live
+<a name="Page_27" id="Page_27" />believed in a world of sight and hearing, they would
+perhaps deem such belief to be due merely to the
+extravagance of its imagination. And similarly there
+are social parasites, as Mr. A.J. Balfour admirably
+observes,<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10" /><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> who, receiving from the society in which they
+live the motives of their moral conduct, deny that belief
+in God and the other life is a necessary foundation for
+good conduct and for a tolerable life, society having
+prepared for them the spiritual nutriment by which they
+live. An isolated individual can endure life and live it
+well and even heroically without in any sort believing
+either in the immortality of the soul or in God, but he
+lives the life of a spiritual parasite. What we call the
+sense of honour is, even in non-Christians, a Christian
+product. And I will say further, that if there exists in
+a man faith in God joined to a life of purity and moral
+elevation, it is not so much the believing in God that
+makes him good, as the being good, thanks to God,
+that makes him believe in Him. Goodness is the best
+source of spiritual clear-sightedness.</p>
+
+<p>I am well aware that it may be objected that all this
+talk of man creating the sensible world and love the ideal
+world, of the blind cells of hearing and the deaf cells of
+sight, of spiritual parasites, etc., is merely metaphor.
+So it is, and I do not claim to discuss otherwise than by
+metaphor. And it is true that this social sense, the
+creature of love, the creator of language, of reason, and
+of the ideal world that springs from it, is at bottom
+nothing other than what we call fancy or imagination.
+<a name="Page_28" id="Page_28" />Out of fancy springs reason. And if by imagination is
+understood a faculty which fashions images capriciously,
+I will ask: What is caprice? And in any case the senses
+and reason are also fallible.</p>
+
+<p>We shall have to enquire what is this inner social
+faculty, the imagination which personalizes everything,
+and which, employed in the service of the instinct of
+perpetuation, reveals to us God and the immortality of
+the soul&mdash;God being thus a social product.</p>
+
+<p>But this we will reserve till later.</p>
+
+<p>And now, why does man philosophize?&mdash;that is to
+say, why does he investigate the first causes and ultimate
+ends of things? Why does he seek the disinterested
+truth? For to say that all men have a natural tendency
+to know is true; but wherefore?</p>
+
+<p>Philosophers seek a theoretic or ideal starting-point
+for their human work, the work of philosophizing; but
+they are not usually concerned to seek the practical and
+real starting-point, the purpose. What is the object in
+making philosophy, in thinking it and then expounding it
+to one's fellows? What does the philosopher seek in it
+and with it? The truth for the truth's own sake? The
+truth, in order that we may subject our conduct to it and
+determine our spiritual attitude towards life and the
+universe comformably with it?</p>
+
+<p>Philosophy is a product of the humanity of each
+philosopher, and each philosopher is a man of flesh and
+bone who addresses himself to other men of flesh and
+bone like himself. And, let him do what he will, he
+philosophizes not with the reason only, but with the
+will, with the feelings, with the flesh and with the bones,
+with the whole soul and the whole body. It is the man
+that philosophizes.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish here to use the word &quot;I&quot; in connection
+with philosophizing, lest the impersonal &quot;I&quot; should
+be understood in place of the man that philosophizes;
+for this concrete, circumscribed &quot;I,&quot; this &quot;I&quot; of flesh
+<a name="Page_29" id="Page_29" />and bone, that suffers from tooth-ache and finds life
+insupportable if death is the annihilation of the personal
+consciousness, must not be confounded with that other
+counterfeit &quot;I,&quot; the theoretical &quot;I&quot; which Fichte
+smuggled into philosophy, nor yet with the Unique,
+also theoretical, of Max Stirner. It is better to say
+&quot;we,&quot; understanding, however, the &quot;we&quot; who are
+circumscribed in space.</p>
+
+<p>Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for
+truth's sake! This is inhuman. And if we say that
+theoretical philosophy addresses itself to practical
+philosophy, truth to goodness, science to ethics, I will
+ask: And to what end is goodness? Is it, perhaps, an
+end in itself? Good is simply that which contributes
+to the preservation, perpetuation, and enrichment of
+consciousness. Goodness addresses itself to man, to
+the maintenance and perfection of human society which
+is composed of men. And to what end is this? &quot;So
+act that your action may be a pattern to all men,&quot; Kant
+tells us. That is well, but wherefore? We must needs
+seek for a wherefore.</p>
+
+<p>In the starting-point of all philosophy, in the real
+starting-point, the practical not the theoretical, there is
+a wherefore. The philosopher philosophizes for something
+more than for the sake of philosophizing.
+<i>Primum vivere, deinde philosophari</i>, says the old Latin
+adage; and as the philosopher is a man before he is a
+philosopher, he must needs live before he can philosophize,
+and, in fact, he philosophizes in order to live.
+And usually he philosophizes either in order to resign
+himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract
+himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and
+amusement. A good illustration of this last case is to
+be found in that terrible Athenian ironist, Socrates, of
+whom Xenophon relates in his <i>Memorabilia</i> that he
+discovered to Theodata, the courtesan, the wiles that
+she ought to make use of in order to lure lovers to her
+<a name="Page_30" id="Page_30" />house so aptly, that she begged him to act as her companion
+in the chase, <i>&#963;&#965;&#957;&#952;&#951;&#961;&#945;&#964;&#951;&#962;</i>, her pimp, in a word.
+And philosophy is wont, in fact, not infrequently to
+convert itself into a kind of art of spiritual pimping.
+And sometimes into an opiate for lulling sorrows to
+sleep.</p>
+
+<p>I take at random a book of metaphysics, the first that
+comes to my hand, <i>Time and Space, a Metaphysical
+Essay</i>, by Shadworth H. Hodgson. I open it, and in
+the fifth paragraph of the first chapter of the first part
+I read:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Metaphysics is, properly speaking, not a science
+but a philosophy&mdash;that is, it is a science whose end is in
+itself, in the gratification and education of the minds
+which carry it on, not in external purpose, such as the
+founding of any art conducive to the welfare of life.&quot;
+Let us examine this. We see that metaphysics is not,
+properly speaking, a science&mdash;that is, it is a science
+whose end is in itself. And this science, which, properly
+speaking, is not a science, has its end in itself, in the
+gratification and education of the minds that cultivate
+it. But what are we to understand? Is its end in itself
+or is it to gratify and educate the minds that cultivate it?
+Either the one or the other! Hodgson afterwards adds
+that the end of metaphysics is not any external purpose,
+such as that of founding an art conducive to the welfare
+of life. But is not the gratification of the mind of him
+who cultivates philosophy part of the well-being of his
+life? Let the reader consider this passage of the
+English metaphysician and tell me if it is not a tissue
+of contradictions.</p>
+
+<p>Such a contradiction is inevitable when an attempt is
+made to define humanly this theory of science, of knowledge,
+whose end is in itself, of knowing for the sake
+of knowing, of attaining truth for the sake of truth.
+Science exists only in personal consciousness and thanks
+to it; astronomy, mathematics, have no other reality
+<a name="Page_31" id="Page_31" />than that which they possess as knowledge in the minds
+of those who study and cultivate them. And if some
+day all personal consciousness must come to an end on
+the earth; if some day the human spirit must return to
+the nothingness&mdash;that is to say, to the absolute unconsciousness&mdash;from
+whence it sprang; and if there shall no
+more be any spirit that can avail itself of all our accumulated
+knowledge&mdash;then to what end is this knowledge?
+For we must not lose sight of the fact that the problem
+of the personal immortality of the soul involves the
+future of the whole human species.</p>
+
+<p>This series of contradictions into which the Englishman
+falls in his desire to explain the theory of a science
+whose end is in itself, is easily understood when it is
+remembered that it is an Englishman who speaks, and
+that the Englishman is before everything else a man.
+Perhaps a German specialist, a philosopher who had
+made philosophy his speciality, who had first murdered
+his humanity and then buried it in his philosophy, would
+be better able to explain this theory of a science whose
+end is in itself and of knowledge for the sake of
+knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Take the man Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew exiled in
+Holland; read his <i>Ethic</i> as a despairing elegiac poem,
+which in fact it is, and tell me if you do not hear,
+beneath the disemburdened and seemingly serene propositions
+<i>more geometrico</i>, the lugubrious echo of the
+prophetic psalms. It is not the philosophy of resignation
+but of despair. And when he wrote that the free
+man thinks of nothing less than of death, and that his
+wisdom consists in meditating not on death but on life&mdash;homo
+liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat et
+eius sapientia non mortis, sed vit&aelig; meditatio est (<i>Ethic</i>,
+Part IV., Prop. LXVII.)&mdash;when he wrote that, he felt, as
+we all feel, that we are slaves, and he did in fact think
+about death, and he wrote it in a vain endeavour to free
+himself from this thought. Nor in writing Proposition
+<a name="Page_32" id="Page_32" />XLII. of Part V., that &quot;happiness is not the reward of
+virtue but virtue itself,&quot; did he feel, one may be sure,
+what he wrote. For this is usually the reason why men
+philosophize&mdash;in order to convince themselves, even
+though they fail in the attempt. And this desire of
+convincing oneself&mdash;that is to say, this desire of doing
+violence to one's own human nature&mdash;is the real starting-point
+of not a few philosophies.</p>
+
+<p>Whence do I come and whence comes the world in
+which and by which I live? Whither do I go and
+whither goes everything that environs me? What does
+it all mean? Such are the questions that man asks as
+soon as he frees himself from the brutalizing necessity
+of labouring for his material sustenance. And if we
+look closely, we shall see that beneath these questions
+lies the wish to know not so much the &quot;why&quot; as the
+&quot;wherefore,&quot; not the cause but the end. Cicero's
+definition of philosophy is well known&mdash;&quot;the knowledge
+of things divine and human and of the causes in which
+these things are contained,&quot; <i>rerum divinarum et
+humanarum, causarumque quibus h&aelig; res continentur</i>;
+but in reality these causes are, for us, ends. And what
+is the Supreme Cause, God, but the Supreme End?
+The &quot;why&quot; interests us only in view of the &quot;wherefore.&quot;
+We wish to know whence we came only in order
+the better to be able to ascertain whither we are going.</p>
+
+<p>This Ciceronian definition, which is the Stoic definition,
+is also found in that formidable intellectualist,
+Clement of Alexandria, who was canonized by the
+Catholic Church, and he expounds it in the fifth chapter
+of the first of his <i>Stromata</i>. But this same Christian
+philosopher&mdash;Christian?&mdash;in the twenty-second chapter
+of his fourth <i>Stroma</i> tells us that for the gnostic&mdash;that is
+to say, the intellectual&mdash;knowledge, <i>gnosis</i>, ought to
+suffice, and he adds: &quot;I will dare aver that it is not
+because he wishes to be saved that he, who devotes himself
+to knowledge for the sake of the divine science itself,
+<a name="Page_33" id="Page_33" />chooses knowledge. For the exertion of the intellect by
+exercise is prolonged to a perpetual exertion. And the
+perpetual exertion of the intellect is the essence of an
+intelligent being, which results from an uninterrupted
+process of admixture, and remains eternal contemplation,
+a living substance. Could we, then, suppose anyone
+proposing to the gnostic whether he would choose
+the knowledge of God or everlasting salvation, and if
+these, which are entirely identical, were separable, he
+would without the least hesitation choose the knowledge
+of God?&quot; May He, may God Himself, whom we long
+to enjoy and possess eternally, deliver us from this
+Clementine gnosticism or intellectualism!</p>
+
+<p>Why do I wish to know whence I come and whither
+I go, whence comes and whither goes everything that
+environs me, and what is the meaning of it all? For I
+do not wish to die utterly, and I wish to know whether
+I am to die or not definitely. If I do not die, what is
+my destiny? and if I die, then nothing has any meaning
+for me. And there are three solutions: (<i>a</i>) I know that
+I shall die utterly, and then irremediable despair, or
+(<i>b</i>) I know that I shall not die utterly, and then resignation,
+or (<i>c</i>) I cannot know either one or the other, and
+then resignation in despair or despair in resignation, a
+desperate resignation or a resigned despair, and hence
+conflict.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It is best,&quot; some reader will say, &quot;not to concern
+yourself with what cannot be known.&quot; But is it possible?
+In his very beautiful poem, <i>The Ancient Sage</i>,
+Tennyson said:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,</div>
+<div>Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,</div>
+<div>Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,</div>
+<div>Thou canst not prove that thou art spirit alone,</div>
+<div>Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:</div>
+<div>Nor canst thou prove thou art immortal, no,</div>
+<div>Nor yet that thou art mortal&mdash;nay, my son,</div>
+<div>Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,</div>
+<div>Am not thyself in converse with thyself,<a name="Page_34" id="Page_34" /></div>
+<div>For nothing worthy proving can be proven,</div>
+<div>Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,</div>
+<div>Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,</div>
+<div>Cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Yes, perhaps, as the Sage says, &quot;nothing worthy
+proving can be proven, nor yet disproven&quot;; but can
+we restrain that instinct which urges man to wish to
+know, and above all to wish to know the things which
+may conduce to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not
+eternal knowledge, as the Alexandrian gnostic said.
+For living is one thing and knowing is another; and,
+as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition
+between the two that we may say that everything vital
+is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything
+rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the
+tragic sense of life.</p>
+
+<p>The defect of Descartes' <i>Discourse of Method</i> lies not
+in the antecedent methodical doubt; not in his beginning
+by resolving to doubt everything, a merely intellectual
+device; but in his resolution to begin by emptying himself
+of himself, of Descartes, of the real man, the man of
+flesh and bone, the man who does not want to die, in
+order that he might be a mere thinker&mdash;that is, an
+abstraction. But the real man returned and thrust
+himself into the philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
+partag&eacute;e</i>.&quot; Thus begins the <i>Discourse of Method</i>, and
+this good sense saved him. He continues talking about
+himself, about the man Descartes, telling us among
+other things that he greatly esteemed eloquence and
+loved poetry; that he delighted above all in mathematics
+because of the evidence and certainty of its reasons, and
+that he revered our theology and claimed as much as any
+to attain to heaven&mdash;<i>et pr&eacute;tendais autant qu'aucun autre
+&agrave; gagner le ciel</i>. And this pretension&mdash;a very laudable
+one, I think, and above all very natural&mdash;was what
+<a name="Page_35" id="Page_35" />prevented him from deducing all the consequences of
+his methodical doubt. The man Descartes claimed, as
+much as any other, to attain to heaven, &quot;but having
+learned as a thing very sure that the way to it is not less
+open to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and
+that the revealed truths which lead thither are beyond
+our intelligence, I did not dare submit them to my feeble
+reasonings, and I thought that to undertake to examine
+them and to succeed therein, I should want some extraordinary
+help from heaven and need to be more than
+man.&quot; And here we have the man. Here we have the
+man who &quot;did not feel obliged, thank God, to make a
+profession (<i>m&eacute;tier</i>) of science in order to increase his
+means, and who did not pretend to play the cynic and
+despise glory.&quot; And afterwards he tells us how he was
+compelled to make a sojourn in Germany, and there,
+shut up in a stove (<i>po&ecirc;le</i>) he began to philosophize his
+method. But in Germany, shut up in a stove! And
+such his discourse is, a stove-discourse, and the stove
+a German one, although the philosopher shut up in it
+was a Frenchman who proposed to himself to attain to
+heaven.</p>
+
+<p>And he arrives at the <i>cogito ergo sum</i>, which St.
+Augustine had already anticipated; but the <i>ego</i> implicit
+in this enthymeme, <i>ego cogito, ergo ego sum</i>, is an unreal&mdash;that
+is, an ideal&mdash;<i>ego</i> or I, and its <i>sum</i>, its existence,
+something unreal also. &quot;I think, therefore I am,&quot; can
+only mean &quot;I think, therefore I am a thinker&quot;; this
+being of the &quot;I am,&quot; which is deduced from &quot;I think,&quot;
+is merely a knowing; this being is knowledge, but not
+life. And the primary reality is not that I think, but
+that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although
+this living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions
+when we seek to join in wedlock life and
+reason!</p>
+
+<p>The truth is <i>sum, ergo cogito</i>&mdash;I am, therefore I
+think, although not everything that is thinks. Is not
+<a name="Page_36" id="Page_36" />consciousness of thinking above all consciousness of
+being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness
+of self, without personality? Can there exist pure
+knowledge without feeling, without that species of
+materiality which feeling lends to it? Do we not perhaps
+feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the
+act of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the
+stove have said: &quot;I feel, therefore I am&quot;? or &quot;I will,
+therefore I am&quot;? And to feel oneself, is it not perhaps
+to feel oneself imperishable? To will oneself, is it not
+to wish oneself eternal&mdash;that is to say, not to wish to
+die? What the sorrowful Jew of Amsterdam called the
+essence of the thing, the effort that it makes to persist
+indefinitely in its own being, self-love, the longing for
+immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and fundamental
+condition of all reflective or human knowledge?
+And is it not therefore the true base, the real starting-point,
+of all philosophy, although the philosophers,
+perverted by intellectualism, may not recognize it?</p>
+
+<p>And, moreover, it was the <i>cogito</i> that introduced a
+distinction which, although fruitful of truths, has been
+fruitful also of confusions, and this distinction is that
+between object, <i>cogito</i>, and subject, <i>sum</i>. There is
+scarcely any distinction that does not also lead to confusion.
+But we will return to this later.</p>
+
+<p>For the present let us remain keenly suspecting that
+the longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality,
+the effort whereby we tend to persist indefinitely
+in our own being, which is, according to the tragic Jew,
+our very essence, that this is the affective basis of all
+knowledge and the personal inward starting-point of all
+human philosophy, wrought by a man and for men.
+And we shall see how the solution of this inward affective
+problem, a solution which may be but the despairing
+renunciation of the attempt at a solution, is that which
+colours all the rest of philosophy. Underlying even the
+so-called problem of knowledge there is simply this
+<a name="Page_37" id="Page_37" />human feeling, just as underlying the enquiry into the
+&quot;why,&quot; the cause, there is simply the search for the
+&quot;wherefore,&quot; the end. All the rest is either to deceive
+oneself or to wish to deceive others; and to wish to
+deceive others in order to deceive oneself.</p>
+
+<p>And this personal and affective starting-point of all
+philosophy and all religion is the tragic sense of life.
+Let us now proceed to consider this.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10" /><a href="#FNanchor_10_10">[10]</a> <i>The Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study of
+Theology</i>, by the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour London, 1895:
+&quot;So it is with those persons who claim to show by their example that
+naturalism is practically consistent with the maintenance of ethical ideals with
+which naturalism has no natural affinity. Their spiritual life is parasitic: it is
+sheltered by convictions which belong, not to them, but to the society of
+which they form a part; it is nourished by processes in which they take no
+share. And when those convictions decay, and those processes come to an
+end, the alien life which they have maintained can scarce be expected to
+outlast them&quot; (Chap. iv.).</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38" /><a name="III" id="III" />III</h2>
+
+<h2>THE HUNGER OF IMMORTALITY</h2>
+
+<p>Let us pause to consider this immortal yearning for
+immortality&mdash;even though the gnostics or intellectuals
+may be able to say that what follows is not philosophy
+but rhetoric. Moreover, the divine Plato, when he
+discussed the immortality of the soul in his <i>Ph&aelig;do</i>, said
+that it was proper to clothe it in legend, <i>&#956;&#965;&#952;&#959;&#955;&#959;&#947;&#949;&#953;&#957;</i>.</p>
+
+<p>First of all let us recall once again&mdash;and it will not be
+for the last time&mdash;that saying of Spinoza that every
+being endeavours to persist in itself, and that this
+endeavour is its actual essence, and implies indefinite
+time, and that the soul, in fine, sometimes with a clear
+and distinct idea, sometimes confusedly, tends to persist
+in its being with indefinite duration, and is aware of its
+persistency (<i>Ethic</i>, Part III., Props. VI.-X.).</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible for us, in effect, to conceive of
+ourselves as not existing, and no effort is capable of
+enabling consciousness to realize absolute unconsciousness,
+its own annihilation. Try, reader, to imagine to
+yourself, when you are wide awake, the condition of your
+soul when you are in a deep sleep; try to fill your consciousness
+with the representation of no-consciousness,
+and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to
+comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.
+We cannot conceive ourselves as not existing.</p>
+
+<p>The visible universe, the universe that is created by
+the instinct of self-preservation, becomes all too narrow
+for me. It is like a cramped cell, against the bars of
+which my soul beats its wings in vain. Its lack of air
+stifles me. More, more, and always more! I want to be
+myself, and yet without ceasing to be myself to be others
+<a name="Page_39" id="Page_39" />as well, to merge myself into the totality of things visible
+and invisible, to extend myself into the illimitable of
+space and to prolong myself into the infinite of time.
+Not to be all and for ever is as if not to be&mdash;at least, let
+me be my whole self, and be so for ever and ever. And
+to be the whole of myself is to be everybody else. Either
+all or nothing!</p>
+
+<p>All or nothing! And what other meaning can the
+Shakespearean &quot;To be or not to be&quot; have, or that
+passage in <i>Coriolanus</i> where it is said of Marcius &quot;He
+wants nothing of a god but eternity&quot;? Eternity,
+eternity!&mdash;that is the supreme desire! The thirst of
+eternity is what is called love among men, and whosoever
+loves another wishes to eternalize himself in him.
+Nothing is real that is not eternal.</p>
+
+<p>From the poets of all ages and from the depths of
+their souls this tremendous vision of the flowing away of
+life like water has wrung bitter cries&mdash;from Pindar's
+&quot;dream of a shadow,&quot; <i>&#963;&#954;&#953;&#945;&#962; &#959;&#957;&#945;&#961;</i>, to Calder&oacute;n's &quot;life
+is a dream&quot; and Shakespeare's &quot;we are such stuff as
+dreams are made on,&quot; this last a yet more tragic sentence
+than Calder&oacute;n's, for whereas the Castilian only declares
+that our life is a dream, but not that we ourselves are
+the dreamers of it, the Englishman makes us ourselves
+a dream, a dream that dreams.</p>
+
+<p>The vanity of the passing world and love are the two
+fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry.
+And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded
+without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the
+vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only
+thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the
+only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it. In
+appearance at any rate, for in reality ... And love,
+above all when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms
+us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of appearances
+and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which
+destiny is overcome and liberty is law.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40" />Everything passes! Such is the refrain of those who
+have drunk, lips to the spring, of the fountain of life, of
+those who have tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge
+of good and evil.</p>
+
+<p>To be, to be for ever, to be without ending! thirst of
+being, thirst of being more! hunger of God! thirst of
+love eternalizing and eternal! to be for ever! to be God!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ye shall be as gods!&quot; we are told in Genesis that
+the serpent said to the first pair of lovers (Gen. iii. 5).
+&quot;If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of
+all men most miserable,&quot; wrote the Apostle (1 Cor.
+xv. 19); and all religion has sprung historically from the
+cult of the dead&mdash;that is to say, from the cult of
+immortality.</p>
+
+<p>The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that
+the free man thinks of nothing less than of death; but
+this free man is a dead man, free from the impulse of
+life, for want of love, the slave of his liberty. This
+thought that I must die and the enigma of what will
+come after death is the very palpitation of my consciousness.
+When I contemplate the green serenity of the
+fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which
+shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the
+diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life
+that flows about me, and I believe in my future; but
+instantly the voice of mystery whispers to me, &quot;Thou
+shalt cease to be!&quot; the angel of Death touches me with
+his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depths of
+my spirit with the blood of divinity.</p>
+
+<p>Like Pascal, I do not understand those who assert
+that they care not a farthing for these things, and this
+indifference &quot;in a matter that touches themselves, their
+eternity, their all, exasperates me rather than moves me
+to compassion, astonishes and shocks me,&quot; and he who
+feels thus &quot;is for me,&quot; as for Pascal, whose are the
+words just quoted, &quot;a monster.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand
+<a name="Page_41" id="Page_41" />books that ancestor-worship is for the most part the
+source of primitive religions, and it may be strictly said
+that what most distinguishes man from the other animals
+is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and
+does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother
+earth; he is an animal that guards its dead. And from
+what does he thus guard them? From what does he so
+futilely protect them? The wretched consciousness
+shrinks from its own annihilation, and, just as an
+animal spirit, newly severed from the womb of the
+world, finds itself confronted with the world and knows
+itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs
+desire to possess another life than that of the world itself.
+And so the earth would run the risk of becoming a vast
+cemetery before the dead themselves should die again.</p>
+
+<p>When mud huts or straw shelters, incapable of resisting
+the inclemency of the weather, sufficed for the living,
+tumuli were raised for the dead, and stone was used for
+sepulchres before it was used for houses. It is the
+strong-builded houses of the dead that have withstood
+the ages, not the houses of the living; not the temporary
+lodgings but the permanent habitations.</p>
+
+<p>This cult, not of death but of immortality, originates
+and preserves religions. In the midst of the delirium of
+destruction, Robespierre induced the Convention to
+declare the existence of the Supreme Being and &quot;the
+consolatory principle of the immortality of the soul,&quot;
+the Incorruptible being dismayed at the idea of having
+himself one day to turn to corruption.</p>
+
+<p>A disease? Perhaps; but he who pays no heed to his
+disease is heedless of his health, and man is an animal
+essentially and substantially diseased. A disease?
+Perhaps it may be, like life itself to which it is thrall,
+and perhaps the only health possible may be death; but
+this disease is the fount of all vigorous health. From
+the depth of this anguish, from the abyss of the feeling
+of our mortality, we emerge into the light of another
+<a name="Page_42" id="Page_42" />heaven, as from the depth of Hell Dante emerged to
+behold the stars once again&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.</i></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Although this meditation upon mortality may soon
+induce in us a sense of anguish, it fortifies us in the end.
+Retire, reader, into yourself and imagine a slow dissolution
+of yourself&mdash;the light dimming about you&mdash;all
+things becoming dumb and soundless, enveloping you
+in silence&mdash;the objects that you handle crumbling away
+between your hands&mdash;the ground slipping from under
+your feet&mdash;your very memory vanishing as if in a swoon&mdash;everything
+melting away from you into nothingness
+and you yourself also melting away&mdash;the very consciousness
+of nothingness, merely as the phantom harbourage
+of a shadow, not even remaining to you.</p>
+
+<p>I have heard it related of a poor harvester who died in
+a hospital bed, that when the priest went to anoint his
+hands with the oil of extreme unction, he refused to open
+his right hand, which clutched a few dirty coins, not
+considering that very soon neither his hand nor he himself
+would be his own any more. And so we close and
+clench, not our hand, but our heart, seeking to clutch
+the world in it.</p>
+
+<p>A friend confessed to me that, foreseeing while in the
+full vigour of physical health the near approach of a
+violent death, he proposed to concentrate his life and
+spend the few days which he calculated still remained
+to him in writing a book. Vanity of vanities!</p>
+
+<p>If at the death of the body which sustains me, and
+which I call mine to distinguish it from the self that is
+I, my consciousness returns to the absolute unconsciousness
+from which it sprang, and if a like fate befalls all
+my brothers in humanity, then is our toil-worn human
+race nothing but a fatidical procession of phantoms,
+going from nothingness to nothingness, and humanitarianism
+the most inhuman thing known.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43" />And the remedy is not that suggested in the quatrain
+that runs&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Cada vez que considero</i></div>
+<div><i>que me tengo de morir,</i></div>
+<div><i>tiendo la capa en el suelo</i></div>
+<div><i>y no me harto de dormir.</i><a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11" /><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>No! The remedy is to consider our mortal destiny
+without flinching, to fasten our gaze upon the gaze of
+the Sphinx, for it is thus that the malevolence of its
+spell is discharmed.</p>
+
+<p>If we all die utterly, wherefore does everything exist?
+Wherefore? It is the Wherefore of the Sphinx; it is
+the Wherefore that corrodes the marrow of the soul; it
+is the begetter of that anguish which gives us the love
+of hope.</p>
+
+<p>Among the poetic laments of the unhappy Cowper
+there are some lines written under the oppression of
+delirium, in which, believing himself to be the mark of
+the Divine vengeance, he exclaims&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>Hell might afford my miseries a shelter.</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is the Puritan sentiment, the preoccupation with
+sin and predestination; but read the much more terrible
+words of S&eacute;nancour, expressive of the Catholic, not the
+Protestant, despair, when he makes his Obermann say,
+&quot;L'homme est p&eacute;rissable. Il se peut; mais p&eacute;rissons
+en r&eacute;sistant, et, si le n&eacute;ant nous est r&eacute;serv&eacute;, ne faisons
+pas que ce soit une justice.&quot; And I must confess, painful
+though the confession be, that in the days of the
+simple faith of my childhood, descriptions of the tortures
+of hell, however terrible, never made me tremble, for I
+always felt that nothingness was much more terrifying.
+He who suffers lives, and he who lives suffering, even
+though over the portal of his abode is written &quot;Abandon
+all hope!&quot; loves and hopes. It is better to live in pain
+<a name="Page_44" id="Page_44" />than to cease to be in peace. The truth is that I could
+not believe in this atrocity of Hell, of an eternity of
+punishment, nor did I see any more real hell than
+nothingness and the prospect of it. And I continue in
+the belief that if we all believed in our salvation from
+nothingness we should all be better.</p>
+
+<p>What is this <i>joie de vivre</i> that they talk about nowadays?
+Our hunger for God, our thirst of immortality,
+of survival, will always stifle in us this pitiful enjoyment
+of the life that passes and abides not. It is the frenzied
+love of life, the love that would have life to be unending,
+that most often urges us to long for death. &quot;If it is
+true that I am to die utterly,&quot; we say to ourselves, &quot;then
+once I am annihilated the world has ended so far as I
+am concerned&mdash;it is finished. Why, then, should it not
+end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed
+to suffer the tormenting illusion of a transient and
+apparential existence, may come into being? If, the
+illusion of living being shattered, living for the mere
+sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise
+doomed to die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the
+good of living? Our best remedy is death.&quot; And thus
+it is that we chant the praises of the never-ending rest
+because of our dread of it, and speak of liberating death.</p>
+
+<p>Leopardi, the poet of sorrow, of annihilation, having
+lost the ultimate illusion, that of believing in his immortality&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div class='i2'><i>Peri l'inganno estremo</i></div>
+<div><i>ch'eterno io mi credei</i>,</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>spoke to his heart of <i>l'infinita vanit&aacute; del tutto</i>, and perceived
+how close is the kinship between love and death,
+and how &quot;when love is born deep down in the heart,
+simultaneously a languid and weary desire to die is felt
+in the breast.&quot; The greater part of those who seek
+death at their own hand are moved thereto by love; it
+is the supreme longing for life, for more life, the longing
+<a name="Page_45" id="Page_45" />to prolong and perpetuate life, that urges them to death,
+once they are persuaded of the vanity of this longing.</p>
+
+<p>The problem is tragic and eternal, and the more we
+seek to escape from it, the more it thrusts itself upon us.
+Four-and-twenty centuries ago, in his dialogue on the
+immortality of the soul, the serene Plato&mdash;but was he
+serene?&mdash;spoke of the uncertainty of our dream of being
+immortal and of the <i>risk</i> that the dream might be vain,
+and from his own soul there escaped this profound cry&mdash;Glorious
+is the risk!&mdash;<i>&#954;&#945;&#955;&#959;&#962; &#947;&#945;&#961; &#959; &#954;&#953;&#957;&#948;&#965;&#957;&#959;&#962;</i>, glorious is
+the risk that we are able to run of our souls never
+dying&mdash;a sentence that was the germ of Pascal's famous
+argument of the wager.</p>
+
+<p>Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments
+designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the
+absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul;
+but these arguments fail to make any impression upon
+me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons,
+and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I
+do not want to die&mdash;no; I neither want to die nor do I
+want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and
+ever. I want this &quot;I&quot; to live&mdash;this poor &quot;I&quot; that I
+am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore
+the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own
+soul, tortures me.</p>
+
+<p>I am the centre of my universe, the centre of the
+universe, and in my supreme anguish I cry with Michelet,
+&quot;Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!&quot; What is a man
+profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own
+soul? (Matt. xvi. 26). Egoism, you say? There is
+nothing more universal than the individual, for what is
+the property of each is the property of all. Each man is
+worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do to
+sacrifice each to all save in so far as all sacrifice themselves
+to each. That which we call egoism is the principle
+of psychic gravity, the necessary postulate. &quot;Love
+thy neighbour as thyself,&quot; we are told, the presupposi<a name="Page_46" id="Page_46" />tion
+being that each man loves himself; and it is not
+said &quot;Love thyself.&quot; And, nevertheless, we do not
+know how to love ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>Put aside the persistence of your own self and ponder
+what they tell you. Sacrifice yourself to your children!
+And sacrifice yourself to them because they are yours,
+part and prolongation of yourself, and they in their turn
+will sacrifice themselves to their children, and these
+children to theirs, and so it will go on without end, a
+sterile sacrifice by which nobody profits. I came into
+the world to create my self, and what is to become of all
+our selves? Live for the True, the Good, the Beautiful!
+We shall see presently the supreme vanity and the
+supreme insincerity of this hypocritical attitude.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That art thou!&quot; they tell me with the Upanishads.
+And I answer: Yes, I am that, if that is I and all is mine,
+and mine the totality of things. As mine I love the All,
+and I love my neighbour because he lives in me and is
+part of my consciousness, because he is like me, because
+he is mine.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, to prolong this blissful moment, to sleep, to
+eternalize oneself in it! Here and now, in this discreet
+and diffused light, in this lake of quietude, the storm of
+the heart appeased and stilled the echoes of the world!
+Insatiable desire now sleeps and does not even dream;
+use and wont, blessed use and wont, are the rule of my
+eternity; my disillusions have died with my memories,
+and with my hopes my fears.</p>
+
+<p>And they come seeking to deceive us with a deceit of
+deceits, telling us that nothing is lost, that everything is
+transformed, shifts and changes, that not the least
+particle of matter is annihilated, not the least impulse of
+energy is lost, and there are some who pretend to console
+us with this! Futile consolation! It is not my matter
+or my energy that is the cause of my disquiet, for they
+are not mine if I myself am not mine&mdash;that is, if I am not
+eternal. No, my longing is not to be submerged in the
+<a name="Page_47" id="Page_47" />vast All, in an infinite and eternal Matter or Energy, or
+in God; not to be possessed by God, but to possess Him,
+to become myself God, yet without ceasing to be I myself,
+I who am now speaking to you. Tricks of monism
+avail us nothing; we crave the substance and not the
+shadow of immortality.</p>
+
+<p>Materialism, you say? Materialism? Without doubt;
+but either our spirit is likewise some kind of matter or it
+is nothing. I dread the idea of having to tear myself
+away from my flesh; I dread still more the idea of having
+to tear myself away from everything sensible and
+material, from all substance. Yes, perhaps this merits
+the name of materialism; and if I grapple myself to God
+with all my powers and all my senses, it is that He may
+carry me in His arms beyond death, looking into these
+eyes of mine with the light of His heaven when the light
+of earth is dimming in them for ever. Self-illusion?
+Talk not to me of illusion&mdash;let me live!</p>
+
+<p>They also call this pride&mdash;&quot;stinking pride&quot; Leopardi
+called it&mdash;and they ask us who are we, vile earthworms,
+to pretend to immortality; in virtue of what? wherefore?
+by what right? &quot;In virtue of what?&quot; you ask; and
+I reply, In virtue of what do we now live? &quot;Wherefore?&quot;&mdash;and
+wherefore do we now exist? &quot;By what
+right?&quot;&mdash;and by what right are we? To exist is just as
+gratuitous as to go on existing for ever. Do not let us
+talk of merit or of right or of the wherefore of our longing,
+which is an end in itself, or we shall lose our reason
+in a vortex of absurdities. I do not claim any right or
+merit; it is only a necessity; I need it in order to live.</p>
+
+<p>And you, who are you? you ask me; and I reply with
+Obermann, &quot;For the universe, nothing; for myself,
+everything!&quot; Pride? Is it pride to want to be immortal?
+Unhappy men that we are! 'Tis a tragic fate,
+without a doubt, to have to base the affirmation of
+immortality upon the insecure and slippery foundation
+of the desire for immortality; but to condemn this
+<a name="Page_48" id="Page_48" />desire on the ground that we believe it to have been
+proved to be unattainable, without undertaking the proof,
+is merely supine. I am dreaming ...? Let me dream,
+if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me from it. I
+believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality,
+which is the very substance of my soul. But
+do I really believe in it ...? And wherefore do you
+want to be immortal? you ask me, wherefore? Frankly,
+I do not understand the question, for it is to ask the
+reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of
+the principle.</p>
+
+<p>But these are things which it is impossible to discuss.</p>
+
+<p>It is related in the book of the Acts of the Apostles
+how wherever Paul went the Jews, moved with envy, were
+stirred up to persecute him. They stoned him in
+Iconium and Lystra, cities of Lycaonia, in spite of the
+wonders that he worked therein; they scourged him in
+Philippi of Macedonia and persecuted his brethren in
+Thessalonica and Berea. He arrived at Athens, however,
+the noble city of the intellectuals, over which
+brooded the sublime spirit of Plato&mdash;the Plato of the
+gloriousness of the risk of immortality; and there Paul
+disputed with Epicureans and Stoics. And some said of
+him, &quot;What doth this babbler (<i>&#963;&#960;&#949;&#961;&#956;&#959;&#955;&#959;&#947;&#959;&#962;</i>) mean?&quot;
+and others, &quot;He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange
+gods&quot; (Acts xvii. 18), &quot;and they took him and brought
+him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this
+new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is? for thou
+bringest certain strange things to our ears; we would
+know, therefore, what these things mean&quot; (verses 19-20).
+And then follows that wonderful characterization of those
+Athenians of the decadence, those dainty connoisseurs of
+the curious, &quot;for all the Athenians and strangers which
+were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to
+tell or to hear some new thing&quot; (verse 21). A wonderful
+stroke which depicts for us the condition of mind of those
+who had learned from the <i>Odyssey</i> that the gods plot and
+<a name="Page_49" id="Page_49" />achieve the destruction of mortals in order that their
+posterity may have something to narrate!</p>
+
+<p>Here Paul stands, then, before the subtle Athenians,
+before the <i>gr&aelig;uli</i>, men of culture and tolerance, who
+are ready to welcome and examine every doctrine, who
+neither stone nor scourge nor imprison any man for professing
+these or those doctrines&mdash;here he stands where
+liberty of conscience is respected and every opinion is
+given an attentive hearing. And he raises his voice in
+the midst of the Areopagus and speaks to them as it was
+fitting to speak to the cultured citizens of Athens, and all
+listen to him, agog to hear the latest novelty. But when
+he begins to speak to them of the resurrection of the dead
+their stock of patience and tolerance comes to an end,
+and some mock him, and others say: &quot;We will hear
+thee again of this matter!&quot; intending not to hear him.
+And a similar thing happened to him at C&aelig;sarea when
+he came before the Roman pr&aelig;tor Felix, likewise a
+broad-minded and cultured man, who mitigated the hardships
+of his imprisonment, and wished to hear and did hear
+him discourse of righteousness and of temperance; but
+when he spoke of the judgement to come, Felix said,
+terrified (<i>&#949;&#956;&#966;&#959;&#946;&#959;&#962; &#947;&#949;&#957;&#959;&#956;&#949;&#957;&#959;&#962;</i>): &quot;Go thy way for this time;
+when I have a convenient season I will call for thee&quot;
+(Acts xxiv. 22-25). And in his audience before King
+Agrippa, when Festus the governor heard him speak of
+the resurrection of the dead, he exclaimed: &quot;Thou art
+mad, Paul; much learning hath made thee mad&quot; (Acts xxvi. 24).</p>
+
+<p>Whatever of truth there may have been in Paul's discourse
+in the Areopagus, and even if there were none, it
+is certain that this admirable account plainly shows how
+far Attic tolerance goes and where the patience of the
+intellectuals ends. They all listen to you, calmly and
+smilingly, and at times they encourage you, saying:
+&quot;That's strange!&quot; or, &quot;He has brains!&quot; or &quot;That's
+suggestive,&quot; or &quot;How fine!&quot; or &quot;Pity that a thing so
+<a name="Page_50" id="Page_50" />beautiful should not be true!&quot; or &quot;this makes one
+think!&quot; But as soon as you speak to them of resurrection
+and life after death, they lose their patience and cut
+short your remarks and exclaim, &quot;Enough of this! we
+will talk about this another day!&quot; And it is about this,
+my poor Athenians, my intolerant intellectuals, it is
+about this that I am going to talk to you here.</p>
+
+<p>And even if this belief be absurd, why is its exposition
+less tolerated than that of others much more absurd?
+Why this manifest hostility to such a belief? Is it fear?
+Is it, perhaps, spite provoked by inability to share it?</p>
+
+<p>And sensible men, those who do not intend to let themselves
+be deceived, keep on dinning into our ears the
+refrain that it is no use giving way to folly and kicking
+against the pricks, for what cannot be is impossible.
+The manly attitude, they say, is to resign oneself to fate;
+since we are not immortal, do not let us want to be so;
+let us submit ourselves to reason without tormenting
+ourselves about what is irremediable, and so making life
+more gloomy and miserable. This obsession, they add,
+is a disease. Disease, madness, reason ... the
+everlasting refrain! Very well then&mdash;No! I do not submit
+to reason, and I rebel against it, and I persist in creating
+by the energy of faith my immortalizing God, and in
+forcing by my will the stars out of their courses, for if
+we had faith as a grain of mustard seed we should say
+to that mountain, &quot;Remove hence,&quot; and it would
+remove, and nothing would be impossible to us (Matt. xvii. 20).</p>
+
+<p>There you have that &quot;thief of energies,&quot; as he<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12" /><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> so
+obtusely called Christ who sought to wed nihilism with
+the struggle for existence, and he talks to you about
+courage. His heart craved the eternal all while his head
+convinced him of nothingness, and, desperate and mad
+to defend himself from himself, he cursed that which he
+<a name="Page_51" id="Page_51" />most loved. Because he could not be Christ, he blasphemed
+against Christ. Bursting with his own self, he
+wished himself unending and dreamed his theory of
+eternal recurrence, a sorry counterfeit of immortality,
+and, full of pity for himself, he abominated all pity. And
+there are some who say that his is the philosophy of
+strong men! No, it is not. My health and my strength
+urge me to perpetuate myself. His is the doctrine of
+weaklings who aspire to be strong, but not of the strong
+who are strong. Only the feeble resign themselves to
+final death and substitute some other desire for the longing
+for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for
+perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their
+superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of
+death.</p>
+
+<p>Before this terrible mystery of mortality, face to face
+with the Sphinx, man adopts different attitudes and seeks
+in various ways to console himself for having been born.
+And now it occurs to him to take it as a diversion, and
+he says to himself with Renan that this universe is a
+spectacle that God presents to Himself, and that it
+behoves us to carry out the intentions of the great Stage-Manager
+and contribute to make the spectacle the most
+brilliant and the most varied that may be. And they
+have made a religion of art, a cure for the metaphysical
+evil, and invented the meaningless phrase of art for art's
+sake.</p>
+
+<p>And it does not suffice them. If the man who tells you
+that he writes, paints, sculptures, or sings for his own
+amusement, gives his work to the public, he lies; he lies
+if he puts his name to his writing, painting, statue, or
+song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a shadow
+of his spirit, something that may survive him. If the
+<i>Imitation of Christ</i> is anonymous, it is because its author
+sought the eternity of the soul and did not trouble himself
+about that of the name. The man of letters who
+shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying rascal.
+<a name="Page_52" id="Page_52" />Of Dante, the author of those three-and-thirty vigorous
+verses (<i>Purg.</i> xi. 85-117) on the vanity of worldly glory,
+Boccaccio says that he relished honours and pomps more
+perhaps than suited with his conspicuous virtue. The
+keenest desire of his condemned souls is that they may be
+remembered and talked of here on earth, and this is the
+chief solace that lightens the darkness of his Inferno.
+And he himself confessed that his aim in expounding the
+concept of Monarchy was not merely that he might be of
+service to others, but that he might win for his own glory
+the palm of so great prize (<i>De Monarchia</i>, lib. i., cap. i.).
+What more? Even of that holy man, seemingly the
+most indifferent to worldly vanity, the Poor Little One
+of Assisi, it is related in the <i>Legenda Trium Sociorum</i>
+that he said: <i>Adhuc adorabor per totum mundum!</i>&mdash;You
+will see how I shall yet be adored by all the world!
+(II. <i>Celano</i>, i. 1). And even of God Himself the
+theologians say that He created the world for the manifestation
+of His glory.</p>
+
+<p>When doubts invade us and cloud our faith in the
+immortality of the soul, a vigorous and painful impulse
+is given to the anxiety to perpetuate our name and fame,
+to grasp at least a shadow of immortality. And hence
+this tremendous struggle to singularize ourselves, to
+survive in some way in the memory of others and of
+posterity. It is this struggle, a thousand times more
+terrible than the struggle for life, that gives its tone,
+colour, and character to our society, in which the
+medieval faith in the immortal soul is passing away.
+Each one seeks to affirm himself, if only in appearance.</p>
+
+<p>Once the needs of hunger are satisfied&mdash;and they are
+soon satisfied&mdash;the vanity, the necessity&mdash;for it is a necessity&mdash;arises
+of imposing ourselves upon and surviving
+in others. Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse,
+but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity. He boasts even
+of his weaknesses and his misfortunes, for want of anything
+better to boast of, and is like a child who, in order
+<a name="Page_53" id="Page_53" />to attract attention, struts about with a bandaged finger.
+And vanity, what is it but eagerness for survival?</p>
+
+<p>The vain man is in like case with the avaricious&mdash;he
+takes the means for the end; forgetting the end he
+pursues the means for its own sake and goes no further.
+The seeming to be something, conducive to being it,
+ends by forming our objective. We need that others
+should believe in our superiority to them in order that
+we may believe in it ourselves, and upon their belief base
+our faith in our own persistence, or at least in the persistence
+of our fame. We are more grateful to him who
+congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a
+cause than we are to him who recognizes the truth or
+the goodness of the cause itself. A rabid mania for
+originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and
+characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err
+with genius than hit the mark with the crowd. Rousseau
+has said in his <i>&Eacute;mile</i> (book iv.): &quot;Even though philosophers
+should be in a position to discover the truth,
+which of them would take any interest in it? Each one
+knows well that his system is not better founded than
+the others, but he supports it because it is his. There is
+not a single one of them who, if he came to know the true
+and the false, would not prefer the falsehood that he had
+found to the truth discovered by another. Where is the
+philosopher who would not willingly deceive mankind
+for his own glory? Where is he who in the secret of his
+heart does not propose to himself any other object than
+to distinguish himself? Provided that he lifts himself
+above the vulgar, provided that he outshines the brilliance
+of his competitors, what does he demand more?
+The essential thing is to think differently from others.
+With believers he is an atheist; with atheists he would be
+a believer.&quot; How much substantial truth there is in
+these gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity!</p>
+
+<p>This violent struggle for the perpetuation of our name
+extends backwards into the past, just as it aspires to
+<a name="Page_54" id="Page_54" />conquer the future; we contend with the dead because
+we, the living, are obscured beneath their shadow. We
+are jealous of the geniuses of former times, whose names,
+standing out like the landmarks of history, rescue the
+ages from oblivion. The heaven of fame is not very
+large, and the more there are who enter it the less is the
+share of each. The great names of the past rob us of our
+place in it; the space which they fill in the popular
+memory they usurp from us who aspire to occupy it.
+And so we rise up in revolt against them, and hence the
+bitterness with which all those who seek after fame in the
+world of letters judge those who have already attained it
+and are in enjoyment of it. If additions continue to be
+made to the wealth of literature, there will come a day
+of sifting, and each one fears lest he be caught in the
+meshes of the sieve. In attacking the masters, irreverent
+youth is only defending itself; the iconoclast or image-breaker
+is a Stylite who erects himself as an image, an
+<i>icon</i>. &quot;Comparisons are odious,&quot; says the familiar
+adage, and the reason is that we wish to be unique. Do
+not tell Fernandez that he is one of the most talented
+Spaniards of the younger generation, for though he will
+affect to be gratified by the eulogy he is really annoyed
+by it; if, however, you tell him that he is the most
+talented man in Spain&mdash;well and good! But even that
+is not sufficient: one of the worldwide reputations would
+be more to his liking, but he is only fully satisfied with
+being esteemed the first in all countries and all ages.
+The more alone, the nearer to that unsubstantial immortality,
+the immortality of the name, for great names
+diminish one another.</p>
+
+<p>What is the meaning of that irritation which we feel
+when we believe that we are robbed of a phrase, or a
+thought, or an image, which we believed to be our own,
+when we are plagiarized? Robbed? Can it indeed be
+ours once we have given it to the public? Only because
+it is ours we prize it; and we are fonder of the false money
+<a name="Page_55" id="Page_55" />that preserves our impress than of the coin of pure gold
+from which our effigy and our legend has been effaced.
+It very commonly happens that it is when the name of a
+writer is no longer in men's mouths that he most influences
+his public, his mind being then disseminated
+and infused in the minds of those who have read him,
+whereas he was quoted chiefly when his thoughts and
+sayings, clashing with those generally received, needed
+the guarantee of a name. What was his now belongs to
+all, and he lives in all. But for him the garlands have
+faded, and he believes himself to have failed. He hears
+no more either the applause or the silent tremor of the
+heart of those who go on reading him. Ask any sincere
+artist which he would prefer, whether that his work
+should perish and his memory survive, or that his work
+should survive and his memory perish, and you will see
+what he will tell you, if he is really sincere. When a
+man does not work merely in order to live and carry on,
+he works in order to survive. To work for the work's
+sake is not work but play. And play? We will talk
+about that later on.</p>
+
+<p>A tremendous passion is this longing that our memory
+may be rescued, if it is possible, from the oblivion which
+overtakes others. From it springs envy, the cause,
+according to the biblical narrative, of the crime with
+which human history opened: the murder of Abel by his
+brother Cain. It was not a struggle for bread&mdash;it was a
+struggle to survive in God, in the divine memory. Envy
+is a thousand times more terrible than hunger, for it is
+spiritual hunger. If what we call the problem of life,
+the problem of bread, were once solved, the earth would
+be turned into a hell by the emergence in a more violent
+form of the struggle for survival.</p>
+
+<p>For the sake of a name man is ready to sacrifice not
+only life but happiness&mdash;life as a matter of course. &quot;Let
+me die, but let my fame live!&quot; exclaimed Rodrigo Arias
+in <i>Las Mocedades del Cid</i> when he fell mortally wounded
+<a name="Page_56" id="Page_56" />by Don Ord&oacute;&ntilde;ez de Lara. &quot;Courage, Girolamo, for
+you will long be remembered; death is bitter, but fame
+eternal!&quot; cried Girolamo Olgiati, the disciple of Cola
+Montano and the murderer, together with his fellow-conspirators
+Lampugnani and Visconti, of Galeazzo
+Sforza, tyrant of Milan. And there are some who covet
+even the gallows for the sake of acquiring fame, even
+though it be an infamous fame: <i>avidus mal&aelig; fam&aelig;</i>, as
+Tacitus says.</p>
+
+<p>And this erostratism, what is it at bottom but the longing
+for immortality, if not for substantial and concrete
+immortality, at any rate for the shadowy immortality of
+the name?</p>
+
+<p>And in this there are degrees. If a man despises the
+applause of the crowd of to-day, it is because he seeks to
+survive in renewed minorities for generations. &quot;Posterity
+is an accumulation of minorities,&quot; said Gounod.
+He wishes to prolong himself in time rather than in
+space. The crowd soon overthrows its own idols and
+the statue lies broken at the foot of the pedestal without
+anyone heeding it; but those who win the hearts of the
+elect will long be the objects of a fervent worship in
+some shrine, small and secluded no doubt, but capable
+of preserving them from the flood of oblivion. The
+artist sacrifices the extensiveness of his fame to its
+duration; he is anxious rather to endure for ever in some
+little corner than to occupy a brilliant second place in the
+whole universe; he prefers to be an atom, eternal and
+conscious of himself, rather than to be for a brief moment
+the consciousness of the whole universe; he sacrifices
+infinitude to eternity.</p>
+
+<p>And they keep on wearying our ears with this chorus
+of Pride! stinking Pride! Pride, to wish to leave an
+ineffaceable name? Pride? It is like calling the thirst
+for riches a thirst for pleasure. No, it is not so much the
+longing for pleasure that drives us poor folk to seek
+money as the terror of poverty, just as it was not the
+<a name="Page_57" id="Page_57" />desire for glory but the terror of hell that drove men in
+the Middle Ages to the cloister with its <i>acedia</i>. Neither
+is this wish to leave a name pride, but terror of extinction.
+We aim at being all because in that we see the
+only means of escaping from being nothing. We wish
+to save our memory&mdash;at any rate, our memory. How
+long will it last? At most as long as the human race
+lasts. And what if we shall save our memory in God?</p>
+
+<p>Unhappy, I know well, are these confessions; but from
+the depth of unhappiness springs new life, and only by
+draining the lees of spiritual sorrow can we at last taste
+the honey that lies at the bottom of the cup of life.
+Anguish leads us to consolation.</p>
+
+<p>This thirst for eternal life is appeased by many,
+especially by the simple, at the fountain of religious
+faith; but to drink of this is not given to all. The
+institution whose primordial end is to protect this faith
+in the personal immortality of the soul is Catholicism;
+but Catholicism has sought to rationalize this faith by
+converting religion into theology, by offering a philosophy,
+and a philosophy of the thirteenth century, as a
+basis for vital belief. This and its consequences we
+will now proceed to examine.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11" /><a href="#FNanchor_11_11">[11]</a> Each time that I consider that it is my lot to die, I spread my cloak upon
+the ground and am never surfeited with sleeping.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12" /><a href="#FNanchor_12_12">[12]</a> Nietzsche.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58" /><a name="IV" id="IV" />IV</h2>
+
+<h2>THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM</h2>
+
+<p>Let us now approach the Christian, Catholic, Pauline,
+or Athanasian solution of our inward vital problem, the
+hunger of immortality.</p>
+
+<p>Christianity sprang from the confluence of two mighty
+spiritual streams&mdash;the one Judaic, the other Hellenic&mdash;each
+of which had already influenced the other, and
+Rome finally gave it a practical stamp and social
+permanence.</p>
+
+<p>It has been asserted, perhaps somewhat precipitately,
+that primitive Christianity was an-eschatological, that
+faith in another life after death is not clearly manifested
+in it, but rather a belief in the proximate end of the
+world and establishment of the kingdom of God, a
+belief known as chiliasm. But were they not fundamentally
+one and the same thing? Faith in the immortality
+of the soul, the nature of which was not perhaps
+very precisely defined, may be said to be a kind of
+tacit understanding or supposition underlying the whole
+of the Gospel; and it is the mental orientation of many of
+those who read it to-day, an orientation contrary to that
+of the Christians from among whom the Gospel sprang,
+that prevents them from seeing this. Without doubt all
+that about the second coming of Christ, when he shall
+come among the clouds, clothed with majesty and great
+power, to judge the quick and the dead, to open to some
+the kingdom of heaven and to cast others into Gehenna,
+where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, may
+be understood in a chiliastic sense; and it is even said of
+Christ in the Gospel (Mark ix. I), that there were with
+<a name="Page_59" id="Page_59" />him some who should not taste of death till they had
+seen the kingdom of God&mdash;that is, that the kingdom
+should come during their generation. And in the same
+chapter, verse 10, it is said of Peter and James and John,
+who went up with Jesus to the Mount of Transfiguration
+and heard him say that he would rise again from the
+dead, that &quot;they kept that saying within themselves,
+questioning one with another what the rising from the
+dead should mean.&quot; And at all events the Gospel was
+written when this belief, the basis and <i>raison d'&ecirc;tre</i>
+of Christianity, was in process of formation. See
+Matt. xxii. 29-32; Mark xii. 24-27; Luke xvi. 22-31;
+xx. 34-37; John v. 24-29; vi. 40, 54, 58; viii. 51; xi. 25, 56;
+xiv. 2, 19. And, above all, that passage in Matt. xxvii. 52,
+which tells how at the resurrection of Christ &quot;many
+bodies of the saints which slept arose.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And this was not a natural resurrection. No; the
+Christian faith was born of the faith that Jesus did not
+remain dead, but that God raised him up again, and
+that this resurrection was a fact; but this did not presuppose
+a mere immortality of the soul in the philosophical
+sense (see Harnack, <i>Dogmengeschichte</i>, Prolegomena,
+v. 4). For the first Fathers of the Church
+themselves the immortality of the soul was not a thing
+pertaining to the natural order; the teaching of the
+Divine Scriptures, as Nimesius said, sufficed for its
+demonstration, and it was, according to Lactantius, a
+gift&mdash;and as such gratuitous&mdash;of God. But more of this
+later.</p>
+
+<p>Christianity sprang, as we have said, from two great
+spiritual streams&mdash;the Judaic and the Hellenic&mdash;each one
+of which had arrived on its account, if not at a precise
+definition of, at any rate at a definite yearning for,
+another life. Among the Jews faith in another life was
+neither general nor clear; but they were led to it by faith
+in a personal and living God, the formation of which
+faith comprises all their spiritual history.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60" />Jahw&eacute;, the Judaic God, began by being one god among
+many others&mdash;the God of the people of Israel, revealed
+among the thunders of the tempest on Mount Sinai.
+But he was so jealous that he demanded that worship
+should be paid to him alone, and it was by way of monocultism
+that the Jews arrived at monotheism. He was
+adored as a living force, not as a metaphysical entity,
+and he was the god of battles. But this God of social
+and martial origin, to whose genesis we shall have to
+return later, became more inward and personal in the
+prophets, and in becoming more inward and personal he
+thereby became more individual and more universal. He
+is the Jahw&eacute; who, instead of loving Israel because Israel
+is his son, takes Israel for a son because he loves him
+(Hosea xi. 1). And faith in the personal God, in the
+Father of men, carries with it faith in the eternalization
+of the individual man&mdash;a faith which had already dawned
+in Pharisaism even before Christ.</p>
+
+<p>Hellenic culture, on its side, ended by discovering
+death; and to discover death is to discover the hunger of
+immortality. This longing does not appear in the
+Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final, in their
+character, marking not the start but the close of a
+civilization. They indicate the transition from the old
+religion of Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion
+of Apollo&mdash;of redemption. But the popular and inward
+religion of the Eleusinian mysteries, the worship of souls
+and ancestors, always persisted underneath. &quot;In so far
+as it is possible to speak of a Delphic theology, among
+its more important elements must be counted the belief
+in the continuation of the life of souls after death in its
+popular forms, and in the worship of the souls of the
+dead.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13" /><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> There were the Titanic and the Dionysiac
+<a name="Page_61" id="Page_61" />elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the
+Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the
+body, in which the soul was like a captive in a prison (see
+Rohde, <i>Psyche</i>, &quot;Die Orphiker,&quot; 4). The Nietzschean
+idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic idea. But the
+idea of the immortality of the soul was not a philosophical
+principle. The attempt of Empedocles to harmonize a
+hylozoistic system with spiritualism proved that a philosophical
+natural science cannot by itself lead to a corroboration
+of the axiom of the perpetuity of the individual
+soul; it could only serve as a support to a theological
+speculation. It was by a contradiction that the first
+Greek philosophers affirmed immortality, by abandoning
+natural philosophy and intruding into theology, by
+formulating not an Apollonian but a Dionysiac and
+Orphic dogma. But &quot;an immortality of the soul as
+such, in virtue of its own nature and condition as
+an imperishable divine force in the mortal body, was
+never an object of popular Hellenic belief&quot; (Rohde,
+<i>op. cit.</i>).</p>
+
+<p>Recall the <i>Ph&aelig;do</i> of Plato and the neo-platonic lucubrations.
+In them the yearning for personal immortality
+already shows itself&mdash;a yearning which, as it was left
+totally unsatisfied by reason, produced the Hellenic
+pessimism. For, as Pfleiderer very well observes
+(<i>Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtliche Grundlage</i>, 3.
+Berlin, 1896), &quot;no people ever came upon the earth so
+serene and sunny as the Greeks in the youthful days of
+their historical existence ... but no people changed so
+completely their idea of the value of life. The Hellenism
+which ended in the religious speculations of neo-pythagorism
+and neo-platonism viewed this world, which had
+once appeared to it so joyous and radiant, as an abode
+of darkness and error, and earthly existence as a period
+of trial which could never be too quickly traversed.&quot;
+Nirvana is an Hellenic idea.</p>
+
+<p>Thus Jews and Greeks each arrived independently at
+<a name="Page_62" id="Page_62" />the real discovery of death&mdash;a discovery which occasions,
+in peoples as in men, the entrance into spiritual puberty,
+the realization of the tragic sense of life, and it is then
+that the living God is begotten by humanity. The discovery
+of death is that which reveals God to us, and the
+death of the perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation
+of death, being the death of the man who ought not
+to have died yet did die.</p>
+
+<p>Such a discovery&mdash;that of immortality&mdash;prepared as it
+was by the Judaic and Hellenic religious processes, was
+a specifically Christian discovery. And its full achievement
+was due above all to Paul of Tarsus, the hellenizing
+Jew and Pharisee. Paul had not personally known
+Jesus, and hence he discovered him as Christ. &quot;It may
+be said that the theology of the Apostle Paul is, in
+general, the first Christian theology. For him it was a
+necessity; it was, in a certain sense, his substitution for
+the lack of a personal knowledge of Jesus,&quot; says Weizs&auml;cker
+(<i>Das apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche</i>.
+Freiburg-i.-B., 1892). He did not know Jesus, but he
+felt him born again in himself, and thus he could say,
+&quot;Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14" /><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a>
+And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumbling-block,
+and unto the Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and
+the central doctrine for the converted Apostle was that of
+the resurrection of Christ. The important thing for him was
+that Christ had been made man and had died and had
+risen again, and not what he did in his life&mdash;not his
+ethical work as a teacher, but his religious work as a
+giver of immortality. And he it was who wrote those
+immortal words: &quot;Now if Christ be preached that He
+rose from the dead, how say some among you that there
+is no resurrection from the dead? But if there be no
+resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen; and if
+Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your
+faith is also vain.... Then they also which are fallen
+<a name="Page_63" id="Page_63" />asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we
+have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable&quot;
+(I Cor. xv. 12-19).</p>
+
+<p>And it is possible to affirm that thenceforward he who
+does not believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ may
+be Christophile but cannot be specifically Christian. It
+is true that a Justin Martyr could say that &quot;all those are
+Christians who live in accordance with reason, even
+though they may be deemed to be atheists, as, among
+the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and other such&quot;;
+but this martyr, is he a martyr&mdash;that is to say a witness&mdash;of
+Christianity? No.</p>
+
+<p>And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced
+by Paul, the dogma of the resurrection and immortality
+of Christ, the guarantee of the resurrection and immortality
+of each believer, that the whole of Christology was
+built up. The God-man, the incarnate Word, came in
+order that man, according to his mode, might be made
+God&mdash;that is, immortal. And the Christian God, the
+Father of Christ, a God necessarily anthropomorphic, is
+He who&mdash;as the Catechism of Christian Doctrine which
+we were made to learn by heart at school says&mdash;created
+the world for man, for each man. And the end of
+redemption, in spite of appearances due to an ethical
+deflection of a dogma properly religious, was to save us
+from death rather than from sin, or from sin in so far as
+sin implies death. And Christ died, or rather rose
+again, for <i>me</i>, for each one of us. And a certain
+solidarity was established between God and His creature.
+Malebranche said that the first man fell <i>in order that</i>
+Christ might redeem us, rather than that Christ redeemed
+us <i>because</i> man had fallen.</p>
+
+<p>After the death of Paul years passed, and generations
+of Christianity wrought upon this central dogma and its
+consequences in order to safeguard faith in the immortality
+of the individual soul, and the Council of Nic&aelig;a
+came, and with it the formidable Athanasius, whose
+<a name="Page_64" id="Page_64" />name is still a battle-cry, an incarnation of the popular
+faith. Athanasius was a man of little learning but of
+great faith, and above all of popular faith, devoured by
+the hunger of immortality. And he opposed Arianism,
+which, like Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism,
+threatened, although unknowingly and unintentionally,
+the foundation of that belief. For the Arians, Christ
+was first and foremost a teacher&mdash;a teacher of morality,
+the wholly perfect man, and therefore the guarantee that
+we may all attain to supreme perfection; but Athanasius
+felt that Christ cannot make us gods if he has not first
+made himself God; if his Divinity had been communicated,
+he could not have communicated it to us. &quot;He
+was not, therefore,&quot; he said, &quot;first man and then
+became God; but He was first God and then became man
+in order that He might the better deify us (<i>&#952;&#949;&#959;&#960;&#959;&#953;&#951;&#963;&#951;</i>)&quot;
+(<i>Orat.</i> i. 39). It was not the Logos of the philosophers,
+the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and
+adored;<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15" /><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> and thus he instituted a separation between
+nature and revelation. The Athanasian or Nicene
+Christ, who is the Catholic Christ, is not the cosmological,
+nor even, strictly, the ethical Christ; he is the
+eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ. Harnack
+says of this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic
+Christology, that he is essentially docetic&mdash;that is,
+apparential&mdash;because the process of the divinization of
+the man in Christ was made in the interests of eschatology.
+But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that
+so-called historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is
+diluted for us in a myth or in a social atom?</p>
+
+<p>This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us
+that Arianism or Unitarianism would have been the
+death of Christianity, reducing it to cosmology and
+ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the
+<a name="Page_65" id="Page_65" />learned might pass over to Catholicism&mdash;that is to say,
+from reason to faith. To this same learned historian
+of dogmas it appears to be an indication of a perverse
+state of things that the man Athanasius, who saved
+Christianity as the religion of a living communion with
+God, should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the
+historical Jesus, whom neither Paul nor Athanasius
+knew personally, nor yet Harnack himself. Among
+Protestants, this historical Jesus is subjected to the
+scalpel of criticism, while the Catholic Christ lives, the
+really historical Christ, he who lives throughout the
+centuries guaranteeing the faith in personal immortality
+and personal salvation.</p>
+
+<p>And Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith,
+that of asserting things mutually contradictory: &quot;The
+complete contradiction that exists in the <i>&#959;&#956;&#959;&#959;&#957;&#963;&#953;&#959;&#962;</i> carried
+in its train a whole army of contradictions which increased
+as thought advanced,&quot; says Harnack. Yes, so it
+was, and so it had to be. And he adds: &quot;Dogma took
+leave for ever of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and
+habituated itself to the contra-rational.&quot; In truth, it
+drew closer to life, which is contra-rational and opposed
+to clear thinking. Not only are judgements of worth
+never rationalizable&mdash;they are anti-rational.</p>
+
+<p>At Nic&aelig;a, then, as afterwards at the Vatican, victory
+rested with the idiots&mdash;taking this word in its proper,
+primitive, and etymological sense&mdash;the simple-minded,
+the rude and headstrong bishops, the representatives of
+the genuine human spirit, the popular spirit, the spirit
+that does not want to die, in spite of whatever reason may
+say, and that seeks a guarantee, the most material possible,
+for this desire.</p>
+
+<p><i>Quid ad &aelig;ternitatem?</i> This is the capital question.
+And the Creed ends with that phrase, <i>resurrectionem
+mortuorum et vitam venturi s&aelig;culi</i>&mdash;the resurrection of
+the dead and the life of the world to come. In the ceme<a name="Page_66" id="Page_66" />tery
+of Mallona, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a
+tombstone on which this verse is carved:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Aunque estamos en polvo convertidos,</i></div>
+<div><i>en Ti, Se&ntilde;or, nuestra esperanza f&iacute;a,</i></div>
+<div><i>que tornaremos a vivir vestidos</i></div>
+<div><i>con la carne y la piel que nos cubria.</i><a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16" /><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>&quot;With the same bodies and souls that they had,&quot; as the
+Catechism says. So much so, that it is orthodox Catholic
+doctrine that the happiness of the blessed is not perfectly
+complete until they recover their bodies. They lament
+in heaven, says our Brother Pedro Mal&oacute;n de Chaide of
+the Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque,<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17" /><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a>
+and &quot;this lament springs from their not being perfectly
+whole in heaven, for only the soul is there; and although
+they cannot suffer, because they see God, in whom they
+unspeakably delight, yet with all this it appears that they
+are not wholly content. They will be so when they are
+clothed with their own bodies.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And to this central dogma of the resurrection in Christ
+and by Christ corresponds likewise a central sacrament,
+the axis of popular Catholic piety&mdash;the Sacrament of the
+Eucharist. In it is administered the body of Christ,
+which is the bread of immortality.</p>
+
+<p>This sacrament is genuinely realist&mdash;<i>dinglich</i>, as the
+Germans would say&mdash;which may without great violence
+be translated &quot;material.&quot; It is the sacrament most
+genuinely <i>ex opere operato</i>, for which is substituted
+among Protestants the idealistic sacrament of the word.
+Fundamentally it is concerned with&mdash;and I say it with
+all possible respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the
+expressiveness of the phrase&mdash;the eating and drinking of
+God, the Eternalizer, the feeding upon Him. Little
+<a name="Page_67" id="Page_67" />wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when she was
+communicating in the monastery of the Incarnation and
+in the second year of her being Prioress there, on the
+octave of St. Martin, and the Father, Fr. Juan de la Cruz,
+divided the Host between her and another sister, she
+thought that it was done not because there was any want
+of Hosts, but because he wished to mortify her, &quot;for I
+had told him how much I delighted in Hosts of a large
+size. Yet I was not ignorant that the size of the Host
+is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole and
+entire in the smallest particle.&quot; Here reason pulls one
+way, feeling another. And what importance for this
+feeling have the thousand and one difficulties that arise
+from reflecting rationally upon the mystery of this sacrament?
+What is a divine body? And the body, in so
+far as it is the body of Christ, is it divine? What is an
+immortal and immortalizing body? What is substance
+separated from the accidents? Nowadays we have
+greatly refined our notion of materiality and substantiality;
+but there were even some among the Fathers of
+the Church to whom the immateriality of God Himself
+was not a thing so clear and definite as it is for us. And
+this sacrament of the Eucharist is the immortalizing
+sacrament <i>par excellence</i>, and therefore the axis of
+popular Catholic piety, and if it may be so said, the
+most specifically religious of sacraments.</p>
+
+<p>For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization
+and not justification, in the Protestant sense.
+Rather is this latter ethical. It was from Kant, in spite
+of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that
+Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions&mdash;namely,
+that religion rests upon morality, and not
+morality upon religion, as in Catholicism.</p>
+
+<p>The preoccupation of sin has never been such a matter
+of anguish, or at any rate has never displayed itself with
+such an appearance of anguish, among Catholics. The
+sacrament of Confession contributes to this. And there
+<a name="Page_68" id="Page_68" />persists, perhaps, among Catholics more than among
+Protestants the substance of the primitive Judaic and
+pagan conception of sin as something material and infectious
+and hereditary, which is cured by baptism and
+absolution. In Adam all his posterity sinned, almost
+materially, and his sin was transmitted as a material
+disease is transmitted. Renan, whose education was
+Catholic, was right, therefore, in calling to account the
+Protestant Amiel who accused him of not giving due
+importance to sin. And, on the other hand, Protestantism,
+absorbed in this preoccupation with justification,
+which in spite of its religious guise was taken more
+in an ethical sense than anything else, ends by neutralizing
+and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons the
+Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure
+religious individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or
+cultured religiosity. What we may call &quot;other-worldliness&quot;
+(<i>Jenseitigkeit</i>) was obliterated little by little by
+&quot;this-worldliness&quot; (<i>Diesseitigkeit</i>); and this in spite of
+Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it. To
+its earthly vocation and passive trust in God is due the
+religious coarseness of Lutheranism, which was almost
+at the point of expiring in the age of the Enlightenment,
+of the <i>Aufkl&auml;rung</i>, and which pietism, infusing into it
+something of the religious sap of Catholicism, barely
+succeeded in galvanizing a little. Hence the exactness
+of the remarks of Oliveira Martins in his magnificent
+<i>History of Iberian Civilization</i>, in which he says (book iv.,
+chap, iii.) that &quot;Catholicism produced heroes and Protestantism
+produced societies that are sensible, happy,
+wealthy, free, as far as their outer institutions go, but
+incapable of any great action, because their religion has
+begun by destroying in the heart of man all that made
+him capable of daring and noble self-sacrifice.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Take any of the dogmatic systems that have resulted
+from the latest Protestant dissolvent analysis&mdash;that of
+Kaftan, the follower of Ritschl, for example&mdash;and note
+<a name="Page_69" id="Page_69" />the extent to which eschatology is reduced. And his
+master, Albrecht Ritschl, himself says: &quot;The question
+regarding the necessity of justification or forgiveness can
+only be solved by conceiving eternal life as the direct end
+and aim of that divine operation. But if the idea of
+eternal life be applied merely to our state in the next life,
+then its content, too, lies beyond all experience, and
+cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind.
+Hopes and desires, though marked by the strongest subjective
+certainty, are not any the clearer for that, and
+contain in themselves no guarantee of the completeness
+of what one hopes or desires. Clearness and completeness
+of idea, however, are the conditions of comprehending
+anything&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, of understanding the necessary connection
+between the various elements of a thing, and
+between the thing and its given presuppositions. The
+Evangelical article of belief, therefore, that justification
+by faith establishes or brings with it assurance of eternal
+life, is of no use theologically, so long as this purposive
+aspect of justification cannot be verified in such experience
+as is possible now&quot; (<i>Rechtfertigung und Vers&ouml;hnung</i>,
+vol. iii., chap. vii., 52). All this is very
+rational, but ...</p>
+
+<p>In the first edition of Melanchthon's <i>Loci Communes</i>,
+that of 1521, the first Lutheran theological work, its
+author omits all Trinitarian and Christological speculations,
+the dogmatic basis of eschatology. And Dr.
+Hermann, professor at Marburg, the author of a book on
+the Christian's commerce with God (<i>Der Verkehr des
+Christen mit Gott</i>)&mdash;a book the first chapter of which
+treats of the opposition between mysticism and the Christian
+religion, and which is, according to Harnack, the
+most perfect Lutheran manual&mdash;tells us in another place,<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18" /><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a>
+referring to this Christological (or Athanasian) specula<a name="Page_70" id="Page_70" />tion,
+that &quot;the effective knowledge of God and of Christ,
+in which knowledge faith lives, is something entirely
+different. Nothing ought to find a place in Christian
+doctrine that is not capable of helping man to recognize
+his sins, to obtain the grace of God, and to serve Him
+in truth. Until that time&mdash;that is to say, until Luther&mdash;the
+Church had accepted much as <i>doctrina sacra</i> which
+cannot absolutely contribute to confer upon man liberty
+of heart and tranquillity of conscience.&quot; For my part,
+I cannot conceive the liberty of a heart or the tranquillity
+of a conscience that are not sure of their perdurability
+after death. &quot;The desire for the soul's salvation,&quot;
+Hermann continues, &quot;must at last have led men to the
+knowledge and understanding of the effective doctrine
+of salvation.&quot; And in his book on the Christian's
+commerce with God, this eminent Lutheran doctor is
+continually discoursing upon trust in God, peace of
+conscience, and an assurance of salvation that is not
+strictly and precisely certainty of everlasting life, but
+rather certainty of the forgiveness of sins.</p>
+
+<p>And I have read in a Protestant theologian, Ernst
+Troeltsch, that in the conceptual order Protestantism has
+attained its highest reach in music, in which art Bach
+has given it its mightiest artistic expression. This, then,
+is what Protestantism dissolves into&mdash;celestial music!<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19" /><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a>
+On the other hand we may say that the highest artistic
+expression of Catholicism, or at least of Spanish
+Catholicism, is in the art that is most material, tangible,
+and permanent&mdash;for the vehicle of sounds is air&mdash;in
+sculpture and painting, in the Christ of Velasquez, that
+Christ who is for ever dying, yet never finishes dying,
+in order that he may give us life.</p>
+
+<p>And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No!
+No modern religion can leave ethics on one side. But
+<a name="Page_71" id="Page_71" />our religion&mdash;although its doctors may protest against
+this&mdash;is fundamentally and for the most part a compromise
+between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology
+pressed into the service of ethics. What else but this is
+that atrocity of the eternal pains of hell, which agrees so
+ill with the Pauline apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind
+those words which the <i>Theologica Germanica</i>, the manual
+of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the mouth of
+God: &quot;If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense
+it with good, for I am and have none other.&quot; And
+Christ said: &quot;Father, forgive them, for they know not
+what they do,&quot; and there is no man who perhaps knows
+what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit
+of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of
+police system, and hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity
+is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism
+predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise
+between the two, although with the eschatological element
+preponderating. The most authentic Catholic
+ethic, monastic asceticism, is an ethic of eschatology,
+directed to the salvation of the individual soul rather
+than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of
+virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea
+that to perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own
+personal perpetuation? The ascetic morality is a negative
+morality. And, strictly, what is important for a
+man is not to die, whether he sins or not. It is not
+necessary to take very literally, but as a lyrical, or rather
+rhetorical, effusion, the words of our famous sonnet&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte</i></div>
+<div><i>el cielo que me tienes prometido,</i><a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20" /><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>and the rest that follows.</p>
+
+<p>The real sin&mdash;perhaps it is the sin against the Holy
+Ghost for which there is no remission&mdash;is the sin of
+<a name="Page_72" id="Page_72" />heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying has
+been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal&mdash;that
+is, a heretic&mdash;is worse than being an assassin, a
+thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey
+the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason.</p>
+
+<p>And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man,
+of the Pope? What difference does it make whether it
+be a book that is infallible&mdash;the Bible, or a society of
+men&mdash;the Church, or a single man? Does it make any
+essential change in the rational difficulty? And since
+the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not
+more rational than that of a single man, this supreme
+offence in the eyes of reason had to be posited.</p>
+
+<p>It is the vital asserting itself, and in order to
+assert itself it creates, with the help of its enemy, the
+rational, a complete dogmatic structure, and this the
+Church defends against rationalism, against Protestantism,
+and against Modernism. The Church defends
+life. It stood up against Galileo, and it did right; for
+his discovery, in its inception and until it became assimilated
+to the general body of human knowledge, tended
+to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the universe
+was created for man. It opposed Darwin, and it did
+right, for Darwinism tends to shatter our belief that
+man is an exceptional animal, created expressly to be
+eternalized. And lastly, Pius IX., the first Pontiff to
+be proclaimed infallible, declared that he was irreconcilable
+with the so-called modern civilization. And he did
+right.</p>
+
+<p>Loisy, the Catholic ex-abb&eacute;, said: &quot;I say simply this,
+that the Church and theology have not looked with
+favour upon the scientific movement, and that on certain
+decisive occasions, so far as it lay in their power, they
+have hindered it. I say, above all, that Catholic teaching
+has not associated itself with, or accommodated itself
+to, this movement. Theology has conducted itself, and
+conducts itself still, as if it were self-possessed of a
+<a name="Page_73" id="Page_73" />science of nature and a science of history, together with
+that general philosophy of nature and history which
+results from a scientific knowledge of them. It might
+be supposed that the domain of theology and that of
+science, distinct in principle and even as defined by the
+Vatican Council, must not be distinct in practice.
+Everything proceeds almost as if theology had nothing
+to learn from modern science, natural or historical, and
+as if by itself it had the power and the right to exercise
+a direct and absolute control over all the activities of the
+human mind&quot; (<i>Autour d'un Petit Livre</i>, 1903, p. 211).</p>
+
+<p>And such must needs be, and such in fact is, the
+Church's attitude in its struggle with Modernism, of
+which Loisy was the learned and leading exponent.</p>
+
+<p>The recent struggle against Kantian and fideist
+Modernism is a struggle for life. Is it indeed possible
+for life, life that seeks assurance of survival, to tolerate
+that a Loisy, a Catholic priest, should affirm that the
+resurrection of the Saviour is not a fact of the historical
+order, demonstrable and demonstrated by the testimony
+of history alone? Read, moreover, the exposition of the
+central dogma, that of the resurrection of Jesus, in E. Le
+Roy's excellent work, <i>Dogme et Critique</i>, and tell me if
+any solid ground is left for our hope to build on. Do
+not the Modernists see that the question at issue is not
+so much that of the immortal life of Christ, reduced,
+perhaps, to a life in the collective Christian consciousness,
+as that of a guarantee of our own personal resurrection
+of body as well as soul? This new psychological
+apologetic appeals to the moral miracle, and we, like the
+Jews, seek for a sign, something that can be taken hold
+of with all the powers of the soul and with all the senses
+of the body. And with the hands and the feet and the
+mouth, if it be possible.</p>
+
+<p>But alas! we do not get it. Reason attacks, and faith,
+which does not feel itself secure without reason, has to
+come to terms with it. And hence come those tragic con<a name="Page_74" id="Page_74" />tradictions
+and lacerations of consciousness. We need
+security, certainty, signs, and they give us <i>motiva
+credibilitatis</i>&mdash;motives of credibility&mdash;upon which to establish
+the <i>rationale obsequium</i>, and although faith precedes
+reason (<i>fides pr&aelig;cedit rationem</i>), according to St. Augustine,
+this same learned doctor and bishop sought to
+travel by faith to understanding (<i>per fidem ad intellectum</i>),
+and to believe in order to understand (<i>credo ut
+intelligam</i>). How far is this from that superb expression
+of Tertullian&mdash;<i>et sepultus resurrexit, certum est quia
+impossibile est!</i>&mdash;&quot;and he was buried and rose again; it
+is certain because it is impossible!&quot; and his sublime
+<i>credo quia absurdum!</i>&mdash;the scandal of the rationalists.
+How far from the <i>il faut s'ab&ecirc;tir</i> of Pascal and from the
+&quot;human reason loves the absurd&quot; of our Donoso
+Cort&eacute;s, which he must have learned from the great
+Joseph de Maistre!</p>
+
+<p>And a first foundation-stone was sought in the
+authority of tradition and the revelation of the word of
+God, and the principle of unanimous consent was
+arrived at. <i>Quod apud multos unum invenitur, non est
+erratum, sed traditum</i>, said Tertullian; and Lamennais
+added, centuries later, that &quot;certitude, the principle of
+life and intelligence ... is, if I may be allowed the
+expression, a social product.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21" /><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> But here, as in so many
+cases, the supreme formula was given by that great
+Catholic, whose Catholicism was of the popular and vital
+order, Count Joseph de Maistre, when he wrote: &quot;I do
+not believe that it is possible to show a single opinion
+of universal utility that is not true.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22" /><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> Here you have the
+Catholic hall-mark&mdash;the deduction of the truth of a principle
+from its supreme goodness or utility. And what
+is there of greater, of more sovereign utility, than the
+immortality of the soul? &quot;As all is uncertain, either
+we must believe all men or none,&quot; said Lactantius; but
+<a name="Page_75" id="Page_75" />that great mystic and ascetic, Blessed Heinrich Seuse, the
+Dominican, implored the Eternal Wisdom for one word
+affirming that He was love, and when the answer came,
+&quot;All creatures proclaim that I am love,&quot; Seuse replied,
+&quot;Alas! Lord, that does not suffice for a yearning soul.&quot;
+Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent,
+nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks the
+support of its enemy, reason.</p>
+
+<p>And thus scholastic theology was devised, and with it
+its handmaiden&mdash;<i>ancilla theologi&aelig;</i>&mdash;scholastic philosophy,
+and this handmaiden turned against her mistress.
+Scholasticism, a magnificent cathedral, in which all the
+problems of architectonic mechanism were resolved for
+future ages, but a cathedral constructed of unbaked
+bricks, gave place little by little to what is called natural
+theology and is merely Christianity depotentialized. The
+attempt was even made, where it was possible, to base
+dogmas upon reason, to show at least that if they were
+indeed super-rational they were not contra-rational, and
+they were reinforced with a philosophical foundation of
+Aristotelian-Neoplatonic thirteenth-century philosophy.
+And such is the Thomism recommended by Leo XIII.
+And now the question is not one of the enforcement of
+dogma but of its philosophical, medieval, and Thomist
+interpretation. It is not enough to believe that in receiving
+the consecrated Host we receive the body and blood of our
+Lord Jesus Christ; we must needs negotiate all those
+difficulties of transubstantiation and substance separated
+from accidents, and so break with the whole of the
+modern rational conception of substantiality.</p>
+
+<p>But for this, implicit faith suffices&mdash;the faith of the
+coalheaver,<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23" /><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> the faith of those who, like St. Teresa (<i>Vida</i>,
+cap. xxv. 2), do not wish to avail themselves of theology.
+&quot;<a name="Page_76" id="Page_76" />Do not ask me the reason of that, for I am ignorant;
+Holy Mother Church possesses doctors who will know
+how to answer you,&quot; as we were made to learn in the
+Catechism. It was for this, among other things, that
+the priesthood was instituted, that the teaching Church
+might be the depositary&mdash;&quot;reservoir instead of river,&quot;
+as Phillips Brooks said&mdash;of theological secrets. &quot;The
+work of the Nicene Creed,&quot; says Harnack (<i>Dogmengeschichte</i>,
+ii. 1, cap. vii. 3), &quot;was a victory of the priesthood
+over the faith of the Christian people. The doctrine
+of the Logos had already become unintelligible to those
+who were not theologians. The setting up of the Niceno-Cappadocian
+formula as the fundamental confession of
+the Church made it perfectly impossible for the Catholic
+laity to get an inner comprehension of the Christian
+Faith, taking as their guide the form in which it was
+presented in the doctrine of the Church. The idea
+became more and more deeply implanted in men's minds
+that Christianity was the revelation of the unintelligible.&quot;
+And so, in truth, it is.</p>
+
+<p>And why was this? Because faith&mdash;that is, Life&mdash;no
+longer felt sure of itself. Neither traditionalism nor the
+theological positivism of Duns Scotus sufficed for it; it
+sought to rationalize itself. And it sought to establish
+its foundation&mdash;not, indeed, over against reason, where it
+really is, but upon reason&mdash;that is to say, within reason&mdash;itself.
+The nominalist or positivist or voluntarist position
+of Scotus&mdash;that which maintains that law and truth
+depend, not so much upon the essence as upon the free
+and inscrutable will of God&mdash;by accentuating its supreme
+irrationality, placed religion in danger among the
+majority of believers endowed with mature reason and
+not mere coalheavers. Hence the triumph of the
+Thomist theological rationalism. It is no longer enough
+to believe in the existence of God; but the sentence of
+anathema falls on him who, though believing in it, does
+not believe that His existence is demonstrable by
+<a name="Page_77" id="Page_77" />rational arguments, or who believes that up to the present
+nobody by means of these rational arguments has ever
+demonstrated it irrefutably. However, in this connection
+the remark of Pohle is perhaps capable of application:
+&quot;If eternal salvation depended upon mathematical
+axioms, we should have to expect that the most odious
+human sophistry would attack their universal validity as
+violently as it now attacks God, the soul, and Christ.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24" /><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></p>
+
+<p>The truth is, Catholicism oscillates between mysticism,
+which is the inward experience of the living God in
+Christ, an intransmittible experience, the danger of
+which, however, is that it absorbs our own personality in
+God, and so does not save our vital longing&mdash;between
+mysticism and the rationalism which it fights against (see
+Weizs&auml;cker, <i>op. cit.</i>); it oscillates between religionized
+science and scientificized religion. The apocalyptic
+enthusiasm changed little by little into neo-platonic
+mysticism, which theology thrust further into the background.
+It feared the excesses of the imagination
+which was supplanting faith and creating gnostic extravagances.
+But it had to sign a kind of pact with
+gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither
+imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely
+vanquished. And thus the body of Catholic
+dogma became a system of contradictions, more or less
+successfully harmonized. The Trinity was a kind of
+pact between monotheism and polytheism, and humanity
+and divinity sealed a peace in Christ, nature covenanted
+with grace, grace with free will, free will with the Divine
+prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps true, as
+Hermann says (<i>loc. cit.</i>), that &quot;as soon as we develop
+religious thought to its logical conclusions, it enters into
+conflict with other ideas which belong equally to the life
+of religion.&quot; And this it is that gives to Catholicism its
+profound vital dialectic. But at what a cost?</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78" />At the cost, it must needs be said, of doing violence to
+the mental exigencies of those believers in possession
+of an adult reason. It demands from them that they
+shall believe all or nothing, that they shall accept the
+complete totality of dogma or that they shall forfeit all
+merit if the least part of it be rejected. And hence the
+result, as the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed
+out,<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25" /><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> that in France and Spain there are multitudes who
+have proceeded from rejecting Popery to absolute
+atheism, because &quot;the fact is, that false and absurd
+doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to
+beget scepticism in those who received them without
+reflection. None are so likely to believe too little as those
+who have begun by believing too much.&quot; Here is,
+indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But
+no! the terrible danger comes from another quarter&mdash;from
+seeking to believe with the reason and not with life.</p>
+
+<p>The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique
+vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal
+salvation of the individual soul, satisfies the will, and
+therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to rationalize it
+by means of dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the reason.
+And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of
+life. It is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider
+as super-rational what clearly appears to us to be contra-rational,
+neither is it any good wishing to become coalheavers
+when we are not coalheavers. Infallibility, a
+notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a rationalistic
+category.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now consider the rationalist or scientific solution&mdash;or,
+more properly, dissolution&mdash;of our problem.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13" /><a href="#FNanchor_13_13">[13]</a> Erwin Rohde, <i>Psyche</i>, &quot;Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der
+Griechen.&quot; T&uuml;bingen, 1907. Up to the present this is the leading
+work dealing with the belief of the Greeks in the immortality of the
+soul.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14" /><a href="#FNanchor_14_14">[14]</a> Gal. ii. 20.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15" /><a href="#FNanchor_15_15">[15]</a> On all relating to this question see, among others, Harnack, <i>Dogmengeschichte</i>,
+ii., Teil i., Buch vii., cap. i.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Foonote_16_16" /><a href="#FNanchor_16_16">[16]</a></p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>Though we are become dust,</div>
+<div>In thee, O Lord, our hope confides,</div>
+<div>That we shall live again clad</div>
+<div>In the flesh and skin that once covered us.</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17" /><a href="#FNanchor_17_17">[17]</a> <i>Libra de la Conversi&oacute;n de la Magdelena</i>, part iv., chap. ix.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18" /><a href="#FNanchor_18_18">[18]</a> In his exposition of Protestant dogma in <i>Systematische christliche
+Religion</i>, Berlin, 1909, one of the series entitled <i>Die Kultur der Gegenwart</i>,
+published by P. Hinneberg.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19" /><a href="#FNanchor_19_19">[19]</a> The common use of the expression <i>m&uacute;sica celestial</i> to denote &quot;nonsense,
+something not worth listening to,&quot; lends it a satirical byplay which disappears
+in the English rendering.&mdash;J.E.C.F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20" /><a href="#FNanchor_20_20">[20]</a> It is not Thy promised heaven, my God, that moves me to love Thee.
+(Anonymous, sixteenth or seventeenth century. See <i>Oxford Book of Spanish
+Verse</i>, No. 106.)</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21" /><a href="#FNanchor_21_21">[21]</a> <i>Essai sur l'indiff&eacute;rence en mati&egrave;re de religion</i>, part iii., chap. i.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22" /><a href="#FNanchor_22_22">[22]</a> <i>Les Soir&eacute;es de Saint-P&eacute;tersbourg</i>, x<sup>me</sup> entretien.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23" /><a href="#FNanchor_23_23">[23]</a> The allusion is to the traditional story of the coalheaver whom the devil
+sought to convince of the irrationality of belief in the Trinity. The coalheaver
+took the cloak that he was wearing and folded it in three folds.
+&quot;Here are three folds,&quot; he said, &quot;and the cloak though threefold is yet one.&quot;
+And the devil departed baffled.&mdash;J.E.C.F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24" /><a href="#FNanchor_24_24">[24]</a> Joseph Pohle, &quot;Christlich Katolische Dogmatik,&quot; in <i>Systematische
+Christliche Religion</i>, Berlin, 1909. <i>Die Kultur der Gegenwart</i> series.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25" /><a href="#FNanchor_25_25">[25]</a> &quot;Objections to Unitarian Christianity Considered,&quot; 1816, in <i>The Complete
+Works of William Ellery Channing, D.D.</i>, London, 1884.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79" /><a name="V" id="V" />V</h2>
+
+<h2>THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION</h2>
+
+<p>The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David
+Hume, begins his essay &quot;On the Immortality of the
+Soul&quot; with these decisive words: &quot;It appears difficult
+by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality of
+the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly
+derived from metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations.
+But it is really the Gospel, and only the Gospel,
+that has brought to light life and immortality.&quot; Which
+is equivalent to denying the rationality of the belief that
+the soul of each one of us is immortal.</p>
+
+<p>Kant, whose criticism found its point of departure in
+Hume, attempted to establish the rationality of this longing
+for immortality and the belief that it imports; and
+this is the real origin, the inward origin, of his <i>Critique
+of Practical Reason</i>, and of his categorical imperative
+and of his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical
+affirmation of Hume holds good. There is no way of
+proving the immortality of the soul rationally. There
+are, on the other hand, ways of proving rationally its
+mortality.</p>
+
+<p>It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to
+enlarge here upon the extent to which the individual
+human consciousness is dependent upon the physical
+organism, pointing out how it comes to birth by slow
+degrees according as the brain receives impressions from
+the outside world, how it is temporarily suspended during
+sleep, swoons, and other accidents, and how everything
+leads us to the rational conjecture that death carries with
+it the loss of consciousness. And just as before our
+<a name="Page_80" id="Page_80" />birth we were not, nor have we any personal pre-natal
+memory, so after our death we shall cease to be. This
+is the rational position.</p>
+
+<p>The designation &quot;soul&quot; is merely a term used to
+denote the individual consciousness in its integrity and
+continuity; and that this soul undergoes change, that
+in like manner as it is integrated so it is disintegrated, is
+a thing very evident. For Aristotle it was the substantial
+form of the body&mdash;the entelechy, but not a
+substance. And more than one modern has called it an
+epiphenomenon&mdash;an absurd term. The appellation
+phenomenon suffices.</p>
+
+<p>Rationalism&mdash;and by rationalism I mean the doctrine
+that abides solely by reason, by objective truth&mdash;is
+necessarily materialist. And let not idealists be scandalized
+thereby.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is&mdash;it is necessary to be perfectly explicit in
+this matter&mdash;that what we call materialism means for us
+nothing else but the doctrine which denies the immortality
+of the individual soul, the persistence of personal
+consciousness after death.</p>
+
+<p>In another sense it may be said that, as we know what
+matter is no more than we know what spirit is, and as
+matter is for us merely an idea, materialism is idealism.
+In fact, and as regards our problem&mdash;the most vital, the
+only really vital problem&mdash;it is all the same to say that
+everything is matter as to say that everything is idea, or
+that everything is energy, or whatever you please.
+Every monist system will always seem to us materialist.
+The immortality of the soul is saved only by the dualist
+systems&mdash;those which teach that human consciousness is
+something substantially distinct and different from the
+other manifestations of phenomena. And reason is
+naturally monist. For it is the function of reason to
+understand and explain the universe, and in order to
+understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the
+soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose
+<a name="Page_81" id="Page_81" />of explaining and understanding our psychic life, for
+psychology, the hypothesis of the soul is unnecessary.
+What was formerly called rational psychology, in opposition
+to empirical psychology, is not psychology but
+metaphysics, and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it
+rational, but profoundly irrational, or rather contra-rational.</p>
+
+<p>The pretended rational doctrine of the substantiality
+and spirituality of the soul, with all the apparatus that
+accompanies it, is born simply of the necessity which
+men feel of grounding upon reason their inexpugnable
+longing for immortality and the subsequent belief in it.
+All the sophistries which aim at proving that the soul is
+substance, simple and incorruptible, proceed from this
+source. And further, the very concept of substance, as
+it was fixed and defined by scholasticism, a concept
+which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept,
+designed expressly to sustain faith in the immortality of
+the soul.</p>
+
+<p>William James, in the third of the lectures which he
+devoted to pragmatism in the Lowell Institute in Boston,
+in December, 1906, and January, 1907<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26" /><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a>&mdash;the weakest
+thing in all the work of the famous American thinker,
+an extremely weak thing indeed&mdash;speaks as follows:
+&quot;Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from
+common sense and made it very technical and articulate.
+Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences
+for us than substances, cut off as we are from
+every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism
+has proved the importance of the substance-idea by
+treating it pragmatically. I refer to certain disputes
+about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance here
+would appear to have momentous pragmatic value.
+Since the accidents of the wafer do not change in the
+Lord's Supper, and yet it has become the very body of
+<a name="Page_82" id="Page_82" />Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance
+solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn
+and the Divine substance substituted miraculously without
+altering the immediate sensible properties. But
+though these do not alter, a tremendous difference has
+been made&mdash;no less a one than this, that we who take the
+sacrament now feed upon the very substance of Divinity.
+The substance-notion breaks into life, with tremendous
+effect, if once you allow that substances can separate
+from their accidents and exchange these latter. This is
+the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea
+with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will
+only be treated seriously by those who already believe in
+the 'real presence' on independent grounds.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Now, leaving on one side the question as to whether it
+is good theology&mdash;and I do not say good reasoning
+because all this lies outside the sphere of reason&mdash;to confound
+the substance of the body&mdash;the body, not the soul&mdash;of
+Christ with the very substance of Divinity&mdash;that is
+to say, with God Himself&mdash;it would appear impossible
+that one so ardently desirous of the immortality of the
+soul as William James, a man whose whole philosophy
+aims simply at establishing this belief on rational
+grounds, should not have perceived that the pragmatic
+application of the concept of substance to the doctrine of the
+Eucharistic transubstantiation is merely a consequence of
+its anterior application to the doctrine of the immortality
+of the soul. As I explained in the preceding chapter,
+the Sacrament of the Eucharist is simply the reflection
+of the belief in immortality; it is, for the believer, the
+proof, by a mystical experience, that the soul is immortal
+and will enjoy God eternally. And the concept of substance
+was born, above all and before all, of the concept
+of the substantiality of the soul, and the latter was
+affirmed in order to confirm faith in the persistence of
+the soul after its separation from the body. Such was at
+the same time its first pragmatic application and its
+<a name="Page_83" id="Page_83" />origin. And subsequently we have transferred this concept
+to external things. It is because I feel myself to be
+substance&mdash;that is to say, permanent in the midst of my
+changes&mdash;that I attribute substantiality to those agents
+exterior to me, which are also permanent in the midst of
+their changes&mdash;just as the concept of force is born of my
+sensation of personal effort in putting a thing in motion.</p>
+
+<p>Read carefully in the first part of the <i>Summa Theologica</i>
+of St. Thomas Aquinas the first six articles of
+question lxxv., which discuss whether the human soul is
+body, whether it is something self-subsistent, whether
+such also is the soul of the lower animals, whether the soul
+is the man, whether the soul is composed of matter and
+form, and whether it is incorruptible, and then say if all
+this is not subtly intended to support the belief that this
+incorruptible substantiality of the soul renders it capable
+of receiving from God immortality, for it is clear that as
+He created it when He implanted it in the body, as St.
+Thomas says, so at its separation from the body He could
+annihilate it. And as the criticism of these proofs has
+been undertaken a hundred times, it is unnecessary to
+repeat it here.</p>
+
+<p>Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to conclude
+that our soul is a substance from the fact that our consciousness
+of our identity&mdash;and this within very narrow
+and variable limits&mdash;persists through all the changes of
+our body? We might as well say of a ship that put out
+to sea and lost first one piece of timber, which was replaced
+by another of the same shape and dimensions, then
+lost another, and so on with all her timbers, and finally
+returned to port the same ship, with the same build, the
+same sea-going qualities, recognizable by everybody as
+the same&mdash;we might as well say of such a ship that it
+had a substantial soul. Is it possible for the unforewarned
+reason to infer the simplicity of the soul from the
+fact that we have to judge and unify our thoughts?
+Thought is not one but complex, and for the reason the
+<a name="Page_84" id="Page_84" />soul is nothing but the succession of co-ordinated states
+of consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>In books of psychology written from the spiritualist
+point of view, it is customary to begin the discussion of
+the existence of the soul as a simple substance, separable
+from the body, after this style: There is in me a principle
+which thinks, wills, and feels.... Now this implies
+a begging of the question. For it is far from being an
+immediate truth that there is in me such a principle; the
+immediate truth is that I think, will, and feel. And I&mdash;the
+I that thinks, wills, and feels&mdash;am immediately my
+living body with the states of consciousness which it
+sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills, and
+feels. How? How you please.</p>
+
+<p>And they proceed to seek to establish the substantiality
+of the soul, hypostatizing the states of consciousness, and
+they begin by saying that this substance must be simple&mdash;that
+is, by opposing thought to extension, after the
+manner of the Cartesian dualism. And as Balmes was
+one of the spiritualist writers who have given the clearest
+and most concise form to the argument, I will present it
+as he expounds it in the second chapter of his <i>Curso de
+Filosofia Elemental</i>. &quot;The human soul is simple,&quot; he
+says, and adds: &quot;Simplicity consists in the absence of
+parts, and the soul has none. Let us suppose that it has
+three parts&mdash;A, B, C. I ask, Where, then, does thought
+reside? If in A only, then B and C are superfluous;
+and consequently the simple subject A will be the soul.
+If thought resides in A, B, and C, it follows that thought
+is divided into parts, which is absurd. What sort of a
+thing is a perception, a comparison, a judgement, a
+ratiocination, distributed among three subjects?&quot; A
+more obvious begging of the question cannot be conceived.
+Balmes begins by taking it for granted that the
+whole, as a whole, is incapable of making a judgement.
+He continues: &quot;The unity of consciousness is opposed
+to the division of the soul. When we think, there is a
+<a name="Page_85" id="Page_85" />subject which knows everything that it thinks, and this
+is impossible if parts be attributed to it. Of the thought
+that is in A, B and C will know nothing, and so in the
+other cases respectively. There will not, therefore, be
+<i>one</i> consciousness of the whole thought: each part will
+have its special consciousness, and there will be within
+us as many thinking beings as there are parts.&quot; The
+begging of the question continues; it is assumed without
+any proof that a whole, as a whole, cannot perceive as
+a unit. Balmes then proceeds to ask if these parts A,
+B, and C are simple or compound, and repeats his argument
+until he arrives at the conclusion that the thinking
+subject must be a part which is not a whole&mdash;that is,
+simple. The argument is based, as will be seen, upon
+the unity of apperception and of judgement. Subsequently
+he endeavours to refute the hypothesis of a communication
+of the parts among themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Balmes&mdash;and with him the <i>a priori</i> spiritualists who
+seek to rationalize faith in the immortality of the soul&mdash;ignore
+the only rational explanation, which is that apperception
+and judgement are a resultant, that perceptions
+or ideas themselves are components which agree. They
+begin by supposing something external to and distinct
+from the states of consciousness, something that is not
+the living body which supports these states, something
+that is not I but is within me.</p>
+
+<p>The soul is simple, others say, because it reflects upon
+itself as a complete whole. No; the state of consciousness
+A, in which I think of my previous state of consciousness
+B, is not the same as its predecessor. Or if
+I think of my soul, I think of an idea distinct from the
+act by which I think of it. To think that one thinks and
+nothing more, is not to think.</p>
+
+<p>The soul is the principle of life, it is said. Yes; and
+similarly the category of force or energy has been conceived
+as the principle of movement. But these are
+concepts, not phenomena, not external realities. Does
+<a name="Page_86" id="Page_86" />the principle of movement move? And only that which
+moves has external reality. Does the principle of life
+live? Hume was right when he said that he never
+encountered this idea of himself&mdash;that he only observed
+himself desiring or performing or feeling something.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27" /><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a>
+The idea of some individual thing&mdash;of this inkstand in
+front of me, of that horse standing at my gate, of these
+two and not of any other individuals of the same class&mdash;is
+the fact, the phenomenon itself. The idea of myself
+is myself.</p>
+
+<p>All the efforts to substantiate consciousness, making
+it independent of extension&mdash;remember that Descartes
+opposed thought to extension&mdash;are but sophistical
+subtilties intended to establish the rationality of faith
+in the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the
+value of objective reality to that which does not possess
+it&mdash;to that whose reality exists only in thought. And
+the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal immortality&mdash;it
+is the continuation of this present life.</p>
+
+<p>The unity of consciousness is for scientific psychology&mdash;the
+only rational psychology&mdash;simply a phenomenal
+unity. No one can say what a substantial unity is.
+And, what is more, no one can say what a substance is.
+For the notion of substance is a non-phenomenal category.
+It is a noumenon and belongs properly to the
+unknowable&mdash;that is to say, according to the sense in
+which it is understood. But in its transcendental sense
+it is something really unknowable and strictly irrational.
+It is precisely this concept of substance that an unforewarned
+mind reduces to a use that is very far from that
+pragmatic application to which William James referred.</p>
+
+<p>And this application is not saved by understanding it
+in an idealistic sense, according to the Berkeleyan principle
+that to be is to be perceived (<i>esse est percipi</i>). To
+<a name="Page_87" id="Page_87" />say that everything is idea or that everything is spirit,
+is the same as saying that everything is matter or that
+everything is energy, for if everything is idea or everything
+spirit, and if, therefore, this diamond is idea or
+spirit, just as my consciousness is, it is not plain why the
+diamond should not endure for ever, if my consciousness,
+because it is idea or spirit, endures for ever.</p>
+
+<p>George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne and
+brother in spirit to the Anglican bishop Joseph Butler,
+was equally as anxious to save the belief in the immortality
+of the soul. In the first words of the Preface to his
+<i>Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge</i>,
+he tells us that he considers that this treatise will
+be useful, &quot;particularly to those who are tainted with
+scepticism, or want a demonstration of the existence and
+immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the
+soul.&quot; In paragraph cxl. he lays it down that we have
+an idea, or rather a notion, of spirit, and that we know
+other spirits by means of our own, from which follows&mdash;so
+in the next paragraph he roundly affirms&mdash;the natural
+immortality of the soul. And here he enters upon a
+series of confusions arising from the ambiguity with
+which he invests the term notion. And after having
+established the immortality of the soul, almost as it were
+<i>per saltum</i>, on the ground that the soul is not passive like
+the body, he proceeds to tell us in paragraph cxlvii. that
+the existence of God is more evident than that of man.
+And yet, in spite of this, there are still some who are
+doubtful!</p>
+
+<p>The question was complicated by making consciousness
+a property of the soul, consciousness being something
+more than soul&mdash;that is to say, a substantial form
+of the body, the originator of all the organic functions of
+the body. The soul not only thinks, feels, and wills,
+but moves the body and prompts its vital functions; in the
+human soul are united the vegetative, animal, and rational
+functions. Such is the theory. But the soul separated
+<a name="Page_88" id="Page_88" />from the body can have neither vegetative nor animal
+functions.</p>
+
+<p>A theory, in short, which for the reason is a veritable
+contexture of confusions.</p>
+
+<p>After the Renaissance and the restoration of purely
+rational thought, emancipated from all theology, the
+doctrine of the mortality of the soul was re-established
+by the newly published writings of the second-century
+philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias and by Pietro
+Pomponazzi and others. And in point of fact, little or
+nothing can be added to what Pomponazzi has written
+in his <i>Tractatus de immortalitate anim&aelig;</i>. It is reason
+itself, and it serves nothing to reiterate his arguments.</p>
+
+<p>Attempts have not been wanting, however, to find an
+empirical support for belief in the immortality of the soul,
+and among these may be counted the work of Frederic
+W.H. Myers on <i>Human Personality and its Survival
+of Bodily Death</i>. No one ever approached more eagerly
+than myself the two thick volumes of this work in which
+the leading spirit of the Society for Psychical Research
+resumed that formidable mass of data relating to presentiments,
+apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of
+dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism,
+ecstasy, and all the rest that goes to furnish the spiritualist
+arsenal. I entered upon the reading of it not only
+without that temper of cautious suspicion which men of
+science maintain in investigations of this character, but
+even with a predisposition in its favour, as one who comes
+to seek the confirmation of his innermost longings; but
+for this reason was my disillusion all the greater. In
+spite of its critical apparatus it does not differ in any
+respect from medieval miracle-mongering. There is a
+fundamental defect of method, of logic.</p>
+
+<p>And if the belief in the immortality of the soul has
+been unable to find vindication in rational empiricism,
+neither is it satisfied with pantheism. To say that everything
+is God, and that when we die we return to God,
+<a name="Page_89" id="Page_89" />or, more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing
+nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God
+before we were born, and if when we die we return to
+where we were before being born, then the human soul,
+the individual consciousness, is perishable. And since
+we know very well that God, the personal and conscious
+God of Christian monotheism, is simply the provider,
+and above all the guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism
+is said, and rightly said, to be merely atheism
+disguised; and, in my opinion, undisguised. And they
+were right in calling Spinoza an atheist, for his is the
+most logical, the most rational, system of pantheism.</p>
+
+<p>Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather
+dissolved and submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine
+of the unknowable, which, when it has professed to wish
+to leave religious feelings scathless, has always been
+inspired by the most refined hypocrisy. The whole of
+the first part of Spencer's <i>First Principles</i>, and especially
+the fifth chapter entitled &quot;Reconciliation&quot;&mdash;that between
+reason and faith or science and religion being understood&mdash;is
+a model at the same time of philosophical superficiality
+and religious insincerity, of the most refined
+British cant. The unknowable, if it is something more
+than the merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative
+concept, a concept of limitation. And upon this
+foundation no human feeling can be built up.</p>
+
+<p>The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion
+considered as an individual and social psychic phenomenon
+irrespective of the transcendental objective validity
+of religious affirmations, is a science which, in explaining
+the origin of the belief that the soul is something
+that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the
+rationality of this belief. However much the religious
+man may repeat with Schleiermacher, &quot;Science can
+teach thee nothing; it is for science to learn from thee,&quot;
+inwardly he thinks otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always
+<a name="Page_90" id="Page_90" />found that reason confronts our longing for personal
+immortality and contradicts it. And the truth is, in all
+strictness, that reason is the enemy of life.</p>
+
+<p>A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as
+memory tends to stability. The living, the absolutely
+unstable, the absolutely individual, is, strictly, unintelligible.
+Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and
+genera, to each representation having no more than one
+single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or
+relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that
+remains the same for two successive moments of its
+existence. My idea of God is different each time that I
+conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the
+intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is
+living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in
+blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a
+body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order
+to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it
+out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead
+ideas, even though life may issue from them. Worms
+also feed upon corpses. My own thoughts, tumultuous
+and agitated in the innermost recesses of my soul, once
+they are torn from their roots in the heart, poured out
+on to this paper and there fixed in unalterable shape, are
+already only the corpses of thoughts. How, then, shall
+reason open its portals to the revelation of life? It is a
+tragic combat&mdash;it is the very essence of tragedy&mdash;this
+combat of life with reason. And truth? Is truth something
+that is lived or that is comprehended?</p>
+
+<p>It is only necessary to read the terrible <i>Parmenides</i> of
+Plato to arrive at his tragic conclusion that &quot;the one is
+and is not, and both itself and others, in relation to themselves
+and one another, are and are not, and appear to
+be and appear not to be.&quot; All that is vital is irrational,
+and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is essentially
+sceptical.</p>
+
+<p>The rational, in effect, is simply the relational; reason
+<a name="Page_91" id="Page_91" />is limited to relating irrational elements. Mathematics
+is the only perfect science, inasmuch as it adds, subtracts,
+multiplies, and divides numbers, but not real and substantial
+things, inasmuch as it is the most formal of the
+sciences. Who can extract the cube root of an ash-tree?</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless we need logic, this terrible power, in
+order to communicate thoughts and perceptions and even
+in order to think and perceive, for we think with words,
+we perceive with forms. To think is to converse with
+oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and
+logic. But may they not perhaps possess a content, an
+individual matter, incommunicable and untranslatable?
+And may not this be the source of their power?</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that man, the prisoner of logic, without
+which he cannot think, has always sought to make logic
+subservient to his desires, and principally to his fundamental
+desire. He has always sought to hold fast to
+logic, and especially in the Middle Ages, in the interests
+of theology and jurisprudence, both of which based themselves
+on what was established by authority. It was not
+until very much later that logic propounded the problem
+of knowledge, the problem of its own validity, the
+scrutiny of the metalogical foundations.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Western theology,&quot; Dean Stanley wrote, &quot;is
+essentially logical in form and based on law. The
+Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and based on
+philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman
+advocate. The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian
+sophist.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28" /><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></p>
+
+<p>And all the laboured arguments in support of our
+hunger of immortality, which pretend to be grounded on
+reason or logic, are merely advocacy and sophistry.</p>
+
+<p>The property and characteristic of advocacy is, in
+effect, to make use of logic in the interests of a thesis that
+is to be defended, while, on the other hand, the strictly
+<a name="Page_92" id="Page_92" />scientific method proceeds from the facts, the data, presented
+to us by reality, in order that it may arrive, or not
+arrive, as the case may be, at a certain conclusion. What
+is important is to define the problem clearly, whence it
+follows that progress consists not seldom in undoing
+what has been done. Advocacy always supposes a
+<i>petitio principii</i>, and its arguments are <i>ad probandum</i>.
+And theology that pretends to be rational is nothing but
+advocacy.</p>
+
+<p>Theology proceeds from dogma, and dogma, <i>&#948;&#959;&#947;&#956;&#945;</i>, in
+its primitive and most direct sense, signifies a decree,
+something akin to the Latin <i>placitum</i>, that which has
+seemed to the legislative authority fitting to be law. This
+juridical concept is the starting-point of theology. For
+the theologian, as for the advocate, dogma, law, is something
+given&mdash;a starting-point which admits of discussion
+only in respect of its application and its most exact
+interpretation. Hence it follows that the theological or
+advocatory spirit is in its principle dogmatical, while the
+strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is sceptical,
+<i>&#963;&#954;&#949;&#960;&#964;&#953;&#954;&#959;&#962;</i>&mdash;that is, investigative. It is so at least in its
+principle, for there is the other sense of the term scepticism,
+that which is most usual to-day, that of a system
+of doubt, suspicion, and uncertainty, and this has arisen
+from the theological or advocatory use of reason, from
+the abuse of dogmatism. The endeavour to apply the
+law of authority, the <i>placitum</i>, the dogma, to different
+and sometimes contraposed practical necessities, is what
+has engendered the scepticism of doubt. It is advocacy,
+or what amounts to the same thing, theology, that
+teaches the distrust of reason&mdash;not true science, not the
+science of investigation, sceptical in the primitive and
+direct meaning of the word, which hastens towards no
+predetermined solution nor proceeds save by the testing
+of hypotheses.</p>
+
+<p>Take the <i>Summa Theologica</i> of St. Thomas, the
+classical monument of the theology&mdash;that is, of the
+<a name="Page_93" id="Page_93" />advocacy&mdash;of Catholicism, and open it where you please.
+First comes the thesis&mdash;<i>utrum</i> ... whether such a thing
+be thus or otherwise; then the objections&mdash;<i>ad primum sic
+proceditur</i>; next the answers to these objections&mdash;<i>sed
+contra est</i> ... or <i>respondeo dicendum</i>.... Pure
+advocacy! And underlying many, perhaps most, of its
+arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be
+expressed <i>more scholastico</i> by this syllogism: I do not
+understand this fact save by giving it this explanation;
+it is thus that I must understand it, therefore this must
+be its explanation. The alternative being that I am left
+without any understanding of it at all. True science
+teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant; advocacy
+neither doubts nor believes that it does not know. It
+requires a solution.</p>
+
+<p>To the mentality that assumes, more or less consciously,
+that we must of necessity find a solution to
+every problem, belongs the argument based on the
+disastrous consequences of a thing. Take any book of
+apologetics&mdash;that is to say, of theological advocacy&mdash;and
+you will see how many times you will meet with this
+phrase&mdash;&quot;the disastrous consequences of this doctrine.&quot;
+Now the disastrous consequences of a doctrine prove at
+most that the doctrine is disastrous, but not that it is
+false, for there is no proof that the true is necessarily that
+which suits us best. The identification of the true and
+the good is but a pious wish. In his <i>&Eacute;tudes sur Blaise
+Pascal</i>, A. Vinet says: &quot;Of the two needs that unceasingly
+belabour human nature, that of happiness is not
+only the more universally felt and the more constantly
+experienced, but it is also the more imperious. And this
+need is not only of the senses; it is intellectual. It is not
+only for the <i>soul</i>; it is for the <i>mind</i> that happiness is a
+necessity. Happiness forms a part of truth.&quot; This last
+proposition&mdash;<i>le bonheur fait partie de la verit&eacute;</i>&mdash;is a
+proposition of pure advocacy, but not of science or of
+pure reason. It would be better to say that truth forms
+<a name="Page_94" id="Page_94" />a part of happiness in a Tertullianesque sense, in the
+sense of <i>credo quia absurdum</i>, which means actually
+<i>credo quia consolans</i>&mdash;I believe because it is a thing consoling
+to me.</p>
+
+<p>No, for reason, truth is that of which it can be proved
+that it is, that it exists, whether it console us or not. And
+reason is certainly not a consoling faculty. That terrible
+Latin poet Lucretius, whose apparent serenity and
+Epicurean <i>ataraxia</i> conceal so much despair, said that
+piety consists in the power to contemplate all things with
+a serene soul&mdash;<i>pacata posse mente omnia tueri</i>. And it
+was the same Lucretius who wrote that religion can persuade
+us into so great evils&mdash;<i>tantum religio potuit
+suadere malorum</i>. And it is true that religion&mdash;above
+all the Christian religion&mdash;has been, as the Apostle says,
+to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the intellectuals
+foolishness.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29" /><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> The Christian religion, the religion of the
+immortality of the soul, was called by Tacitus a pernicious
+superstition (<i>exitialis superstitio</i>), and he asserted
+that it involved a hatred of mankind (<i>odium generis
+humani</i>).</p>
+
+<p>Speaking of the age in which these men lived, the
+most genuinely rationalistic age in the world's history,
+Flaubert, writing to Madame Roger des Genettes,
+uttered these pregnant words: &quot;You are right; we must
+speak with respect of Lucretius; I see no one who can
+compare with him except Byron, and Byron has not his
+gravity nor the sincerity of his sadness. The melancholy
+of the ancients seems to me more profound than that of
+the moderns, who all more or less presuppose an immortality
+on the yonder side of the <i>black hole</i>. But for the
+ancients this black hole was the infinite itself; the procession
+of their dreams is imaged against a background
+of immutable ebony. The gods being no more and
+Christ being not yet, there was between Cicero and Marcus
+Aurelius a unique moment in which man stood alone.
+<a name="Page_95" id="Page_95" />Nowhere else do I find this grandeur; but what renders
+Lucretius intolerable is his physics, which he gives as if
+positive. If he is weak, it is because he did not doubt
+enough; he wished to explain, to arrive at a conclusion!&quot;<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30" /><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a></p>
+
+<p>Yes, Lucretius wished to arrive at a conclusion, a
+solution, and, what is worse, he wished to find consolation
+in reason. For there is also an anti-theological
+advocacy, and an <i>odium anti-theologicum</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Many, very many, men of science, the majority of those
+who call themselves rationalists, are afflicted by it.</p>
+
+<p>The rationalist acts rationally&mdash;that is to say, he does
+not speak out of his part&mdash;so long as he confines himself
+to denying that reason satisfies our vital hunger for immortality;
+but, furious at not being able to believe, he
+soon becomes a prey to the vindictiveness of the <i>odium
+anti-theologicum</i>, and exclaims with the Pharisees: &quot;This
+people who knoweth not the law are cursed.&quot; There is
+much truth in these words of Soloviev: &quot;I have a foreboding
+of the near approach of a time when Christians will
+gather together again in the Catacombs, because of the
+persecution of the faith&mdash;a persecution less brutal, perhaps,
+than that of Nero's day, but not less refined in its
+severity, consummated by mendacity, derision, and all
+the hypocrisies.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The anti-theological hate, the scientificist&mdash;I do not say
+scientific&mdash;fury, is manifest. Consider, not the more
+detached scientific investigators, those who know how to
+doubt, but the fanatics of rationalism, and observe with
+what gross brutality they speak of faith. Vogt considered
+it probable that the cranial structure of the
+Apostles was of a pronounced simian character; of the
+indecencies of Haeckel, that supreme incomprehender,
+there is no need to speak, nor yet of those of B&uuml;chner;
+even Virchow is not free from them. And others work
+with more subtilty. There are people who seem not to
+<a name="Page_96" id="Page_96" />be content with not believing that there is another life,
+or rather, with believing that there is none, but who are
+vexed and hurt that others should believe in it or even
+should wish that it might exist. And this attitude is as
+contemptible as that is worthy of respect which characterizes
+those who, though urged by the need they have of
+it to believe in another life, are unable to believe. But
+of this most noble attitude of the spirit, the most profound,
+the most human, and the most fruitful, the attitude
+of despair, we will speak later on.</p>
+
+<p>And the rationalists who do not succumb to the anti-theological
+fury are bent on convincing men that there
+are motives for living and consolations for having been
+born, even though there shall come a time, at the end of
+some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all
+human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And
+these motives for living and working, this thing which
+some call humanism, are the amazing products of the
+affective and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of
+its stupendous hypocrisy&mdash;a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing
+sincerity to veracity, and sworn not to confess that reason
+is a dissolvent and disconsolatory power.</p>
+
+<p>Must I repeat again what I have already said about all
+this business of manufacturing culture, of progressing,
+of realizing good, truth, and beauty, of establishing
+justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those who shall
+come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny,
+and all this without our taking thought for the ultimate
+end of each one of us? Must I again declare to you the
+supreme vacuity of culture, of science, of art, of good, of
+truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these beautiful conceptions,
+if at the last, in four days or in four millions of
+centuries&mdash;it matters not which&mdash;no human consciousness
+shall exist to appropriate this civilization, this
+science, art, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest?</p>
+
+<p>Many and very various have been the rationalist
+devices&mdash;more or less rational&mdash;by means of which from
+<a name="Page_97" id="Page_97" />the days of the Epicureans and the Stoics it has been
+sought to discover rational consolation in truth and to
+convince men, although those who sought so to do
+remained themselves unconvinced, that there are motives
+for working and lures for living, even though the human
+consciousness be destined some day to disappear.</p>
+
+<p>The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression
+of which is &quot;Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
+we die,&quot; or the Horatian <i>carpe diem</i>, which may
+be rendered by &quot;Live for the day,&quot; does not differ in its
+essence from the Stoic attitude with its &quot;Accomplish
+what the moral conscience dictates to thee, and afterward
+let it be as it may be.&quot; Both attitudes have a common
+base; and pleasure for pleasure's sake comes to the same
+as duty for duty's sake.</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza, the most logical and consistent of atheists&mdash;I
+mean of those who deny the persistence of individual
+consciousness through indefinite future time&mdash;and at the
+same time the most pious, Spinoza devoted the fifth and
+last part of his <i>Ethic</i> to elucidating the path that leads to
+liberty and to determining the concept of happiness.
+The concept! Concept, not feeling! For Spinoza, who
+was a terrible intellectualist, happiness (<i>beatitudo</i>) is a
+concept, and the love of God an intellectual love. After
+establishing in proposition xxi. of the fifth part that
+&quot;the mind can imagine nothing, neither can it remember
+anything that is past, save during the continuance of the
+body&quot;&mdash;which is equivalent to denying the immortality
+of the soul, since a soul which, disjoined from the body
+in which it lived, does not remember its past, is neither
+immortal nor is it a soul&mdash;he goes on to affirm in proposition
+xxiii. that &quot;the human mind cannot be absolutely
+destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something
+which is <i>eternal</i>,&quot; and this eternity of the mind is
+a certain mode of thinking. But do not let yourselves
+be deceived; there is no such eternity of the individual
+mind. Everything is <i>sub &aelig;ternitatis specie</i>&mdash;that is to
+<a name="Page_98" id="Page_98" />say, pure illusion. Nothing could be more dreary,
+nothing more desolating, nothing more anti-vital than
+this happiness, this <i>beatitudo</i>, of Spinoza, that consists
+in the intellectual love of the mind towards God, which
+is nothing else but the very love with which God loves
+Himself (prop, xxxvi.). Our happiness&mdash;that is to say,
+our liberty&mdash;consists in the constant and eternal love of
+God towards men. So affirms the corollary to this
+thirty-sixth proposition. And all this in order to arrive
+at the conclusion, which is the final and crowning proposition
+of the whole <i>Ethic</i>, that happiness is not the reward
+of virtue, but virtue itself. The everlasting refrain! Or,
+to put it plainly, we proceed from God and to God we
+return, which, translated into concrete language, the
+language of life and feeling, means that my personal consciousness
+sprang from nothingness, from my unconsciousness,
+and to nothingness it will return.</p>
+
+<p>And this most dreary and desolating voice of Spinoza
+is the very voice of reason. And the liberty of which he
+tells us is a terrible liberty. And against Spinoza and
+his doctrine of happiness there is only one irresistible
+argument, the argument <i>ad hominem</i>. Was he happy,
+Benedict Spinoza, while, to allay his inner unhappiness,
+he was discoursing of happiness? Was he free?</p>
+
+<p>In the corollary to proposition xli. of this same final and
+most tragic part of that tremendous tragedy of his <i>Ethic</i>,
+the poor desperate Jew of Amsterdam discourses of the
+common persuasion of the vulgar of the truth of eternal
+life. Let us hear what he says: &quot;It would appear that
+they esteem piety and religion&mdash;and, indeed, all that is referred
+to fortitude or strength of mind&mdash;as burdens which
+they expect to lay down after death, when they hope to
+receive a reward for their servitude, not for their piety
+and religion in this life. Nor is it even this hope alone
+that leads them; the fear of frightful punishments with
+which they are menaced after death also influences them
+to live&mdash;in so far as their impotence and poverty of spirit
+<a name="Page_99" id="Page_99" />permits&mdash;in conformity with the prescription of the
+Divine law. And were not this hope and this fear infused
+into the minds of men&mdash;but, on the contrary, did they
+believe that the soul perished with the body, and that,
+beyond the grave, there was no other life prepared for the
+wretched who had borne the burden <i>of piety</i> in this&mdash;they
+would return to their natural inclinations, preferring to
+accommodate everything to their own liking, and would
+follow fortune rather than reason. But all this appears
+no less absurd than it would be to suppose that a man,
+because he did not believe that he could nourish his body
+eternally with wholesome food, would saturate himself
+with deadly poisons; or than if because believing that his
+soul was not eternal and immortal, he should therefore
+prefer to be without a soul (<i>amens</i>) and to live without
+reason; all of which is so absurd as to be scarcely worth
+refuting (<i>qu&aelig; adeo absurda sunt, ut vix recenseri
+mereantur</i>).&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may
+be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid&mdash;in which case
+all comment is superfluous&mdash;or it is something formidable,
+the very crux of the problem. And this it is in this
+case. Yes! poor Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland,
+yes! that he who is convinced without a vestige of doubt,
+without the faintest hope of any saving uncertainty, that
+his soul is not immortal, should prefer to be without a
+soul (<i>amens</i>), or irrational, or idiot, that he should prefer
+not to have been born, is a supposition that has nothing,
+absolutely nothing, absurd in it. Was he happy, the
+poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and
+of happiness? For that and no other is the problem.
+&quot;What does it profit thee to know the definition of compunction
+if thou dost not feel it?&quot; says &agrave; Kempis.
+And what profits it to discuss or to define happiness if
+you cannot thereby achieve happiness? Not inapposite
+in this connection is that terrible story that Diderot tells
+of a eunuch who desired to take lessons in esthetics from
+<a name="Page_100" id="Page_100" />a native of Marseilles in order that he might be better
+qualified to select the slaves destined for the harem of
+the Sultan, his master. At the end of the first lesson, a
+physiological lesson, brutally and carnally physiological,
+the eunuch exclaimed bitterly, &quot;It is evident that I shall
+never know esthetics!&quot; Even so, and just as eunuchs
+will never know esthetics as applied to the selection of
+beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever
+know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness,
+for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a
+thing that is reasoned about or defined.</p>
+
+<p>And you have another rationalist, one not sad or submissive,
+like Spinoza, but rebellious, and though concealing
+a despair not less bitter, making a hypocritical
+pretence of light-heartedness, you have Nietzsche, who
+discovered <i>mathematically</i> (!!!) that counterfeit of the
+immortality of the soul which is called &quot;eternal recurrence,&quot;
+and which is in fact the most stupendous tragi-comedy
+or comi-tragedy. The number of atoms or
+irreducible primary elements being finite and the universe
+eternal, a combination identical with that which at present
+exists must at some future time be reproduced, and therefore
+that which now is must be repeated an infinite number
+of times. This is evident, and just as I shall live
+again the life that I am now living, so I have already
+lived it before an infinite number of times, for there is an
+eternity that stretches into the past&mdash;<i>a parte ante</i>&mdash;just
+as there will be one stretching into the future&mdash;<i>a parte
+post</i>. But, unfortunately, it happens that I remember
+none of my previous existences, and perhaps it is impossible
+that I should remember them, for two things absolutely
+and completely identical are but one. Instead of
+supposing that we live in a finite universe, composed of a
+finite number of irreducible primary elements, suppose
+that we live in an infinite universe, without limits in
+space&mdash;which concrete infinity is not less inconceivable
+than the concrete eternity in time&mdash;then it will follow that
+<a name="Page_101" id="Page_101" />this system of ours, that of the Milky Way, is repeated an
+infinite number of times in the infinite of space, and that
+therefore I am now living an infinite number of lives, all
+exactly identical. A jest, as you see, but one not less
+comic&mdash;that is to say, not less tragic&mdash;than that of
+Nietzsche, that of the laughing lion. And why does the
+lion laugh? I think he laughs with rage, because he can
+never succeed in finding consolation in the thought that
+he has been the same lion before and is destined to be
+the same lion again.</p>
+
+<p>But if Spinoza and Nietzsche were indeed both
+rationalists, each after his own manner, they were not
+spiritual eunuchs; they had heart, feeling, and, above all,
+hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for immortality. The
+physical eunuch does not feel the need of reproducing
+himself carnally, in the body, and neither does the
+spiritual eunuch feel the hunger for self-perpetuation.</p>
+
+<p>Certain it is that there are some who assert that reason
+suffices them, and they counsel us to desist from seeking
+to penetrate into the impenetrable. But of those who say
+that they have no need of any faith in an eternal personal
+life to furnish them with incentives to living and motives
+for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind
+from birth may also assure us that he feels no great
+longing to enjoy the world of sight nor suffers any great
+anguish from not having enjoyed it, and we must needs
+believe him, for what is wholly unknown cannot be the
+object of desire&mdash;<i>nihil volitum quin pr&aelig;cognitum</i>, there
+can be no volition save of things already known. But I
+cannot be persuaded that he who has once in his life,
+either in his youth or for some other brief space of time,
+cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will
+ever find peace without it. And of this sort of blindness
+from birth there are but few instances among us, and then
+only by a kind of strange aberration. For the merely and
+exclusively rational man is an aberration and nothing but
+an aberration.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102" />More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say:
+&quot;We must not talk about it, for in talking about it we
+only waste our time and weaken our will; let us do our
+duty here and hereafter let come what may.&quot; But this
+sincerity hides a yet deeper insincerity. May it perhaps
+be that by saying &quot;We must not talk about it,&quot; they
+succeed in not thinking about it? Our will is weakened?
+And what then? We lose the capacity for human
+action? And what then? It is very convenient to tell
+a man whom a fatal disease condemns to an early death,
+and who knows it, not to think about it.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Meglio oprando obliar, senz&aacute; indagarlo,</i></div>
+<div><i>Questo enorme mister del universo!</i></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>&quot;Better to work and to forget and not to probe into
+this vast mystery of the universe!&quot; Carducci wrote in his
+<i>Idilio Maremmano</i>, the same Carducci who at the close
+of his ode <i>Sul Monte Mario</i> tells us how the earth, the
+mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory
+and sorrow round the sun &quot;until, worn out beneath the
+equator, mocked by the last flames of dying heat, the
+exhausted human race is reduced to a single man and
+woman, who, standing in the midst of dead woods, surrounded
+by sheer mountains, livid, with glassy eyes
+watch thee, O sun, set across the immense frozen waste.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But is it possible for us to give ourselves to any serious
+and lasting work, forgetting the vast mystery of the
+universe and abandoning all attempt to understand it?
+Is it possible to contemplate the vast All with a serene
+soul, in the spirit of the Lucretian piety, if we are conscious
+of the thought that a time must come when this All
+will no longer be reflected in any human consciousness?</p>
+
+<p>Cain, in Byron's poem, asks of Lucifer, the prince of
+the intellectuals, &quot;Are ye happy?&quot; and Lucifer replies,
+&quot;We are mighty.&quot; Cain questions again, &quot;Are ye
+happy?&quot; and then the great Intellectual says to him:
+&quot;No; art thou?&quot; And further on, this same Lucifer
+says to Adah, the sister and wife of Cain: &quot;Choose
+<a name="Page_103" id="Page_103" />betwixt love and knowledge&mdash;since there is no other
+choice.&quot; And in the same stupendous poem, when Cain
+says that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was
+a lying tree, for &quot;we know nothing; at least it promised
+knowledge at the price of death,&quot; Lucifer answers him:
+&quot;It may be death leads to the highest knowledge&quot;&mdash;that
+is to say, to nothingness.</p>
+
+<p>To this word <i>knowledge</i> which Lord Byron uses in the
+above quotations, the Spanish <i>ciencia</i>, the French
+<i>science</i>, the German <i>Wissenschaft</i>, is often opposed
+the word <i>wisdom, sabiduria, sagesse, Weisheit</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,</div>
+<div>Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest,</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>says another lord, Tennyson, in his <i>Locksley Hall</i>. And
+what is this wisdom which we have to seek chiefly in the
+poets, leaving knowledge on one side? It is well
+enough to say with Matthew Arnold in his Introduction
+to Wordsworth's poems, that poetry is reality and
+philosophy illusion; but reason is always reason and
+reality is always reality, that which can be proved to
+exist externally to us, whether we find in it consolation
+or despair.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know why so many people were scandalized,
+or pretended to be scandalized, when Bruneti&egrave;re proclaimed
+again the bankruptcy of science. For science
+as a substitute for religion and reason as a substitute
+for faith have always fallen to pieces. Science will be
+able to satisfy, and in fact does satisfy in an increasing
+measure, our increasing logical or intellectual needs,
+our desire to know and understand the truth; but science
+does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, and
+far from satisfying our hunger for immortality it contradicts
+it. Rational truth and life stand in opposition to
+one another. And is it possible that there is any other
+truth than rational truth?</p>
+
+<p>It must remain established, therefore, that reason&mdash;human
+reason&mdash;within its limits, not only does not prove
+<a name="Page_104" id="Page_104" />rationally that the soul is immortal or that the human
+consciousness shall preserve its indestructibility through
+the tracts of time to come, but that it proves rather&mdash;within
+its limits, I repeat&mdash;that the individual consciousness
+cannot persist after the death of the physical
+organism upon which it depends. And these limits,
+within which I say that human reason proves this, are
+the limits of rationality, of what is known by demonstration.
+Beyond these limits is the irrational, which,
+whether it be called the super-rational or the infra-rational
+or the contra-rational, is all the same thing.
+Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the
+impossible of the <i>certum est, quia impossibile est</i>. And
+this absurd can only base itself upon the most absolute
+uncertainty.</p>
+
+<p>The rational dissolution ends in dissolving reason
+itself; it ends in the most absolute scepticism, in the
+phenomenalism of Hume or in the doctrine of absolute
+contingencies of Stuart Mill, the most consistent and
+logical of the positivists. The supreme triumph of
+reason, the analytical&mdash;that is, the destructive and dissolvent&mdash;faculty,
+is to cast doubt upon its own validity.
+The stomach that contains an ulcer ends by digesting
+itself; and reason ends by destroying the immediate and
+absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept
+of necessity. Both concepts are relative; there is
+no absolute truth, no absolute necessity. We call a
+concept true which agrees with the general system of all
+our concepts; and we call a perception true which does
+not contradict the system of our perceptions. Truth is
+coherence. But as regards the whole system, the aggregate,
+as there is nothing outside of it of which we have
+knowledge, we cannot say whether it is true or not. It
+is conceivable that the universe, as it exists in itself, outside
+of our consciousness, may be quite other than it
+appears to us, although this is a supposition that has no
+meaning for reason. And as regards necessity, is there
+<a name="Page_105" id="Page_105" />an absolute necessity? By necessary we mean merely
+that which is, and in so far as it is, for in another more
+transcendental sense, what absolute necessity, logical
+and independent of the fact that the universe exists, is
+there that there should be a universe or anything else
+at all?</p>
+
+<p>Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less
+than scepticism, in the most modern sense of the term,
+is the supreme triumph of the reasoning reason.</p>
+
+<p>Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation
+into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth
+into consolation. But reason going beyond truth itself,
+beyond the concept of reality itself, succeeds in plunging
+itself into the depths of scepticism. And in this abyss
+the scepticism of the reason encounters the despair of
+the heart, and this encounter leads to the discovery of
+a basis&mdash;a terrible basis!&mdash;for consolation to build on.</p>
+
+<p>Let us examine it.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26" /><a href="#FNanchor_26_26">[26]</a> <i>Pragmatism, a New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking</i>. Popular
+lectures on philosophy by William James, 1907.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27" /><a href="#FNanchor_27_27">[27]</a> <i>Treatise of Human Nature</i>, book i., part iv., sect. vi., &quot;Of Personal
+Identity&quot;: &quot;I never can catch <i>myself</i> at any time without a perception, and
+never can observe anything but the perception.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28" /><a href="#FNanchor_28_28">[28]</a> Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, <i>Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church</i>,
+lecture i., sect. iii.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29" /><a href="#FNanchor_29_29">[29]</a> 1 Cor. i. 23.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30" /><a href="#FNanchor_30_30">[30]</a> Gustave Flaubert, <i>Correspondance</i>, troisi&egrave;me s&eacute;rie (1854-1869). Paris,
+1910.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106" /><a name="VI" id="VI" />VI</h2>
+
+<h2>IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS</h2>
+
+<blockquote><p><i>Parce unic&aelig; spes totius orbis.</i>&mdash;TERTULLIANUS, Adversus Marcionem, 5.</p></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>We have seen that the vital longing for human immortality
+finds no consolation in reason and that reason
+leaves us without incentive or consolation in life and life
+itself without real finality. But here, in the depths of
+the abyss, the despair of the heart and of the will and the
+scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace like
+brothers. And we shall see it is from this embrace, a
+tragic&mdash;that is to say, an intimately loving&mdash;embrace,
+that the wellspring of life will flow, a life serious and
+terrible. Scepticism, uncertainty&mdash;the position to which
+reason, by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its
+own validity, at last arrives&mdash;is the foundation upon
+which the heart's despair must build up its hope.</p>
+
+<p>Disillusioned, we had to abandon the position of those
+who seek to give consolation the force of rational and
+logical truth, pretending to prove the rationality, or at
+any rate the non-irrationality, of consolation; and we had
+to abandon likewise the position of those who seek to
+give rational truth the force of consolation and of a
+motive for life. Neither the one nor the other of these
+positions satisfied us. The one is at variance with our
+reason, the other with our feeling. These two powers
+can never conclude peace and we must needs live by their
+war. We must make of this war, of war itself, the very
+condition of our spiritual life.</p>
+
+<p>Neither does this high debate admit of that indecent
+and repugnant expedient which the more or less parliamentary
+type of politician has devised and dubbed &quot;a
+formula of agreement,&quot; the property of which is to render
+<a name="Page_107" id="Page_107" />it impossible for either side to claim to be victorious.
+There is no place here for a time-serving compromise.
+Perhaps a degenerate and cowardly reason might bring
+itself to propose some such formula of agreement, for in
+truth reason lives by formulas; but life, which cannot
+be formulated, life which lives and seeks to live for ever,
+does not submit to formulas. Its sole formula is: all or
+nothing. Feeling does not compound its differences
+with middle terms.</p>
+
+<p><i>Initium sapienti&aelig; timor Domini</i>, it is said, meaning
+perhaps <i>timor mortis</i>, or it may be, <i>timor vit&aelig;</i>, which is
+the same thing. Always it comes about that the beginning
+of wisdom is a fear.</p>
+
+<p>Is it true to say of this saving scepticism which I am
+now going to discuss, that it is doubt? It is doubt, yes,
+but it is much more than doubt. Doubt is commonly
+something very cold, of very little vitalizing force, and
+above all something rather artificial, especially since
+Descartes degraded it to the function of a method. The
+conflict between reason and life is something more than
+a doubt. For doubt is easily resolved into a comic
+element.</p>
+
+<p>The methodical doubt of Descartes is a comic doubt, a
+doubt purely theoretical and provisional&mdash;that is to say,
+the doubt of a man who acts as if he doubted without
+really doubting. And because it was a stove-excogitated
+doubt, the man who deduced that he existed from the
+fact that he thought did not approve of &quot;those turbulent
+(<i>brouillonnes</i>) and restless persons who, being called
+neither by birth nor by fortune to the management of
+public affairs, are perpetually devising some new reformation,&quot;
+and he was pained by the suspicion that there might
+be something of this kind in his own writings. No, he,
+Descartes, proposed only to &quot;reform his own thoughts
+and to build upon ground that was wholly his.&quot; And he
+resolved not to accept anything as true when he did not
+recognize it clearly to be so, and to make a clean sweep of
+<a name="Page_108" id="Page_108" />all prejudices and received ideas, to the end that he might
+construct his intellectual habitation anew. But &quot;as it is
+not enough, before beginning to rebuild one's dwelling-house,
+to pull it down and to furnish materials and architects,
+or to study architecture oneself ... but it is also
+necessary to be provided with some other wherein to lodge
+conveniently while the work is in progress,&quot; he framed for
+himself a provisional ethic&mdash;<i>une morale de provision</i>&mdash;the
+first law of which was to observe the customs of his
+country and to keep always to the religion in which, by the
+grace of God, he had been instructed from his infancy,
+governing himself in all things according to the most
+moderate opinions. Yes, exactly, a provisional religion
+and even a provisional God! And he chose the most
+moderate opinions &quot;because these are always the most
+convenient for practice.&quot; But it is best to proceed no
+further.</p>
+
+<p>This methodical or theoretical Cartesian doubt, this
+philosophical doubt excogitated in a stove, is not the
+doubt, is not the scepticism, is not the incertitude, that I
+am talking about here. No! This other doubt is a passionate
+doubt, it is the eternal conflict between reason and
+feeling, science and life, logic and biotic. For science
+destroys the concept of personality by reducing it to a
+complex in continual flux from moment to moment&mdash;that
+is to say, it destroys the very foundation of the spiritual
+and emotional life, which ranges itself unyieldingly
+against reason.</p>
+
+<p>And this doubt cannot avail itself of any provisional
+ethic, but has to found its ethic, as we shall see, on the conflict
+itself, an ethic of battle, and itself has to serve as the
+foundation of religion. And it inhabits a house which is
+continually being demolished and which continually it
+has to rebuild. Without ceasing the will, I mean the will
+never to die, the spirit of unsubmissiveness to death,
+labours to build up the house of life, and without ceasing
+the keen blasts and stormy assaults of reason beat it down.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109" />And more than this, in the concrete vital problem that
+concerns us, reason takes up no position whatever. In
+truth, it does something worse than deny the immortality
+of the soul&mdash;for that at any rate would be one solution&mdash;it
+refuses even to recognize the problem as our vital desire
+presents it to us. In the rational and logical sense of the
+term problem, there is no such problem. This question
+of the immortality of the soul, of the persistence of the
+individual consciousness, is not rational, it falls outside
+reason. As a problem, and whatever solution it may
+receive, it is irrational. Rationally even the very propounding
+of the problem lacks sense. The immortality
+of the soul is as unconceivable as, in all strictness, is its
+absolute mortality. For the purpose of explaining the
+world and existence&mdash;and such is the task of reason&mdash;it is
+not necessary that we should suppose that our soul is
+either mortal or immortal. The mere enunciation of the
+problem is, therefore, an irrationality.</p>
+
+<p>Let us hear what our brother Kierkegaard has to say.
+&quot;The danger of abstract thought is seen precisely in
+respect of the problem of existence, the difficulty of which
+it solves by going round it, afterwards boasting that it
+has completely explained it. It explains immortality in
+general, and it does so in a remarkable way by identifying
+it with eternity&mdash;with the eternity which is essentially the
+medium of thought. But with the immortality of each
+individually existing man, wherein precisely the difficulty
+lies, abstraction does not concern itself, is not interested
+in it. And yet the difficulty of existence lies just in the
+interest of the existing being&mdash;the man who exists is
+infinitely interested in existing. Abstract thought
+besteads immortality only in order that it may kill me as
+an individual being with an individual existence, and so
+make me immortal, pretty much in the same way as that
+famous physician in one of Holberg's plays, whose
+medicine, while it took away the patient's fever, took
+away his life at the same time. An abstract thinker, who
+<a name="Page_110" id="Page_110" />refuses to disclose and admit the relation that exists
+between his abstract thought and the fact that he is an
+existing being, produces a comic impression upon us,
+however accomplished and distinguished he may be, for
+he runs the risk of ceasing to be a man. While an
+effective man, compounded of infinitude and finitude,
+owes his effectiveness precisely to the conjunction of these
+two elements and is infinitely interested in existing, an
+abstract thinker, similarly compounded, is a double
+being, a fantastical being, who lives in the pure being of
+abstraction, and at times presents the sorry figure of a
+professor who lays aside this abstract essence as he lays
+aside his walking-stick. When one reads the Life of a
+thinker of this kind&mdash;whose writings may be excellent&mdash;one
+trembles at the thought of what it is to be a man.
+And when one reads in his writings that thinking and
+being are the same thing, one thinks, remembering his
+life, that that being, which is identical with thinking,
+is not precisely the same thing as being a man&quot;
+(<i>Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift</i>, chap. iii.).</p>
+
+<p>What intense passion&mdash;that is to say, what truth&mdash;there
+is in this bitter invective against Hegel, prototype of the
+rationalist!&mdash;for the rationalist takes away our fever by
+taking away our life, and promises us, instead of a concrete,
+an abstract immortality, as if the hunger for
+immortality that consumes us were an abstract and not a
+concrete hunger!</p>
+
+<p>It may indeed be said that when once the dog is dead
+there is an end to the rabies, and that after I have died I
+shall no more be tortured by this rage of not dying, and
+that the fear of death, or more properly, of nothingness,
+is an irrational fear, but ... Yes, but ... <i>Eppur si
+muove!</i> And it will go on moving. For it is the source
+of all movement!</p>
+
+<p>I doubt, however, whether our brother Kierkegaard is
+altogether in the right, for this same abstract thinker,
+or thinker of abstractions, thinks <i>in order that</i> he may
+<a name="Page_111" id="Page_111" />exist, that he may not cease to exist, or thinks perhaps in
+order to forget that he will have to cease to exist. This
+is the root of the passion for abstract thought. And
+possibly Hegel was as infinitely interested as Kierkegaard
+in his own concrete, individual existence, although the
+professional decorum of the state-philosopher compelled
+him to conceal the fact.</p>
+
+<p>Faith in immortality is irrational. And, notwithstanding,
+faith, life, and reason have mutual need of one
+another. This vital longing is not properly a problem,
+cannot assume a logical status, cannot be formulated in
+propositions susceptible of rational discussion; but it
+announces itself in us as hunger announces itself.
+Neither can the wolf that throws itself with the fury of
+hunger upon its prey or with the fury of instinct upon
+the she-wolf, enunciate its impulse rationally and as a
+logical problem. Reason and faith are two enemies,
+neither of which can maintain itself without the other.
+The irrational demands to be rationalized and reason only
+can operate on the irrational. They are compelled to
+seek mutual support and association. But association in
+struggle, for struggle is a mode of association.</p>
+
+<p>In the world of living beings the struggle for life
+establishes an association, and a very close one, not only
+between those who unite together in combat against a
+common foe, but between the combatants themselves.
+And is there any possible association more intimate than
+that uniting the animal that eats another and the animal
+that is eaten, between the devourer and the devoured?
+And if this is clearly seen in the struggle between
+individuals, it is still more evident in the struggle between
+peoples. War has always been the most effective factor
+of progress, even more than commerce. It is through
+war that conquerors and conquered learn to know each
+other and in consequence to love each other.</p>
+
+<p>Christianity, the foolishness of the Cross, the irrational
+faith that Christ rose from the dead in order to raise us
+<a name="Page_112" id="Page_112" />from the dead, was saved by the rationalistic Hellenic
+culture, and this in its turn was saved by Christianity.
+Without Christianity the Renaissance would have been
+impossible. Without the Gospel, without St. Paul, the
+peoples who had traversed the Middle Ages would have
+understood neither Plato nor Aristotle. A purely
+rationalist tradition is as impossible as a tradition purely
+religious. It is frequently disputed whether the Reformation
+was born as the child of the Renaissance or as a protest
+against it, and both propositions may be said to be
+true, for the son is always born as a protest against the
+father. It is also said that it was the revived Greek
+classics that led men like Erasmus back to St. Paul and to
+primitive Christianity, which is the most irrational form
+of Christianity; but it may be retorted that it was St. Paul,
+that it was the Christian irrationality underlying his
+Catholic theology, that led them back to the classics.
+&quot;Christianity is what it has come to be,&quot; it has been
+said, &quot;only through its alliance with antiquity, while
+with the Copts and Ethiopians it is but a kind of
+buffoonery. Islam developed under the influence of Persian
+and Greek culture, and under that of the Turks it
+has been transformed into a destructive barbarism.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31" /><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></p>
+
+<p>We have emerged from the Middle Ages, from the
+medieval faith as ardent as it was at heart despairing, and
+not without its inward and abysmal incertitudes, and we
+have entered upon the age of rationalism, likewise not
+without its incertitudes. Faith in reason is exposed to
+the same rational indefensibility as all other faith. And
+we may say with Robert Browning,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>All we have gained, then, by our unbelief</div>
+<div>Is a life of doubt diversified by faith</div>
+<div>For one of faith diversified by doubt.</div>
+<div class='i6'>(<i>Bishop Blougram's Apology</i>.)</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113" />And if, as I have said, faith, life, can only sustain
+itself by leaning upon reason, which renders it transmissible&mdash;and
+above all transmissible from myself to
+myself&mdash;that is to say, reflective and conscious&mdash;it is none
+the less true that reason in its turn can only sustain itself
+by leaning upon faith, upon life, even if only upon faith
+in reason, faith in its availability for something more
+than mere knowing, faith in its availability for living.
+Nevertheless, neither is faith transmissible or rational,
+nor is reason vital.</p>
+
+<p>The will and the intelligence have need of one another,
+and the reverse of that old aphorism, <i>nihil volitum quin
+pr&aelig;cognitum</i>, nothing is willed but what is previously
+known, is not so paradoxical as at first sight it may
+appear&mdash;<i>nihil cognitum quin pr&aelig;volitum</i>, nothing is
+known but what is previously willed. Vinet, in his study
+of Cousin's book on the <i>Pens&eacute;es</i> of Pascal, says: &quot;The
+very knowledge of the mind as such has need of the heart.
+Without the desire to see there is no seeing; in a great
+materialization of life and of thought there is no believing
+in the things of the spirit.&quot; We shall see presently that
+to believe is, in the first instance, to wish to believe.</p>
+
+<p>The will and the intelligence seek opposite ends: that
+we may absorb the world into ourselves, appropriate it to
+ourselves, is the aim of the will; that we may be absorbed
+into the world, that of the intelligence. Opposite ends?&mdash;are
+they not rather one and the same? No, they are
+not, although they may seem to be so. The intelligence
+is monist or pantheist, the will monotheist or egoist.
+The intelligence has no need of anything outside it to
+exercise itself upon; it builds its foundation with ideas
+themselves, while the will requires matter. To know
+something is to make this something that I know myself;
+but to avail myself of it, to dominate it, it has to remain
+distinct from myself.</p>
+
+<p>Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they
+are enemies they have need of one another. There is no
+<a name="Page_114" id="Page_114" />religion without some philosophic basis, no philosophy
+without roots in religion. Each lives by its contrary.
+The history of philosophy is, strictly speaking, a history
+of religion. And the attacks which are directed against
+religion from a presumed scientific or philosophical point
+of view are merely attacks from another but opposing religious
+point of view. &quot;The opposition which professedly
+exists between natural science and Christianity really
+exists between an impulse derived from natural religion
+blended with the scientific investigation of nature, and
+the validity of the Christian view of the world,
+which assures to spirit its pre-eminence over the entire
+world of nature,&quot; says Ritschl (<i>Rechtfertgung und
+Vers&ouml;hnung</i>, iii. chap. iv. &sect; 28). Now this instinct is
+the instinct of rationality itself. And the critical
+idealism of Kant is of religious origin, and it is
+in order to save religion that Kant enlarged the limits
+of reason after having in a certain sense dissolved it
+in scepticism. The system of antitheses, contradictions,
+and antinomies, upon which Hegel constructed his absolute
+idealism, has its root and germ in Kant himself, and
+this root is an irrational root.</p>
+
+<p>We shall see later on, when we come to deal with faith,
+that faith is in its essence simply a matter of will, not of
+reason, that to believe is to wish to believe, and to believe
+in God is, before all and above all, to wish that there may
+be a God. In the same way, to believe in the immortality
+of the soul is to wish that the soul may be immortal, but
+to wish it with such force that this volition shall trample
+reason under foot and pass beyond it. But reason has
+its revenge.</p>
+
+<p>The instinct of knowing and the instinct of living, or
+rather of surviving, come into conflict. In his work on
+the <i>Analysis of the Sensations and the Relation of the
+Physical to the Psychical</i>,<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32" /><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> Dr. E. Mach tells us that not
+<a name="Page_115" id="Page_115" />even the investigator, the savant, <i>der Forscher</i>, is
+exempted from taking his part in the struggle for existence,
+that even the roads of science lead mouth-wards,
+and that in the actual conditions of the society in which
+we live the pure instinct of knowing, <i>der reine Erkenntnisstrieb</i>,
+is still no more than an ideal. And so it always
+will be. <i>Primum vivere, deinde philosophari</i>, or perhaps
+better, <i>primum supervivere</i> or <i>superesse</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Every position of permanent agreement or harmony
+between reason and life, between philosophy and religion,
+becomes impossible. And the tragic history of human
+thought is simply the history of a struggle between reason
+and life&mdash;reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing it
+to submit to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on
+vitalizing reason and forcing it to serve as a support for
+its own vital desires. And this is the history of
+philosophy, inseparable from the history of religion.</p>
+
+<p>Our sense of the world of objective reality is necessarily
+subjective, human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will
+always rise up against rationalism; reason will always
+find itself confronted by will. Hence the rhythm of the
+history of philosophy and the alternation of periods in
+which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual forms,
+with those in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to
+materialist forms, although both of these classes of forms
+of belief may be disguised by other names. Neither
+reason nor life ever acknowledges itself vanquished. But
+we will return to this in the next chapter.</p>
+
+<p>The vital consequence of rationalism would be suicide.
+Kierkegaard puts it very well: &quot;The consequence for
+existence<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33" /><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> of pure thought is suicide.... We do not
+praise suicide but passion. The thinker, on the contrary,
+is a curious animal&mdash;for a few spells during the day he is
+very intelligent, but, for the rest, he has nothing in
+<a name="Page_116" id="Page_116" />common with man&quot; (<i>Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift</i>,
+chap iii., &sect; 1).</p>
+
+<p>As the thinker, in spite of all, does not cease to be a
+man, he employs reason in the interests of life, whether
+he knows it or not. Life cheats reason and reason cheats
+life. Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy fabricated in the
+interest of life a teleologic-evolutionist system, rational in
+appearance, which might serve as a support for our vital
+longing. This philosophy, the basis of the orthodox
+Christian supernaturalism, whether Catholic or Protestant,
+was, in its essence, merely a trick on the part of
+life to force reason to lend it its support. But reason
+supported it with such pressure that it ended by pulverizing it.</p>
+
+<p>I have read that the ex-Carmelite, Hyacinthe Loyson,
+declared that he could present himself before God with
+tranquillity, for he was at peace with his conscience and
+with his reason. With what conscience? If with his
+religious conscience, then I do not understand. For it
+is a truth that no man can serve two masters, and least of
+all when, though they may sign truces and armistices
+and compromises, these two are enemies because of
+their conflicting interests.</p>
+
+<p>To all this someone is sure to object that life ought to
+subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody
+ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject
+itself to reason. &quot;Ought, therefore can,&quot; some Kantian
+will retort. To which we shall demur: &quot;Cannot,
+therefore ought not.&quot; And life cannot submit itself to
+reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.</p>
+
+<p>Again, there are those who talk of the religious duty of
+resignation to mortality. This is indeed the very summit
+of aberration and insincerity. But someone is sure to
+oppose the idea of veracity to that of sincerity. Granted,
+and yet the two may very well be reconciled. Veracity,
+the homage I owe to what I believe to be rational, to what
+<a name="Page_117" id="Page_117" />logically we call truth, moves me to affirm, in this case,
+that the immortality of the individual soul is a contradiction
+in terms, that it is something, not only irrational,
+but contra-rational; but sincerity leads me to affirm also
+my refusal to resign myself to this previous affirmation
+and my protest against its validity. What I feel is a
+truth, at any rate as much a truth as what I see, touch,
+hear, or what is demonstrated to me&mdash;nay, I believe it is
+more of a truth&mdash;and sincerity obliges me not to hide
+what I feel.</p>
+
+<p>And life, quick to defend itself, searches for the weak
+point in reason and finds it in scepticism, which it
+straightway fastens upon, seeking to save itself by means
+of this stranglehold. It needs the weakness of its adversary.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is sure. Everything is elusive and in the air.
+In an outburst of passion Lamennais exclaims: &quot;But
+what! Shall we, losing all hope, shut our eyes and plunge
+into the voiceless depths of a universal scepticism? Shall
+we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature
+does not allow it; she forces us to believe even when our
+reason is not convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute
+doubt are both alike forbidden to us. We hover in a
+vague mean between these two extremes, as between being
+and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be the
+extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man.
+But it is not given to man to annihilate himself; there is
+in him something which invincibly resists destruction, I
+know not what vital faith, indomitable even by his will.
+Whether he likes it or not, he must believe, because he
+must act, because he must preserve himself. His reason,
+if he listened only to that, teaching him to doubt everything,
+itself included, would reduce him to a state of
+absolute inaction; he would perish before even he had
+been able to prove to himself that he existed&quot; (<i>Essai
+sur l'indiff&eacute;rence en mati&egrave;re de religion</i>, iii<sup>e</sup> partie,
+chap. lxvii.).</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118" />Reason, however, does not actually lead us to absolute
+scepticism. No! Reason does not lead me and cannot
+lead me to doubt that I exist. Whither reason does lead
+me is to vital scepticism, or more properly, to vital negation&mdash;not
+merely to doubt, but to deny, that my consciousness
+survives my death. Scepticism is produced by
+the clash between reason and desire. And from this
+clash, from this embrace between despair and scepticism,
+is born that holy, that sweet, that saving incertitude,
+which is our supreme consolation.</p>
+
+<p>The absolute and complete certainty, on the one hand,
+that death is a complete, definite, irrevocable annihilation
+of personal consciousness, a certainty of the same order
+as the certainty that the three angles of a triangle are
+equal to two right angles, or, on the other hand, the
+absolute and complete certainty that our personal consciousness
+is prolonged beyond death in these present or
+in other conditions, and above all including in itself that
+strange and adventitious addition of eternal rewards and
+punishments&mdash;both of these certainties alike would make
+life impossible for us. In the most secret chamber of
+the spirit of him who believes himself convinced that
+death puts an end to his personal consciousness, his
+memory, for ever, and all unknown to him perhaps, there
+lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of shadow, of
+uncertainty, and while he says within himself, &quot;Well, let
+us live this life that passes away, for there is no other!&quot;
+the silence of this secret chamber speaks to him and
+murmurs, &quot;Who knows!...&quot; He may not think he
+hears it, but he hears it nevertheless. And likewise in
+some secret place of the soul of the believer who most
+firmly holds the belief in a future life, there is a muffled
+voice, a voice of uncertainty, which whispers in the ear
+of his spirit, &quot;Who knows!...&quot; These voices are
+like the humming of a mosquito when the south-west
+wind roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish
+this faint humming, yet nevertheless, merged in
+<a name="Page_119" id="Page_119" />the clamour of the storm, it reaches the ear. Otherwise,
+without this uncertainty, how could we live?</p>
+
+<p><i>&quot;Is there?&quot; &quot;Is there not?&quot;</i>&mdash;these are the bases
+of our inner life. There may be a rationalist who has
+never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the
+soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered
+in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would
+only prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so
+there are those who are stupid as regards heart and
+feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who
+are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue. But,
+in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me
+that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of
+direst loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty
+breathed upon their consciousness. I do not understand
+those men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder
+side of death has never tormented them, that the thought
+of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my
+part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and
+my head, between my faith and my reason&mdash;I wish rather
+that there should be war between them!</p>
+
+<p>In the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to Mark
+it is related how a man brought unto Jesus his son who
+was possessed by a dumb spirit, and wheresoever the
+spirit took him it tore him, causing him to foam and gnash
+his teeth and pine away, wherefore he sought to bring
+him to Jesus that he might cure him. And the Master,
+impatient of those who sought only for signs and wonders,
+exclaimed: &quot;O faithless generation, how long shall I
+be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto
+me&quot; (ver. 19), and they brought him unto him. And
+when the Master saw him wallowing on the ground, he
+asked his father how long it was ago since this had come
+unto him and the father replied that it was since he was
+&amp; child. And Jesus said unto him: &quot;If thou canst
+believe, all things are possible to him that believeth&quot;
+(ver. 23). And then the father of the epileptic or
+<a name="Page_120" id="Page_120" />demoniac uttered these pregnant and immortal words:
+&quot;Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!&quot;&mdash;<i>&#928;&#953;&#963;&#964;&#949;&#965;&#969;,
+&#954;&#965;&#961;&#953;&#949;, &#946;&#959;&#951;&#952;&#949;&#953; &#964;&#951; &#945;&#960;&#953;&#959;&#964;&#953;&#945; &#956;&#959;&#965;
+</i> (ver. 24).</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!&quot; A contradiction
+seemingly, for if he believes, if he trusts, how
+is it that he beseeches the Lord to help his lack of trust?
+Nevertheless, it is this contradiction that gives to the
+heart's cry of the father of the demoniac its most profound
+human value. His faith is a faith that is based upon
+incertitude. Because he believes&mdash;that is to say, because
+he wishes to believe, because he has need that his son
+should be cured&mdash;he beseeches the Lord to help his unbelief,
+his doubt that such a cure could be effected. Of
+such kind is human faith; of such kind was the heroic
+faith that Sancho Panza had in his master, the knight
+Don Quijote de la Mancha, as I think I have shown in
+my <i>Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho</i>; a faith based upon
+incertitude, upon doubt. Sancho Panza was indeed a
+man, a whole and a true man, and he was not stupid, for
+only if he had been stupid would he have believed, without
+a shadow of doubt, in the follies of his master. And
+his master himself did not believe in them without a
+shadow of doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though
+mad, stupid. He was at heart a man of despair, as I
+think I have shown in my above-mentioned book. And
+because he was a man of an heroical despair, the hero
+of that inward and resigned despair, he stands as the
+eternal exemplar of every man whose soul is the battle-ground
+of reason and immortal desire. Our Lord Don
+Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose faith is
+based upon uncertainty, and Sancho is the prototype of
+the rationalist who doubts his own reason.</p>
+
+<p>Tormented by torturing doubts, August Hermann
+Francke resolved to call upon God, a God in whom he
+did not believe, or rather in whom he believed that he
+did not believe, imploring Him to take pity upon him,
+upon the poor pietist Francke, if perchance He really
+<a name="Page_121" id="Page_121" />existed.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34" /><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> And from a similar state of mind came the
+inspiration of the sonnet entitled &quot;The Atheist's
+Prayer,&quot; which is included in my <i>Rosario de Sonetos
+L&iacute;ricos</i>, and closes with these lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div class='i6'><i>Sufro yo a tu costa,</i></div>
+<div><i>Dios no existiente, pues si t&uacute; existieras</i></div>
+<div><i>existier&iacute;a yo tambi&eacute;n de veras.</i><a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35" /><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Yes, if God the guarantor of our personal immortality
+existed, then should we ourselves really exist. And if
+He exists not, neither do we exist.</p>
+
+<p>That terrible secret, that hidden will of God which,
+translated into the language of theology, is known as
+predestination, that idea which dictated to Luther his
+<i>servum arbitrium</i>, and which gives to Calvinism its tragic
+sense, that doubt of our own salvation, is in its essence
+nothing but uncertainty, and this uncertainty, allied
+with despair, forms the basis of faith. Faith, some say,
+consists in not thinking about it, in surrendering ourselves
+trustingly to the arms of God, the secrets of whose
+providence are inscrutable. Yes, but infidelity also
+consists in not thinking about it. This absurd faith, this
+faith that knows no shadow of uncertainty, this faith of
+the stupid coalheaver, joins hands with an absurd
+incredulity, the incredulity that knows no shadow of
+uncertainty, the incredulity of the intellectuals who are
+afflicted with affective stupidity in order that they may
+not think about it.</p>
+
+<p>And what but uncertainty, doubt, the voice of reason,
+was that abyss, that terrible <i>gouffre</i>, before which Pascal
+trembled? And it was that which led him to pronounce
+his terrible sentence, <i>il faut s'ab&ecirc;tir</i>&mdash;need is that we
+become fools!</p>
+
+<p>All Jansenism, the Catholic adaptation of Calvinism,
+<a name="Page_122" id="Page_122" />bears the same impress. Port-Royal, which owed its
+existence to a Basque, the Abb&eacute; de Saint-Cyran, a man
+of the same race as I&ntilde;igo de Loyola and as he who writes
+these lines, always preserved deep down a sediment of
+religious despair, of the suicide of reason. Loyola also
+slew his reason in obedience.</p>
+
+<p>Our affirmation is despair, our negation is despair,
+and from despair we abstain from affirming and denying.
+Note the greater part of our atheists and you will see
+that they are atheists from a kind of rage, rage at not
+being able to believe that there is a God. They are the
+personal enemies of God. They have invested Nothingness
+with substance and personality, and their No-God
+is an Anti-God.</p>
+
+<p>And concerning that abject and ignoble saying, &quot;If
+there were not a God it would be necessary to invent
+Him,&quot; we shall say nothing. It is the expression of the
+unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look upon
+religion merely as a means of government and whose
+interest it is that in the other life there shall be a hell for
+those who oppose their worldly interests in this life.
+This repugnant and Sadducean phrase is worthy of the
+time-serving sceptic to whom it is attributed.</p>
+
+<p>No, with all this the deep vital sense has nothing to
+do. It has nothing to do with a transcendental police
+regimen, or with securing order&mdash;and what an order!&mdash;upon
+earth by means of promises and threats of eternal
+rewards and punishments after death. All this belongs
+to a lower plane&mdash;that is to say, it is merely politics, or
+if you like, ethics. The vital sense has to do with living.</p>
+
+<p>But it is in our endeavour to represent to ourselves
+what the life of the soul after death really means that
+uncertainty finds its surest foundation. This it is that
+most shakes our vital desire and most intensifies the
+dissolvent efficacy of reason. For even if by a mighty
+effort of faith we overcome that reason which tells and
+teaches us that the soul is only a function of the physical
+<a name="Page_123" id="Page_123" />organism, it yet remains for our imagination to conceive
+an image of the immortal and eternal life of the
+soul. This conception involves us in contradictions and
+absurdities, and it may be that we shall arrive with
+Kierkegaard at the conclusion that if the mortality of the
+soul is terrible, not less terrible is its immortality.</p>
+
+<p>But when we have overcome the first, the only real
+difficulty, when we have overcome the impediment of
+reason, when we have achieved the faith, however painful
+and involved in uncertainty it may be, that our personal
+consciousness shall continue after death, what difficulty,
+what impediment, lies in the way of our imagining to
+ourselves this persistence of self in harmony with our
+desire? Yes, we can imagine it as an eternal rejuvenescence,
+as an eternal growth of ourselves, and as a
+journeying towards God, towards the Universal Consciousness,
+without ever an arrival, we can imagine it
+as ... But who shall put fetters upon the imagination,
+once it has broken the chain of the rational?</p>
+
+<p>I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps
+tedious, but it is all necessary. And I must repeat once
+again that we have nothing to do with a transcendental
+police system or with the conversion of God into a great
+Judge or Policeman&mdash;that is to say, we are not concerned
+with heaven or hell considered as buttresses to
+shore up our poor earthly morality, nor are we concerned
+with anything egoistic or personal. It is not I myself
+alone, it is the whole human race that is involved, it is
+the ultimate finality of all our civilization. I am but
+one, but all men are I's.</p>
+
+<p>Do you remember the end of that <i>Song of the Wild
+Cock</i> which Leopardi wrote in prose?&mdash;the despairing
+Leopardi, the victim of reason, who never succeeded in
+achieving belief. &quot;A time will come,&quot; he says, &quot;when
+this Universe and Nature itself will be extinguished.
+And just as of the grandest kingdoms and empires of
+mankind and the marvellous things achieved therein,
+<a name="Page_124" id="Page_124" />very famous in their own time, no vestige or memory
+remains to-day, so, in like manner, of the entire world
+and of the vicissitudes and calamities of all created things
+there will remain not a single trace, but a naked silence
+and a most profound stillness will fill the immensity of
+space. And so before ever it has been uttered or understood,
+this admirable and fearful secret of universal
+existence will be obliterated and lost.&quot; And this they
+now describe by a scientific and very rationalistic term&mdash;namely,
+<i>entropia</i>. Very pretty, is it not? Spencer
+invented the notion of a primordial homogeneity, from
+which it is impossible to conceive how any heterogeneity
+could originate. Well now, this <i>entropia</i> is a kind of
+ultimate homogeneity, a state of perfect equilibrium.
+For a soul avid of life, it is the most like nothingness
+that the mind can conceive.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>To this point, through a series of dolorous reflections,
+I have brought the reader who has had the patience to
+follow me, endeavouring always to do equal justice to
+the claims of reason and of feeling. I have not wished
+to keep silence on matters about which others are silent;
+I have sought to strip naked, not only my own soul, but
+the human soul, be its nature what it may, its destiny to
+disappear or not to disappear. And we have arrived at
+the bottom of the abyss, at the irreconcilable conflict
+between reason and vital feeling. And having arrived
+here, I have told you that it is necessary to accept the
+conflict as such and to live by it. Now it remains for me
+to explain to you how, according to my way of feeling,
+and even according to my way of thinking, this despair
+may be the basis of a vigorous life, of an efficacious
+activity, of an ethic, of an esthetic, of a religion and even
+of a logic. But in what follows there will be as much of
+imagination as of ratiocination, or rather, much more.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to deceive anyone, or to offer as
+philosophy what it may be is only poetry or <a name="Page_125" id="Page_125" />phantasmagoria,
+in any case a kind of mythology. The divine
+Plato, after having discussed the immortality of the soul
+in his dialogue <i>Ph&aelig;do</i> (an ideal&mdash;that is to say, a lying&mdash;immortality),
+embarked upon an interpretation of the
+myths which treat of the other life, remarking that it was
+also necessary to mythologize. Let us, then, mythologize.</p>
+
+<p>He who looks for reasons, strictly so called, scientific
+arguments, technically logical reflections, may refuse to
+follow me further. Throughout the remainder of these
+reflections upon the tragic sense, I am going to fish for
+the attention of the reader with the naked, unbaited hook;
+whoever wishes to bite, let him bite, but I deceive no
+one. Only in the conclusion I hope to gather everything
+together and to show that this religious despair
+which I have been talking about, and which is nothing
+other than the tragic sense of life itself, is, though more
+or less hidden, the very foundation of the consciousness
+of civilized individuals and peoples to-day&mdash;that is to
+say, of those individuals and those peoples who do not
+suffer from stupidity of intellect or stupidity of feeling.</p>
+
+<p>And this tragic sense is the spring of heroic achievements.</p>
+
+<p>If in that which follows you shall meet with arbitrary
+apothegms, brusque transitions, inconsecutive statements,
+veritable somersaults of thought, do not cry out
+that you have been deceived. We are about to enter&mdash;if
+it be that you wish to accompany me&mdash;upon a field of
+contradictions between feeling and reasoning, and we
+shall have to avail ourselves of the one as well as of the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>That which follows is not the outcome of reason but of
+life, although in order that I may transmit it to you I
+shall have to rationalize it after a fashion. The greater
+part of it can be reduced to no logical theory or system;
+but like that tremendous Yankee poet, Walt Whitman,
+I charge that there be no theory or school founded out
+of me&quot; (<i>Myself and Mine</i>).</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126" />Neither am I the only begetter of the fancies I am
+about to set forth. By no means. They have also been
+conceived by other men, if not precisely by other thinkers,
+who have preceded me in this vale of tears, and who have
+exhibited their life and given expression to it. Their life,
+I repeat, not their thought, save in so far as it was thought
+inspired by life, thought with a basis of irrationality.</p>
+
+<p>Does this mean that in all that follows, in the efforts
+of the irrational to express itself, there is a total lack of
+rationality, of all objective value? No; the absolutely,
+the irrevocably irrational, is inexpressible, is intransmissible.
+But not the contra-rational. Perhaps there
+is no way of rationalizing the irrational; but there is a
+way of rationalizing the contra-rational, and that is by
+trying to explain it. Since only the rational is intelligible,
+really intelligible, and since the absurd, being
+devoid of sense, is condemned to be incommunicable,
+you will find that whenever we succeed in giving expression
+and intelligibility to anything apparently irrational
+or absurd we invariably resolve it into something rational,
+even though it be into the negation of that which we
+affirm.</p>
+
+<p>The maddest dreams of the fancy have some ground of
+reason, and who knows if everything that the imagination
+of man can conceive either has not already happened, or
+is not now happening or will not happen some time, in
+some world or another? The possible combinations are
+perhaps infinite. It only remains to know whether all
+that is imaginable is possible.</p>
+
+<p>It may also be said, and with justice, that much of what
+I am about to set forth is merely a repetition of ideas
+which have been expressed a hundred times before and a
+hundred times refuted; but the repetition of an idea
+really implies that its refutation has not been final. And
+as I do not pretend that the majority of these fancies are
+new, so neither do I pretend, obviously, that other voices
+before mine have not spoken to the winds the same
+<a name="Page_127" id="Page_127" />laments. But when yet another voice echoes the same
+eternal lament it can only be inferred that the same grief
+still dwells in the heart.</p>
+
+<p>And it comes not amiss to repeat yet once again the
+same eternal lamentations that were already old in the
+days of Job and Ecclesiastes, and even to repeat them
+in the same words, to the end that the devotees of progress
+may see that there is something that never dies. Whosoever
+repeats the &quot;Vanity of vanities&quot; of Ecclesiastes or
+the lamentations of Job, even though without changing a
+letter, having first experienced them in his soul, performs
+a work of admonition. Need is to repeat without
+ceasing the <i>memento mori</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But to what end?&quot; you will ask. Even though it be
+only to the end that some people should be irritated and
+should see that these things are not dead and, so long as
+men exist, cannot die; to the end that they should be
+convinced that to-day, in the twentieth century, all the
+bygone centuries and all of them alive, are still subsisting.
+When a supposed error reappears, it must be,
+believe me, that it has not ceased to be true in part, just
+as when one who was dead reappears, it must be that he
+was not wholly dead.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, I know well that others before me have felt what
+I feel and express; that many others feel it to-day,
+although they keep silence about it. Why do I not keep
+silence about it too? Well, for the very reason that
+most of those who feel it are silent about it; and yet,
+though they are silent, they obey in silence that inner
+voice. And I do not keep silence about it because it is
+for many the thing which must not be spoken, the
+abomination of abominations&mdash;<i>infandum</i>&mdash;and I believe
+that it is necessary now and again to speak the thing
+which must not be spoken. But if it leads to nothing?
+Even if it should lead only to irritating the devotees of
+progress, those who believe that truth is consolation, it
+would lead to not a little. To irritating them and making
+<a name="Page_128" id="Page_128" />them say: Poor fellow! if he would only use his intelligence
+to better purpose!... Someone perhaps will
+add that I do not know what I say, to which I shall reply
+that perhaps he may be right&mdash;and being right is such a
+little thing!&mdash;but that I feel what I say and I know what
+I feel and that suffices me. And that it is better to be
+lacking in reason than to have too much of it.</p>
+
+<p>And the reader who perseveres in reading me will also
+see how out of this abyss of despair hope may arise, and
+how this critical position may be the well-spring of
+human, profoundly human, action and effort, and of
+solidarity and even of progress. He will see its pragmatic
+justification. And he will see how, in order to
+work, and to work efficaciously and morally, there is no
+need of either of these two conflicting certainties, either
+that of faith or that of reason, and how still less is there
+any need&mdash;this never under any circumstances&mdash;to shirk
+the problem of the immortality of the soul, or to distort
+it idealistically&mdash;that is to say, hypocritically. The
+reader will see how this uncertainty, with the suffering
+that accompanies it, and the fruitless struggle to escape
+from it, may be and is a basis for action and morals.</p>
+
+<p>And in the fact that it serves as a basis for action and
+morals, this feeling of uncertainty and the inward
+struggle between reason on the one hand and faith and
+the passionate longing for eternal life on the other, should
+find their justification in the eyes of the pragmatist. But
+it must be clearly stated that I do not adduce this practical
+consequence in order to justify the feeling, but
+merely because I encounter it in my inward experience.
+I neither desire to seek, nor ought I to seek, any justification
+for this state of inward struggle and uncertainty and
+longing; it is a fact and that suffices. And if anyone
+finding himself in this state, in the depth of the abyss,
+fails to find there motives for and incentives to life and
+action, and concludes by committing bodily or spiritual
+suicide, whether he kills himself or he abandons all
+<a name="Page_129" id="Page_129" />co-operation with his fellows in human endeavour, it will
+not be I who will pass censure upon him. And apart
+from the fact that the evil consequences of a doctrine, or
+rather those which we call evil, only prove, I repeat, that
+the doctrine is disastrous for our desires, but not that it
+is false in itself, the consequences themselves depend not
+so much upon the doctrine as upon him who deduces
+them. The same principle may furnish one man with
+grounds for action and another man with grounds for
+abstaining from action, it may lead one man to direct his
+effort towards a certain end and another man towards a
+directly opposite end. For the truth is that our doctrines
+are usually only the justification <i>a posteriori</i> of our conduct,
+or else they are our way of trying to explain that
+conduct to ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>Man, in effect, is unwilling to remain in ignorance of
+the motives of his own conduct. And just as a man who
+has been led to perform a certain action by hypnotic suggestion
+will afterwards invent reasons which would
+justify it and make it appear logical to himself and others,
+being unaware all the time of the real cause of his action,
+so every man&mdash;for since &quot;life is a dream&quot; every man
+is in a condition of hypnotism&mdash;seeks to find reasons
+for his conduct. And if the pieces on a chessboard were
+endowed with consciousness, they would probably have
+little difficulty in ascribing their moves to freewill&mdash;that
+is to say, they would claim for them a finalist rationality.
+And thus it comes about that every philosophic theory
+serves to explain and justify an ethic, a doctrine of conduct,
+which has its real origin in the inward moral feeling
+of the author of the theory. But he who harbours
+this feeling may possibly himself have no clear consciousness
+of its true reason or cause.</p>
+
+<p>Consequently, if my reason, which is in a certain
+sense a part of the reason of all my brothers in humanity
+in time and space, teaches me this absolute scepticism
+in respect of what concerns my longing for never-<a name="Page_130" id="Page_130" />ending
+life, I think that I can assume that my feeling
+of life, which is the essence of life itself, my vitality,
+my boundless appetite for living and my abhorrence
+of dying, my refusal to submit to death&mdash;that it is this
+which suggests to me the doctrines with which I try
+to counter-check the working of the reason. Have
+these doctrines an objective value? someone will ask
+me, and I shall answer that I do not understand what
+this objective value of a doctrine is. I will not say that
+the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines
+that I am about to set forth are those which make me
+live; but I will venture to say that it is my longing to
+live and to live for ever that inspires these doctrines within
+me. And if by means of them I succeed in strengthening
+and sustaining this same longing in another, perhaps
+when it was all but dead, then I shall have performed a
+man's work and, above all, I shall have lived. In a word,
+be it with reason or without reason or against reason, I
+am resolved not to die. And if, when at last I die out,
+I die out altogether, then I shall not have died out of
+myself&mdash;that is, I shall not have yielded myself to death,
+but my human destiny will have killed me. Unless I
+come to lose my head, or rather my heart, I will not
+abdicate from life&mdash;life will be wrested from me.</p>
+
+<p>To have recourse to those, ambiguous words,
+&quot;optimism&quot; and &quot;pessimism,&quot; does not assist us in
+any way, for frequently they express the very contrary of
+what those who use them mean to express. To ticket a
+doctrine with the label of pessimism is not to impugn its
+validity, and the so-called optimists are not the most
+efficient in action. I believe, on the contrary, that many
+of the greatest heroes, perhaps the greatest of all, have
+been men of despair and that by despair they have accomplished
+their mighty works. Apart from this, however,
+and accepting in all their ambiguity these denominations
+of optimism and pessimism, that there exists a certain
+transcendental pessimism which may be the begetter of
+<a name="Page_131" id="Page_131" />a temporal and terrestrial optimism, is a matter that I
+propose to develop in the following part of this treatise.</p>
+
+<p>Very different, well I know, is the attitude of our progressives,
+the partisans of &quot;the central current of contemporary
+European thought&quot;; but I cannot bring myself
+to believe that these individuals do not voluntarily close
+their eyes to the grand problem of existence and that, in
+endeavouring to stifle this feeling of the tragedy of life,
+they themselves are not living a lie.</p>
+
+<p>The foregoing reflections are a kind of practical summary
+of the criticism developed in the first six chapters
+of this treatise, a kind of definition of the practical position
+to which such a criticism is capable of leading whosoever
+will not renounce life and will not renounce reason
+and who is compelled to live and act between these upper
+and nether millstones which grind upon the soul. The
+reader who follows me further is now aware that I am
+about to carry him into the region of the imagination, of
+imagination not destitute of reason, for without reason
+nothing subsists, but of imagination founded on feeling.
+And as regards its truth, the real truth, that which is
+independent of ourselves, beyond the reach of our logic
+and of our heart&mdash;of this truth who knows aught?</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31" /><a href="#FNanchor_31_31">[31]</a> See Troeltsch, <i>Systematische christliche Religion</i>, in <i>Die Kultur der
+Gegenwart</i> series.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32" /><a href="#FNanchor_32_32">[32]</a> <i>Die Analyse der Empfindigungen und das Verh&auml;ltniss des Physischen
+zum Psychischen</i>, i., &sect; 12, note.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33" /><a href="#FNanchor_33_33">[33]</a> I have left the original expression here, almost without translating it&mdash;<i>Existents-Consequents</i>.
+It means the existential or practical, not the purely
+rational or logical, consequence. (Author's note.)</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34" /><a href="#FNanchor_34_34">[34]</a> Albrecht Ritschl: <i>Geschichte des Pietismus</i>, ii., Abt. i., Bonn, 1884,
+p. 251.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35" /><a href="#FNanchor_35_35">[35]</a> Thou art the cause of my suffering, O non-existing God, for if Thou
+didst exist, then should I also really exist.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII" /><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132" />VII</h2>
+
+<h2>LOVE, SUFFERING, PITY, AND PERSONALITY</h2>
+
+<blockquote><div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>CAIN:&nbsp;&nbsp; Let me, or happy or unhappy, learn</div>
+<div class='i4'>To anticipate my immortality.</div>
+<div>LUCIFER:&nbsp;&nbsp; Thou didst before I came upon thee.</div>
+<div>CAIN: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;How?</div>
+<div>LUCIFER:&nbsp;&nbsp; By suffering.</div>
+<div class='i12'>BYRON: <i>Cain</i>, Act II., Scene I.</div></div>
+</div></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>The most tragic thing in the world and in life, readers
+and brothers of mine, is love. Love is the child of
+illusion and the parent of disillusion; love is consolation
+in desolation; it is the sole medicine against death, for
+it is death's brother.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte</i></div>
+<div><i>Ingener&oacute; la sorte</i>,</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>as Leopardi sang.</p>
+
+<p>Love seeks with fury, through the medium of the
+beloved, something beyond, and since it finds it not, it
+despairs.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever we speak of love there is always present in
+our memory the idea of sexual love, the love between
+man and woman, whose end is the perpetuation of the
+human race upon the earth. Hence it is that we never
+succeed in reducing love either to a purely intellectual
+or to a purely volitional element, putting aside that part
+in it which belongs to the feeling, or, if you like, to the
+senses. For, in its essence, love is neither idea nor
+volition; rather it is desire, feeling; it is something
+<a name="Page_133" id="Page_133" />carnal in spirit itself. Thanks to love, we feel all that
+spirit has of flesh in it.</p>
+
+<p>Sexual love is the generative type of every other love.
+In love and by love we seek to perpetuate ourselves, and
+we perpetuate ourselves on the earth only on condition
+that we die, that we yield up our life to others. The
+humblest forms of animal life, the lowest of living
+beings, multiply by dividing themselves, by splitting
+into two, by ceasing to be the unit which they previously
+formed.</p>
+
+<p>But when at last the vitality of the being that multiplies
+itself by division is exhausted, the species must
+renew the source of life from time to time by means of
+the union of two wasting individuals, by means of what
+is called, among protozoaria, conjugation. They unite
+in order to begin dividing again with more vigour.
+And every act of generation consists in a being's ceasing
+to be what it was, either wholly or in part, in a splitting up,
+in a partial death. To live is to give oneself, to perpetuate
+oneself, and to perpetuate oneself and to give oneself is
+to die. The supreme delight of begetting is perhaps
+nothing but a foretaste of death, the eradication of our
+own vital essence. We unite with another, but it is to
+divide ourselves; this most intimate embrace is only a
+most intimate sundering. In its essence, the delight of
+sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection,
+of renewing our life in another, for only in others
+can we renew our life and so perpetuate ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>Without doubt there is something tragically destructive
+in the essence of love, as it presents itself to us in its
+primitive animal form, in the unconquerable instinct which
+impels the male and the female to mix their being in a
+fury of conjunction. The same impulse that joins their
+bodies, separates, in a certain sense, their souls; they
+hate one another, while they embrace, no less than they
+love, and above all they contend with one another, they
+contend for a third life, which as yet is without life. Love
+<a name="Page_134" id="Page_134" />is a contention, and there are animal species in which the
+male maltreats the female in his union with her, and other
+in which the female devours the male after being fertilized
+by him.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that love is a mutual selfishness; and,
+in fact, each one of the lovers seeks to possess the other,
+and in seeking his own perpetuation through the instrumentality
+of the other, though without being at the time
+conscious of it or purposing it, he thereby seeks his own
+enjoyment. Each one of the lovers is an immediate
+instrument of enjoyment and a mediate instrument of
+perpetuation, for the other. And thus they are tyrants
+and slaves, each one at once the tyrant and slave of the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>Is there really anything strange in the fact that the
+deepest religious feeling has condemned carnal love and
+exalted virginity? Avarice, said the Apostle, is the root
+of all evil, and the reason is because avarice takes riches,
+which are only a means, for an end; and therein lies the
+essence of sin, in taking means for ends, in not recognizing
+or in disesteeming the end. And since it takes
+enjoyment for the end, whereas it is only the means, and
+not perpetuation, which is the true end, what is carnal
+love but avarice? And it is possible that there are some
+who preserve their virginity in order the better to perpetuate
+themselves, and in order to perpetuate something
+more human than the flesh.</p>
+
+<p>For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death,
+that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once
+the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister,
+mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth
+of love there is a depth of eternal despair, out of which
+spring hope and consolation. For out of this carnal and
+primitive love of which I have been speaking, out of this
+love of the whole body with all its senses, which is the
+animal origin of human society, out of this loving-fondness,
+rises spiritual and sorrowful love.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135" />This other form of love, this spiritual love, is born of
+sorrow, is born of the death of carnal love, is born also
+of the feeling of compassion and protection which parents
+feel in the presence of a stricken child. Lovers never
+attain to a love of self abandonment, of true fusion of
+soul and not merely of body, until the heavy pestle of
+sorrow has bruised their hearts and crushed them in the
+same mortar of suffering. Sensual love joined their
+bodies but disjoined their souls; it kept their souls
+strangers to one another; but of this love is begotten a
+fruit of their flesh&mdash;a child. And perchance this child,
+begotten in death, falls sick and dies. Then it comes to
+pass that over the fruit of their carnal fusion and spiritual
+separation and estrangement, their bodies now separated
+and cold with sorrow but united by sorrow their souls,
+the lovers, the parents, join in an embrace of despair,
+and then is born, of the death of the child of their flesh,
+the true spiritual love. Or rather, when the bond of
+flesh which united them is broken, they breathe with a
+sigh of relief. For men love one another with a spiritual
+love only when they have suffered the same sorrow
+together, when through long days they have ploughed
+the stony ground bowed beneath the common yoke of a
+common grief. It is then that they know one another
+and feel one another, and feel with one another in their
+common anguish, they pity one another and love one
+another. For to love is to pity; and if bodies are united
+by pleasure, souls are united by pain.</p>
+
+<p>And this is felt with still more clearness and force in
+the seeding, the taking root, and the blossoming of one
+of those tragic loves which are doomed to contend with
+the diamond-hard laws of Destiny&mdash;one of those loves
+which are born out of due time and season, before or
+after the moment, or out of the normal mode in which
+the world, which is custom, would have been willing to
+welcome them. The more barriers Destiny and the
+world and its law interpose between the lovers, the
+<a name="Page_136" id="Page_136" />stronger is the impulse that urges them towards one
+another, and their happiness in loving one another turns
+to bitterness, and their unhappiness in not being able to
+love freely and openly grows heavier, and they pity one
+another from the bottom of their hearts; and this common
+pity, which is their common misery and their
+common happiness, gives fire and fuel to their love.
+And they suffer their joy, enjoying their suffering. And
+they establish their love beyond the confines of the world,
+and the strength of this poor love suffering beneath the
+yoke of Destiny gives them intuition of another world
+where there is no other law than the liberty of love&mdash;another
+world where there are no barriers because there
+is no flesh. For nothing inspires us more with hope and
+faith in another world than the impossibility of our love
+truly fructifying in this world of flesh and of appearances.</p>
+
+<p>And what is maternal love but compassion for the
+weak, helpless, defenceless infant that craves the mother's
+milk and the comfort of her breast? And woman's love
+is all maternal.</p>
+
+<p>To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities
+most loves most. Men aflame with a burning charity
+towards their neighbours are thus enkindled because they
+have touched the depth of their own misery, their own
+apparentiality, their own nothingness, and then, turning
+their newly opened eyes upon their fellows, they have
+seen that they also are miserable, apparential, condemned
+to nothingness, and they have pitied them and loved
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Man yearns to be loved, or, what is the same thing, to
+be pitied. Man wishes others to feel and share his hardships
+and his sorrows. The roadside beggar's exhibition
+of his sores and gangrened mutilations is something more
+than a device to extort alms from the passer-by. True
+alms is pity rather than the pittance that alleviates the
+material hardships of life. The beggar shows little
+gratitude for alms thrown to him by one who hurries past
+<a name="Page_137" id="Page_137" />with averted face; he is more grateful to him who pities
+him but does not help than to him who helps but does
+not pity, although from another point of view he may
+prefer the latter. Observe with what satisfaction he
+relates his woes to one who is moved by the story of them.
+He desires to be pitied, to be loved.</p>
+
+<p>Woman's love, above all, as I have remarked, is always
+compassionate in its essence&mdash;maternal. Woman yields
+herself to the lover because she feels that his desire makes
+him suffer. Isabel had compassion upon Lorenzo, Juliet
+upon Romeo, Francesca upon Paolo. Woman seems to
+say: &quot;Come, poor one, thou shalt not suffer so for my
+sake!&quot; And therefore is her love more loving and
+purer than that of man, braver and more enduring.</p>
+
+<p>Pity, then, is the essence of human spiritual love, of
+the love that is conscious of being love, of the love that
+is not purely animal, of the love, in a word, of a rational
+person. Love pities, and pities most when it loves most.</p>
+
+<p>Reversing the terms of the adage <i>nihil volitum quin
+pr&aelig;cognitum</i>, I have told you that <i>nihil cognitum quin
+pr&aelig;volitum</i>, that we know nothing save what we have
+first, in one way or another, desired; and it may even be
+added that we can know nothing well save what we love,
+save what we pity.</p>
+
+<p>As love grows, this restless yearning to pierce to the
+uttermost and to the innermost, so it continually embraces
+all that it sees, and pities all that it embraces.
+According as you turn inwards and penetrate more
+deeply into yourself, you will discover more and more
+your own emptiness, that you are not all that you are
+not, that you are not what you would wish to be, that
+you are, in a word, only a nonentity. And in touching
+your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent
+base, in not reaching your own infinity, still less your
+own eternity, you will have a whole-hearted pity for
+yourself, and you will burn with a sorrowful love for
+yourself&mdash;a love that will consume your so-called self-<a name="Page_138" id="Page_138" />love,
+which is merely a species of sensual self-delectation,
+the self-enjoyment, as it were, of the flesh of your
+soul.</p>
+
+<p>Spiritual self-love, the pity that one feels for oneself,
+may perhaps be called egotism; but nothing could be
+more opposed to ordinary egoism. For this love or pity
+for yourself, this intense despair, bred of the consciousness
+that just as before you were born you were not, so
+after your death you will cease to be, will lead you to pity&mdash;that
+is, to love&mdash;all your fellows and brothers in this
+world of appearance, these unhappy shadows who pass
+from nothingness to nothingness, these sparks of consciousness
+which shine for a moment in the infinite and
+eternal darkness. And this compassionate feeling for
+other men, for your fellows, beginning with those most
+akin to you, those with whom you live, will expand into
+a universal pity for all living things, and perhaps even
+for things that have not life but merely existence. That
+distant star which shines up there in the night will some
+day be quenched and will turn to dust and will cease to
+shine and cease to exist. And so, too, it will be with the
+whole of the star-strewn heavens. Unhappy heavens!</p>
+
+<p>And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to
+be, perhaps it would be more grievous still to go on
+being always oneself, and no more than oneself, without
+being able to be at the same time other, without being
+able to be at the same time everything else, without
+being able to be all.</p>
+
+<p>If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly
+as you are able to look&mdash;that is to say, if you look within
+yourself; if you not only contemplate but feel all things
+in your own consciousness, upon which all things have
+traced their painful impression&mdash;you will arrive at the
+abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of something
+more: at the tedium of existence, at the bottomless pit
+of the vanity of vanities. And thus you will come to
+pity all things; you will arrive at universal love.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139" />In order to love everything, in order to pity everything,
+human and extra-human, living and non-living,
+you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize
+everything. For everything that it loves, everything
+that it pities, love personalizes. We only pity&mdash;that
+is to say, we only love&mdash;that which is like ourselves
+and in so far as it is like ourselves, and the more like it
+is the more we love; and thus our pity for things, and
+with it our love, grows in proportion as we discover in
+them the likenesses which they have with ourselves. Or,
+rather, it is love itself, which of itself tends to grow, that
+reveals these resemblances to us. If I am moved to pity
+and love the luckless star that one day will vanish from
+the face of heaven, it is because love, pity, makes me feel
+that it has a consciousness, more or less dim, which
+makes it suffer because it is no more than a star, and a
+star that is doomed one day to cease to be. For all consciousness
+is consciousness of death and of suffering.</p>
+
+<p>Consciousness (<i>conscientia</i>) is participated knowledge,
+is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes
+all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can
+we fall in love with an idea. And when love is so great
+and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves
+everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers
+that the total All, that the Universe, is also a Person
+possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its
+turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness.
+And this Consciousness of the Universe, which
+love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we
+call God. And thus the soul pities God and feels itself
+pitied by Him; loves Him and feels itself loved by Him,
+sheltering its misery in the bosom of the eternal and
+infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and infinitizing
+itself, is the supreme happiness itself.</p>
+
+<p>God is, then, the personalization of the All; He is the
+eternal and infinite Consciousness of the Universe&mdash;Consciousness
+taken captive by matter and struggling to
+<a name="Page_140" id="Page_140" />free himself from it. We personalize the All in order to
+save ourselves from Nothingness; and the only mystery
+really mysterious is the mystery of suffering.</p>
+
+<p>Suffering is the path of consciousness, and by it living
+beings arrive at the possession of self-consciousness.
+For to possess consciousness of oneself, to possess personality,
+is to know oneself and to feel oneself distinct
+from other beings, and this feeling of distinction is only
+reached through an act of collision, through suffering
+more or less severe, through the sense of one's own
+limits. Consciousness of oneself is simply consciousness
+of one's own limitation. I feel myself when I feel that I
+am not others; to know and to feel the extent of my being
+is to know at what point I cease to be, the point beyond
+which I no longer am.</p>
+
+<p>And how do we know that we exist if we do not suffer,
+little or much? How can we turn upon ourselves,
+acquire reflective consciousness, save by suffering?
+When we enjoy ourselves we forget ourselves, forget that
+we exist; we pass over into another, an alien being, we
+alienate ourselves. And we become centred in ourselves
+again, we return to ourselves, only by suffering.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div class='i4'><i>Nessun maggior dolore</i></div>
+<div><i>che ricordarsi del tempo felice</i></div>
+<div><i>nella miseria</i></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>are the words that Dante puts into the mouth of Francesca
+da Rimini (<i>Inferno</i>, v., 121-123); but if there is no greater
+sorrow than the recollection in adversity of happy bygone
+days, there is, on the other hand, no pleasure in remembering
+adversity in days of prosperity.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The bitterest sorrow that man can know is to aspire
+to do much and to achieve nothing&quot; (<i>&#960;&#959;&#955;&#955;&#945; &#966;&#961;&#959;&#957;&#949;&#959;&#953;&#964;&#945;
+&#956;&#951;&#948;&#949;&#957;&#959;&#962; &#967;&#961;&#945;&#964;&#949;&#949;&#953;&#957;</i>)&mdash;
+so Herodotus relates that a Persian said
+to a Theban at a banquet (book ix., chap. xvi.). And it
+is true. With knowledge and desire we can embrace
+everything, or almost everything; with the will nothing,
+<a name="Page_141" id="Page_141" />or almost nothing. And contemplation is not happiness&mdash;no!
+not if this contemplation implies impotence. And
+out of this collision between our knowledge and our
+power pity arises.</p>
+
+<p>We pity what is like ourselves, and the greater and
+clearer our sense of its likeness with ourselves, the greater
+our pity. And if we may say that this likeness provokes
+our pity, it may also be maintained that it is our reservoir
+of pity, eager to diffuse itself over everything, that makes
+us discover the likeness of things with ourselves, the
+common bond that unites us with them in suffering.</p>
+
+<p>Our own struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase
+our own consciousness makes us discover in the endeavours
+and movements and revolutions of all things a
+struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase consciousness,
+to which everything tends. Beneath the actions of those
+most akin to myself, of my fellow-men, I feel&mdash;or, rather,
+I co-feel&mdash;a state of consciousness similar to that which
+lies beneath my own actions. On hearing my brother
+give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes and cries in the
+depth of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel
+the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its
+branches is being cut off, and I feel it most when my
+imagination is alive, for the imagination is the faculty of
+intuition, of inward vision.</p>
+
+<p>Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness,
+the only consciousness which we feel from
+within and in which feeling is identical with being, we
+attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim,
+to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for
+they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is
+simply a struggle to realize fullness of consciousness
+through suffering, a continual aspiration to be others
+without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to
+preserve their proper limits.</p>
+
+<p>And this process of personalization or subjectivization
+of everything external, phenomenal, or objective, is none
+<a name="Page_142" id="Page_142" />other than the vital process of philosophy in the contest
+of life against reason and of reason against life. We
+have already indicated it in the preceding chapter, and
+we must now confirm it by developing it further.</p>
+
+<p>Giovanni Baptista Vico, with his profound esthetic
+penetration into the soul of antiquity, saw that the spontaneous
+philosophy of man was to make of himself the
+norm of the universe, guided by the <i>instinto d'animazione</i>.
+Language, necessarily anthropomorphic, mythopeic,
+engenders thought. &quot;Poetic wisdom, which was the
+primitive wisdom of paganism,&quot; says Vico in his <i>Scienza
+Nuova</i>, &quot;must have begun with a metaphysic, not
+reasoned and abstract, like that of modern educated men,
+but felt and imagined, such as must have been that of
+primitive men. This was their own poetry, which with
+them was inborn, an innate faculty, for nature had
+furnished them with such feelings and such imaginations,
+a faculty born of the ignorance of causes, and therefore
+begetting a universal sense of wonder, for knowing
+nothing they marvelled greatly at everything. This
+poetry had a divine origin, for, while they invented the
+causes of things out of their own imagination, at the same
+time they regarded these causes with feelings of wonder
+as gods. In this way the first men of the pagan peoples,
+as children of the growing human race, fashioned things
+out of their ideas.... This nature of human things
+has bequeathed that eternal property which Tacitus
+elucidated with a fine phrase when he said, not without
+reason, that men in their terror <i>fingunt simul creduntque</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And then, passing from the age of imagination, Vico
+proceeds to show us the age of reason, this age of ours
+in which the mind, even the popular mind, is too remote
+from the senses, &quot;with so many abstractions of which all
+languages are full,&quot; an age in which &quot;the ability to conceive
+an immense image of such a personage as we call
+sympathetic Nature is denied to us, for though the phrase
+'Dame Nature' may be on our lips, there is nothing in our
+<a name="Page_143" id="Page_143" />minds that corresponds with it, our minds being occupied
+with the false, the non-existent.&quot; &quot;To-day,&quot; Vico continues,
+&quot;it is naturally impossible for us to enter into the
+vast imagination of these primitive men.&quot; But is this
+certain? Do not we continue to live by the creations of
+their imagination, embodied for ever in the language
+with which we think, or, rather, the language which
+thinks in us?</p>
+
+<p>It was in vain that Comte declared that human thought
+had already emerged from the age of theology and was
+now emerging from the age of metaphysics into the age
+of positivism; the three ages coexist, and although
+antagonistic they lend one another mutual support.
+High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny
+and begins to affirm something, whenever it becomes
+really positive, is nothing but metaphysics; and metaphysics,
+in its essence, is always theology, and theology
+is born of imagination yoked to the service of life, of life
+with its craving for immortality.</p>
+
+<p>Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our
+understanding of it, is necessarily anthropomorphic and
+mythopeic. When rationalism dawned with Thales of
+Miletus, this philosopher abandoned Oceanus and Thetis,
+gods and the progenitors of gods, and attributed the
+origin of things to water; but this water was a god
+in disguise. Beneath nature (<i>&#966;&#965;&#963;&#953;&#962;</i>) and the world
+(<i>&#954;&#959;&#963;&#956;&#959;&#962;</i>), mythical and anthropomorphic creations
+throbbed with life. They were implicated in the structure
+of language itself. Xenophon tells us (<i>Memorabilia</i>,
+i., i., 6-9) that among phenomena Socrates distinguished
+between those which were within the scope of human
+study and those which the gods had reserved for themselves,
+and that he execrated the attempt of Anaxagoras
+to explain everything rationally. His contemporary,
+Hippocrates, regarded diseases as of divine origin, and
+Plato believed that the sun and stars were animated gods
+with their souls (<i>Philebus</i>, cap. xvi., <i>Laws</i>, x.), and
+<a name="Page_144" id="Page_144" />only permitted astronomical investigation so long as it
+abstained from blasphemy against these gods. And
+Aristotle in his <i>Physics</i> tells us that Zeus rains not in
+order that the corn may grow, but by necessity
+(<i>&#949;&#958; &#945;&#957;&#945;&#961;&#967;&#951;&#962;</i>). They tried to mechanize and rationalize
+God, but God rebelled against them.</p>
+
+<p>And what is the concept of God, a concept continually
+renewed because springing out of the eternal feeling of
+God in man, but the eternal protest of life against reason,
+the unconquerable instinct of personalization? And
+what is the notion of substance itself but the objectivization
+of that which is most subjective&mdash;that is, of the will
+or consciousness? For consciousness, even before it
+knows itself as reason, feels itself, is palpable to itself, is
+most in harmony with itself, as will, and as will not to
+die. Hence that rhythm, of which we spoke, in the
+history of thought. Positivism inducted us into an age
+of rationalism&mdash;that is to say, of materialism, mechanism,
+or mortalism; and behold now the return of vitalism, of
+spiritualism. What was the effort of pragmatism but
+an effort to restore faith in the human finality of the
+universe? What is the effort of a Bergson, for example,
+especially in his work on creative evolution, but an
+attempt to re-integrate the personal God and eternal consciousness?
+Life never surrenders.</p>
+
+<p>And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic
+or anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our
+thought, as if we thought only for the sake of thinking
+and knowing, and not for the sake of living. The very
+language with which we think prevents us from so doing.
+Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors
+with a mythic and anthropomorphic base. And to
+construct a purely rational philosophy it would be necessary
+to construct it by means of algebraic formulas or to
+create a new language for it, an inhuman language&mdash;that
+is to say, one inapt for the needs of life&mdash;as indeed
+Dr. Richard Avenarius, professor of philosophy at
+<a name="Page_145" id="Page_145" />Z&uuml;rich, attempted to do in his <i>Critique of Pure Experience
+(Kritik der reinen Erfahrung</i>), in order to avoid
+preconceptions. And this rigorous attempt of Avenarius,
+the chief of the critics of experience, ends strictly in pure
+scepticism. He himself says at the end of the Prologue
+to the work above mentioned: &quot;The childish confidence
+that it is granted to us to discover truth has long since
+disappeared; as we progress we become aware of the
+difficulties that lie in the way of its discovery and of the
+limitation of our powers. And what is the end?...
+If we could only succeed in seeing clearly into ourselves!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Seeing clearly! seeing clearly! Clear vision would be
+only attainable by a pure thinker who used algebra instead
+of language and was able to divest himself of his
+own humanity&mdash;that is to say, by an unsubstantial,
+merely objective being: a no-being, in short. In spite of
+reason we are compelled to think with life, and in spite
+of life we are compelled to rationalize thought.</p>
+
+<p>This animation, this personification, interpenetrates
+our very knowledge. &quot;Who is it that sends the rain?
+Who is it that thunders?&quot; old Strepsiades asks of
+Socrates in <i>The Clouds</i> of Aristophanes, and the philosopher
+replies: &quot;Not Zeus, but the clouds.&quot; &quot;But,&quot;
+questions Strepsiades, &quot;who but Zeus makes the clouds
+sweep along?&quot; to which Socrates answers: &quot;Not a bit
+of it; it is atmospheric whirligig.&quot; &quot;Whirligig?&quot;
+muses Strepsiades; &quot;I never thought of that&mdash;that Zeus
+is gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead.&quot;
+And so the old man goes on personifying and animating
+the whirlwind, as if the whirlwind were now a king, not
+without consciousness of his kingship. And in exchanging
+a Zeus for a whirlwind&mdash;God for matter, for example&mdash;we
+all do the same thing. And the reason is because
+philosophy does not work upon the objective reality
+which we perceive with the senses, but upon the complex
+of ideas, images, notions, perceptions, etc., embodied in
+language and transmitted to us with our language by our
+<a name="Page_146" id="Page_146" />ancestors. That which we call the world, the objective
+world, is a social tradition. It is given to us ready made.</p>
+
+<p>Man does not submit to being, as consciousness, alone
+in the Universe, nor to being merely one objective
+phenomenon the more. He wishes to save his vital or
+passional subjectivity by attributing life, personality,
+spirit, to the whole Universe. In order to realize his
+wish he has discovered God and substance; God and
+substance continually reappear in his thought cloaked in
+different disguises. Because we are conscious, we feel
+that we exist, which is quite another thing from knowing
+that we exist, and we wish to feel the existence of everything
+else; we wish that of all the other individual things
+each one should also be an &quot;I.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The most consistent, although the most incongruous
+and vacillating, idealism, that of Berkeley, who denied
+the existence of matter, of something inert and extended
+and passive, as the cause of our sensations and the substratum
+of external phenomena, is in its essence nothing
+but an absolute spiritualism or dynamism, the supposition
+that every sensation comes to us, causatively, from
+another spirit&mdash;that is, from another consciousness. And
+his doctrine has a certain affinity with those of Schopenhauer
+and Hartmann. The former's doctrine of the Will
+and the latter's doctrine of the Unconscious are already
+implied in the Berkeleyan theory that to be is to be perceived.
+To which must be added: and to cause others
+to perceive what is. Thus the old adage <i>operari sequitur
+esse</i> (action follows being) must be modified by saying
+that to be is to act, and only that which acts&mdash;the active&mdash;exists,
+and in so far as it acts.</p>
+
+<p>As regards Schopenhauer, there is no need to endeavour
+to show that the will, which he posits as the essence of
+things, proceeds from consciousness. And it is only
+necessary to read his book on the Will in Nature to see
+how he attributed a certain spirit and even a certain personality
+to the plants themselves. And this doctrine of
+<a name="Page_147" id="Page_147" />his carried him logically to pessimism, for the true
+property and most inward function of the will is to suffer.
+The will is a force which feels itself&mdash;that is, which
+suffers. And, someone will add, which enjoys. But
+the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity
+to suffer; and the faculty of enjoyment is one with that
+of pain. Whosoever does not suffer does not enjoy, just
+as whosoever is insensible to cold is insensible to heat.</p>
+
+<p>And it is also quite logical that Schopenhauer, who
+deduced pessimism from the voluntarist doctrine or
+doctrine of universal personalization, should have
+deduced from both of these that the foundation of morals
+is compassion. Only his lack of the social and historical
+sense, his inability to feel that humanity also is a person,
+although a collective one, his egoism, in short, prevented
+him from feeling God, prevented him from individualizing
+and personalizing the total and collective Will&mdash;the
+Will of the Universe.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, it is easy to understand his aversion
+from purely empirical, evolutionist, or transformist
+doctrines, such as those set forth in the works of Lamarck
+and Darwin which came to his notice. Judging Darwin's
+theory solely by an extensive extract in <i>The Times</i>, he
+described it, in a letter to Adam Louis von Doss (March 1,
+1860), as &quot;downright empiricism&quot; <i>(platter Empirismus)</i>.
+In fact, for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so
+sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of
+Darwin left out of account the inward force, the essential
+motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden
+force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to
+perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence
+and propagation? Selection, adaptation, heredity, these
+are only external conditions. This inner, essential force
+has been called will on the supposition that there exists
+also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a
+feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others
+as well as ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are.
+<a name="Page_148" id="Page_148" />And it may be said that this force is the divine in us, that
+it is God Himself who works in us because He suffers
+in us.</p>
+
+<p>And sympathy teaches us to discover this force, this
+aspiration towards consciousness, in all things. It
+moves and activates the most minute living creatures;
+it moves and activates, perhaps, the very cells of our
+own bodily organism, which is a confederation, more or
+less solidary, of living beings; it moves the very globules
+of our blood. Our life is composed of lives, our vital
+aspiration of aspirations existing perhaps in the limbo
+of subconsciousness. Not more absurd than so many
+other dreams which pass as valid theories is the belief
+that our cells, our globules, may possess something akin
+to a rudimentary cellular, globular consciousness or basis
+of consciousness. Or that they may arrive at possessing
+such consciousness. And since we have given a loose
+rein to the fancy, we may fancy that these cells may communicate
+with one another, and that some of them may
+express their belief that they form part of a superior
+organism endowed with a collective personal consciousness.
+And more than once in the history of human
+feeling this fancy has been expressed in the surmisal of
+some philosopher or poet that we men are a kind of
+globules in the blood of a Supreme Being, who possesses
+his own personal collective consciousness, the consciousness
+of the Universe.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear
+nights we behold stretching across the heavens, this vast
+encircling ring in which our planetary system is itself
+but a molecule, is in its turn but a cell in the Universe,
+in the Body of God. All the cells of our body combine
+and co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their
+activity our consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness
+or the souls of all these cells entered completely
+into our consciousness, into the composite whole,
+if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my
+<a name="Page_149" id="Page_149" />bodily organism, I should feel the universe happening
+within myself, and perhaps the painful sense of my
+limitedness would disappear. And if all the consciousness
+of all beings unite in their entirety in the universal
+consciousness, this consciousness&mdash;that is to say, God&mdash;is
+all.</p>
+
+<p>In every instant obscure consciousnesses, elementary
+souls, are born and die within us, and their birth and
+death constitute our life. And their sudden and violent
+death constitutes our pain. And in like manner, in the
+heart of God consciousnesses are born and die&mdash;but do
+they die?&mdash;and their births and deaths constitute His life.</p>
+
+<p>If there is a Universal and Supreme Consciousness, I
+am an idea in it; and is it possible for any idea in this
+Supreme Consciousness to be completely blotted out?
+After I have died, God will go on remembering me, and
+to be remembered by God, to have my consciousness
+sustained by the Supreme Consciousness, is not that,
+perhaps, to be?</p>
+
+<p>And if anyone should say that God has made the
+universe, it may be rejoined that so also our soul has
+made our body as much as, if not more than, it has been
+made by it&mdash;if, indeed, there be a soul.</p>
+
+<p>When pity, love, reveals to us the whole universe
+striving to gain, to preserve, and to enlarge its consciousness,
+striving more and more to saturate itself
+with consciousness, feeling the pain of the discords
+which are produced within it, pity reveals to us the likeness
+of the whole universe with ourselves; it reveals to
+us that it is human, and it leads us to discover our Father
+in it, of whose flesh we are flesh; love leads us to personalize
+the whole of which we form a part.</p>
+
+<p>To say that God is eternally producing things is
+fundamentally the same as saying that things are
+eternally producing God. And the belief in a personal
+and spiritual God is based on the belief in our own personality
+and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to
+<a name="Page_150" id="Page_150" />be consciousness, we feel God to be consciousness&mdash;that
+is to say, a person; and because we desire ardently that
+our consciousness shall live and be independently of the
+body, we believe that the divine person lives and exists
+independently of the universe, that his state of consciousness
+is <i>ad extra</i>.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt logicians will come forward and confront us
+with the evident rational difficulties which this involves;
+but we have already stated that, although presented
+under logical forms, the content of all this is not strictly
+rational. Every rational conception of God is in itself
+contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for God&mdash;we
+believe that God exists by force of wishing that He
+may exist, and it is born also, perhaps, of God's love for
+us. Reason does not prove to us that God exists, but
+neither does it prove that He cannot exist.</p>
+
+<p>But of this conception of faith in God as the personalization
+of the universe we shall have more to say
+presently.</p>
+
+<p>And recalling what has been said in another part of
+this work, we may say that material things, in so far as
+they are known to us, issue into knowledge through the
+agency of hunger, and out of hunger issues the sensible
+or material universe in which we conglomerate these
+things; and that ideal things issue out of love, and out
+of love issues God, in whom we conglomerate these ideal
+things as in the Consciousness of the Universe. It is
+social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct of
+perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see
+society in everything, and that shows us at last that all
+Nature is really an infinite Society. For my part, the
+feeling that Nature is a society has taken hold of me
+hundreds of times in walking through the woods
+possessed with a sense of solidarity with the oaks, a
+sense of their dim awareness of my presence.</p>
+
+<p>Imagination, which is the social sense, animates
+the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it
+<a name="Page_151" id="Page_151" />humanizes everything and even makes everything
+identical with man.<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36" /><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> And the work of man is to supernaturalize
+Nature&mdash;that is to say, to make it divine by
+making it human, to help it to become conscious of itself,
+in short. The action of reason, on the other hand, is
+to mechanize or materialize.</p>
+
+<p>And just as a fruitful union is consummated between
+the individual&mdash;who is, in a certain sense, a society&mdash;and
+society, which is also an individual&mdash;the two being
+so inseparable from one another that it is impossible to
+say where the one begins and the other ends, for they
+are rather two aspects of a single essence&mdash;so also the
+spirit, the social element, which by relating us to others
+makes us conscious, unites with matter, the individual
+and individualizing element; similarly, reason or intelligence
+and imagination embrace in a mutually fruitful
+union, and the Universe merges into one with God.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Is all this true? And what is truth? I in my turn
+will ask, as Pilate asked&mdash;not, however, only to turn
+away and wash my hands, without waiting for an answer.</p>
+
+<p>Is truth in reason, or above reason, or beneath reason,
+or outside of reason, in some way or another? Is only
+the rational true? May there not be a reality, by its very
+nature, unattainable by reason, and perhaps, by its very
+nature, opposed to reason? And how can we know this
+reality if reason alone holds the key to knowledge?</p>
+
+<p>Our desire of living, our need of life, asks that that
+may be true which urges us to self-preservation and self-perpetuation,
+which sustains man and society; it asks
+that the true water may be that which assuages our thirst,
+and because it assuages it, that the true bread may be
+that which satisfies our hunger, because it satisfies it.</p>
+
+<p>The senses are devoted to the service of the instinct of
+preservation, and everything that satisfies this need of
+preserving ourselves, even though it does not pass
+<a name="Page_152" id="Page_152" />through the senses, is nevertheless a kind of intimate
+penetration of reality in us. Is the process of assimilating
+nutriment perhaps less real than the process of knowing
+the nutritive substance? It may be said that to eat
+a loaf of bread is not the same thing as seeing, touching,
+or tasting it; that in the one case it enters into our body,
+but not therefore into our consciousness. Is this true?
+Does not the loaf of bread that I have converted into my
+flesh and blood enter more into my consciousness than
+the other loaf which I see and touch, and of which I say:
+&quot;This is mine&quot;? And must I refuse objective reality
+to the bread that I have thus converted into my flesh and
+blood and made mine when I only touch it?</p>
+
+<p>There are some who live by air without knowing it.
+In the same way, it may be, we live by God and in God&mdash;in
+God the spirit and consciousness of society and of
+the whole Universe, in so far as the Universe is also a
+society.</p>
+
+<p>God is felt only in so far as He is lived; and man does
+not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth
+out of the mouth of God (Matt. iv. 4; Deut. viii. 3).</p>
+
+<p>And this personalization of the all, of the Universe, to
+which we are led by love, by pity, is the personalization
+of a person who embraces and comprehends within himself
+the other persons of which he is composed.</p>
+
+<p>The only way to give finality to the world is to give it
+consciousness. For where there is no consciousness there
+is no finality, finality presupposing a purpose. And, as
+we shall see, faith in God is based simply upon the vital
+need of giving finality to existence, of making it answer
+to a purpose. We need God, not in order to understand
+the <i>why</i>, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate
+<i>wherefore</i>, to give a meaning to the Universe.</p>
+
+<p>And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation
+that this consciousness of the Universe is composed
+and integrated by the consciousnesses of the beings
+which form the Universe, by the consciousnesses of all
+<a name="Page_153" id="Page_153" />the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it remains a
+personal consciousness distinct from those which compose
+it. Only thus is it possible to understand how in
+God we live, move, and have our being. That great
+visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, saw or caught a
+glimpse of this in his book on Heaven and Hell <i>(De
+Coelo et Inferno</i>, lii.), when he tells us: &quot;An entire
+angelic society appears sometimes in the form of a single
+angel, which also it hath been granted me by the Lord
+to see. When the Lord Himself appears in the midst of
+the angels, He doth not appear as encompassed by a
+multitude, but as a single being in angelic form. Hence
+it is that the Lord in the Word is called an angel, and
+likewise that on entire society is so called. Michael,
+Gabriel, and Raphael are nothing but angelical societies,
+which are so named from their functions.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>May we not perhaps live and love&mdash;that is, suffer and
+pity&mdash;in this all-enveloping Supreme Person&mdash;we, all the
+persons who suffer and pity and all the beings that strive to
+achieve personality, to acquire consciousness of their suffering
+and their limitation? And are we not, perhaps, ideas
+of this total Grand Consciousness, which by thinking of
+us as existing confers existence upon us? Does not our
+existence consist in being perceived and felt by God?
+And, further on, this same visionary tells us, under the
+form of images, that each angel, each society of angels,
+and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed,
+appear in human form, and in virtue of this human form
+the Lord rules them as one man.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He
+is eternal,&quot; wrote Kierkegaard (<i>Afslutende uvidens-kabelige
+Efterskrift</i>); but perhaps it is more exact to say
+with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that &quot;God
+is great because His thought is action&quot; (<i>Ai giovani
+d'ltalia</i>), because with Him to think is to create, and He
+gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the
+mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is the un<a name="Page_154" id="Page_154" />thinkable
+by God. Is it not written in the Scriptures
+that God creates with His word&mdash;that is to say, with His
+thought&mdash;and that by this, by His Word, He made
+everything that exists? And what God has once made does
+He ever forget? May it not be that all the thoughts that
+have ever passed through the Supreme Consciousness
+still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all
+existence eternalized?</p>
+
+<p>Our longing to save consciousness, to give personal
+and human finality to the Universe and to existence, is
+such that even in the midst of a supreme, an agonizing
+and lacerating sacrifice, we should still hear the voice
+that assured us that if our consciousness disappears, it is
+that the infinite and eternal Consciousness may be enriched
+thereby, that our souls may serve as nutriment to
+the Universal Soul. Yes, I enrich God, because before
+I existed He did not think of me as existing, because I
+am one more&mdash;one more even though among an infinity
+of others&mdash;who, having really lived, really suffered, and
+really loved, abide in His bosom. It is the furious longing
+to give finality to the Universe, to make it conscious
+and personal, that has brought us to believe in God, to
+wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To
+create Him, yes! This saying ought not to scandalize
+even the most devout theist. For to believe in God is, in
+a certain sense, to create Him, although He first creates
+us.<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37" /><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> It is He who in us is continually creating Himself.</p>
+
+<p>We have created God in order to save the Universe
+from nothingness, for all that is not consciousness and
+eternal consciousness, conscious of its eternity and
+eternally conscious, is nothing more than appearance.
+There is nothing truly real save that which feels, suffers,
+pities, loves, and desires, save consciousness; there is
+nothing substantial but consciousness. And we need
+<a name="Page_155" id="Page_155" />God in order to save consciousness; not in order to think
+existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know the
+why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore
+of it. Love is a contradiction if there is no God.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now consider this idea of God, of the logical
+God or the Supreme Reason, and of the vital God or the
+God of the heart&mdash;that is, Supreme Love.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36" /><a href="#FNanchor_36_36">[36]</a> <i>Todo lo humaniza, y aun lo humana</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37" /><a href="#FNanchor_37_37">[37]</a> In the translation it is impossible to retain the play upon the verbs <i>crear</i>,
+to create, and <i>creer</i>, to believe: <i>&quot;Porque creer en Dios es en cierto modo
+crearle, aunque El nos cree antes.&quot;</i>&mdash;J.E.C.F.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII" /><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156" />VIII</h2>
+
+<h2>FROM GOD TO GOD</h2>
+
+<p>To affirm that the religious sense is a sense of divinity
+and that it is impossible without some abuse of the
+ordinary usages of human language to speak of an
+atheistic religion, is not, I think, to do violence to the
+truth; although it is clear that everything will depend
+upon the concept that we form of God, a concept which
+in its turn depends upon the concept of divinity.</p>
+
+<p>Our proper procedure, in effect, will be to begin with
+this sense of divinity, before prefixing to the concept of
+this quality the definite article and the capital letter and
+so converting it into &quot;the Divinity&quot;&mdash;that is, into
+God. For man has not deduced the divine from God,
+but rather he has reached God through the divine.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of these somewhat wandering but at the
+same time urgent reflections upon the tragic sense of life,
+I have already alluded to the <i>timor fecit deos</i> of Statius
+with the object of limiting and correcting it. It is not
+my intention to trace yet once again the historical processes
+by which peoples have arrived at the consciousness
+and concept of a personal God like the God of
+Christianity. And I say peoples and not isolated individuals,
+for if there is any feeling or concept that is truly
+collective and social it is the feeling and concept of God,
+although the individual subsequently individualizes it.
+Philosophy may, and in fact does, possess an individual
+origin; theology is necessarily collective.</p>
+
+<p>Schleiermacher's theory, which attributes the origin,
+or rather the essence, of the religious sense to the
+<a name="Page_157" id="Page_157" />immediate and simple feeling of dependency, appears to
+be the most profound and exact explanation. Primitive
+man, living in society, feels himself to be dependent
+upon the mysterious forces invisibly environing him; he
+feels himself to be in social communion, not only with
+beings like himself, his fellow-men, but with the whole
+of Nature, animate and inanimate, which simply means,
+in other words, that he personalizes everything. Not
+only does he possess a consciousness of the world, but
+he imagines that the world, like himself, possesses consciousness
+also. Just as a child talks to his doll or his
+dog as if it understood what he was saying, so the
+savage believes that his fetich hears him when he speaks
+to it, and that the angry storm-cloud is aware of him and
+deliberately pursues him. For the newly born mind of
+the primitive natural man has not yet wholly severed
+itself from the cords which still bind it to the womb of
+Nature, neither has it clearly marked out the boundary
+that separates dreaming from waking, imagination from
+reality.</p>
+
+<p>The divine, therefore, was not originally something
+objective, but was rather the subjectivity of consciousness
+projected exteriorly, the personalization of the
+world. The concept of divinity arose out of the feeling
+of divinity, and the feeling of divinity is simply the dim
+and nascent feeling of personality vented upon the outside
+world. And strictly speaking it is not possible to
+speak of outside and inside, objective and subjective,
+when no such distinction was actually felt; indeed it is
+precisely from this lack of distinction that the feeling and
+concept of divinity proceed. The clearer our consciousness
+of the distinction between the objective and the subjective,
+the more obscure is the feeling of divinity in us.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said, and very justly so it would appear,
+that Hellenic paganism was not so much polytheistic as
+pantheistic. I do not know that the belief in a multitude
+of gods, taking the concept of God in the sense in which
+<a name="Page_158" id="Page_158" />we understand it to-day, has ever really existed in any
+human mind. And if by pantheism is understood the
+doctrine, not that everything and each individual thing
+is God&mdash;a proposition which I find unthinkable&mdash;but
+that everything is divine, then it may be said without
+any great abuse of language that paganism was
+pantheistic. Its gods not only mixed among men but
+intermixed with them; they begat gods upon mortal
+women and upon goddesses mortal men begat demi-gods.
+And if demi-gods, that is, demi-men, were believed to
+exist, it was because the divine and the human were
+viewed as different aspects of the same reality. The
+divinization of everything was simply its humanization.
+To say that the sun was a god was equivalent to saying
+that it was a man, a human consciousness, more or less,
+aggrandized and sublimated. And this is true of all
+beliefs from fetichism to Hellenic paganism.</p>
+
+<p>The real distinction between gods and men consisted
+in the fact that the former were immortal. A god came
+to be identical with an immortal man and a man was
+deified, reputed as a god, when it was deemed that at
+his death he had not really died. Of certain heroes it
+was believed that they were alive in the kingdom of the
+dead. And this is a point of great importance in estimating
+the value of the concept of the divine.</p>
+
+<p>In those republics of gods there was always some predominating
+god, some real monarch. It was through
+the agency of this divine monarchy that primitive peoples
+were led from monocultism to monotheism. Hence
+monarchy and monotheism are twin brethren. Zeus,
+Jupiter, was in process of being converted into an only
+god, just as Jahw&eacute; originally one god among many
+others, came to be converted into an only god, first the
+god of the people of Israel, then the god of humanity,
+and finally the god of the whole universe.</p>
+
+<p>Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin.
+&quot;It is only on the march and in time of war,&quot; says
+<a name="Page_159" id="Page_159" />Robertson Smith in <i>The Prophets of Israel</i>,<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38" /><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> &quot;that a
+nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority,
+and so it came about that in the first beginnings of
+national organization, centring in the sanctuary of the
+ark, Israel was thought of mainly as the host of Jehovah.
+The very name of Israel is martial, and means 'God (<i>El</i>)
+fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahw&egrave;
+&Ccedil;eb&auml;&ocirc;th&mdash;the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on
+the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly
+realized; but in primitive nations the leader in time of
+war is also the natural judge in time of peace.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>God, the only God, issued, therefore, from man's sense
+of divinity as a warlike, monarchical and social God. He
+revealed himself to the people as a whole, not to the
+individual. He was the God of a people and he jealously
+exacted that worship should be rendered to him alone.
+The transition from this monocultism to monotheism
+was effected largely by the individual action, more
+philosophical perhaps than theological, of the prophets.
+It was, in fact, the individual activity of the prophets
+that individualized the divinity. And above all by
+making the divinity ethical.</p>
+
+<p>Subsequently reason&mdash;that is, philosophy&mdash;took possession
+of this God who had arisen in the human consciousness
+as a consequence of the sense of divinity in man, and
+tended to define him and convert him into an idea. For
+to define a thing is to idealize it, a process which necessitates
+the abstraction from it of its incommensurable or
+irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of
+feeling, the divinity felt as a unique person and consciousness
+external to us, although at the same time
+enveloping and sustaining us, was converted into the
+idea of God.</p>
+
+<p>The logical, rational God, the <i>ens summum</i>, the
+<i>primum movens</i>, the Supreme Being of theological
+philosophy, the God who is reached by the three famous
+<a name="Page_160" id="Page_160" />ways of negation, eminence and causality, <i>vi&aelig; negationis,
+eminenti&aelig;, causalitatis</i>, is nothing but an idea of
+God, a dead thing. The traditional and much debated
+proofs of his existence are, at bottom, merely a vain
+attempt to determine his essence; for as Vinet has very
+well observed, existence is deduced from essence; and to
+say that God exists, without saying what God is and how
+he is, is equivalent to saying nothing at all.</p>
+
+<p>And this God, arrived at by the methods of eminence
+and negation or abstraction of finite qualities, ends by becoming
+an unthinkable God, a pure idea, a God of whom,
+by the very fact of his ideal excellence, we can say that
+he is nothing, as indeed he has been defined by Scotus
+Erigena: <i>Deus propter excellentiam non inmerito nihil
+vocatur</i>. Or in the words of the pseudo-Dionysius the
+Areopagite, in his fifth Epistle, &quot;The divine darkness is
+the inaccessible light in which God is said to dwell.&quot;
+The anthropomorphic God, the God who is felt, in being
+purified of human, and as such finite, relative and temporal,
+attributes, evaporates into the God of deism or of
+pantheism.</p>
+
+<p>The traditional so-called proofs of the existence of God
+all refer to this God-Idea, to this logical God, the God
+by abstraction, and hence they really prove nothing, or
+rather, they prove nothing more than the existence of this
+idea of God.</p>
+
+<p>In my early youth, when first I began to be puzzled
+by these eternal problems, I read in a book, the author of
+which I have no wish to recall,<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39" /><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> this sentence: &quot;God is
+the great X placed over the ultimate barrier of human
+knowledge; in the measure in which science advances,
+the barrier recedes.&quot; And I wrote in the margin, &quot;On
+this side of the barrier, everything is explained without
+Him; on the further side, nothing is explained, either
+<a name="Page_161" id="Page_161" />with Him or without Him; God therefore is superfluous.&quot;
+And so far as concerns the God-Idea, the God of the
+proofs, I continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace
+is said to have stated that he had not found the hypothesis
+of God necessary in order to construct his scheme of the
+origin of the Universe, and it is very true. In no way
+whatever does the idea of God help us to understand
+better the existence, the essence and the finality of the
+Universe.</p>
+
+<p>That there is a Supreme Being, infinite, absolute and
+eternal, whose existence is unknown to us, and who has
+created the Universe, is not more conceivable than that
+the material basis of the Universe itself, its matter, is
+eternal and infinite and absolute. We do not understand
+the existence of the world one whit the better by telling
+ourselves that God created it. It is a begging of the
+question, or a merely verbal solution, intended to cover
+up our ignorance. In strict truth, we deduce the existence
+of the Creator from the fact that the thing created
+exists, a process which does not justify rationally His
+existence. You cannot deduce a necessity from a fact,
+or else everything were necessary.</p>
+
+<p>And if from the nature of the Universe we pass to
+what is called its order, which is supposed to necessitate
+an Ordainer, we may say that order is what there is, and
+we do not conceive of any other. This deduction of
+God's existence from the order of the Universe implies a
+transition from the ideal to the real order, an outward
+projection of our mind, a supposition that the rational
+explanation of a thing produces the thing itself. Human
+art, instructed by Nature, possesses a conscious creative
+faculty, by means of which it apprehends the process of
+creation, and we proceed to transfer this conscious and
+artistic creative faculty to the consciousness of an artist-creator,
+but from what nature he in his turn learnt his
+art we cannot tell.</p>
+
+<p>The traditional analogy of the watch and the watch<a name="Page_162" id="Page_162" />maker
+is inapplicable to a Being absolute, infinite and
+eternal. It is, moreover, only another way of explaining
+nothing. For to say that the world is as it is and not
+otherwise because God made it so, while at the same time
+we do not know for what reason He made it so, is to say
+nothing. And if we knew for what reason God made it
+so, then God is superfluous and the reason itself suffices.
+If everything were mathematics, if there were no
+irrational element, we should not have had recourse to
+this explanatory theory of a Supreme Ordainer, who is
+nothing but the reason of the irrational, and so merely
+another cloak for our ignorance. And let us not discuss
+here that absurd proposition that, if all the type in a
+printing-press were printed at random, the result could
+not possibly be the composition of <i>Don Quixote</i>. Something
+would be composed which would be as good as
+<i>Don Quixote</i> for those who would have to be content
+with it and would grow in it and would form part of it.</p>
+
+<p>In effect, this traditional supposed proof of God's
+existence resolves itself fundamentally into hypostatizing
+or substantivating the explanation or reason of a
+phenomenon; it amounts to saying that Mechanics is the
+cause of movement, Biology of life, Philology of language,
+Chemistry of bodies, by simply adding the capital
+letter to the science and converting it into a force distinct
+from the phenomena from which we derive it and
+distinct from our mind which effects the derivation. But
+the God who is the result of this process, a God who is
+nothing but reason hypostatized and projected towards
+the infinite, cannot possibly be felt as something living
+and real, nor yet be conceived of save as a mere idea
+which will die with us.</p>
+
+<p>The question arises, on the other hand, whether a thing
+the idea of which has been conceived but which has no
+real existence, does not exist because God wills that it
+should not exist, or whether God does not will it to exist
+because, in fact, it does not exist; and, with regard to the
+<a name="Page_163" id="Page_163" />impossible, whether a thing is impossible because God
+wills it so, or whether God wills it so because, in itself
+and by the very fact of its own inherent absurdity, it is
+impossible. God has to submit to the logical law of contradiction,
+and He cannot, according to the theologians,
+cause two and two to make either more or less than four.
+Either the law of necessity is above Him or He Himself
+is the law of necessity. And in the moral order the question
+arises whether falsehood, or homicide, or adultery,
+are wrong because He has so decreed it, or whether He
+has so decreed it because they are wrong. If the former,
+then God is a capricious and unreasonable God, who
+decrees one law when He might equally well have decreed
+another, or, if the latter, He obeys an intrinsic nature
+and essence which exists in things themselves independently
+of Him&mdash;that is to say, independently of His
+sovereign will; and if this is the case, if He obeys the
+innate reason of things, this reason, if we could but know
+it, would suffice us without any further need of God, and
+since we do not know it, God explains nothing. This
+reason would be above God. Neither is it of any avail
+to say that this reason is God Himself, the supreme
+reason of things. A reason of this kind, a necessary
+reason, is not a personal something. It is will that
+gives personality. And it is because of this problem of
+the relations between God's reason, necessarily necessary,
+and His will, necessarily free, that the logical and
+Aristotelian God will always be a contradictory God.</p>
+
+<p>The scholastic theologians never succeeded in disentangling
+themselves from the difficulties in which they
+found themselves involved when they attempted to reconcile
+human liberty with divine prescience and with the
+knowledge that God possesses of the free and contingent
+future; and that is strictly the reason why the rational
+God is wholly inapplicable to the contingent, for the
+notion of contingency is fundamentally the same as the
+notion of irrationality. The rational God is necessarily
+<a name="Page_164" id="Page_164" />necessary in His being and in His working; in every single
+case He cannot do other than the best, and a number of
+different things cannot all equally be the best, for among
+infinite possibilities there is only one that is best accommodated
+to its end, just as among the infinite number of
+lines that can be drawn from one point to another, there
+is only one straight line. And the rational God, the
+God of reason, cannot but follow in each case the straight
+line, the line that leads most directly to the end proposed,
+a necessary end, just as the only straight line that
+leads to it is a necessary line. And thus for the divinity
+of God is substituted His necessity. And in the necessity
+of God, His free will&mdash;that is to say, His conscious
+personality&mdash;perishes. The God of our heart's desire,
+the God who shall save our soul from nothingness, must
+needs be an arbitrary God.</p>
+
+<p>Not because He thinks can God be God, but because He
+works, because He creates; He is not a contemplative but
+an active God. A God-Reason, a theoretical or contemplative
+God, such as is this God of theological rationalism,
+is a God that is diluted in His own contemplation. With
+this God corresponds, as we shall see, the beatific vision,
+understood as the supreme expression of human felicity.
+A quietist God, in short, as reason, by its very essence,
+is quietist.</p>
+
+<p>There remains the other famous proof of God's existence,
+that of the supposed unanimous consent in a belief
+in Him among all peoples. But this proof is not strictly
+rational, neither is it an argument in favour of the rational
+God who explains the Universe, but of the God of the
+heart, who makes us live. We should be justified in
+calling it a rational proof only on the supposition that
+we believed that reason was identical with a more or less
+unanimous agreement among all peoples, that it corresponded
+with the verdict of a universal suffrage, only on
+the supposition that we held that <i>vox populi</i>, which is
+said to be <i>vox Dei</i>, was actually the voice of reason.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165" />Such was, indeed, the belief of Lamennais, that tragic
+and ardent spirit, who affirmed that life and truth were
+essentially one and the same thing&mdash;would that they
+were!&mdash;and that reason was one, universal, everlasting
+and holy (<i>Essai sur l'indiff&eacute;rence</i>, partie iv., chap, viii.).
+He invoked the <i>aut omnibus credendum est aut nemini</i>
+of Lactantius&mdash;we must believe all or none&mdash;and the saying
+of Heraclitus that every individual opinion is fallible,
+and that of Aristotle that the strongest proof consists in
+the general agreement of mankind, and above all that
+of Pliny (<i>Paneg. Trajani</i>, lxii.), to the effect that one man
+cannot deceive all men or be deceived by all&mdash;<i>nemo
+omnes, neminem omnes fefellerunt</i>. Would that it were
+so! And so he concludes with the dictum of Cicero (<i>De
+natura deorum</i>, lib. iii., cap. ii., 5 and 6), that we must
+believe the tradition of our ancestors even though they
+fail to render us a reason&mdash;<i>maioribus autem nostris, etiam
+nulla ratione reddita credere</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Let us suppose that this belief of the ancients in the
+divine interpenetration of the whole of Nature is universal
+and constant, and that it is, as Aristotle calls it, an
+ancestral dogma (<i>&#960;&#945;&#964;&#961;&#953;&#959;&#962; &#948;&#959;&#958;&#945;</i>) (<i>Metaphysica</i>, lib. vii.,
+cap. vii.); this would prove only that there is a motive
+impelling peoples and individuals&mdash;that is to say, all or
+almost all or a majority of them&mdash;to believe in a God. But
+may it not be that there are illusions and fallacies rooted in
+human nature itself? Do not all peoples begin by believing
+that the sun turns round the earth? And do we not
+all naturally incline to believe that which satisfies our
+desires? Shall we say with Hermann<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40" /><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> that, &quot;if there is
+a God, He has not left us without some indication of
+Himself, and if is His will that we should find Him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A pious desire, no doubt, but we cannot strictly call it
+a reason, unless we apply to it the Augustinian sentence,
+<a name="Page_166" id="Page_166" />but which again is not a reason, &quot;Since thou seekest Me,
+it must be that thou hast found Me,&quot; believing that God
+is the cause of our seeking Him.</p>
+
+<p>This famous argument from the supposed unanimity
+of mankind's belief in God, the argument which with a
+sure instinct was seized upon by the ancients, is in its
+essence identical with the so-called moral proof which
+Kant employed in his <i>Critique of Practical Reason</i>,
+transposing its application from mankind collectively to
+the individual, the proof which he derives from our conscience,
+or rather from our feeling of divinity. It is not
+a proof strictly or specifically rational, but vital; it cannot
+be applied to the logical God, the <i>ens summum</i>, the essentially
+simple and abstract Being, the immobile and impassible
+prime mover, the God-Reason, in a word, but
+to the biotic God, to the Being essentially complex and
+concrete, to the suffering God who suffers and desires in
+us and with us, to the Father of Christ who is only to be
+approached through Man, through His Son (John xiv. 6),
+and whose revelation is historical, or if you like,
+anecdotical, but not philosophical or categorical.</p>
+
+<p>The unanimous consent of mankind (let us suppose
+the unanimity) or, in other words, this universal longing
+of all human souls who have arrived at the consciousness
+of their humanity, which desires to be the end and meaning
+of the Universe, this longing, which is nothing but
+that very essence of the soul which consists in its effort
+to persist eternally and without a break in the continuity
+of consciousness, leads us to the human, anthropomorphic
+God, the projection of our consciousness to the Consciousness
+of the Universe; it leads us to the God who confers
+human meaning and finality upon the Universe and who
+is not the <i>ens summum</i>, the <i>primum movens</i>, nor the
+Creator of the Universe, nor merely the Idea-God. It
+leads us to the living, subjective God, for He is simply
+subjectivity objectified or personality universalized&mdash;He
+is more than a mere idea, and He is will rather than
+<a name="Page_167" id="Page_167" />reason. God is Love&mdash;that is, Will. Reason, the
+Word, derives from Him, but He, the Father, is, above
+all, Will.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There can be no doubt whatever,&quot; Ritschl says
+(<i>Rechtfertigung und Vers&ouml;hnung</i>, iii., chap. v.), &quot;that a
+very imperfect view was taken of God's spiritual personality
+in the older theology, when the functions of knowing
+and willing alone were employed to illustrate it.
+Religious thought plainly ascribes to God affections of
+feeling as well. The older theology, however, laboured
+under the impression that feeling and emotion were
+characteristic only of limited and created personality; it
+transformed, <i>e.g.</i>, the religious idea of the Divine
+blessedness into eternal self-knowledge, and that of the
+Divine wrath into a fixed purpose to punish sin.&quot; Yes,
+this logical God, arrived at by the <i>via negationis</i>, was a
+God who, strictly speaking, neither loved nor hated,
+because He neither enjoyed nor suffered, an inhuman
+God, and His justice was a rational or mathematical
+justice&mdash;that is, an injustice.</p>
+
+<p>The attributes of the living God, of the Father of
+Christ, must be deduced from His historical revelation in
+the Gospel and in the conscience of every Christian
+believer, and not from metaphysical reasonings which
+lead only to the Nothing-God of Scotus Erigena, to the
+rational or pantheistic God, to the atheist God&mdash;in short,
+to the de-personalized Divinity.</p>
+
+<p>Not by the way of reason, but only by the way of love
+and of suffering, do we come to the living God, the human
+God. Reason rather separates us from Him. We cannot
+first know Him in order that afterwards we may love
+Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him,
+hungering after Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge
+of God proceeds from the love of God, and this
+knowledge has little or nothing of the rational in it. For
+God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to
+confine Him within the limits of our mind&mdash;that is to say,
+<a name="Page_168" id="Page_168" />to kill Him. In so far as we attempt to define Him,
+there rises up before us&mdash;Nothingness.</p>
+
+<p>The idea of God, formulated by a theodicy that claims
+to be rational, is simply an hypothesis, like the hypotheses
+of ether, for example.</p>
+
+<p>Ether is, in effect, a merely hypothetical entity, valuable
+only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we
+endeavour to explain&mdash;light, electricity or universal
+gravitation&mdash;and only in so far as these facts cannot be
+explained in any other way. In like manner the idea
+of God is also an hypothesis, valuable only in so far as
+it enables us to explain that which by means of if we
+endeavour to explain&mdash;the essence and existence of the
+Universe&mdash;and only so long as these cannot be explained
+in any other way. And since in reality we explain the
+Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than
+without it, the idea of God, the supreme <i>petitio principii</i>,
+is valueless.</p>
+
+<p>But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory
+of light, air, on the other hand, is a thing that is directly
+felt; and even though it did not enable us to explain the
+phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless always be
+directly aware of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in
+moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same
+way God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a
+reality that is immediately felt; and even though the idea
+of Him does not enable us to explain either the existence
+or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct
+feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation.
+And this feeling&mdash;mark it well, for all that is tragic
+in it and the whole tragic sense of life is founded upon
+this&mdash;this feeling is a feeling of hunger for God, of the
+lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance,
+as we shall see, to wish that there may be a God, to be
+unable to live without Him.</p>
+
+<p>So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason
+in search of God, I could not find Him, for I was not
+<a name="Page_169" id="Page_169" />deluded by the idea of God, neither could I take an idea
+for God, and it was then, as I wandered among the
+wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought
+to seek no other consolation than the truth, meaning
+thereby reason, and yet for all that I was not comforted.
+But as I sank deeper and deeper into rational scepticism
+on the one hand and into heart's despair on the other,
+the hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation
+of spirit made me feel the want of God, and with the want
+of Him, His reality. And I wished that there might be
+a God, that God might exist. And God does not exist,
+but rather super-exists, and He is sustaining our existence,
+existing us <i>(existi&eacute;ndonos)</i>.</p>
+
+<p>God, who is Love, the Father of Love, is the son of
+love in us. There are men of a facile and external habit
+of mind, slaves of reason, that reason which externalizes
+us, who think it a shrewd comment to say that so far
+from God having made man in His image and likeness,
+it is rather man who has made his gods or his God in his
+own image and likeness,<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41" /><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> and so superficial are they that
+they do not pause to consider that if the second of these
+propositions be true, as in fact it is, it is owing to the fact
+that the first is not less true. God and man, in effect,
+mutually create one another; God creates or reveals Himself
+in man and man creates himself in God. God is
+His own maker, <i>Deus ipse se facit</i>, said Lactantius
+(<i>Divinarum Institutionum</i>, ii., 8), and we may say that
+He is making Himself continually both in man and by
+man. And if each of us, impelled by his love, by his
+hunger for divinity, creates for himself an image of God
+according to his own desire, and if according to His
+desire God creates Himself for each of us, then there is
+a collective, social, human God, the resultant of all the
+human imaginations that imagine Him. For God is
+<a name="Page_170" id="Page_170" />and reveals Himself in collectivity. And God is the
+richest and most personal of human conceptions.</p>
+
+<p>The Master of divinity has bidden us be perfect as our
+Father who is in heaven is perfect (Matt. v. 48), and in
+the sphere of thought and feeling our perfection consists
+in the zeal with which we endeavour to equate our imagination
+with the total imagination of the humanity of which
+in God we form a part.</p>
+
+<p>The logical theory of the opposition between the extension
+and the comprehension of a concept, the one
+increasing in the ratio in which the other diminishes, is
+well known. The concept that is most extensive and at
+the same time least comprehensive is that of being or of
+thing, which embraces everything that exists and possesses
+no other distinguishing quality than that of being;
+while the concept that is most comprehensive and least
+extensive is that of the Universe, which is only applicable
+to itself and comprehends all existing qualities. And the
+logical or rational God, the God obtained by way of
+negation, the absolute entity, merges, like reality itself,
+into nothingness; for, as Hegel pointed out, pure being
+and pure nothingness are identical. And the God of the
+heart, the God who is felt, the God of living men, is the
+Universe itself conceived as personality, is the consciousness
+of the Universe. A God universal and personal,
+altogether different from the individual God of a rigid
+metaphysical monotheism.</p>
+
+<p>I must advert here once again to my view of the opposition
+that exists between individuality and personality,
+notwithstanding the fact that the one demands the other.
+Individuality is, if I may so express it, the continent
+or thing which contains, personality the content or
+thing contained, or I might say that my personality
+is in a certain sense my comprehension, that which
+I comprehend or embrace within myself&mdash;which is in a
+certain way the whole Universe&mdash;and that my individuality
+is my extension; the one my infinite, the other
+<a name="Page_171" id="Page_171" />my finite. A hundred jars of hard earthenware are
+strongly individualized, but it is possible for them to be
+all equally empty or all equally full of the same homogeneous
+liquid, whereas two bladders of so delicate a
+membrane as to admit of the action of osmosis and
+exosmosis may be strongly differentiated and contain
+liquids of a very mixed composition. And thus a man,
+in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply
+detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and
+yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further,
+it is true on the other hand that the more personality a
+man has and the greater his interior richness and the
+more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely
+he is divided from his fellows. In the same way the
+rigid God of deism, of Aristotelian monotheism, the
+<i>ens summum</i>, is a being in whom individuality, or rather
+simplicity, stifles personality. Definition kills him, for
+to define is to impose boundaries, it is to limit, and it is
+impossible to define the absolutely indefinable. This
+God lacks interior richness; he is not a society in himself.
+And this the vital revelation obviated by the
+belief in the Trinity, which makes God a society and even
+a family in himself and no longer a pure individual. The
+God of faith is personal; He is a person because He
+includes three persons, for personality is not sensible of
+itself in isolation. An isolated person ceases to be a
+person, for whom should he love? And if he does not
+love, he is not a person. Nor can a simple being love
+himself without his love expanding him into a compound
+being.</p>
+
+<p>It was because God was felt as a Father that the belief
+in the Trinity arose. For a God-Father cannot be a
+single, that is, a solitary, God. A father is always the
+father of a family. And the fact that God was felt as a
+father acted as a continual incentive to conceive Him not
+merely anthropomorphically&mdash;that is to say, as a man,
+<i>&#945;&#957;&#952;&#961;&#969;&#960;&#959;&#962;</i>&mdash;but andromorphically, as a male, <i>&#945;&#957;&#951;&#961;</i>. In the
+<a name="Page_172" id="Page_172" />popular Christian imagination, in effect, God the Father
+is conceived of as a male. And the reason is that man,
+<i>homo</i>, <i>&#945;&#957;&#952;&#961;&#969;&#960;&#959;&#962;</i>, as we know him, is necessarily either a
+male, <i>vir</i>, <i>&#945;&#957;&#951;&#961;</i>, or a female, <i>mulier</i>, <i>&#947;&#965;&#957;&#951;</i>. And to these
+may be added the child, who is neuter. And hence in
+order to satisfy imaginatively this necessity of feeling
+God as a perfect man&mdash;that is, as a family&mdash;arose the cult
+of the God-Mother, the Virgin Mary, and the cult of the
+Child Jesus.</p>
+
+<p>The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which, by the
+gradual elevation of the divine element in the Virgin has
+led almost to her deification, answers merely to the
+demand of the feeling that God should be a perfect man,
+that God should include in His nature the feminine
+element. The progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary,
+the work of Catholic piety, having its beginning in the
+expression Mother of God, <i>&#952;&#949;&#959;&#964;&#959;&#954;&#959;&#962;</i>, <i>deipara</i>, has culminated
+in attributing to her the status of co-redeemer
+and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without
+the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a
+position between Humanity and Divinity and nearer
+Divinity than Humanity. And it has been surmised that
+in course of time she may perhaps even come to be
+regarded as yet another personal manifestation of the
+Godhead.</p>
+
+<p>And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion
+of the Trinity into a Quaternity. If <i>&#960;&#957;&#949;&#965;&#956;&#945;</i>, in
+Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter had been feminine,
+who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already
+have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy
+Spirit? That fervent piety which always knows how to
+mould theological speculation in accordance with its own
+desires would have found sufficient warranty for such a
+doctrine in the text of the Gospel, in Luke's narrative
+of the Annunciation where the angel Gabriel hails Mary
+with the words, &quot;The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee,&quot;
+<i>&#960;&#957;&#949;&#965;&#956;&#945; &#945;&#947;&#953;&#959;&#957; &#949;&#960;&#949;
+&#955;&#949;&#965;&#963;&#949;&#964;&#945;&#953; &#949;&#960;&#953; &#963;&#949;</i> (Luke i. 35). And thus
+<a name="Page_173" id="Page_173" />a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel
+to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his
+identification with the Word.</p>
+
+<p>In any case the cult of the Virgin, of the eternal
+feminine, or rather of the divine feminine, of the divine
+maternity, helps to complete the personalization of God
+by constituting Him a family.</p>
+
+<p>In one of my books (<i>Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho</i>,
+part ii., chap. lxvii.) I have said that &quot;God was and is,
+in our mind, masculine. In His mode of judging and
+condemning men, He acts as a male, not as a human
+person above the limitation of sex; He acts as a father.
+And to counterbalance this, the Mother element was
+required, the Mother who always forgives, the Mother
+whose arms are always open to the child when he flies
+from the frowning brow or uplifted hand of the angry
+father; the Mother in whose bosom we seek the dim,
+comforting memory of that warmth and peace of our pre-natal
+unconsciousness, of that milky sweetness that
+soothed our dreams of innocence; the Mother who knows
+no justice but that of forgiveness, no law but that of love.
+Our weak and imperfect conception of God as a God
+with a long beard and a voice of thunder, of a God who
+promulgates laws and pronounces dooms, of a God who
+is the Master of a household, a Roman Paterfamilias,
+required counterpoise and complement, and since fundamentally
+we are unable to conceive of the personal and
+living God as exalted above human and even masculine
+characteristics, and still less as a neutral or hermaphrodite
+God, we have recourse to providing Him with a
+feminine God, and by the side of the God-Father we
+have placed the Goddess-Mother, she who always forgives,
+because, since she sees with love-blind eyes, she
+sees always the hidden cause of the fault and in that
+hidden cause the only justice of forgiveness ...&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And to this I must now add that not only are we unable
+to conceive of the full and living God as masculine
+<a name="Page_174" id="Page_174" />simply, but we are unable to conceive of Him as
+individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I, an
+unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living
+I is an I that is really a We; my living personal I lives
+only in other, of other, and by other I's; I am sprung,
+from a multitude of ancestors, I carry them within me in
+extract, and at the same time I carry within me, potentially,
+a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection
+of my I to the infinite&mdash;or rather I, the projection of
+God to the finite&mdash;must also be multitude. Hence, in
+order to save the personality of God&mdash;that is to say, in
+order to save the living God&mdash;faith's need&mdash;the need of
+the feeling and the imagination&mdash;of conceiving Him and;
+feeling Him as possessed of a certain internal multiplicity.</p>
+
+<p>This need the pagan feeling of a living divinity
+obviated by polytheism. It is the agglomeration of its
+gods, the republic of them, that really constitutes its
+Divinity. The real God of Hellenic paganism is not so
+much Father Zeus (<i>Jupiter</i>) as the whole society of gods
+and demi-gods. Hence the solemnity of the invocation
+of Demosthenes when he invoked all the gods and all the
+goddesses: <i>&#964;&#959;&#953;&#962; &#952;&#949;&#959;&#953;&#962; &#949;&#965;&#967;&#959;&#956;&#945;&#953; &#954;&#945;&#953; &#960;&#945;&#963;&#945;&#953;&#962;</i>. And when
+the rationalizers converted the term god, <i>&#952;&#949;&#959;&#962;</i>, which is
+properly an adjective, a quality predicated of each one
+of the gods, into a substantive, and added the definite
+article to it, they produced <i>the</i> god, <i>&#959; &#952;&#949;&#959;&#962;</i>, the dead and
+abstract god of philosophical rationalism, a substantivized
+quality and therefore void of personality. For the masculine
+concrete god (<i>el</i> dios) is nothing but the neuter
+abstract divine quality (<i>lo</i> divino). Now the transition
+from feeling the divinity in all things to substantivating
+it and converting the Divinity into God, cannot be
+achieved without feeling undergoing a certain risk.
+And the Aristotelian God, the God of the logical proofs,
+is nothing more than the Divinity, a concept and not a
+living person who can be felt and with whom through
+love man can communicate. This God is merely a sub<a name="Page_175" id="Page_175" />stantivized
+adjective; He is a constitutional God who
+reigns but does not govern, and Knowledge is His constitutional
+charter.</p>
+
+<p>And even in Greco-Latin paganism itself the tendency
+towards a living monotheism is apparent in the fact that
+Zeus was conceived of and felt as a father, <i>&#918;&#949;&#965;&#962; &#960;&#945;&#964;&#951;&#961;</i>, as Homer calls him, the <i>Ju-piter</i> or <i>Ju-pater</i> of the Latins,
+and as a father of a whole widely extended family of gods
+and goddesses who together with him constituted the
+Divinity.</p>
+
+<p>The conjunction of pagan polytheism with Judaic
+monotheism, which had endeavoured by other means to
+save the personality of God, gave birth to the feeling of
+the Catholic God, a God who is a society, as the pagan
+God of whom I have spoken was a society, and who at
+the same time is one, as the God of Israel finally became
+one. Such is the Christian Trinity, whose deepest sense
+rationalistic deism has scarcely ever succeeded in understanding,
+that deism, which though more or less impregnated
+with Christianity, always remains Unitarian or
+Socinian.</p>
+
+<p>And the truth is that we feel God less as a superhuman
+consciousness than as the actual consciousness of the
+whole human race, past, present, and future, as the collective
+consciousness of the whole race, and still more,
+as the total and infinite consciousness which embraces
+and sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human,
+and perhaps, super-human. The divinity that there is
+in everything, from the lowest&mdash;that is to say, from the
+least conscious&mdash;of living forms, to the highest, including
+our own human consciousness, this divinity we feel to be
+personalized, conscious of itself, in God. And this
+gradation of consciousnesses, this sense of the gulf
+between the human and the fully divine, the universal,
+consciousness, finds its counterpart in the belief in angels
+with their different hierarchies, as intermediaries between
+our human consciousness and that of God. And these
+<a name="Page_176" id="Page_176" />gradations a faith consistent with itself must believe to be
+infinite, for only by an infinite number of degrees is it
+possible to pass from the finite to the infinite.</p>
+
+<p>Deistic rationalism conceives God as the Reason of
+the Universe, but its logic compels it to conceive Him as
+an impersonal reason&mdash;that is to say, as an idea&mdash;while
+deistic vitalism feels and imagines God as Consciousness,
+and therefore as a person or rather as a society of persons.
+The consciousness of each one of us, in effect, is a society
+of persons; in me there are various I's and even the I's
+of those among whom I live, live in me.</p>
+
+<p>The God of deistic rationalism, in effect, the God of the
+logical proofs of His existence, the <i>ens realissimum</i> and
+the immobile prime mover, is nothing more than a
+Supreme Reason, but in the same sense in which we can
+call the law of universal gravitation the reason of the
+falling of bodies, this law being merely the explanation
+of the phenomenon. But will anyone say that that which
+we call the law of universal gravitation, or any other
+law or mathematical principle, is a true and independent
+reality, that it is an angel, that it is something which
+possesses consciousness of itself and others, that it is a
+person? No, it is nothing but an idea without any reality
+outside of the mind of him who conceives it. And similarly
+this God-Reason either possesses consciousness of
+himself or he possesses no reality outside the mind that
+conceives him. And if he possesses consciousness of
+himself, he becomes a personal reason, and then all the
+value of the traditional proofs disappears, for these proofs
+only proved a reason, but not a supreme consciousness.
+Mathematics prove an order, a constancy, a reason in the
+series of mechanical phenomena, but they 'do not prove
+that this reason is conscious of itself. This reason is a
+logical necessity, but the logical necessity does not prove
+the teleological or finalist necessity. And where there
+is no finality there is no personality, there is no consciousness.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177" />The rational God, therefore&mdash;that is to say, the God
+who is simply the Reason of the Universe and nothing
+more&mdash;consummates his own destruction, is destroyed in
+our mind in so far as he is such a God, and is only born
+again in us when we feel him in our heart as a living
+person, as Consciousness, and no longer merely as the
+impersonal and objective Reason of the Universe. If
+we wish for a rational explanation of the construction of
+a machine, all that we require to know is the mechanical
+science of its constructor; but if we would have a reason
+for the existence of such a machine, then, since it is
+the work not of Nature but of man, we must suppose a
+conscious, constructive being. But the second part of
+this reasoning is not applicable to God, even though it
+be said that in Him the mechanical science and the
+mechanician, by means of which the machine was constructed,
+are one and the same thing. From the rational
+point of view this identification is merely a begging of
+the question. And thus it is that reason destroys this
+Supreme Reason, in so far as the latter is a person.</p>
+
+<p>The human reason, in effect, is a reason that is based
+upon the irrational, upon the total vital consciousness,
+upon will and feeling; our human reason is not a reason
+that can prove to us the existence of a Supreme Reason,
+which in its turn would have to be based upon the
+Supreme Irrational, upon the Universal Consciousness.
+And the revelation of this Supreme Consciousness in our
+feeling and imagination, by love, by faith, by the process
+of personalization, is that which leads us to believe in the
+living God.</p>
+
+<p>And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is
+in me, is in you, lives in us, and we live and move and
+have our being in Him. And He is in us by virtue of the
+hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is Himself
+creating the longing for Himself. And He is the
+God of the humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God
+chose the foolish things of the world to confound the
+<a name="Page_178" id="Page_178" />wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the
+things which are mighty (i Cor. i. 27). And God is in
+each one of us in the measure in which each one feels
+Him and loves Him. &quot;If of two men,&quot; says Kierkegaard,
+&quot;one prays to the true God without sincerity of
+heart, and the other prays to an idol with all the passion
+of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to
+an idol, while the second really prays to God.&quot; It would
+be better to say that the true God is He to whom man
+truly prays and whom man truly desires. And there
+may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than
+in theology. The venerable Father of the long beard
+and white locks who appears among the clouds carrying
+the globe of the world in his hand is more living and
+more real than the <i>ens realissimum</i> of theodicy.</p>
+
+<p>Reason is an analytical, that is, a dissolving force,
+whenever it transfers its activity from the form of
+intuitions, whether those of the individual instinct of
+preservation or those of the social instinct of perpetuation,
+and applies it to the essence and matter of them. Reason
+orders the sensible perceptions which give us the material
+world; but when its analysis is exercised upon the reality
+of the perceptions themselves, it dissolves them and
+plunges us into a world of appearances, a world of
+shadows without consistency, for outside the domain of
+the formal, reason is nihilist and annihilating. And it
+performs the same terrible office when we withdraw it
+from its proper domain and apply it to the scrutiny of
+the imaginative intuitions which give us the spiritual
+world. For reason annihilates and imagination completes,
+integrates or totalizes; reason by itself alone kills,
+and it is imagination that gives life. If it is true that
+imagination by itself alone, in giving us life without limit,
+leads us to lose our identity in the All and also kills us
+as individuals, it kills us by excess of life. Reason, the
+head, speaks to us the word Nothing! imagination, the
+heart, the word All! and between all and nothing, by
+<a name="Page_179" id="Page_179" />the fusion of the all and the nothing within us, we live
+in God, who is All, and God lives in us who, without
+Him, are nothing. Reason reiterates, Vanity of vanities!
+all is vanity! And imagination answers, Plenitude of
+plenitudes! all is plenitude! And thus we live the
+vanity of plenitude or the plenitude of vanity.</p>
+
+<p>And so deeply rooted in the depths of man's being is
+this vital need of living a world<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42" /><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> illogical, irrational,
+personal or divine, that those who do not believe in
+God, or believe that they do not believe in Him, believe
+nevertheless in some little pocket god or even
+devil of their own, or in an omen, or in a horseshoe
+picked up by chance on the roadside and carried about
+with them to bring them good luck and defend them
+from that very reason whose loyal and devoted henchmen
+they imagine themselves to be.</p>
+
+<p>The God whom we hunger after is the God to whom
+we pray, the God of the <i>Pater Noster</i>, of the Lord's
+Prayer; the God whom we beseech, before all and above
+all, and whether we are aware of it or not, to instil faith
+into us, to make us believe in Him, to make Himself in
+us, the God to whom we pray that His name may be
+hallowed and that His will may be done&mdash;His will, not
+His reason&mdash;on earth as it is in heaven; but feeling that
+His will cannot be other than the essence of our will, the
+desire to persist eternally.</p>
+
+<p>And such a God is the God of love&mdash;<i>how</i> He is it profits
+us not to ask, but rather let each consult his own heart
+and give his imagination leave to picture Him in the
+remoteness of the Universe, gazing down upon him with
+those myriad eyes of His that shine in the night-darkened
+heavens. He in whom you believe, reader, He is your
+God, He who has lived with you and within you, who
+was born with you, who was a child when you were a
+child, who became a man according as you became a
+man, who will vanish when you yourself vanish, and who
+<a name="Page_180" id="Page_180" />is your principle of continuity in the spiritual life, for
+He is the principle of solidarity among all men and in
+each man and between men and the Universe, and He
+is, as you are, a person. And if you believe in God,
+God believes in you, and believing in you He creates
+you continually. For in your essence you are nothing
+but the idea that God possesses of you&mdash;but a living idea,
+because the idea of a God who is living and conscious of
+Himself, of a God-Consciousness, and apart from what
+you are in the society of God you are nothing.</p>
+
+<p>How to define God? Yes, that is our longing. That
+was the longing of the man Jacob, when, after wrestling
+all the night until the breaking of the day with that divine
+visitant, he cried, &quot;Tell me, I pray thee, thy name!&quot;
+(Gen. xxxii. 29). Listen to the words of that great
+Christian preacher, Frederick William Robertson, in a
+sermon preached in Trinity Chapel, Brighton, on the
+10th of June, 1849: &quot;And this is our struggle&mdash;<i>the</i>
+struggle. Let any true man go down into the deeps of
+his own being, and answer us&mdash;what is the cry that comes
+from the most real part of his nature? Is it the cry for
+daily bread? Jacob asked for that in his <i>first</i> communing
+with God&mdash;preservation, safety. Is it even this&mdash;to be
+forgiven our sins? Jacob had a sin to be forgiven, and
+in that most solemn moment of his existence he did not
+say a syllable about it. Or is it this&mdash;'Hallowed be
+Thy name'? No, my brethren. Out of our frail and
+yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the
+earthlier hours of our religion may be this&mdash;'Save my
+soul'; but in the most unearthly moments it is this&mdash;'Tell
+me thy name.' We move through a world of mystery;
+and the deepest question is, What is the being that is
+ever near, sometimes felt, never seen; that which has
+haunted us from childhood with a dream of something
+surpassingly fair, which has never yet been realized;
+that which sweeps through the soul at times as a desolation,
+like the blast from the wings of the Angel of Death,
+<a name="Page_181" id="Page_181" />leaving us stricken and silent in our loneliness; that
+which has touched us in our tenderest point, and the
+flesh has quivered with agony, and our mortal affections
+have shrivelled up with pain; that which comes to us in
+aspirations of nobleness and conceptions of superhuman
+excellence? Shall we say It or He? What is It? Who
+is He? Those anticipations of Immortality and God&mdash;what
+are they? Are they the mere throbbings of my own
+heart, heard and mistaken for a living something beside
+me? Are they the sound of my own wishes, echoing
+through the vast void of Nothingness? or shall I call
+them God, Father, Spirit, Love? A living Being within
+me or outside me? Tell me Thy name, thou awful
+mystery of Loveliness! This is the struggle of all
+earnest life.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43" /><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a></p>
+
+<p>Thus Robertson. To which I must add this comment,
+that Tell me thy name is essentially the same as Save
+my soul! We ask Him His name in order that He may
+save our soul, that He may save the human soul, that
+He may save the human finality of the Universe. And
+if they tell us that He is called He, that He is the <i>ens
+realissimum</i> or the Supreme Being or any other metaphysical
+name, we are not contented, for we know that
+every metaphysical name is an X, and we go on asking
+Him His name. And there is only one name that
+satisfies our longing, and that is the name Saviour, Jesus.
+God is the love that saves. As Browning said in his
+<i>Christmas Eve and Easter Day</i>,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>For the loving worm within its clod,</div>
+<div>Were diviner than a loveless God</div>
+<div>Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The essence of the divine is Love, Will that personalizes
+and eternalizes, that feels the hunger for eternity and
+infinity.</p>
+
+<p>It is ourselves, it is our eternity that we seek in God,
+<a name="Page_182" id="Page_182" />it is our divinization. It was Browning again who said,
+in <i>Saul</i>,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh that I seek</div>
+<div>In the Godhead!</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>But this God who saves us, this personal God, the Consciousness
+of the Universe who envelops and sustains our
+consciousnesses, this God who gives human finality to
+the whole creation&mdash;does He exist? Have we proofs of
+His existence?</p>
+
+<p>This question leads in the first place to an enquiry into
+the cleaning of this notion of existence. What is it to
+exist and in what sense do we speak of things as not
+existing?</p>
+
+<p>In its etymological signification to exist is to be outside
+of ourselves, outside of our mind: <i>ex-sistere</i>. But
+is there anything outside of our mind, outside of our
+consciousness which embraces the sum of the known?
+Undoubtedly there is. The matter of knowledge comes
+to us from without. And what is the mode of this
+matter? It is impossible for us to know, for to know is
+to clothe matter with form, and hence we cannot know
+the formless as formless. To do so would be tantamount
+to investing chaos with order.</p>
+
+<p>This problem of the existence of God, a problem that
+is rationally insoluble, is really identical with the problem
+of consciousness, of the <i>ex-sistentia</i> and not of the
+<i>in-sistentia</i> of consciousness, it is none other than the
+problem of the substantial existence of the soul, the
+problem of the perpetuity of the human soul, the problem
+of the human finality of the Universe itself. To believe
+in a living and personal God, in an eternal and universal
+consciousness that knows and loves us, is to believe that
+the Universe exists <i>for</i> man. For man, or for a consciousness
+of the same order as the human consciousness,
+of the same nature, although sublimated, a consciousness
+that is capable of knowing us, in the depth of whose
+being our memory may live for ever.
+<a name="Page_183" id="Page_183" />Perhaps, as I have said before, by a supreme and
+desperate effort of resignation we might succeed in
+making the sacrifice of our personality provided that we
+knew that at our death it would go to enrich a Supreme
+Personality; provided that we knew that the Universal
+Soul was nourished by our souls and had need of them.
+We might perhaps meet death with a desperate resignation
+or with a resigned despair, delivering up our soul to
+the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the
+work that bears the impress of our person, if it were certain
+that this humanity were destined to bequeath its soul
+in its turn to another soul, when at long last consciousness
+shall have become extinct upon this desire-tormented
+Earth. But is it certain?</p>
+
+<p>And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human
+collective consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness
+of the Universe, and if this Consciousness is eternal,
+why must our own individual consciousness&mdash;yours,
+reader, mine&mdash;be not eternal?</p>
+
+<p>In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique
+anomaly&mdash;a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself
+and feels itself, joined to an organism which can only
+live within such and such degrees of heat, a merely
+transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity
+that inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars
+are inhabited by living organisms, by consciousnesses
+akin to our own, and a profound longing enters into that
+dream that our souls shall pass from star to star through
+the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of
+transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us
+wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness,
+in a greater or less degree, extends through
+everything. We wish not only to save ourselves, but
+to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God.
+Such is His finality as we feel it.</p>
+
+<p>What would a universe be without any consciousness
+capable of reflecting it and knowing it? What would
+<a name="Page_184" id="Page_184" />objectified reason be without will and feeling? For us
+it would be equivalent to nothing&mdash;a thousand times
+more dreadful than nothing.</p>
+
+<p>If such a supposition is reality, our life is deprived of
+sense and value.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, therefore, rational necessity, but vital anguish
+that impels us to believe in God. And to believe in
+God&mdash;I must reiterate it yet again&mdash;is, before all and
+above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger for divinity,
+to be sensible of His lack and absence, to wish that God
+may exist. And it is to wish to save the human finality
+of the Universe. For one might even come to resign
+oneself to being absorbed by God, if it be that our consciousness
+is based upon a Consciousness, if consciousness
+is the end of the Universe.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The wicked man hath said in his heart, There is no
+God.&quot; And this is truth. For in his head the righteous
+man may say to himself, God does not exist! But only
+the wicked can say it in his heart. Not to believe that
+there is a God or to believe that there is not a God, is
+one thing; to resign oneself to there not being a God is
+another thing, and it is a terrible and inhuman thing;
+but not to wish that there be a God exceeds every other
+moral monstrosity; although, as a matter of fact, those
+who deny God deny Him because of their despair at not
+finding Him.</p>
+
+<p>And now reason once again confronts us with the
+Sphinx-like question&mdash;the Sphinx, in effect, is reason&mdash;Does
+God exist? This eternal and eternalizing person
+who gives meaning&mdash;and I will add, a human meaning,
+for there is none other&mdash;to the Universe, is it a substantial
+something, existing independently of our consciousness,
+independently of our desire? Here we arrive at the
+insoluble, and it is best that it should be so. Let it suffice
+for reason that it cannot prove the impossibility of His
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>To believe in God is to long for His existence and,
+<a name="Page_185" id="Page_185" />further, it is to act as if He existed; it is to live by this
+longing and to make it the inner spring of our action.
+This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope, hope
+begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this
+divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of
+goodness.</p>
+
+<p>Let us see how this may be.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38" /><a href="#FNanchor_38_38">[38]</a> Lecture I., p. 36. London, 1895, Black.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39" /><a href="#FNanchor_39_39">[39]</a> <i>No quiero acordarme</i>, a phrase that is always associated in Spanish
+literature with the opening sentence of <i>Don Quijote: En an lugar de la
+Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme</i>.&mdash;J.E.C.F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40" /><a href="#FNanchor_40_40">[40]</a> W. Hermann, <i>Christlich systematische Dogmatik</i>, in the volume entitled
+<i>Systematische christliche Religion. Die Kultur der Gegenwart</i> series,
+published by P. Hinneberg.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41" /><a href="#FNanchor_41_41">[41]</a> <i>Dieu a fait l'homme &agrave; son image, mais l'homme le lui a bien rendu</i>,
+Voltaire.&mdash;J.E.C.F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42" /><a href="#FNanchor_42_42">[42]</a> <i>Vivir un mundo</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43" /><a href="#FNanchor_43_43">[43]</a> <i>Sermons</i>, by the Rev. Frederick W. Robertson. First series, sermon iii.,
+&quot;Jacob's Wrestling.&quot; Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr&uuml;buer and Co., London, 1898.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX" /><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186" />IX</h2>
+
+<h2>FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY</h2>
+
+<blockquote><p>Sanctius ac reverentius visum de actis deorum credere quam scire.&mdash;TACITUS:
+<i>Germania</i>, 34.</p></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>The road that leads us to the living God, the God of the
+heart, and that leads us back to Him when we have left
+Him for the lifeless God of logic, is the road of faith, not
+of rational or mathematical conviction.</p>
+
+<p>And what is faith?</p>
+
+<p>This is the question propounded in the Catechism of
+Christian Doctrine that was taught us at school, and the
+answer runs: Faith is believing what we have not seen.</p>
+
+<p>This, in an essay written some twelve years ago, I
+amended as follows: &quot;Believing what we have not seen,
+no! but creating what we do not see.&quot; And I have
+already told you that believing in God is, in the first
+instance at least, wishing that God may be, longing for
+the existence of God.</p>
+
+<p>The theological virtue of faith, according to the
+Apostle Paul, whose definition serves as the basis of the
+traditional Christian disquisitions upon it, is &quot;the substance
+of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
+seen,&quot; <i>&#949;&#955;&#960;&#953;&#950;&#959;&#956;&#949;&#957;&#969;&#957;
+&#965;&#960;&#959;&#963;&#964;&#945;&#963;&#953;&#962;, &#960;&#961;&#945;&#947;&#956;&#945;&#964;&#969;&#957;
+&#949;&#955;&#949;&#947;&#967;&#959;&#962; &#959;&#965; &#946;&#955;&#949;&#960;&#959;&#956;&#949;&#957;&#969;&#957;</i>
+ (Heb. xi. 1).</p>
+
+<p>The substance, or rather the support and basis, of
+hope, the guarantee of it. That which connects, or,
+rather than connects, subordinates, faith to hope. And
+in fact we do not hope because we believe, but rather we
+believe because we hope. It is hope in God, it is the
+ardent longing that there may be a God who guarantees
+the eternity of consciousness, that leads us to believe in
+Him.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187" />But faith, which after all is something compound,
+comprising a cognitive, logical, or rational element
+together with an affective, biotic, sentimental, and strictly
+irrational element, is presented to us under the form of
+knowledge. And hence the insuperable difficulty of
+separating it from some dogma or other. Pure faith, free
+from dogmas, about which I wrote a great deal years ago,
+is a phantasm. Neither is the difficulty overcome by
+inventing the theory of faith in faith itself. Faith needs
+a matter to work upon.</p>
+
+<p>Believing is a form of knowing, even if it be no more
+than a knowing and even a formulating of our vital longing.
+In ordinary language the term &quot;believing,&quot; however,
+is used in a double and even a contradictory sense.
+It may express, on the one hand, the highest degree of
+the mind's conviction of the truth of a thing, and, on the
+other hand, it may imply merely a weak and hesitating
+persuasion of its truth. For if in one sense believing
+expresses the firmest kind of assent we are capable of
+giving, the expression &quot;I believe that it is so, although
+I am not sure of it,&quot; is nevertheless common in ordinary
+speech.</p>
+
+<p>And this agrees with what we have said above with
+respect to uncertainty as the basis of faith. The most
+robust faith, in so far as it is distinguished from all other
+knowledge that is not <i>pistic</i> or of faith&mdash;faithful, as we
+might say&mdash;is based on uncertainty. And this is because
+faith, the guarantee of things hoped for, is not so much
+rational adhesion to a theoretical principle as trust in a
+person who assures us of something. Faith supposes an
+objective, personal element. We do not so much believe
+something as believe someone who promises us or assures
+us of this or the other thing. We believe in a person and
+in God in so far as He is a person and a personalization
+of the Universe.</p>
+
+<p>This personal or religious element in faith is evident.
+Faith, it is said, is in itself neither theoretical knowledge
+<a name="Page_188" id="Page_188" />nor rational adhesion to a truth, nor yet is its essence
+sufficiently explained by defining it as trust in God.
+Seeberg says of faith that it is &quot;the inward submission to
+the spiritual authority of God, immediate obedience.
+And in so far as this obedience is the means of attaining
+a rational principle, faith is a personal conviction.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44" /><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a></p>
+
+<p>The faith which St. Paul defined, <i>&#960;&#953;&#963;&#964;&#953;&#962;</i> in Greek, is
+better translated as trust, confidence. The word <i>pistis</i> is
+derived from the verb <i>&#960;&#949;&#953;&#952;&#969;</i>, which in its active voice
+means to persuade and in its middle voice to trust in
+someone, to esteem him as worthy of trust, to place confidence
+in him, to obey. And <i>fidare se</i>, to trust, is
+derived from the root <i>fid</i>&mdash;whence <i>fides</i>, faith, and also
+confidence. The Greek root <i>&#960;&#953;&#952;</i> and the Latin <i>fid</i> are
+twin brothers. In the root of the word &quot;faith&quot; itself,
+therefore, there is implicit the idea of confidence, of surrender
+to the will of another, to a person. Confidence is
+placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which
+we conceive as something personal and conscious, not in
+Fate, which is something impersonal. And thus it is in
+the person who tells us the truth, in the person who gives
+us hope, that we believe, not directly and immediately in
+truth itself or in hope itself.</p>
+
+<p>And this personal or rather personifying element in
+faith extends even to the lowest forms of it, for it is this
+that produces faith in pseudo-revelation, in inspiration,
+in miracle. There is a story of a Parisian doctor, who,
+when he found that a quack-healer was drawing away his
+client&egrave;le, removed to a quarter of the city as distant as
+possible from his former abode, where he was totally
+unknown, and here he gave himself out as a quack-healer
+and conducted himself as such. When he was denounced
+as an illegal practitioner he produced his doctor's certificate,
+and explained his action more or less as follows:
+&quot;I am indeed a doctor, but if I had announced myself as
+<a name="Page_189" id="Page_189" />such I should not have had as large a client&egrave;le as I have
+as a quack-healer. Now that all my clients know that I
+have studied medicine, however, and that I am a properly
+qualified medical man, they will desert me in favour of
+some quack who can assure them that he has never
+studied, but cures simply by inspiration.&quot; And true it
+is that a doctor is discredited when it is proved that he has
+never studied medicine and possesses no qualifying
+certificate, and that a quack is discredited when it is proved
+that he has studied and is a qualified practitioner. For
+some believe in science and in study, while others believe
+in the person, in inspiration, and even in ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There is one distinction in the world's geography
+which comes immediately to our minds when we thus
+state the different thoughts and desires of men concerning
+their religion. We remember how the whole
+world is in general divided into two hemispheres
+upon this matter. One half of the world&mdash;the great
+dim East&mdash;is mystic. It insists upon not seeing anything
+too clearly. Make any one of the great ideas of
+life distinct and clear, and immediately it seems to the
+Oriental to be untrue. He has an instinct which tells
+him that the vastest thoughts are too vast for the human
+mind, and that if they are made to present themselves in
+forms of statement which the human mind can comprehend,
+their nature is violated and their strength is lost.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;On the other hand, the Occidental, the man of the
+West, demands clearness and is impatient with mystery.
+He loves a definite statement as much as his brother of
+the East dislikes it. He insists on knowing what the
+eternal and infinite forces mean to his personal life, how
+they will make him personally happier and better, almost
+how they will build the house over his head, and cook the
+dinner on his hearth. This is the difference between the
+East and the West, between man on the banks of the
+Ganges and man on the banks of the Mississippi. Plenty
+of exceptions, of course, there are&mdash;mystics in Boston and
+<a name="Page_190" id="Page_190" />St. Louis, hard-headed men of facts in Bombay and Calcutta.
+The two great dispositions cannot be shut off
+from one another by an ocean or a range of mountains.
+In some nations and places&mdash;as, for instance, among the
+Jews and in our own New England&mdash;they notably commingle.
+But in general they thus divide the world
+between them. The East lives in the moonlight of
+mystery, the West in the sunlight of scientific fact.
+The East cries out to the Eternal for vague impulses.
+The West seizes the present with light hands, and will
+not let it go till it has furnished it with reasonable,
+intelligible motives. Each misunderstands, distrusts,
+and in large degree despises the other. But the two
+hemispheres together, and not either one by itself, make
+up the total world.&quot; Thus, in one of his sermons,
+spoke the great Unitarian preacher Phillips Brooks, late
+Bishop of Massachusetts (<i>The Mystery of Iniquity and
+Other Sermons</i>, sermon xvi.).</p>
+
+<p>We might rather say that throughout the whole world,
+in the East as well as in the West, rationalists seek
+definition and believe in the concept, while vitalists
+seek inspiration and believe in the person. The former
+scrutinize the Universe in order that they may wrest its
+secrets from it; the latter pray to the Consciousness of
+the Universe, strive to place themselves in immediate
+relationship with the Soul of the World, with God, in
+order that they may find the guarantee or substance of
+what they hope for, which is not to die, and the evidence
+of what they do not see.</p>
+
+<p>And since a person is a will, and will always has
+reference to the future, he who believes, believes in what
+is to come&mdash;that is, in what he hopes for. We do not
+believe, strictly speaking, in what is or in what was,
+except as the guarantee, as the substance, of what will
+be. For the Christian, to believe in the resurrection of
+Christ&mdash;that is to say, in tradition and in the Gospel,
+which assure him that Christ has risen, both of them
+<a name="Page_191" id="Page_191" />personal forces&mdash;is to believe that he himself will one
+day rise again by the grace of Christ. And even scientific
+faith&mdash;for such there is&mdash;refers to the future and is
+an act of trust. The man of science believes that at a
+certain future date an eclipse of the sun will take place;
+he believes that the laws which have governed the world
+hitherto will continue to govern it.</p>
+
+<p>To believe, I repeat, is to place confidence in someone,
+and it has reference to a person. I say that I know
+that there is an animal called the horse, and that it has
+such and such characteristics, because I have seen it;
+and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or
+the ornithorhyncus, and that it possesses such and such
+qualities, because I believe those who assure me that
+they have seen it. And hence the element of uncertainty
+attached to faith, for it is possible that a person
+may be deceived or that he may deceive us.</p>
+
+<p>But, on the other hand, this personal element in belief
+gives it an effective and loving character, and above all, in
+religious faith, a reference to what is hoped for. Perhaps
+there is nobody who would sacrifice his life for the sake of
+maintaining that the three angles of a triangle are together
+equal to two right angles, for such a truth does not
+demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand,
+there are many who have lost their lives for the sake of
+maintaining their religious faith. Indeed it is truer to
+say that martyrs make faith than that faith makes
+martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the
+intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition
+of a theoretical truth, a process in which the will merely
+sets in motion our faculty of comprehension; faith is an
+act of the will&mdash;it is a movement of the soul towards a
+practical truth, towards a person, towards something
+that makes us not merely comprehend life, but that
+makes us live.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45" /><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a></p>
+
+<p>Faith makes us live by showing us that life, although
+<a name="Page_192" id="Page_192" />it is dependent upon reason, has its well-spring and
+source of power elsewhere, in something supernatural
+and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man of
+singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped
+mind, has said that it is this tendency towards the supernatural
+and miraculous that gives life, and that when it
+is lacking, all the speculations of the reason lead to
+nothing but affliction of spirit (<i>Trait&eacute; de l'encha&icirc;nement
+des id&eacute;es fondamentales dans les sciences et dans
+l'histoire</i>, &sect; 329). And in truth we wish to live.</p>
+
+<p>But, although we have said that faith is a thing of the
+will, it would perhaps be better to say that it is will
+itself&mdash;the will not to die, or, rather, that it is some other
+psychic force distinct from intelligence, will, and feeling.
+We should thus have feeling, knowing, willing,
+and believing or creating. For neither feeling, nor
+intelligence, nor will creates; they operate upon a
+material already given, upon the material given them
+by faith. Faith is the creative power in man. But
+since it has a more intimate relation with the will than
+with any other of his faculties, we conceive it under the
+form of volition. It should be borne in mind, however,
+that wishing to believe&mdash;that is to say, wishing to create&mdash;is
+not precisely the same as believing or creating,
+although it is its starting-point.</p>
+
+<p>Faith, therefore, if not a creative force, is the fruit of
+the will, and its function is to create. Faith, in a certain
+sense, creates its object. And faith in God consists in
+creating God; and since it is God who gives us faith in
+Himself, it is God who is continually creating Himself
+in us. Therefore St. Augustine said: &quot;I will seek
+Thee, Lord, by calling upon Thee, and I will call upon
+Thee by believing in Thee. My faith calls upon Thee,
+Lord, the faith which Thou hast given me, with which
+Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy
+Son, through the ministry of Thy preacher&quot; (<i>Confessions</i>,
+book i., chap. i.). The power of creating God in
+<a name="Page_193" id="Page_193" />our own image and likeness, of personalizing the
+Universe, simply means that we carry God within us, as
+the substance of what we hope for, and that God is continually
+creating us in His own image and likeness.</p>
+
+<p>And we create God&mdash;that is to say, God creates Himself
+in us&mdash;by compassion, by love. To believe in God
+is to love Him, and in our love to fear Him; and we
+begin by loving Him even before knowing Him, and by
+loving Him we come at last to see and discover Him in
+all things.</p>
+
+<p>Those who say that they believe in God and yet
+neither love nor fear Him, do not in fact believe in Him
+but in those who have taught them that God exists, and
+these in their turn often enough do not believe in Him
+either. Those who believe that they believe in God, but
+without any passion in their heart, without anguish of
+mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an
+element of despair even in their consolation, believe only
+in the God-Idea, not in God Himself. And just as
+belief in God is born of love, so also it may be born of
+fear, and even of hate, and of such kind was the belief
+of Vanni Fucci, the thief, whom Dante depicts insulting
+God with obscene gestures in Hell (<i>Inf.</i>, xxv., 1-3). For
+the devils also believe in God, and not a few atheists.</p>
+
+<p>Is it not perhaps a mode of believing in God, this
+fury with which those deny and even insult Him, who,
+because they cannot bring themselves to believe in Him,
+wish that He may not exist? Like those who believe,
+they, too, wish that God may exist; but being men of a
+weak and passive or of an evil disposition, in whom
+reason is stronger than will, they feel themselves caught
+in the grip of reason and haled along in their own
+despite, and they fall into despair, and because of their
+despair they deny, and in their denial they affirm and
+create the thing that they deny, and God reveals Himself
+in them, affirming Himself by their very denial of Him.</p>
+
+<p>But it will be objected to all this that to demonstrate
+<a name="Page_194" id="Page_194" />that faith creates its own object is to demonstrate that
+this object is an object for faith alone, that outside faith
+it has no objective reality; just as, on the other hand, to
+maintain that faith is necessary because it affords consolation
+to the masses of the people, or imposes a wholesome
+restraint upon them, is to declare that the object
+of faith is illusory. What is certain is that for thinking
+believers to-day, faith is, before all and above all, wishing
+that God may exist.</p>
+
+<p>Wishing that God may exist, and acting and feeling
+as if He did exist. And desiring God's existence and acting
+conformably with this desire, is the means whereby
+we create God&mdash;that is, whereby God creates Himself
+in us, manifests Himself to us, opens and reveals Himself
+to us. For God goes out to meet him who seeks
+Him with love and by love, and hides Himself from him
+who searches for Him with the cold and loveless reason.
+God wills that the heart should have rest, but not the
+head, reversing the order of the physical life in which
+the head sleeps and rests at times while the heart wakes
+and works unceasingly. And thus knowledge without
+love leads us away from God; and love, even without
+knowledge, and perhaps better without it, leads us to
+God, and through God to wisdom. Blessed are the
+pure in heart, for they shall see God!</p>
+
+<p>And if you should ask me how I believe in God&mdash;that
+is to say, how God creates Himself in me and reveals
+Himself to me&mdash;my answer may, perhaps, provoke your
+smiles or your laughter, or it may even scandalize you.</p>
+
+<p>I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I
+feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and
+intangible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me;
+because I possess an inner consciousness of a particular
+providence and of a universal mind that marks out for
+me the course of my own destiny. And the concept of
+law&mdash;it is nothing but a concept after all!&mdash;tells me
+nothing and teaches me nothing.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195" />Once and again in my life I have seen myself suspended
+in a trance over the abyss; once and again I
+have found myself at the cross-roads, confronted by a
+choice of ways and aware that in choosing one I should
+be renouncing all the others&mdash;for there is no turning
+back upon these roads of life; and once and again in
+such unique moments as these I have felt the impulse of
+a mighty power, conscious, sovereign, and loving.
+And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens out the
+way of the Lord.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible for a man to feel the Universe calling to
+him and guiding him as one person guides and calls to
+another, to hear within him its voice speaking without
+words and saying: &quot;Go and preach to all peoples!&quot;
+How do you know that the man you see before you
+possesses a consciousness like you, and that an animal
+also possesses such a consciousness, more or less dimly,
+but not a stone? Because the man acts towards you like a
+man, like a being made in your likeness, and because the
+stone does not act towards you at all, but suffers you to
+act upon it. And in the same way I believe that the
+Universe possesses a certain consciousness like myself,
+because its action towards me is a human action, and I
+feel that it is a personality that environs me.</p>
+
+<p>Here is a formless mass; it appears to be a kind of
+animal; it is impossible to distinguish its members; I
+only see two eyes, eyes which gaze at me with a human
+gaze, the gaze of a fellow-being, a gaze which asks for
+pity; and I hear it breathing. I conclude that in this
+formless mass there is a consciousness. In just such a
+way and none other, the starry-eyed heavens gaze down
+upon the believer, with a superhuman, a divine, gaze, a
+gaze that asks for supreme pity and supreme love, and in
+the serenity of the night he hears the breathing of God,
+and God touches him in his heart of hearts and reveals
+Himself to him. It is the Universe, living, suffering,
+loving, and asking for love.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196" />From loving little trifling material things, which
+lightly come and lightly go, having no deep root in our
+affections, we come to love the more lasting things, the
+things which our hands cannot grasp; from loving goods
+we come to love the Good; from loving beautiful things
+we come to love Beauty; from loving the true we come to
+love the Truth; from loving pleasures we come to love
+Happiness; and, last of all, we come to love Love. We
+emerge from ourselves in order to penetrate further into
+our supreme I; individual consciousness emerges from
+us in order to submerge itself in the total Consciousness
+of which we form a part, but without being dissolved in
+it. And God is simply the Love that springs from
+universal suffering and becomes consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>But this, it will be said, is merely to revolve in an iron
+ring, for such a God is not objective. And at this point
+it may not be out of place to give reason its due and to
+examine exactly what is meant by a thing existing, being
+objective.</p>
+
+<p>What is it, in effect, to exist? and when do we say that
+a thing exists? A thing exists when it is placed outside
+us, and in such a way that it shall have preceded our
+perception of it and be capable of continuing to subsist
+outside us after we have disappeared. But have I any
+certainty that anything has preceded me or that anything
+must survive me? Can my consciousness know
+that there is anything outside it? Everything that I
+know or can know is within my consciousness. We will
+not entangle ourselves, therefore, in the insoluble
+problem of an objectivity outside our perceptions.
+Things exist in so far as they act. To exist is
+to act.</p>
+
+<p>But now it will be said that it is not God, but the idea
+of God, that acts in us. To which we shall reply that it
+is sometimes God acting by His idea, but still very often
+it is rather God acting in us by Himself. And the retort
+will be a demand for proofs of the objective truth of the
+<a name="Page_197" id="Page_197" />existence of God, since we ask for signs. And we shall
+have to answer with Pilate: What is truth?</p>
+
+<p>And having asked this question, Pilate turned away
+without waiting for an answer and proceeded to wash his
+hands in order that he might exculpate himself for
+having allowed Christ to be condemned to death. And
+there are many who ask this question, What is truth?
+but without any intention of waiting for the answer, and
+solely in order that they may turn away and wash their
+hands of the crime of having helped to kill and eject God
+from their own consciousness or from the consciousness
+of others.</p>
+
+<p>What is truth? There are two kinds of truth&mdash;the
+logical or objective, the opposite of which is error, and
+the moral or subjective, the opposite of which is falsehood.
+And in a previous essay I have endeavoured to
+show that error is the fruit of falsehood.<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46" /><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a></p>
+
+<p>Moral truth, the road that leads to intellectual truth,
+which also is moral, inculcates the study of science,
+which is over and above all a school of sincerity and
+humility. Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our
+reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as
+they are&mdash;that is to say, as they themselves choose to
+be and not as we would have them be. In a religiously
+scientific investigation, it is the data of reality themselves,
+it is the perceptions which we receive from the
+outside world, that formulate themselves in our mind as
+laws&mdash;it is not we ourselves who thus formulate them.
+It is the numbers themselves which in our mind create
+mathematics. Science is the most intimate school of
+resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before
+the seemingly most insignificant of facts. And it is the
+gateway of religion; but within the temple itself its function
+ceases.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198" />And just as there is logical truth, opposed to error,
+and moral truth, opposed to falsehood, so there is also
+esthetic truth or verisimilitude, which is opposed to
+extravagance, and religious truth or hope, which is
+opposed to the inquietude of absolute despair. For
+esthetic verisimilitude, the expression of which is
+sensible, differs from logical truth, the demonstration of
+which is rational; and religious truth, the truth of faith,
+the substance of things hoped for, is not equivalent to
+moral truth, but superimposes itself upon it. He who
+affirms a faith built upon a basis of uncertainty does not
+and cannot lie.</p>
+
+<p>And not only do we not believe with reason, nor yet
+above reason nor below reason, but we believe against
+reason. Religious faith, it must be repeated yet again, is
+not only irrational, it is contra-rational. Kierkegaard
+says: &quot;Poetry is illusion before knowledge; religion illusion
+after knowledge. Between poetry and religion the
+worldly wisdom of living plays its comedy. Every
+individual who does not live either poetically or religiously
+is a fool&quot; (<i>Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift</i>,
+chap. iv., sect. 2a, &sect; 2). The same writer tells us
+that Christianity is a desperate sortie (<i>salida</i>). Even so,
+but it is only by the very desperateness of this sortie that
+we can win through to hope, to that hope whose vitalizing
+illusion is of more force than all rational knowledge,
+and which assures us that there is always something that
+cannot be reduced to reason. And of reason the same
+may be said as was said of Christ: that he who is not
+with it is against it. That which is not rational is contra-rational;
+and such is hope.</p>
+
+<p>By this circuitous route we always arrive at hope in
+the end.</p>
+
+<p>To the mystery of love, which is the mystery of suffering,
+belongs a mysterious form, and this form is time.
+We join yesterday to to-morrow with links of longing,
+and the now is, strictly, nothing but the endeavour of
+<a name="Page_199" id="Page_199" />the before to make itself the after; the present is simply
+the determination of the past to become the future. The
+now is a point which, if not sharply articulated, vanishes;
+and, nevertheless, in this point is all eternity, the substance
+of time.</p>
+
+<p>Everything that has been can be only as it was, and
+everything that is can be only as it is; the possible is
+always relegated to the future, the sole domain of liberty,
+wherein imagination, the creative and liberating energy,
+the incarnation of faith, has space to roam at large.</p>
+
+<p>Love ever looks and tends to the future, for its work
+is the work of our perpetuation; the property of love is
+to hope, and only upon hopes does it nourish itself. And
+thus when love sees the fruition of its desire it becomes
+sad, for it then discovers that what it desired was not its
+true end, and that God gave it this desire merely as a
+lure to spur it to action; it discovers that its end is further
+on, and it sets out again upon its toilsome pilgrimage
+through life, revolving through a constant cycle of illusions
+and disillusions. And continually it transforms
+its frustrated hopes into memories, and from these
+memories it draws fresh hopes. From the subterranean
+ore of memory we extract the jewelled visions of our
+future; imagination shapes our remembrances into
+hopes. And humanity is like a young girl full of longings,
+hungering for life and thirsting for love, who
+weaves her days with dreams, and hopes, hopes ever,
+hopes without ceasing, for the eternal and predestined
+lover, for him who, because he was destined for her from
+the beginning, from before the dawn of her remotest
+memory, from before her cradle-days, shall live with her
+and for her into the illimitable future, beyond the
+stretch of her furthest hopes, beyond the grave itself.
+And for this poor lovelorn humanity, as for the girl ever
+awaiting her lover, there is no kinder wish than that
+when the winter of life shall come it may find the sweet
+dreams of its spring changed into memories sweeter still,
+<a name="Page_200" id="Page_200" />and memories that shall burgeon into new hopes. In
+the days when our summer is over, what a flow of calm
+felicity, of resignation to destiny, must come from remembering
+hopes which have never been realized and
+which, because they have never been realized, preserve
+their pristine purity.</p>
+
+<p>Love hopes, hopes ever and never wearies of hoping;
+and love of God, our faith in God, is, above all, hope in
+Him. For God dies not, and he who hopes in God shall
+live for ever. And our fundamental hope, the root and
+stem of all our hopes, is the hope of eternal life.</p>
+
+<p>And if faith is the substance of hope, hope in its turn
+is the form of faith. Until it gives us hope, our faith is
+a formless faith, vague, chaotic, potential; it is but the
+possibility of believing, the longing to believe. But we
+must needs believe in something, and we believe in what
+we hope for, we believe in hope. We remember the
+past, we know the present, we only believe in the future.
+To believe what we have not seen is to believe what we
+shall see. Faith, then, I repeat once again, is faith in
+hope; we believe what we hope for.</p>
+
+<p>Love makes us believe in God, in whom we hope and
+from whom we hope to receive life to come; love makes
+us believe in that which the dream of hope creates for us.</p>
+
+<p>Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and
+hope is God's longing, the longing of the eternal, of the
+divine in us, which advances to meet our faith and uplifts
+us. Man aspires to God by faith and cries to Him: &quot;I
+believe&mdash;give me, Lord, wherein to believe!&quot; And
+God, the divinity in man, sends him hope in another life
+in order that he may believe in it. Hope is the reward
+of faith. Only he who believes truly hopes; and only
+he who truly hopes believes. We only believe what we
+hope, and we only hope what we believe.</p>
+
+<p>It was hope that called God by the name of Father;
+and this name, so comforting yet so mysterious, is still
+bestowed upon Him by hope. The father gave us life
+<a name="Page_201" id="Page_201" />and gives bread wherewith to sustain it, and we ask
+the father to preserve our life for us. And if Christ
+was he who, with the fullest heart and purest mouth,
+named with the name of Father his Father and ours, if
+the noblest feeling of Christianity is the feeling of the
+Fatherhood of God, it is because in Christ the human
+race sublimated its hunger for eternity.</p>
+
+<p>It may perhaps be said that this longing of faith, that
+this hope, is more than anything else an esthetic feeling.
+Possibly the esthetic feeling enters into it, but without
+completely satisfying it.</p>
+
+<p>We seek in art an image of eternalization. If for a
+brief moment our spirit finds peace and rest and assuagement
+in the contemplation of the beautiful, even though
+it finds therein no real cure for its distress, it is because
+the beautiful is the revelation of the eternal, of the
+divine in things, and beauty but the perpetuation of
+momentaneity. Just as truth is the goal of rational
+knowledge, so beauty is the goal of hope, which is perhaps
+in its essence irrational.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in
+some way or another everything is perpetuated; and
+everything, after passing through time, returns to
+eternity. The temporal world has its roots in eternity,
+and in eternity yesterday is united with to-day and to-morrow.
+The scenes of life pass before us as in a cinematograph
+show, but on the further side of time the film
+is one and indivisible.</p>
+
+<p>Physicists affirm that not a single particle of matter
+nor a single tremor of energy is lost, but that each is
+transformed and transmitted and persists. And can it
+be that any form, however fugitive it may be, is lost?
+We must needs believe&mdash;believe and hope!&mdash;that it is
+not, but that somewhere it remains archived and perpetuated,
+and that there is some mirror of eternity in
+which, without losing themselves in one another, all
+the images that pass through time are received. Every
+<a name="Page_202" id="Page_202" />impression that reaches me remains stored up in my
+brain even though it may be so deep or so weak that it is
+buried in the depths of my subconsciousness; but from
+these depths it animates my life; and if the whole of my
+spirit, the total content of my soul, were to awake to
+full consciousness, all these dimly perceived and forgotten
+fugitive impressions would come to life again,
+including even those which I had never been aware of.
+I carry within me everything that has passed before me,
+and I perpetuate it with myself, and it may be that it all
+goes into my germs, and that all my ancestors live undiminished
+in me and will continue so to live, united
+with me, in my descendants. And perhaps I, the whole
+I, with all this universe of mine, enter into each one of
+my actions, or, at all events, that which is essential in
+me enters into them&mdash;that which makes me myself, my
+individual essence.</p>
+
+<p>And how is this individual essence in each several
+thing&mdash;that which makes it itself and not another&mdash;revealed
+to us save as beauty? What is the beauty of
+anything but its eternal essence, that which unites its
+past with its future, that element of it that rests and
+abides in the womb of eternity? or, rather, what is it but
+the revelation of its divinity?</p>
+
+<p>And this beauty, which is the root of eternity, is revealed
+to us by love; it is the supreme revelation of the
+love of God and the token of our ultimate victory over
+time. It is love that reveals to us the eternal in us and
+in our neighbours.</p>
+
+<p>Is it the beautiful, the eternal, in things, that awakens
+and kindles our love for them, or is it our love for things
+that reveals to us the beautiful, the eternal, in them?
+Is not beauty perhaps a creation of love, in the same way
+and in the same sense that the sensible world is a creation
+of the instinct of preservation and the supersensible world
+of that of perpetuation? Is not beauty, and together with
+beauty eternity, a creation of love? &quot;Though our outward
+<a name="Page_203" id="Page_203" />man perish,&quot; says the Apostle, &quot;yet the inward man is
+renewed day by day&quot; (2 Cor. iv. 16). The man of
+passing appearances perishes and passes away with
+them; the man of reality remains and grows. &quot;For our
+light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for
+us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory&quot;
+(ver. 17). Our suffering causes us anguish, and this
+anguish, bursting because of its own fullness, seems to
+us consolation. &quot;While we look not at the things which
+are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the
+things which are seen are temporal; but the things which
+are not seen are eternal&quot; (ver. 18).</p>
+
+<p>This suffering gives hope, which is the beautiful in
+life, the supreme beauty, or the supreme consolation.
+And since love is full of suffering, since love is compassion
+and pity, beauty springs from compassion and is
+simply the temporal consolation that compassion seeks.
+A tragic consolation! And the supreme beauty is that
+of tragedy. The consciousness that everything passes
+away, that we ourselves pass away, and that everything
+that is ours and everything that environs us passes away,
+fills us with anguish, and this anguish itself reveals to us
+the consolation of that which does not pass away, of the
+eternal, of the beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>And this beauty thus revealed, this perpetuation of
+momentaneity, only realizes itself practically, only lives
+through the work of charity. Hope in action is charity,
+and beauty in action is goodness.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Charity, which eternalizes everything it loves, and in
+giving us the goodness of it brings to light its hidden
+beauty, has its root in the love of God, or, if you like,
+in charity towards God, in pity for God. Love, pity,
+personalizes everything, we have said; in discovering
+the suffering in everything and in personalizing everything,
+it personalizes the Universe itself as well&mdash;for the
+Universe also suffers&mdash;and it discovers God to us. For
+<a name="Page_204" id="Page_204" />God is revealed to us because He suffers and because we
+suffer; because He suffers He demands our love, and
+because we suffer He gives us His love, and He covers
+our anguish with the eternal and infinite anguish.</p>
+
+<p>This was the scandal of Christianity among Jews and
+Greeks, among Pharisees and Stoics, and this, which
+was its scandal of old, the scandal of the Cross, is still
+its scandal to-day, and will continue to be so, even
+among Christians themselves&mdash;the scandal of a God who
+becomes man in order that He may suffer and die and
+rise again, because He has suffered and died, the scandal
+of a God subject to suffering and death. And this truth
+that God suffers&mdash;a truth that appals the mind of man&mdash;is
+the revelation of the very heart of the Universe and of
+its mystery, the revelation that God revealed to us when
+He sent His Son in order that he might redeem us by
+suffering and dying. It was the revelation of the divine
+in suffering, for only that which suffers is divine.</p>
+
+<p>And men made a god of this Christ who suffered, and
+through him they discovered the eternal essence of a
+living, human God&mdash;that is, of a God who suffers&mdash;it
+is only the dead, the inhuman, that does not suffer&mdash;a
+God who loves and thirsts for love, for pity, a God who
+is a person. Whosoever knows not the Son will never
+know the Father, and the Father is only known through
+the Son; whosoever knows not the Son of Man&mdash;he who
+suffers bloody anguish and the pangs of a breaking heart,
+whose soul is heavy within him even unto death, who
+suffers the pain that kills and brings to life again&mdash;will
+never know the Father, and can know nothing of the
+suffering God.</p>
+
+<p>He who does not suffer, and who does not suffer
+because he does not live, is that logical and frozen <i>ens
+realissimum</i>, the <i>primum movens</i>, that impassive entity,
+which because of its impassivity is nothing but a pure
+idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it
+live or exist as a person. And how is the world to derive
+<a name="Page_205" id="Page_205" />its origin and life from an impassive idea? Such a
+world would be but the idea of the world. But the world
+suffers, and suffering is the sense of the flesh of reality;
+it is the spirit's sense of its mass and substance; it is the
+self's sense of its own tangibility; it is immediate reality.</p>
+
+<p>Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality,
+for it is only suffering that makes us persons.
+And suffering is universal, suffering is that which unites
+all us living beings together; it is the universal or divine
+blood that flows through us all. That which we call
+will, what is it but suffering?</p>
+
+<p>And suffering has its degrees, according to the depth
+of its penetration, from the suffering that floats upon the
+sea of appearances to the eternal anguish, the source of
+the tragic sense of life, which seeks a habitation in the
+depths of the eternal and there awakens consolation;
+from the physical suffering that contorts our bodies to
+the religious anguish that flings us upon the bosom of
+God, there to be watered by the divine tears.</p>
+
+<p>Anguish is something far deeper, more intimate, and
+more spiritual than suffering. We are wont to feel the
+touch of anguish even in the midst of that which we call
+happiness, and even because of this happiness itself, to
+which we cannot resign ourselves and before which we
+tremble. The happy who resign themselves to their
+apparent happiness, to a transitory happiness, seem to
+be as men without substance, or, at any rate, men who
+have not discovered this substance in themselves, who
+have not touched it. Such men are usually incapable of
+loving or of being loved, and they go through life without
+really knowing either pain or bliss.</p>
+
+<p>There is no true love save in suffering, and in this
+world we have to choose either love, which is suffering,
+or happiness. And love leads us to no other happiness
+than that of love itself and its tragic consolation of
+uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and
+satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love.
+<a name="Page_206" id="Page_206" />The satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep
+in habit, near neighbour to annihilation. To fall into a
+habit is to begin to cease to be. Man is the more man&mdash;that
+is, the more divine&mdash;the greater his capacity for
+suffering, or, rather, for anguish.</p>
+
+<p>At our coming into the world it is given to us to choose
+between love and happiness, and we wish&mdash;poor fools!&mdash;for
+both: the happiness of loving and the love of happiness.
+But we ought to ask for the gift of love and not
+of happiness, and to be preserved from dozing away into
+habit, lest we should fall into a fast sleep, a sleep without
+waking, and so lose our consciousness beyond power
+of recovery. We ought to ask God to make us conscious
+of ourselves in ourselves, in our suffering.</p>
+
+<p>What is Fate, what is Fatality, but the brotherhood of
+love and suffering? What is it but that terrible mystery
+in virtue of which love dies as soon as it touches the
+happiness towards which it reaches out, and true happiness
+dies with it? Love and suffering mutually engender
+one another, and love is charity and compassion, and the
+love that is not charitable and compassionate is not love.
+Love, in a word, is resigned despair.</p>
+
+<p>That which the mathematicians call the problem of
+maxima and minima, which is also called the law of
+economy, is the formula for all existential&mdash;that is,
+passional&mdash;activity. In material mechanics and in
+social mechanics, in industry and in political economy,
+every problem resolves itself into an attempt to obtain
+the greatest possible resulting utility with the least
+possible effort, the greatest income with the least expenditure,
+the most pleasure with the least pain. And
+the terrible and tragic formula of the inner, spiritual life
+is either to obtain the most happiness with the least love,
+or the most love with the least happiness. And it is
+necessary to choose between the one and the other, and
+to know that he who approaches the infinite of love, the
+love that is infinite, approaches the zero of happiness,
+<a name="Page_207" id="Page_207" />the supreme anguish. And in reaching this zero he is
+beyond the reach of the misery that kills. &quot;Be not,
+and thou shalt be mightier than aught that is,&quot; said
+Brother Juan de los Angeles in one of his <i>Di&aacute;logos de la
+conquista del reino de Dios</i> (Dial. iii. 8).</p>
+
+<p>And there is something still more anguishing than
+suffering. A man about to receive a much-dreaded blow
+expects to have to suffer so severely that he may even
+succumb to the suffering, and when the blow falls he
+feels scarcely any pain; but afterwards, when he has
+come to himself and is conscious of his insensibility, he
+is seized with terror, a tragic terror, the most terrible of
+all, and choking with anguish he cries out: &quot;Can it be
+that I no longer exist?&quot; Which would you find most
+appalling&mdash;to feel such a pain as would deprive you of
+your senses on being pierced through with a white-hot
+iron, or to see yourself thus pierced through without
+feeling any pain? Have you never felt the horrible
+terror of feeling yourself incapable of suffering and of
+tears? Suffering tells us that we exist; suffering tells
+us that those whom we love exist; suffering tells us that
+the world in which we live exists; and suffering tells us
+that God exists and suffers; but it is the suffering of
+anguish, the anguish of surviving and being eternal.
+Anguish discovers God to us and makes us love
+Him.</p>
+
+<p>To believe in God is to love Him, and to love Him is
+to feel Him suffering, to pity Him.</p>
+
+<p>It may perhaps appear blasphemous to say that God
+suffers, for suffering implies limitation. Nevertheless,
+God, the Consciousness of the Universe, is limited by the
+brute matter in which He lives, by the unconscious, from
+which He seeks to liberate Himself and to liberate us.
+And we, in our turn, must seek to liberate Him. God
+suffers in each and all of us, in each and all of the consciousnesses
+imprisoned in transitory matter, and we all
+suffer in Him. Religious anguish is but the divine
+<a name="Page_208" id="Page_208" />suffering, the feeling that God suffers in me and that I
+suffer in Him.</p>
+
+<p>The universal suffering is the anguish of all in seeking
+to be all else but without power to achieve it, the anguish
+of each in being he that he is, being at the same time all
+that he is not, and being so for ever. The essence of a
+being is not only its endeavour to persist for ever, as
+Spinoza taught us, but also its endeavour to universalize
+itself; it is the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity.
+Every created being tends not only to preserve itself in
+itself, but to perpetuate itself, and, moreover, to invade
+all other beings, to be others without ceasing to be itself,
+to extend its limits to the infinite, but without breaking
+them. It does not wish to throw down its walls and
+leave everything laid flat, common and undefended, confounding
+and losing its own individuality, but it wishes
+to carry its walls to the extreme limits of creation and to
+embrace everything within them. It seeks the maximum
+of individuality with the maximum also of personality;
+it aspires to the identification of the Universe
+with itself; it aspires to God.</p>
+
+<p>And this vast I, within which each individual I seeks
+to put the Universe&mdash;what is it but God? And because
+I aspire to God, I love Him; and this aspiration of mine
+towards God is my love for Him, and just as I suffer in
+being He, He also suffers in being I, and in being each
+one of us.</p>
+
+<p>I am well aware that in spite of my warning that I am
+attempting here to give a logical form to a system of
+a-logical feelings, I shall be scandalizing not a few of
+my readers in speaking of a God who suffers, and in
+applying to God Himself, as God, the passion of Christ.
+The God of so-called rational theology excludes in effect
+all suffering. And the reader will no doubt think that
+this idea of suffering can have only a metaphorical value
+when applied to God, similar to that which is supposed
+to attach to those passages in the Old Testament which
+<a name="Page_209" id="Page_209" />describe the human passions of the God of Israel. For
+anger, wrath, and vengeance are impossible without
+suffering. And as for saying that God suffers through
+being bound by matter, I shall be told that, in the words
+of Plotinus (<i>Second Ennead</i>, ix., 7), the Universal Soul
+cannot be bound by the very thing&mdash;namely, bodies or
+matter&mdash;which is bound by It.</p>
+
+<p>Herein is involved the whole problem of the origin of
+evil, the evil of sin no less than the evil of pain, for if
+God does not suffer, He causes suffering; and if His life,
+since God lives, is not a process of realizing in Himself a
+total consciousness which is continually becoming fuller&mdash;that
+is to say, which is continually becoming more
+and more God&mdash;it is a process of drawing all things
+towards Himself, of imparting Himself to all, of constraining
+the consciousness of each part to enter into the
+consciousness of the All, which is He Himself, until at
+last He comes to be all in all&mdash;<i>&#960;&#945;&#957;&#964;&#945; &#949;&#957; &#960;&#945;&#963;&#953;</i>, according
+to the expression of St. Paul, the first Christian mystic.
+We will discuss this more fully, however, in the next
+chapter on the apocatastasis or beatific union.</p>
+
+<p>For the present let it suffice to say that there is a vast
+current of suffering urging living beings towards one
+another, constraining them to love one another and to
+seek one another, and to endeavour to complete one
+another, and to be each himself and others at the same
+time. In God everything lives, and in His suffering
+everything suffers, and in loving God we love His
+creatures in Him, just as in loving and pitying His
+creatures we love and pity God in them. No single soul
+can be free so long as there is anything enslaved in God's
+world, neither can God Himself, who lives in the soul of
+each one of us, be free so long as our soul is not free.</p>
+
+<p>My most immediate sensation is the sense and love of
+my own misery, my anguish, the compassion I feel for
+myself, the love I bear for myself. And when this compassion
+is vital and superabundant, it overflows from me
+<a name="Page_210" id="Page_210" />upon others, and from the excess of my own compassion
+I come to have compassion for my neighbours. My
+own misery is so great that the compassion for myself
+which it awakens within me soon overflows and reveals
+to me the universal misery.</p>
+
+<p>And what is charity but the overflow of pity? What
+is it but reflected pity that overflows and pours itself out
+in a flood of pity for the woes of others and in the
+exercise of charity?</p>
+
+<p>When the overplus of our pity leads us to the consciousness
+of God within us, it fills us with so great
+anguish for the misery shed abroad in all things, that we
+have to pour our pity abroad, and this we do in the
+form of charity. And in this pouring abroad of our pity
+we experience relief and the painful sweetness of goodness.
+This is what Teresa de Jes&uacute;s, the mystical doctor,
+called &quot;sweet-tasting suffering&quot; (<i>dolor sabroso</i>), and she
+knew also the lore of suffering loves. It is as when one
+looks upon some thing of beauty and feels the necessity
+of making others sharers in it. For the creative impulse,
+in which charity consists, is the work of suffering
+love.</p>
+
+<p>We feel, in effect, a satisfaction in doing good when
+good superabounds within us, when we are swollen with
+pity; and we are swollen with pity when God, filling our
+soul, gives us the suffering sensation of universal life,
+of the universal longing for eternal divinization. For
+we are not merely placed side by side with others in the
+world, having no common root with them, neither is their
+lot indifferent to us, but their pain hurts us, their
+anguish fills us with anguish, and we feel our community
+of origin and of suffering even without knowing
+it. Suffering, and pity which is born of suffering, are
+what reveal to us the brotherhood of every existing thing
+that possesses life and more or less of consciousness.
+&quot;Brother Wolf&quot; St. Francis of Assisi called the poor
+wolf that feels a painful hunger for the sheep, and feels,
+<a name="Page_211" id="Page_211" />too, perhaps, the pain of having to devour them; and
+this brotherhood reveals to us the Fatherhood of God,
+reveals to us that God is a Father and that He exists.
+And as a Father He shelters our common misery.</p>
+
+<p>Charity, then, is the impulse to liberate myself and all
+my fellows from suffering, and to liberate God, who
+embraces us all.</p>
+
+<p>Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate
+revelation of consciousness, and it may be that our
+body was given us simply in order that suffering might
+be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never
+known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would
+scarcely possess consciousness of himself. The child
+first cries at birth when the air, entering into his lungs
+and limiting him, seems to say to him: You have to
+breathe me in order that you may live!</p>
+
+<p>We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels
+reason may give us, that the material or sensible world
+which the senses create for us exists solely in order to
+embody and sustain that other spiritual or imaginable
+world which the imagination creates for us. Consciousness
+tends to be ever more and more consciousness, to
+intensify its consciousness, to acquire full consciousness
+of its complete self, of the whole of its content. We
+must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason
+may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in
+animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in
+all the Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know
+itself, to acquire consciousness of itself, to be itself&mdash;for
+to be oneself is to know oneself&mdash;to be pure spirit; and
+since it can only achieve this by means of the body, by
+means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at
+the same time that it remains the prisoner of it. The
+face can only see itself when portrayed in the mirror,
+but in order to see itself it must remain the prisoner of
+the mirror in which it sees itself, and the image which
+it sees therein is as the mirror distorts it; and if the
+<a name="Page_212" id="Page_212" />mirror breaks, the image is broken; and if the mirror is
+blurred, the image is blurred.</p>
+
+<p>Spirit finds itself limited by the matter in which it has
+to live and acquire consciousness of itself, just as
+thought is limited by the word in which as a social
+medium it is incarnated. Without matter there is no
+spirit, but matter makes spirit suffer by limiting it. And
+suffering is simply the obstacle which matter opposes to
+spirit; it is the clash of the conscious with the unconscious.</p>
+
+<p>Suffering is, in effect, the barrier which unconsciousness,
+matter, sets up against consciousness, spirit; it is
+the resistance to will, the limit which the visible universe
+imposes upon God; it is the wall that consciousness runs
+up against when it seeks to extend itself at the expense
+of unconsciousness; it is the resistance which unconsciousness
+opposes to its penetration by consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>Although in deference to authority we may believe, we
+do not in fact know, that we possess heart, stomach, or
+lungs so long as they do not cause us discomfort, suffering,
+or anguish. Physical suffering, or even discomfort,
+is what reveals to us our own internal core. And
+the same is true of spiritual suffering and anguish, for
+we do not take account of the fact that we possess a soul
+until it hurts us.</p>
+
+<p>Anguish is that which makes consciousness return
+upon itself. He who knows no anguish knows what he
+does and what he thinks, but he does not truly know that
+he does it and that he thinks it. He thinks, but he does
+not think that he thinks, and his thoughts are as if they
+were not his. Neither does he properly belong to himself.
+For it is only anguish, it is only the passionate
+longing never to die, that makes a human spirit master
+of itself.</p>
+
+<p>Pain, which is a kind of dissolution, makes us discover
+our internal core; and in the supreme dissolution, which
+<a name="Page_213" id="Page_213" />is death, we shall, at last, through the pain of annihilation,
+arrive at the core of our temporal core&mdash;at God,
+whom in our spiritual anguish we breathe and learn to
+love.</p>
+
+<p>Even so must we believe with faith, whatever counsels
+reason may give us.</p>
+
+<p>The origin of evil, as many discovered of old, is
+nothing other than what is called by another name the
+inertia of matter, and, as applied to the things of the
+spirit, sloth. And not without truth has it been said
+that sloth is the mother of all vices, not forgetting that
+the supreme sloth is that of not longing madly for
+immortality.</p>
+
+<p>Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always
+more, hunger of eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite
+for God&mdash;these are never satisfied. Each consciousness
+seeks to be itself and to be all other consciousnesses
+without ceasing to be itself: it seeks to be God. And
+matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends
+to be nothing, its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit
+says: I wish to be! and matter answers: I wish not
+to be!</p>
+
+<p>And in the order of human life, the individual would
+tend, under the sole instigation of the instinct of
+preservation, the creator of the material world, to
+destruction, to annihilation, if it were not for society,
+which, in implanting in him the instinct of perpetuation,
+the creator of the spiritual world, lifts and impels him
+towards the All, towards immortalization. And everything
+that man does as a mere individual, opposed to
+society, for the sake of his own preservation, and at the
+expense of society, if need be, is bad; and everything
+that he does as a social person, for the sake of the society
+in which he himself is included, for the sake of its perpetuation
+and of the perpetuation of himself in it, is
+good. And many of those who seem to be the greatest
+egoists, trampling everything under their feet in their
+zeal to bring their work to a successful issue, are in
+<a name="Page_214" id="Page_214" />reality men whose souls are aflame and overflowing with
+charity, for they subject and subordinate their petty
+personal I to the social I that has a mission to accomplish.</p>
+
+<p>He who would tie the working of love, of spiritualization,
+of liberation, to transitory and individual forms,
+crucifies God in matter; he crucifies God who makes the
+ideal subservient to his own temporal interests or worldly
+glory. And such a one is a deicide.</p>
+
+<p>The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavour
+to liberate God from brute matter, to endeavour to give
+consciousness to everything, to spiritualize or universalize
+everything; it is to dream that the very rocks may
+find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this
+dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may
+become conscious, that the Word may become life.</p>
+
+<p>We have but to look at the eucharistic symbol to see
+an instance of it. The Word has been imprisoned in a
+piece of material bread, and it has been imprisoned
+therein to the end that we may eat it, and in eating it
+make it our own, part and parcel of our body in which
+the spirit dwells, and that it may beat in our heart and
+think in our brain and be consciousness. It has been
+imprisoned in this bread in order that, after being buried
+in our body, it may come to life again in our spirit.</p>
+
+<p>And we must spiritualize everything. And this we
+shall accomplish by giving our spirit, which grows the
+more the more it is distributed, to all men and to all
+things. And we give our spirit when we invade other
+spirits and make ourselves the master of them.</p>
+
+<p>All this is to be believed with faith, whatever counsels
+reason may give us.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>And now we are about to see what practical consequences
+all these more or less fantastical doctrines may
+have in regard to logic, to esthetics, and, above all, to
+ethics&mdash;their religious concretion, in a word. And
+perhaps then they will gain more justification in the eyes
+<a name="Page_215" id="Page_215" />of the reader who, in spite of my warnings, has hitherto
+been looking for the scientific or even philosophic
+development of an irrational system.</p>
+
+<p>I think it may not be superfluous to recall to the reader
+once again what I said at the conclusion of the sixth
+chapter, that entitled &quot;In the Depths of the Abyss&quot;;
+but we now approach the practical or pragmatical part
+of this treatise. First, however, we must see how the
+religious sense may become concrete in the hopeful
+vision of another life.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44" /><a href="#FNanchor_44_44">[44]</a> Reinold Seeberg, <i>Christliche-protestantische Ethik</i> in <i>Systematische
+christliche Religion</i>, in <i>Die Kultur der Gegenwart</i> series.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45" /><a href="#FNanchor_45_45">[45]</a> <i>Cf.</i> St. Thomas Aquinas, <i>Summa</i>, secunda secund&aelig;, qu&aelig;stio iv., art. 2.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46" /><a href="#FNanchor_46_46">[46]</a> &quot;<i>Qu&eacute; es Verdad?</i>&quot; (&quot;What is truth?&quot;), published in <i>La Espa&ntilde;a
+Moderna</i>, March, 1906, vol. 207 (reprinted in the edition of collected
+<i>Ensayos</i>, vol. vi., Madrid, 1918).</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X" /><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216" />X</h2>
+
+<h2>RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND AND THE APOCATASTASIS</h2>
+
+<blockquote><p><i>&#922;&#945;&#953; &#947;&#945;&#961; &#953;&#963;&#969;&#962; &#954;&#945;&#953;
+ &#956;&#945;&#955;&#953;&#959;&#964;&#945; &#960;&#961;&#949;&#960;&#949;&#953;
+ &#956;&#949;&#955;&#955;&#959;&#957;&#964;&#945; &#949;&#967;&#949;&#953;&#963;&#949; &#945;&#960;&#959;&#948;&#951;&#956;&#949;&#953;&#957;
+ &#948;&#953;&#945;&#963;&#954;&#959;&#960;&#949;&#953;&#957; &#964;&#949; &#954;&#945;&#953;
+ &#956;&#965;&#952;&#959;&#955;&#959;&#947;&#949;&#953;&#957; &#960;&#949;&#961;&#953; &#964;&#951;&#962;
+ &#945;&#960;&#959;&#948;&#951;&#956;&#953;&#945;&#962; &#964;&#951;&#962; &#949;&#967;&#949;&#953;,
+ &#960;&#959;&#953;&#945;&#957; &#964;&#953;&#957;&#945; &#945;&#965;&#964;&#951;&#957; &#959;&#953;&#959;&#956;&#949;&#952;&#945; &#949;&#953;&#957;&#945;&#953;
+</i>.&mdash;PLATO: <i>Ph&aelig;do</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>Religion is founded upon faith, hope, and charity, which
+in their turn are founded upon the feeling of divinity and
+of God. Of faith in God is born our faith in men, of
+hope in God hope in men, and of charity or piety
+towards God&mdash;for as Cicero said,<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47" /><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> <i>est enim pietas iustitia
+adversum deos</i>&mdash;charity towards men. In God is
+resumed not only Humanity, but the whole Universe,
+and the Universe spiritualized and penetrated with consciousness,
+for as the Christian Faith teaches, God shall
+at last be all in all. St. Teresa said, and Miguel de
+Molinos repeated with a harsher and more despairing
+inflection, that the soul must realize that nothing exists
+but itself and God.</p>
+
+<p>And this relation with God, this more or less intimate
+union with Him, is what we call religion.</p>
+
+<p>What is religion? In what does it differ from the
+religious sense and how are the two related? Every
+man's definition of religion is based upon his own inward
+experience of it rather than upon his observation of it in
+others, nor indeed is it possible to define it without in
+some way or another experiencing it. Tacitus said
+(<i>Hist.</i> v. 4), speaking of the Jews, that they regarded as
+profane everything that the Romans held to be sacred,
+<a name="Page_217" id="Page_217" />and that what was sacred to them was to the Romans
+impure: <i>profana illic omnia qu&aelig; apud nos sacra,
+rursum conversa apud illos qu&aelig; nobis incesta</i>. Therefore
+he, the Roman, describes the Jews as a people
+dominated by superstition and hostile to religion, <i>gens
+superstitioni obnoxia, religionibus adversa</i>, while as
+regards Christianity, with which he was very imperfectly
+acquainted, scarcely distinguishing it from Judaism, he
+deemed it to be a pernicious superstition, <i>existialis superstitio</i>,
+inspired by a hatred of mankind, <i>odium generis
+humani</i> (<i>Ab excessu Aug.</i>, xv., 44). And there have
+been many others who have shared his opinion. But
+where does religion end and superstition begin, or
+perhaps rather we should say at what point does superstition
+merge into religion? What is the criterion by
+means of which we discriminate between them?</p>
+
+<p>It would be of little profit to recapitulate here, even
+summarily, the principal definitions, each bearing the
+impress of the personal feeling of its definer, which have
+been given of religion. Religion is better described than
+defined and better felt than described. But if there is
+any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance,
+it is that of Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion
+consists in the simple feeling of a relationship of dependence
+upon something above us and a desire to establish
+relations with this mysterious power. Nor is there much
+amiss with the statement of W. Hermann<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48" /><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> that the religious
+longing of man is a desire for truth concerning his
+human existence. And to cut short these extraneous
+citations, I will end with one from the judicious and perspicacious
+Cournot: &quot;Religious manifestations are the
+necessary consequence of man's predisposition to believe
+in the existence of an invisible, supernatural and
+miraculous world, a predisposition which it has been possible
+to consider sometimes as a reminiscence of an
+anterior state, sometimes as an intimation of a future
+<a name="Page_218" id="Page_218" />destiny&quot; (<i>Trait&eacute; de l'encha&icirc;nement des id&eacute;es fondamentales
+dans les sciences et dans l'histoire</i>, &sect; 396). And
+it is this problem of human destiny, of eternal life, or of
+the human finality of the Universe or of God, that we
+have now reached. All the highways of religion lead up
+to this, for it is the very essence of all religion.</p>
+
+<p>Beginning with the savage's personalization of the
+whole Universe in his fetich, religion has its roots in the
+vital necessity of giving human finality to the Universe,
+to God, and this necessity obliges it, therefore, to attribute
+to the Universe, to God, consciousness of self and of
+purpose. And it may be said that religion is simply
+union with God, each one interpreting God according to
+his own sense of Him. God gives transcendent meaning
+and finality to life; but He gives it relatively to each one
+of us who believe in Him. And thus God is for man as
+much as man is for God, for God in becoming man, in
+becoming human, has given Himself to man because of
+His love of him.</p>
+
+<p>And this religious longing for union with God is a
+longing for a union that cannot be consummated in
+science or in art, but only in life. &quot;He who possesses
+science and art, has religion; he who possesses neither
+science nor art, let him get religion,&quot; said Goethe in one
+of his frequent accesses of paganism. And yet in spite
+of what he said, he himself, Goethe...?</p>
+
+<p>And to wish that we may be united with God is not to
+wish that we may be lost and submerged in Him, for this
+loss and submersion of self ends at last in the complete
+dissolution of self in the dreamless sleep of Nirvana; it is
+to wish to possess Him rather than to be possessed by
+Him. When his disciples, amazed at his saying that it
+was impossible for a rich man to enter into the kingdom
+of heaven, asked Jesus who then could be saved, the
+Master replied that with men it was impossible but not
+with God; and then said Peter, &quot;Behold, we have forsaken
+all and followed thee; what shall we have there<a name="Page_219" id="Page_219" />fore?&quot;
+And the reply of Jesus was, not that they should
+be absorbed in the Father, but that they should sit upon
+twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel
+(Matt. xix. 23-26).</p>
+
+<p>It was a Spaniard, and very emphatically a Spaniard,
+Miguel de Molinos, who said in his <i>Gu&iacute;a Espiritual</i><a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49" /><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> that
+&quot;he who would attain to the mystical science must
+abandon and be detached from five things: first, from
+creatures; second, from temporal things; third, from
+the very gifts of the Holy Spirit; fourth, from himself;
+and fifth, he must be detached even from God.&quot; And he
+adds that &quot;this last is the completest of all, because that
+soul only that knows how to be so detached is that which
+attains to being lost in God, and only the soul that attains
+to being so lost succeeds in finding itself.&quot; Emphatically
+a true Spaniard, Molinos, and truly Spanish is this
+paradoxical expression of quietism or rather of nihilism&mdash;for
+he himself elsewhere speaks of annihilation&mdash;and not
+less Spanish, nay, perhaps even more Spanish, were the
+Jesuits who attacked him, upholding the prerogatives of
+the All against the claims of Nothingness. For religion
+is not the longing for self-annihilation, but for self-completion,
+it is the longing not for death but for life. &quot;The
+eternal religion of the inward essence of man ... the
+individual dream of the heart, is the worship of his own
+being, the adoration of life,&quot; as the tortured soul of
+Flaubert was intimately aware (<i>Par les champs et par les
+gr&egrave;ves</i>, vii.).</p>
+
+<p>When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at
+the Renaissance, the pagan sense of religion came to
+life again, it took concrete form in the knightly ideal with
+its codes of love and honour. But it was a paganism
+Christianized, baptized. &quot;Woman&mdash;<i>la donna</i>&mdash;was the
+divinity enshrined within those savage breasts. Who<a name="Page_220" id="Page_220" />soever
+will investigate the memorials of primitive times
+will find this ideal of woman in its full force and purity;
+the Universe is woman. And so it was in Germany, in
+France, in Provence, in Spain, in Italy, at the beginning
+of the modern age. History was cast in this mould;
+Trojans and Romans were conceived as knights-errant,
+and so too were Arabs, Saracens, Turks, the Sultan and
+Saladin.... In this universal fraternity mingle
+angels, saints, miracles and paradise, strangely blended
+with the fantasy and voluptuousness of the Oriental
+world, and all baptized in the name of Chivalry.&quot; Thus,
+in his <i>Storia della Letteratura italiana</i>, ii., writes
+Francesco de Sanctis, and in an earlier passage he informs
+us that for that breed of men &quot;in paradise itself the
+lover's delight was to look upon his lady&mdash;<i>Madonna</i>&mdash;and
+that he had no desire to go thither if he might not
+go in his lady's company.&quot; What, in fact, was Chivalry&mdash;which
+Cervantes, intending to kill it, afterwards purified
+and Christianized in <i>Don Quixote</i>&mdash;but a real though
+distorted religion, a hybrid between paganism and
+Christianity, whose gospel perhaps was the legend of
+Tristan and Iseult? And did not even the Christianity
+of the mystics&mdash;those knights-errant of the spirit&mdash;possibly
+reach its culminating-point in the worship of the
+divine woman, the Virgin Mary? What else was the
+Mariolatry of a St. Bonaventura, the troubadour of
+Mary? And this sentiment found its inspiration in love
+of the fountain of life, of that which saves us from death.</p>
+
+<p>But as the Renaissance advanced men turned from the
+religion of woman to the religion of science; desire, the
+foundation of which was curiosity, ended in curiosity, in
+eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of good and evil.
+Europe flocked to the University of Bologna in search of
+learning. Chivalry was succeeded by Platonism. Men
+sought to discover the mystery of the world and of life.
+But it was really in order to save life, which they had also
+sought to save in the worship of woman. Human con<a name="Page_221" id="Page_221" />sciousness
+sought to penetrate the Universal Consciousness,
+but its real object, whether it was aware of it or not,
+was to save itself.</p>
+
+<p>For the truth is that we feel and imagine the Universal
+Consciousness&mdash;and in this feeling and imagination religious
+experience consists&mdash;simply in order that thereby
+we may save our own individual consciousnesses. And
+how?</p>
+
+<p>Once again I must repeat that the longing for the
+immortality of the soul, for the permanence, in some form
+or another, of our personal and individual consciousness,
+is as much of the essence of religion as is the longing
+that there may be a God. The one does not exist apart
+from the other, the reason being that fundamentally they
+are one and the same thing. But as soon as we attempt
+to give a concrete and rational form to this longing for
+immortality and permanence, to define it to ourselves,
+we encounter even more difficulties than we encountered
+in our attempt to rationalize God.</p>
+
+<p>The universal consent of mankind has again been
+invoked as a means of justifying this immortal longing
+for immortality to our own feeble reason. <i>Permanere
+animos arbitratur consensu nationum omnium</i>, said
+Cicero, echoing the opinion of the ancients (<i>Tuscul.
+Qu&aelig;st.</i>, xvi., 36). But this same recorder of his own
+feelings confessed that, although when he read the arguments
+in favour of the immortality of the soul in the
+<i>Ph&aelig;do</i> of Plato he was compelled to assent to them, as
+soon as he put the book aside and began to revolve the
+problem in his own mind, all his previous assent melted
+away, <i>assentio omnis illa illabitur</i> (cap. xi., 25). And
+what happened to Cicero happens to us all, and it
+happened likewise to Swedenborg, the most daring
+visionary of the other world. Swedenborg admitted that
+he who discourses of life after death, putting aside all
+erudite notions concerning the soul and its mode of union
+with the body, believes that after death he shall live in a
+<a name="Page_222" id="Page_222" />glorious joy and vision, as a man among angels; but
+when he begins to reflect upon the doctrine of the union
+of the soul with the body, or upon the hypothetical
+opinion concerning the soul, doubts arise in him as to
+whether the soul is thus or otherwise, and when these
+doubts arise, his former idea is dissipated (<i>De c&aelig;lo et
+inferno</i>, &sect; 183). Nevertheless, as Cournot says, &quot;it is
+the destiny that awaits me, <i>me</i> or my <i>person</i>, that moves,
+perturbs and consoles me, that makes me capable of
+abnegation and sacrifice, whatever be the origin, the
+nature or the essence of this inexplicable bond of union,
+in the absence of which the philosophers are pleased to
+determine that my person must disappear&quot; (<i>Trait&eacute;</i>, etc.,
+&sect; 297).</p>
+
+<p>Must we then embrace the pure and naked faith in an
+eternal life without trying to represent it to ourselves?
+This is impossible; it is beyond our power to bring ourselves
+or accustom ourselves to do so. And nevertheless
+there are some who call themselves Christians
+and yet leave almost altogether on one side this
+question of representation. Take any work of theology
+informed by the most enlightened&mdash;that is, the most
+rationalistic and liberal&mdash;Protestantism; take, for
+instance, the <i>Dogmatik</i> of Dr. Julius Kaftan, and of
+the 668 pages of which the sixth edition, that of 1909,
+consists, you will find only one, the last, that is devoted to
+this problem. And in this page, after affirming that
+Christ is not only the beginning and middle but also the
+end and consummation of History, and that those who
+are in Christ will attain to fullness of life, the eternal life
+of those who are in Christ, not a single word as to what
+that life may be. Half a dozen words at most about
+eternal death, that is, hell, &quot;for its existence is demanded
+by the moral character of faith and of Christian hope.&quot;
+Its moral character, eh? not its religious character, for I
+am not aware that the latter knows any such exigency.
+And all this inspired by a prudent agnostic parsimony.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223" />Yes, the prudent, the rational, and, some will say, the
+pious, attitude, is not to seek to penetrate into mysteries
+that are hidden from our knowledge, not to insist upon
+shaping a plastic representation of eternal glory, such as
+that of the <i>Divina Commedia</i>. True faith, true Christian
+piety, we shall be told, consists in resting upon the confidence
+that God, by the grace of Christ, will, in some way
+or another, make us live in Him, in His Son; that, as our
+destiny is in His almighty hands, we should surrender
+ourselves to Him, in the full assurance that He will do
+with us what is best for the ultimate end of life, of spirit
+and of the universe. Such is the teaching that has
+traversed many centuries, and was notably prominent in
+the period between Luther and Kant.</p>
+
+<p>And nevertheless men have not ceased endeavouring to
+imagine to themselves what this eternal life may be, nor
+will they cease their endeavours so long as they are men
+and not merely thinking machines. There are books of
+theology&mdash;or of what passes for theology&mdash;full of disquisitions
+upon the conditions under which the blessed
+dead live in paradise, upon their mode of enjoyment, upon
+the properties of the glorious body, for without some form
+of body the soul cannot be conceived.</p>
+
+<p>And to this same necessity, the real necessity of forming
+to ourselves a concrete representation of what this
+other life may be, must in great part be referred the
+indestructible vitality of doctrines such as those of
+spiritualism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls
+from star to star, and the like; doctrines which as often
+as they are pronounced to be defeated and dead, are found
+to have come to life again, clothed in some more or less
+new form. And it is merely supine to be content to
+ignore them and not to seek to discover their permanent
+and living essence. Man will never willingly abandon
+his attempt to form a concrete representation of the other
+life.</p>
+
+<p>But is an eternal and endless life after death indeed
+<a name="Page_224" id="Page_224" />thinkable? How can we conceive the life of a disembodied
+spirit? How can we conceive such a spirit?
+How can we conceive a pure consciousness, without a
+corporal organism? Descartes divided the world into
+thought and extension, a dualism which was imposed
+upon him by the Christian dogma of the immortality of
+the soul. But is extension, is matter, that which thinks
+and is spiritualized, or is thought that which is extended
+and materialized? The weightiest questions of metaphysics
+arise practically out of our desire to arrive at an
+understanding of the possibility of our immortality&mdash;from
+this fact they derive their value and cease to be merely the
+idle discussions of fruitless curiosity. For the truth is
+that metaphysics has no value save in so far as it attempts
+to explain in what way our vital longing can or cannot be
+realized. And thus it is that there is and always will be
+a rational metaphysic and a vital metaphysic, in perennial
+conflict with one another, the one setting out from
+the notion of cause, the other from the notion of
+substance.</p>
+
+<p>And even if we were to succeed in imagining personal
+immortality, might we not possibly feel it to be something
+no less terrible than its negation? &quot;Calypso was
+inconsolable at the departure of Ulysses; in her sorrow
+she was dismayed at being immortal,&quot; said the gentle,
+the mystical F&eacute;nelon at the beginning of his <i>T&eacute;l&eacute;maque</i>.
+Was it not a kind of doom that the ancient gods, no less
+than the demons, were subject to&mdash;the deprivation of the
+power to commit suicide?</p>
+
+<p>When Jesus took Peter and James and John up into a
+high mountain and was transfigured before them, his
+raiment shining as white as snow, and Moses and Elias
+appeared and talked with him, Peter said to the Master:
+&quot;Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make
+three tabernacles; one for thee and one for Moses and one
+for Elias,&quot; for he wished to eternalize that moment. And
+as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged
+<a name="Page_225" id="Page_225" />them that they should tell no man what they had seen
+until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead.
+And they, keeping this saying to themselves, questioned
+one with another what this rising from the dead should
+mean, as men not understanding the purport of it. And
+it was after this that Jesus met the father whose son was
+possessed with a dumb spirit and who cried out to him,
+&quot;Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief&quot; (Mark ix.).</p>
+
+<p>Those three apostles did not understand what this
+rising from the dead meant. Neither did those Sadducees
+who asked the Master whose wife she should be in the
+resurrection who in this life had had seven husbands
+(Matt. xxii.); and it was then that Jesus said that God is
+not the God of the dead, but of the living. And the
+other life is not, in fact, thinkable to us except under the
+same forms as those of this earthly and transitory life.
+Nor is the mystery at all clarified by that metaphor of the
+grain and the wheat that it bears, with which Paul
+answers the question, &quot;How are the dead raised up,
+and with what body do they come?&quot; (1 Cor. xv. 35).</p>
+
+<p>How can a human soul live and enjoy God eternally
+without losing its individual personality&mdash;that is to say,
+without losing itself? What is it to enjoy God? What
+is eternity as opposed to time? Does the soul change or
+does it not change in the other life? If it does not
+change, how does it live? And if it changes, how does
+it preserve its individuality through so vast a period of
+time? For though the other life may exclude space, it
+cannot exclude time, as Cournot observes in the work
+quoted above.</p>
+
+<p>If there is life in heaven there is change. Swedenborg
+remarked that the angels change, because the delight of
+the celestial life would gradually lose its value if they
+always enjoyed it in its fullness, and because angels, like
+men, love themselves, and he who loves himself experiences
+changes of state; and he adds further that at times
+the angels are sad, and that he, Swedenborg, discoursed
+<a name="Page_226" id="Page_226" />with some when they were sad (<i>De C&aelig;lo et Inferno</i>,
+&sect;&sect; 158, 160). In any case, it is impossible for us to conceive
+life without change, change of growth or of diminution,
+of sadness or of joy, of love or of hate.</p>
+
+<p>In effect, an eternal life is unthinkable and an eternal
+life of absolute felicity, of beatific vision, is more unthinkable
+still.</p>
+
+<p>And what precisely is this beatific vision? We
+observe in the first place that it is called vision and not
+action, something passive being therefore presupposed.
+And does not this beatific vision suppose loss of personal
+consciousness? A saint in heaven, says Bossuet, is a
+being who is scarcely sensible of himself, so completely
+is he possessed by God and immerged in His glory....
+Our attention cannot stay on the saint, because one finds
+him outside of himself, and subject by an unchangeable
+love to the source of his being and his happiness (<i>Du culte
+qui est d&ucirc; &agrave; Dieu</i>). And these are the words of Bossuet,
+the antiquietist. This loving vision of God supposes an absorption
+in Him. He who in a state of blessedness enjoys
+God in His fullness must perforce neither think of himself,
+nor remember himself, nor have any consciousness
+of himself, but be in perpetual ecstasy (<i>&#949;&#954;&#963;&#964;&#945;&#963;&#953;&#962;</i>) outside
+of himself, in a condition of alienation. And the
+ecstasy that the mystics describe is a prelude of this
+vision.</p>
+
+<p>He who sees God shall die, say the Scriptures
+(Judg. xiii. 22); and may it not be that the eternal vision
+of God is an eternal death, a swooning away of the personality?
+But St. Teresa, in her description of the last
+state of prayer, the rapture, transport, flight, or ecstasy
+of the soul, tells us that the soul is borne as upon a
+cloud or a mighty eagle, &quot;but you see yourself carried
+away and know not whither,&quot; and it is &quot;with
+delight,&quot; and &quot;if you do not resist, the senses are not
+lost, at least I was so much myself as to be able to perceive
+that I was being lifted up &quot;&mdash;that is to say, without
+<a name="Page_227" id="Page_227" />losing consciousness. And God &quot;appears to be not content
+with thus attracting the soul to Himself in so real a
+way, but wishes to have the body also, though it be
+mortal and of earth so foul.&quot; &quot;Ofttimes the soul is
+absorbed&mdash;or, to speak more correctly, the Lord absorbs
+it in Himself; and when He has held it thus for a
+moment, the will alone remains in union with Him&quot;&mdash;not
+the intelligence alone. We see, therefore, that it is
+not so much vision as a union of the will, and meanwhile,
+&quot;the understanding and memory are distraught ...
+like one who has slept long and dreamed and is hardly
+yet awake.&quot; It is &quot;a soft flight, a delicious flight, a
+noiseless flight.&quot; And in this delicious flight the consciousness
+of self is preserved, the awareness of distinction
+from God with whom one is united. And one is
+raised to this rapture, according to the Spanish mystic,
+by the contemplation of the Humanity of Christ&mdash;that is
+to say, of something concrete and human; it is the vision
+of the living God, not of the idea of God. And in the
+28th chapter she tells us that &quot;though there were nothing
+else to delight the sight in heaven but the great beauty
+of the glorified bodies, that would be an excessive bliss,
+particularly the vision of the Humanity of Jesus Christ
+our Lord....&quot; &quot;This vision,&quot; she continues,
+&quot;though imaginary, I did never see with my bodily eyes,
+nor, indeed, any other, but only with the eyes of the
+soul.&quot; And thus it is that in heaven the soul does not
+see God only, but everything in God, or rather it sees
+that everything is God, for God embraces all things.
+And this idea is further emphasized by Jacob B&ouml;hme.
+The saint tells us in the <i>Moradas Setimas</i> (vii. 2) that
+&quot;this secret union takes place in the innermost centre of
+the soul, where God Himself must dwell.&quot; And she
+goes on to say that &quot;the soul, I mean the spirit of the
+soul, is made one with God ...&quot;; and this union may
+be likened to &quot;two wax candles, the tips of which touch
+each other so closely that there is but one light; or again,
+<a name="Page_228" id="Page_228" />the wick, the wax, and the light become one, but the one
+candle can again be separated from the other, and the two
+candles remain distinct; or the wick may be withdrawn
+from the wax.&quot; But there is another more intimate
+union, and this is &quot;like rain falling from heaven into a
+river or stream, becoming one and the same liquid, so
+that the river and the rain-water cannot be divided; or it
+resembles a streamlet flowing into the sea, which cannot
+afterwards be disunited from it; or it may be likened to
+a room into which a bright light enters through two windows&mdash;though
+divided when it enters, the light becomes
+one and the same.&quot; And what difference is there
+between this and the internal and mystical silence of
+Miguel de Molinos, the third and most perfect degree of
+which is the silence of thought? (<i>Gu&iacute;a Espiritual</i>,
+book i., chap. xvii., &sect; 128). Do we not here very
+closely approach the view that &quot;nothingness is the
+way to attain to that high state of a mind reformed&quot;?
+(book iii., chap. xx., &sect; 196). And what marvel is it
+that Amiel in his <i>Journal Intime</i> should twice have
+made use of the Spanish word <i>nada</i>, nothing, doubtless
+because he found none more expressive in any other
+language? And nevertheless, if we read our mystical
+doctor, St. Teresa, with care, we shall see that the
+sensitive element is never excluded, the element of
+delight&mdash;that is to say, the element of personal consciousness.
+The soul allows itself to be absorbed in
+God in order that it may absorb Him, in order that it
+may acquire consciousness of its own divinity.</p>
+
+<p>A beatific vision, a loving contemplation in which the
+soul is absorbed in God and, as it were, lost in Him,
+appears either as an annihilation of self or as a prolonged
+tedium to our natural way of feeling. And hence
+a certain feeling which we not infrequently observe and
+which has more than once expressed itself in satires, not
+altogether free from irreverence or perhaps impiety, with
+reference to the heaven of eternal glory as a place of
+<a name="Page_229" id="Page_229" />eternal boredom. And it is useless to despise feelings
+such as these, so wholly natural and spontaneous.</p>
+
+<p>It is clear that those who feel thus have failed to take
+note of the fact that man's highest pleasure consists in
+acquiring and intensifying consciousness. Not the
+pleasure of knowing, exactly, but rather that of learning.
+In knowing a thing we tend to forget it, to convert it, if
+the expression may be allowed, into unconscious knowledge.
+Man's pleasure, his purest delight, is allied with
+the act of learning, of getting at the truth of things, of
+acquiring knowledge with differentiation. And hence
+the famous saying of Lessing which I have already
+quoted. There is a story told of an ancient Spaniard
+who accompanied Vasco N&uacute;&ntilde;ez de Balboa when he
+climbed that peak in Darien from which both the Atlantic
+and the Pacific are visible. On beholding the two
+oceans the old man fell on his knees and exclaimed, &quot;I
+thank Thee, God, that Thou didst not let me die without
+having seen so great a wonder.&quot; But if this man had
+stayed there, very soon the wonder would have ceased to
+be wonderful, and with the wonder the pleasure, too,
+would have vanished. His joy was the joy of discovery.
+And perhaps the joy of the beatific vision may be not
+exactly that of the contemplation of the supreme Truth,
+whole and entire (for this the soul could not endure),
+but rather that of a continual discovery of the Truth, of
+a ceaseless act of learning involving an effort which keeps
+the sense of personal consciousness continually active.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult for us to conceive a beatific vision of
+mental quiet, of full knowledge and not of gradual apprehension,
+as in any way different from a kind of Nirvana,
+a spiritual diffusion, a dissipation of energy in the essence
+of God, a return to unconsciousness induced by the
+absence of shock, of difference&mdash;in a word, of activity.</p>
+
+<p>May it not be that the very condition which makes our
+eternal union with God thinkable destroys our longing?
+What difference is there between being absorbed by God
+<a name="Page_230" id="Page_230" />and absorbing Him in ourself? Is it the stream that is
+lost in the sea or the sea that is lost in the stream? It is
+all the same.</p>
+
+<p>Our fundamental feeling is our longing not to lose the
+sense of the continuity of our consciousness, not to break
+the concatenation of our memories, the feeling of our
+own personal concrete identity, even though we may be
+gradually being absorbed in God, enriching Him. Who
+at eighty years of age remembers the child that he
+was at eight, conscious though he may be of the
+unbroken chain connecting the two? And it may be
+said that the problem for feeling resolves itself into the
+question as to whether there is a God, whether there is
+a human finality to the Universe. But what is finality?
+For just as it is always possible to ask the why of every
+why, so it is also always possible to ask the wherefore
+of every wherefore. Supposing that there is a God,
+then wherefore God? For Himself, it will be said.
+And someone is sure to reply: What is the difference
+between this consciousness and no-consciousness? But
+it will always be true, as Plotinus has said (<i>Enn</i>., ii.,
+ix., 8), that to ask why God made the world is the same
+as to ask why there is a soul. Or rather, not why, but
+wherefore (<i>&#948;&#953;&#945; &#964;&#953;</i>).</p>
+
+<p>For him who places himself outside himself, in an
+objective hypothetical position&mdash;which is as much as to
+say in an inhuman position&mdash;the ultimate wherefore is
+as inaccessible&mdash;and strictly, as absurd&mdash;as the ultimate
+why. What difference in effect does it make if there is
+not any finality? What logical contradiction is involved
+in the Universe not being destined to any finality, either
+human or superhuman? What objection is there in
+reason to there being no other purpose in the sum of
+things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and
+happen? For him who places himself outside himself,
+none; but for him who lives and suffers and desires
+within himself&mdash;for him it is a question of life or death.
+<a name="Page_231" id="Page_231" />Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself,
+does not one find one's own nothingness? &quot;Having
+become a sinner in seeking himself, man has become
+wretched in finding himself,&quot; said Bossuet (<i>Trait&eacute; de la
+Concupiscence</i>, chap. xi.). &quot;Seek thyself&quot; begins
+with &quot;Know thyself.&quot; To which Carlyle answers
+(<i>Past and Present</i>, book iii., chap. xi.): &quot;The latest
+Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it.
+'Know thyself': long enough has that poor 'self' of
+thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it,
+I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing
+thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what
+thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules.
+That will be thy better plan.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Yes, but what I work at, will not that too be lost
+in the end? And if it be lost, wherefore should I
+work at it? Yes, yes, it may be that to accomplish
+my work&mdash;and what is my work?&mdash;without thinking
+about myself, is to love God. And what is it to love
+God?</p>
+
+<p>And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am
+I not loving myself more than God, am I not loving
+myself in God?</p>
+
+<p>What we really long for after death is to go on living
+this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills, without
+its tedium, and without death. Seneca, the Spaniard,
+gave expression to this in his <i>Consolatio ad Marciam</i>
+(xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again:
+<i>ista moliri</i>. And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to
+see God in the flesh, not in the spirit. And what but
+that is the meaning of that comic conception of <i>eternal
+recurrence</i> which issued from the tragic soul of poor
+Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?</p>
+
+<p>And this beatific vision which is the primary Catholic
+solution of the problem, how can it be realized, I ask
+again, without obliteration of the consciousness of self?
+<a name="Page_232" id="Page_232" />Will it not be like a sleep in which we dream without
+knowing what we dream? Who would wish for an
+eternal life like that? To think without knowing that
+we think is not to be sensible of ourselves, it is not to
+be ourselves. And is not eternal life perhaps eternal
+consciousness, not only seeing God, but seeing that we
+see Him, seeing ourselves at the same time and ourselves
+as distinct from Him? He who sleeps lives, but
+he has no consciousness of himself; and would anyone
+wish for an eternal sleep? When Circe advised Ulysses
+to descend to the abode of the dead in order to consult
+the soothsayer Teiresias, she told him that Teiresias
+alone among the shades of the dead was possessed of
+understanding, for all the others flitted about like
+shadows (<i>Odyssey</i>, x., 487-495). And can it be said
+that the others, apart from Teiresias, had really overcome
+death? Is it to overcome death to flit about like
+shadows without understanding?</p>
+
+<p>And on the other hand, may we not imagine that
+possibly this earthly life of ours is to the other life what
+sleep is to waking? May not all our life be a dream
+and death an awakening? But an awakening to what?
+And supposing that everything is but the dream of God
+and that God one day will awaken? Will He remember
+His dream?</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle, the rationalist, tells in his <i>Ethics</i> of the
+superior happiness of the contemplative life, <i>&#946;&#953;&#959;&#962; &#952;&#949;&#969;&#961;&#951;&#964;&#953;&#954;&#959;&#962;</i>; and all rationalists are wont to place happiness
+in knowledge. And the conception of eternal
+happiness, of the enjoyment of God, as a beatific vision,
+as knowledge and comprehension of God, is a thing of
+rationalist origin, it is the kind of happiness that corresponds
+with the God-Idea of Aristotelianism. But the
+truth is that, in addition to vision, happiness demands
+delight, and this is a thing which has very little to do,
+with rationalism and is only attainable when we feel
+ourselves distinct from God.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233" />Our Aristotelian Catholic theologian, the author of
+the endeavour to rationalize Catholic feeling, St. Thomas
+Aquinas, tells us in his <i>Summa</i> (<i>prima secund&aelig; partis,
+qu&aelig;stio</i> iv., <i>art</i>. i) that &quot;delight is requisite for happiness.
+For delight is caused by the fact of desire resting
+in attained good. Hence, since happiness is nothing
+but the attainment of the Sovereign Good, there cannot
+be happiness without concomitant delight.&quot; But where
+is the delight of him who rests? To rest, <i>requiescere</i>&mdash;is
+not that to sleep and not to possess even the consciousness
+that one is resting? &quot;Delight is caused by
+the vision of God itself,&quot; the theologian continues. But
+does the soul feel itself distinct from God? &quot;The
+delight that accompanies the activity of the understanding
+does not impede, but rather strengthens that
+activity,&quot; he says later on. Obviously! for what
+happiness were it else? And in order to save delectation,
+delight, pleasure, which, like pain, has always
+something material in it, and which we conceive of only
+as existing in a soul incarnate in a body, it was necessary
+to suppose that the soul in a state of blessedness
+is united with its body. Apart from some kind of body,
+how is delight possible? The immortality of the pure
+soul, without some sort of body or spirit-covering, is
+not true immortality. And at bottom, what we long for
+is a prolongation of this life, this life and no other, this
+life of flesh and suffering, this life which we imprecate
+at times simply because it comes to an end. The
+majority of suicides would not take their lives if they
+had the assurance that they would never die on this
+earth. The self-slayer kills himself because he will not
+wait for death.</p>
+
+<p>When in the thirty-third canto of the <i>Paradiso</i>, Dante
+relates how he attained to the vision of God, he tells us
+that just as a man who beholds somewhat in his sleep
+retains on awakening nothing but the impression of the
+feeling in his mind, so it was with him, for when the
+<a name="Page_234" id="Page_234" />vision had all but passed away the sweetness that sprang
+from it still distilled itself in his heart.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Cotal son to, che quasi tutta cessa</i></div>
+<div><i>mia visione ed ancor mi distilla</i></div>
+<div><i>nel cuor lo dulce che nacque da essa</i></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>like snow that melts in the sun&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>cosi la neve al sol si disigilla</i>.</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>That is to say, that the vision, the intellectual content,
+passes, and that which remains is the delight, the <i>passione
+impressa</i>, the emotional, the irrational&mdash;in a word,
+the corporeal.</p>
+
+<p>What we desire is not merely spiritual felicity, not
+merely vision, but delight, bodily happiness. The
+other happiness, the rationalist <i>beatitude</i>, the happiness
+of being submerged in understanding, can only&mdash;
+I will not say satisfy or deceive, for I do not believe that
+it ever satisfied or deceived even a Spinoza. At the conclusion
+of his <i>Ethic</i>, in propositions xxxv. and xxxvi. of
+the fifth part, Spinoza, affirms that God loves Himself
+with an infinite intellectual love; that the intellectual
+love of the mind towards God is the selfsame love with
+which God loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite,
+but in so far as He can be manifested through the
+essence of the human mind, considered under the form
+of eternity&mdash;that is to say, that the intellectual love of
+the mind towards God is part of the infinite love with
+which God loves Himself. And after these tragic, these
+desolating propositions, we are told in the last proposition
+of the whole book, that which closes and crowns
+this tremendous tragedy of the <i>Ethic</i>, that happiness is
+not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, and that our
+repression of our desires is not the cause of our enjoyment
+of virtue, but rather because we find enjoyment in
+virtue we are able to repress our desires. Intellectual
+love! intellectual love! what is this intellectual love?
+Something of the nature of a red flavour, or a bitter
+<a name="Page_235" id="Page_235" />sound, or an aromatic colour, or rather something of
+the same sort as a love-stricken triangle or an enraged
+ellipse&mdash;a pure metaphor, but a tragic metaphor. And
+a metaphor corresponding tragically with that saying
+that the heart also has its reasons. Reasons of the
+heart! loves of the head! intellectual delight! delicious
+intellection!&mdash;tragedy, tragedy, tragedy!</p>
+
+<p>And nevertheless there is something which may be
+called intellectual love, and that is the love of understanding,
+that which Aristotle meant by the contemplative
+life, for there is something of action and of love
+in the act of understanding, and the beatific vision is the
+vision of the total truth. Is there not perhaps at the
+root of every passion something of curiosity? Did not
+our first parents, according to the Biblical story, fall
+because of their eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree
+of the knowledge of good and evil, and to be as gods,
+knowers of this knowledge? The vision of God&mdash;that
+is to say, the vision of the Universe itself, in its soul, in
+its inmost essence&mdash;would not that appease all our longing?
+And this vision can fail to satisfy only men of a
+gross mind who do not perceive that the greatest joy of
+man is to be more man&mdash;that is, more God&mdash;and that
+man is more God the more consciousness he has.</p>
+
+<p>And this intellectual love, which is nothing but the
+so-called platonic love, is a means to dominion and
+possession. There is, in fact, no more perfect dominion
+than knowledge; he who knows something, possesses
+it. Knowledge unites the knower with the known. &quot;I
+contemplate thee and in contemplating thee I make thee
+mine&quot;&mdash;such is the formula. And to know God, what
+can that be but to possess Him? He who knows God
+is thereby himself God.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>La D&eacute;gradation de l'&eacute;nergie</i> (iv<sup>e</sup> partie,
+chap. xviii., 2) B. Brunhes relates a story concerning
+the great Catholic mathematician Cauchy, communicated
+to him by M. Sarrau, who had it from P&egrave;re Gratry.
+<a name="Page_236" id="Page_236" />While Cauchy and P&egrave;re Gratry were walking in the
+gardens of the Luxumbourg, their conversation turned
+upon the happiness which those in heaven would have
+in knowing at last, without any obscurity or limitation,
+the truths which they had so long and so laboriously
+sought to investigate on earth. In allusion to the study
+which Cauchy had made of the mechanistic theory of
+the reflection of light, P&egrave;re Gratry threw out the suggestion
+that one on the greatest intellectual joys of the
+great geometrician in the future life would be to penetrate
+into the secret of light. To which Cauchy replied
+that it did not appear to him to be possible to know more
+about this than he himself already knew, neither could
+he conceive how the most perfect intelligence could
+arrive at a clearer comprehension of the mystery of
+reflection than that manifested in his own explanation
+of it, seeing that he had furnished a mechanistic theory
+of the phenomenon. &quot;His piety,&quot; Brunhes adds, &quot;did
+not extend to a belief that God Himself could have
+created anything different or anything better.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>From this narrative two points of interest emerge.
+The first is the idea expressed in it as to what contemplation,
+intellectual love, or beatific vision, may mean
+for men of a superior order of intelligence, men whose
+ruling passion is knowledge; and the second is the
+implicit faith shown in the mechanistic explanation of
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>This mechanistic tendency of the intellect coheres with
+the well-known formula, &quot;Nothing is created, nothing
+is lost, everything is transformed&quot;&mdash;a formula by
+means of which it has been sought to interpret the
+ambiguous principle of the conservation of energy, forgetting
+that practically, for us, for men, energy is
+utilizable energy, and that this is continually being lost,
+dissipated by the diffusion of heat, and degraded, its
+tendency being to arrive at a dead-level and homogeneity.
+That which has value, and more than value,
+<a name="Page_237" id="Page_237" />reality, for us, is the differential, which is the qualitative;
+pure, undifferentiated quantity is for us as if it did
+not exist, for it does not act. And the material
+Universe, the body of the Universe, would appear to
+be gradually proceeding&mdash;unaffected by the retarding
+action of living organisms or even by the conscious
+action of man&mdash;towards a state of perfect stability, of
+homogeneity (<i>vide</i> Brunhes, <i>op. cit.</i>) For, while spirit
+tends towards concentration, material energy tends
+towards diffusion.</p>
+
+<p>And may not this have an intimate relation with our
+problem? May there not be a connection between this
+conclusion of scientific philosophy with respect to a
+final state of stability and homogeneity and the mystical
+dream of the apocatastasis? May not this death of the
+body of the Universe be the final triumph of its spirit,
+of God?</p>
+
+<p>It is manifest that there is an intimate relation between
+the religious need of an eternal life after death and the
+conclusions&mdash;always provisional&mdash;at which scientific
+philosophy arrives with respect to the probable future of
+the material or sensible Universe. And the fact is that
+just as there are theologians of God and the immortality
+of the soul, so there are also those whom Brunhes calls
+(<i>op. cit.</i>, chap. xxvi., &sect; 2) theologians of monism, and
+whom it would perhaps be better to call atheologians,
+people who pertinaciously adhere to the spirit of <i>a priori</i>
+affirmation; and this becomes intolerable, Brunhes adds,
+when they harbour the pretension of despising theology.
+A notable type of these gentlemen may be found in
+Haeckel, who has succeeded in solving the riddles of
+Nature!</p>
+
+<p>These atheologians have seized upon the principle of
+the conservation of energy, the &quot;Nothing is created,
+nothing is lost, everything is transformed&quot; formula,
+the theological origin of which is seen in Descartes, and
+have made use of it as a means whereby we are able to
+<a name="Page_238" id="Page_238" />dispense with God. &quot;The world built to last,&quot; Brunhes
+comments, &quot;resisting all wear and tear, or rather automatically
+repairing the rents that appear in it&mdash;what a
+splendid theme for oratorical amplification! But these
+same amplifications which served in the seventeenth
+century to prove the wisdom of the Creator have been
+used in our days as arguments for those who presume to
+do without Him.&quot; It is the old story: so-called
+scientific philosophy, the origin and inspiration of which
+is fundamentally theological or religious, ending in an
+atheology or irreligion, which is itself nothing else but
+theology and religion. Let us call to mind the comments
+of Ritschl upon this head, already quoted in this work.</p>
+
+<p>To-day the last word of science, or rather of scientific
+philosophy, appears to be that, by virtue of the degradation
+of energy, of the predominance of irreversible
+phenomena, the material, sensible world is travelling
+towards a condition of ultimate levelness, a kind of final
+homogeneity. And this brings to our mind the
+hypothesis, not only so much used but abused by
+Spencer, of a primordial homogeneity, and his fantastic
+theory of the instability of the homogeneous. An
+instability that required the atheological agnosticism of
+Spencer in order to explain the inexplicable transition
+from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. For how,
+without any action from without, can any heterogeneity
+emerge from perfect and absolute homogeneity? But
+as it was necessary to get rid of every kind of creation,
+&quot;the unemployed engineer turned metaphysician,&quot; as
+Papini called him, invented the theory of the instability
+of the homogeneous, which is more ... what shall I
+say? more mystical, and even more mythological if you
+like, than the creative action of God.</p>
+
+<p>The Italian positivist, Roberto Ardigo, was nearer
+the mark when, objecting to Spencer's theory, he said
+that the most natural supposition was that things always
+were as they are now, that always there have been
+<a name="Page_239" id="Page_239" />worlds in process of formation, in the nebulous stage,
+worlds completely formed and worlds in process of dissolution;
+that heterogeneity, in short, is eternal.
+Another way, it will be seen, of not solving the riddle.</p>
+
+<p>Is this perhaps the solution? But in that case the
+Universe would be infinite, and in reality we are unable
+to conceive a Universe that is both eternal and limited
+such as that which served as the basis of Nietzsche's
+theory of eternal recurrence. If the Universe must be
+eternal, if within it and as regards each of its component
+worlds, periods in which the movement is towards homogeneity,
+towards the degradation of energy, must
+alternate with other periods in which the movement
+is towards heterogeneity, then it is necessary that
+the Universe should be infinite, that there should be
+scope, always and in each world, for some action coming
+from without. And, in fact, the body of God cannot be
+other than eternal and infinite.</p>
+
+<p>But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual
+levelling-down&mdash;or, we might say, its death&mdash;appears
+to be proved. And how will this process affect the fate
+of our spirit? Will it wane with the degradation of the
+energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or
+will it rather grow according as the utilizable energy
+diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it
+makes to retard this degradation and to dominate
+Nature?&mdash;for this it is that constitutes the life of the spirit.
+May it be that consciousness and its extended support
+are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at
+the expense of the other?</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that the best of our scientific work, the best
+of our industry (that part of it I mean&mdash;and it is a large
+part&mdash;that does not tend to destruction), is directed
+towards retarding this fatal process of the degradation
+of energy. And organic life, the support of our consciousness,
+is itself an effort to avoid, so far as it is
+possible, this fatal period, to postpone it.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240" />It is useless to seek to deceive ourselves with pagan
+p&aelig;ans in praise of Nature, for as Leopardi, that
+Christian atheist, said with profound truth in his stupendous
+poem <i>La Ginestra</i>, Nature &quot;gives us life like a
+mother, but loves us like a step-mother.&quot; The origin
+of human companionship was opposition to Nature; it
+was horror of impious Nature that first linked men
+together in the bonds of society. It is human society,
+in effect, the source of reflective consciousness and of the
+craving for immortality, that inaugurates the state of
+grace upon the state of Nature; and it is man who, by
+humanizing and spiritualizing Nature by his industry,
+supernaturalizes her.</p>
+
+<p>In two amazing sonnets which he called <i>Redemption</i>,
+the tragic Portuguese poet, Antero de Quental,
+embodied his dream of a spirit imprisoned, not in atoms
+or ions or crystals, but&mdash;as is natural in a poet&mdash;in the
+sea, in trees, in the forest, in the mountains, in the wind,
+in all material individualities and forms; and he
+imagines that a day may come when all these captive
+souls, as yet in the limbo of existence, will awaken to
+consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought from
+the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these
+forms, the creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve
+like a baseless vision. It is a magnificent dream of the
+penetration of everything by consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>May it not be that the Universe, our Universe&mdash;who
+knows if there are others?&mdash;began with a zero of spirit&mdash;and
+zero is not the same as nothing&mdash;and an infinite of
+matter, and that its goal is to end with an infinite of
+spirit and a zero of matter? Dreams!</p>
+
+<p>May it be that everything has a soul and that this
+soul begs to be freed?</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Oh tierras de Alvargonz&aacute;lez,</i></div>
+<div><i>en el coraz&oacute;n de Espa&ntilde;a,</i></div>
+<div><i>tierras pobres, tierras tristes,</i></div>
+<div><i>tan tristes que tienen alma!</i></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241" />sings our poet Antonio Machado in his <i>Campos de
+Castilla</i>.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50" /><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> Is the sadness of the field in the fields themselves
+or in us who look upon them? Do they not
+suffer? But what can an individual soul in a world of
+matter actually be? Is it the rock or the mountain that
+is the individual? Is it the tree?</p>
+
+<p>And nevertheless the fact always remains that spirit
+and matter are at strife. This is the thought that
+Espronceda expressed when he wrote:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Aqu&iacute;, para vivir en santa calma,</i></div>
+<div><i>o sobra la materia, o sobra el alma.</i><a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51" /><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>And is there not in the history of thought, or of
+human imagination if you prefer it, something that
+corresponds to this process of the reduction of matter, in
+the sense of a reduction of everything to consciousness?</p>
+
+<p>Yes, there is, and its author is the first Christian mystic,
+St. Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle of the Gentiles, he who
+because he had never with his bodily eyes looked upon
+the face of the fleshly and mortal Christ, the ethical Christ,
+created within himself an immortal and religious Christ&mdash;he
+who was caught up into the third heaven and there
+beheld secret and unspeakable things (2 Cor. xii.). And
+this first Christian mystic dreamed also of a final triumph
+of spirit, of consciousness, and this is what in theology
+is technically called the apocatastasis or restitution.</p>
+
+<p>In 1 Cor. xv. 26-28 he tells us that &quot;the last enemy
+that shall be destroyed is death, for he hath put all things
+under his feet. But when he saith all things are put
+under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did
+put all things under him. And when all things shall be
+subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be
+<a name="Page_242" id="Page_242" />subject unto him that put all things under him, that God
+may be all in all&quot;: <i>&#953;&#957;&#945; &#951; &#959; &#952;&#949;&#959;&#962; &#960;&#945;&#957;&#964;&#945; &#949;&#957; &#960;&#945;&#963;&#953;&#957;</i>&mdash;that is to
+say, that the end is that God, Consciousness, will end by
+being all in all.</p>
+
+<p>This doctrine is completed by Paul's teaching, in his
+Epistle to the Ephesians, with regard to the end of the
+whole history of the world. In this Epistle, as you
+know, he represents Christ&mdash;by whom &quot;were all things
+created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible
+and invisible&quot; (Col. i. 16)&mdash;as the head over all things
+(Eph. i. 22), and in him, in this head, we all shall be
+raised up that we may live in the communion of saints
+and that we &quot;may be able to comprehend with all saints
+what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height,
+and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge&quot;
+(Eph. iii. 18, 19). And this gathering of us
+together in Christ, who is the head and, as it were, the
+compendium, of Humanity, is what the Apostle calls the
+gathering or collecting together or recapitulating of all
+things in Christ, <i>&#945;&#957;&#945;&#954;&#949;&#966;&#945;&#955;&#945;&#953;&#969;&#963;&#945;&#963;&#952;&#945;&#953; &#964;&#945; &#960;&#945;&#957;&#964;&#945; &#949;&#957; &#935;&#961;&#953;&#963;&#964;&#969;</i>.
+And this recapitulation&mdash;<i>&#945;&#957;&#945;&#954;&#949;&#966;&#945;&#955;&#945;&#953;&#969;&#963;&#953;&#962;</i>, anacefaleosis&mdash;the
+end of the world's history and of the human race, is
+merely another aspect of the apocatastasis. The apocatastasis,
+God's coming to be all in all, thus resolves itself
+into the anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things
+in Christ, in Humanity&mdash;Humanity therefore being the
+end of creation. And does not this apocatastasis, this
+humanization or divinization of all things, do away with
+matter? But if matter, which is the principle of individuation,
+the scholastic <i>principium individuationis</i>, is
+once done away with, does not everything return to pure
+consciousness, which, in its pure purity, neither knows
+itself nor is it anything that can be conceived or felt?
+And if matter be abolished, what support is there left for
+spirit?</p>
+
+<p>Thus a different train of thought leads us to the same
+difficulties, the same unthinkabilities.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243" />It may be said, on the other hand, that the apocatastasis,
+God's coming to be all in all, presupposes that there was
+a time when He was not all in all. The supposition that
+all beings shall attain to the enjoyment of God implies
+the supposition that God shall attain to the enjoyment of
+all beings, for the beatific vision is mutual, and God is
+perfected in being better known, and His being is
+nourished and enriched with souls.</p>
+
+<p>Following up the track of these wild dreams, we might
+imagine an unconscious God, slumbering in matter, and
+gradually wakening into consciousness of everything,
+consciousness of His own divinity; we might imagine the
+whole Universe becoming conscious of itself as a whole
+and becoming conscious of each of its constituent consciousnesses,
+becoming God. But in that case, how did
+this unconscious God begin? Is He not matter itself?
+God would thus be not the beginning but the end of the
+Universe; but can that be the end which was not the
+beginning? Or can it be that outside time, in eternity,
+there is a difference between beginning and end? &quot;The
+soul of all things cannot be bound by that very thing&mdash;that
+is, matter&mdash;which it itself has bound,&quot; says Plotinus
+(<i>Enn.</i> ii., ix. 7). Or is it not rather the Consciousness of
+the Whole that strives to become the consciousness of
+each part and to make each partial consciousness conscious
+of itself&mdash;that is, of the total consciousness? Is
+not this universal soul a monotheist or solitary God who
+is in process of becoming a pantheist God? And if it is
+not so, if matter and pain are alien to God, wherefore, it
+will be asked, did God create the world? For what purpose
+did He make matter and introduce pain? Would
+it not have been better if He had not made anything?
+What added glory does He gain by the creation of angels
+or of men whose fall He must punish with eternal torment?
+Did He perhaps create evil for the sake of
+remedying it? Or was redemption His design, redemption
+complete and absolute, redemption of all things and
+<a name="Page_244" id="Page_244" />of all men? For this hypothesis is neither more rational
+nor more pious than the other.</p>
+
+<p>In so far as we attempt to represent eternal happiness
+to ourselves, we are confronted by a series of questions to
+which there is no satisfactory&mdash;that is, rational&mdash;answer,
+and it matters not whether the supposition from which we
+start be monotheist, or pantheist, or even panentheist.</p>
+
+<p>Let us return to the Pauline apocatastasis.</p>
+
+<p>Is it not possible that in becoming all in all God completes
+Himself, becomes at last fully God, an infinite consciousness
+embracing all consciousnesses? And what is
+an infinite consciousness? Since consciousness supposes
+limitation, or rather since consciousness is consciousness
+of limitation, of distinction, does it not thereby
+exclude infinitude? What value has the notion of infinitude
+applied to consciousness? What is a consciousness
+that is all consciousness, without anything outside it that
+is not consciousness? In such a case, of what is consciousness
+the consciousness? Of its content? Or may
+it not rather be that, starting from chaos, from absolute
+unconsciousness, in the eternity of the past, we continually
+approach the apocatastasis or final apotheosis
+without ever reaching it?</p>
+
+<p>May not this apocatastasis, this return of all things to
+God, be rather an ideal term to which we unceasingly
+approach&mdash;some of us with fleeter step than others&mdash;but
+which we are destined never to reach? May not the
+absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope,
+which would die if it were to be realized? Is it possible
+to be happy without hope? And there is no place for
+hope when once possession has been realized, for hope,
+desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say,
+that all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater
+measure than others, but all having to pass some time
+through the same degree of growth, whatever that degree
+may be, and yet without ever arriving at the infinite, at
+God, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal
+<a name="Page_245" id="Page_245" />happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of
+sorrow in order that happiness shall not be swallowed up
+in nothingness?</p>
+
+<p>Follow more questions to which there is no answer.
+&quot;He shall be all in all,&quot; says the Apostle. But will His
+mode of being in each one be different or will it be the
+same for all alike? Will not God be wholly in one of the
+damned? Is He not in his soul? Is He not in what is
+called hell? And in what sense is He in hell?</p>
+
+<p>Whence arise new problems, those relating to the
+opposition between heaven and hell, between eternal
+happiness and eternal unhappiness.</p>
+
+<p>May it not be that in the end all shall be saved, including
+Cain and Judas and Satan himself, as Origen's development
+of the Pauline apocatastasis led him to hope?</p>
+
+<p>When our Catholic theologians seek to justify rationally&mdash;or
+in other words, ethically&mdash;the dogma of the
+eternity of the pains of hell, they put forward reasons so
+specious, ridiculous, and childish, that it would appear
+impossible that they should ever have obtained currency.
+For to assert that since God is infinite, an offence committed
+against Him is infinite also and therefore demands
+an eternal punishment, is, apart from the inconceivability
+of an infinite offence, to be unaware that, in human ethics,
+if not in the human police system, the gravity of the
+offence is measured not by the dignity of the injured
+person but by the intention of the injurer, and that to
+speak of an infinite culpable intention is sheer nonsense,
+and nothing else. In this connection those words which
+Christ addressed to His Father are capable of application:
+&quot;Father, forgive them, for they know not what
+they do,&quot; and no man who commits an offence against
+God or his neighbour knows what he does. In human
+ethics, or if you like in human police regulations&mdash;that
+which is called penal law and is anything but law<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52" /><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a>
+eternal punishment is a meaningless phrase.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<a name="Page_246" id="Page_246" />God is just and punishes us; that is all we need to
+know; as far as we are concerned the rest is merely
+curiosity.&quot; Such was the conclusion of Lamennais
+(<i>Essai</i>, etc., iv<sup>e</sup> partie, chap, vii.), an opinion shared by
+many others. Calvin also held the same view. But is
+there anyone who is content with this? Pure curiosity!&mdash;to
+call this load that wellnigh crushes our heart pure
+curiosity!</p>
+
+<p>May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is
+annihilated because he wished to be annihilated, or that
+he did not wish strongly enough to eternalize himself
+because he was evil? May we not say that it is not
+believing in the other life that makes a man good, but
+rather that being good makes him believe in it? And
+what is being good and being evil? These states pertain
+to the sphere of ethics, not of religion: or, rather,
+does not the doing good though being evil pertain to
+ethics, and the being good though doing evil to religion?</p>
+
+<p>Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that
+if the sinner suffers an eternal punishment, it is because
+he does not cease to sin?&mdash;for the damned sin without
+ceasing. This, however, is no solution of the problem,
+which derives all its absurdity from the fact that punishment
+has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance,
+not as correction, has been conceived after the fashion of
+barbarous peoples. And in the same way hell has been
+conceived as a sort of police institution, necessary in
+order to put fear into the world. And the worst of it is
+that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to
+be shut up.</p>
+
+<p>But, on the other hand, as a religious conception and
+veiled in mystery, why not&mdash;although the idea revolts our
+feelings&mdash;an eternity of suffering? why not a God who is
+nourished by our suffering? Is our happiness the end of
+the Universe? or may we possibly sustain with our suffering
+some alien happiness? Let us read again in the
+<i>Eumenides</i> of that terrible tragedian, &AElig;schylus, those
+<a name="Page_247" id="Page_247" />choruses of the Furies in which they curse the new gods
+for overturning the ancient laws and snatching Orestes
+from their hands&mdash;impassioned invectives against the
+Apollinian redemption. Does not redemption tear man,
+their captive and plaything, from the hands of the gods,
+who delight and amuse themselves in his sufferings, like
+children, as the tragic poet says, torturing beetles? And
+let us remember the cry, &quot;My God, my God, why hast
+thou forsaken me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Yes, why not an eternity of suffering? Hell is an
+eternalization of the soul, even though it be an eternity
+of pain. Is not pain essential to life?</p>
+
+<p>Men go on inventing theories to explain what they call
+the origin of evil. And why not the origin of good? Why
+suppose that it is good that is positive and original, and
+evil that is negative and derivatory? &quot;Everything that
+is, in so far as it is, is good,&quot; St. Augustine affirmed.
+But why? What does &quot;being good&quot; mean? Good is
+good for something, conducive to an end, and to say that
+everything is good is equivalent to saying that everything
+is making for its end. But what is its end? Our desire
+is to eternalize ourselves, to persist, and we call good
+everything that conspires to this end and bad everything
+that tends to lessen or destroy our consciousness. We
+suppose that human consciousness is an end and not a
+means to something else which may not be consciousness,
+whether human or superhuman.</p>
+
+<p>All metaphysical optimism, such as that of Leibnitz,
+and all metaphysical pessimism, such as that of Schopenhauer,
+have no other foundation than this. For Leibnitz
+this world is the best because it conspires to perpetuate
+consciousness, and, together with consciousness, will,
+because intelligence increases will and perfects it, because
+the end of man is the contemplation of God; while for
+Schopenhauer this world is the worst of all possible
+worlds, because it conspires to destroy will, because intelligence,
+representation, nullifies the will that begot it.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248" />And similarly Franklin, who believed in another life,
+asserted that he was willing to live this life over again,
+the life that he had actually lived, &quot;from its beginning
+to the end&quot;; while Leopardi, who did not believe in
+another life, asserted that nobody would consent to live
+his life over again. These two views of life are not
+merely ethical, but religious; and the feeling of moral
+good, in so far as it is a teleological value, is of religious
+origin also.</p>
+
+<p>And to return to our interrogations: Shall not all be
+saved, shall not all be made eternal, and eternal not in
+suffering but in happiness, those whom we call good and
+those whom we call bad alike?</p>
+
+<p>And as regards this question of good and evil, does
+not the malice of him who judges enter in? Is the badness
+in the intention of him who does the deed or is it
+not rather in that of him who judges it to be bad? But
+the terrible thing is that man judges himself, creates
+himself his own judge.</p>
+
+<p>Who then shall be saved? And now the imagination
+puts forth another possibility&mdash;neither more nor less
+rational than all those which have just been put forward
+interrogatively&mdash;and that is that only those are saved
+who have longed to be saved, that only those are eternalized
+who have lived in an agony of hunger for eternity
+and for eternalization. He who desires never to die and
+believes that he shall never die in the spirit, desires it
+because he deserves it, or rather, only he desires personal
+immortality who carries his immortality within him.
+The man who does not long passionately, and with a
+passion that triumphs over all the dictates of reason,
+for his own immortality, is the man who does not deserve
+it, and because he does not deserve it he does not long
+for it. And it is no injustice not to give a man that
+which he does not know how to desire, for &quot;ask, and it
+shall be given you.&quot; It may be that to each will be
+given that which he desired. And perhaps the sin
+<a name="Page_249" id="Page_249" />against the Holy Ghost&mdash;for which, according to the
+Evangelist, there is no remission&mdash;is none other than that
+of not desiring God, not longing to be made eternal.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>As is your sort of mind</div>
+<div>So is your sort of search; you'll find</div>
+<div>What you desire, and that's to be</div>
+<div>A Christian,</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>said Robert Browning in <i>Christmas Eve and Easter Day</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In his <i>Inferno</i> Dante condemned the Epicureans, those
+who did not believe in another life, to something more
+terrible than the not having it, and that is the consciousness
+of not having it, and this he expressed in plastic
+form by picturing them shut up in their tombs for all
+eternity, without light, without air, without fire, without
+movement, without life (<i>Inferno</i>, x., 10-15).</p>
+
+<p>What cruelty is there in denying to a man that which
+he did not or could not desire? In the sixth book of his
+<i>&AElig;neid</i> (426-429) the gentle Virgil makes us hear the
+plaintive voices and sobbing of the babes who weep upon
+the threshold of Hades,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Continuo &agrave;udit&aelig; voces, vagitus et ingens,</i></div>
+<div><i>Infantumque anim&aelig; flentes in limine primo,</i></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>unhappy in that they had but entered upon life and never
+known the sweetness of it, and whom, torn from their
+mothers' breasts, a dark day had cut off and drowned in
+bitter death&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Quos dulcis vit&aelig; exsortes et at ubere raptos</i></div>
+<div><i>Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo.</i></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>But what life did they lose, if they neither knew life nor
+longed for it? And yet is it true that they never longed
+for it?</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that others craved life on their behalf,
+that their parents longed for them to be eternal to the end
+that they might be gladdened by them in paradise. And
+so a fresh field is opened up for the imagination&mdash;namely,
+<a name="Page_250" id="Page_250" />the consideration of the solidarity and representivity of
+eternal salvation.</p>
+
+<p>There are many, indeed, who imagine the human race
+as one being, a collective and solidary individual, in
+whom each member may represent or may come to represent
+the total collectivity; and they imagine salvation as
+something collective. As something collective also,
+merit, and as something collective sin, and redemption.
+According to this mode of feeling and imagining, either
+all are saved or none is saved; redemption is total and
+it is mutual; each man is his neighbour's Christ.</p>
+
+<p>And is there not perhaps a hint of this in the popular
+Catholic belief with regard to souls in purgatory, the
+belief that the living may devote suffrages and apply
+merits to the souls of their dead? This sense of the transmission
+of merits, both to the living and the dead, is
+general in popular Catholic piety.</p>
+
+<p>Nor should it be forgotten that in the history of man's
+religious thought there has often presented itself the idea
+of an immortality restricted to a certain number of the
+elect, spirits representative of the rest and in a certain
+sense including them; an idea of pagan derivation&mdash;for
+such were the heroes and demi-gods&mdash;which sometimes
+shelters itself behind the pronouncement that there are
+many that are called and few that are chosen.</p>
+
+<p>Recently, while I was engaged upon this essay, there
+came into my hands the third edition of the <i>Dialogue sur
+la vie et sur la mort</i>, by Charles Bonnefon, a book in
+which imaginative conceptions similar to those that I
+have been setting forth find succinct and suggestive expression.
+The soul cannot live without the body,
+Bonnefon says, nor the body without the soul, and thus
+neither birth nor death has any real existence&mdash;strictly
+speaking, there is no body, no soul, no birth, no death,
+all of which are abstractions and appearances, but only a
+thinking life, of which we form part and which can
+neither be born nor die. Hence he is led to deny human
+<a name="Page_251" id="Page_251" />individuality and to assert that no one can say &quot;I am&quot;
+but only &quot;we are,&quot; or, more correctly, &quot;there is in us.&quot;
+It is humanity, the species, that thinks and loves in us.
+And souls are transmitted in the same way that bodies
+are transmitted. &quot;The living thought or the thinking
+life which we are will find itself again immediately in a
+form analogous to that which was our origin and corresponding
+with our being in the womb of a pregnant
+woman.&quot; Each of us, therefore, has lived before and
+will live again, although he does not know it. &quot;If
+humanity is gradually raised above itself, when the last
+man dies, the man who will contain all the rest of mankind
+in himself, who shall say that he may not have
+arrived at that higher order of humanity such as exists
+elsewhere, in heaven?... As we are all bound
+together in solidarity, we shall all, little by little, gather
+the fruits of our travail.&quot; According to this mode of
+imagining and thinking, since nobody is born, nobody
+dies, no single soul has finished its struggle but many
+times has been plunged into the midst of the human
+struggle &quot;ever since the type of embryo corresponding
+with the same consciousness was represented in the succession
+of human phenomena.&quot; It is obvious that since
+Bonnefon begins by denying personal individuality, he
+leaves out of account our real longing, which is to save
+our individuality; but on the other hand, since he,
+Bonnefon, is a personal individual and feels this longing,
+he has recourse to the distinction between the called and
+the chosen, and to the idea of representative spirits, and
+he concedes to a certain number of men this representative
+individual immortality. Of these elect he says that
+&quot;they will be somewhat more necessary to God than we
+ourselves.&quot; And he closes this splendid dream by supposing
+that &quot;it is not impossible that we shall arrive by
+a series of ascensions at the supreme happiness, and that
+our life shall be merged in the perfect Life as a drop of
+water in the sea. Then we shall understand,&quot; he con<a name="Page_252" id="Page_252" />tinues,
+&quot;that everything was necessary, that every
+philosophy and every religion had its hour of truth, and
+that in all our wanderings and errors and in the darkest
+moments of our history we discerned the light of the
+distant beacon, and that we were all predestined to participate
+in the Eternal Light. And if the God whom we
+shall find again possesses a body&mdash;and we cannot conceive
+a living God without a body&mdash;we, together with
+each of the myriads of races that the myriads of suns
+have brought forth, shall be the conscious cells of his
+body. If this dream should be fulfilled, an ocean of love
+would beat upon our shores and the end of every life
+would be to add a drop of water to this ocean's infinity.&quot;
+And what is this cosmic dream of Bonnefon's but the
+plastic representation of the Pauline apocatastasis?</p>
+
+<p>Yes, this dream, which has its origin far back in the
+dawn of Christianity, is fundamentally the same as the
+Pauline anacefaleosis, the fusion of all men in Man, in
+the whole of Humanity embodied in a Person, who is
+Christ, and the fusion not only of all men but of all
+things, and the subsequent subjection of all things to
+God, in order that God, Consciousness, may be all in all.
+And this supposes a collective redemption and a society
+beyond the grave.</p>
+
+<p>In the middle of the eighteenth century, two pietists of
+Protestant origin, Johann Jakob Moser and Friedrich
+Christoph Oetinger, gave a new force and value to the
+Pauline anacefaleosis. Moser &quot;declared that his
+religion consisted not in holding certain doctrines to be
+true and in living a virtuous life conformably therewith,
+but in being reunited to God through Christ. But this
+demands the thorough knowledge&mdash;a knowledge that
+goes on increasing until the end of life&mdash;of one's own
+sins and also of the mercy and patience of God, the
+transformation of all natural feelings, the appropriation
+of the atonement wrought by the death of Christ, the
+enjoyment of peace with God in the permanent witness
+<a name="Page_253" id="Page_253" />of the Holy Spirit to the remission of sins, the ordering
+of life according to the pattern of Christ, which is the
+fruit of faith alone, the drawing near to God and the
+intercourse of the soul with Him, the disposition to die
+in grace and the joyful expectation of the Judgement
+which will bestow blessedness in the more intimate
+enjoyment of God and in the <i>commerce with all the
+saints</i>&quot; (Ritschl, <i>Geschichte des Pietismus</i>, vol. iii.,
+&sect; 43). The commerce with all the saints&mdash;that is to say,
+the eternal human society. And for his part, Oetinger
+considers eternal happiness not as the contemplation of
+God in His infinitude, but, taking the Epistle to the
+Ephesians as his authority, as the contemplation of God
+in the harmony of the creature with Christ. The commerce
+with all the saints was, according to him, essential
+to the content of eternal happiness. It was the realization
+of the kingdom of God, which thus comes to be the
+kingdom of Man. And in his exposition of these doctrines
+of the two pietists, Ritschl confesses <i>(op. cit.</i>, iii.,
+&sect; 46) that both witnesses have with these doctrines contributed
+something to Protestantism that is of like value
+with the theological method of Spener, another pietist.</p>
+
+<p>We see, therefore, that the Christian, mystical, inward
+longing ever since St. Paul, has been to give human
+finality, or divine finality, to the Universe, to save
+human consciousness, and to save it by converting all
+humanity into a person. This longing is expressed in
+the anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things, all
+things in earth and in heaven, the visible and the
+invisible, in Christ, and also in the apocatastasis, the
+return of all things to God, to consciousness, in order
+that God may be all in all. And does not God's being
+all in all mean that all things shall acquire consciousness
+and that in this consciousness everything that has happened
+will come to life again, and that everything that
+has existed in time will be eternalized? And within the
+all, all individual consciousnesses, those which have
+<a name="Page_254" id="Page_254" />been, those that are, and those that will be, and as they
+have been, as they are, and as they will be, will exist in
+a condition of society and solidarity.</p>
+
+<p>But does not this awakening to consciousness of everything
+that has been, necessarily involve a fusion of the
+identical, an amalgamation of like things? In this conversion
+of the human race into a true society in Christ, a
+communion of saints, a kingdom of heaven, will not
+individual differences, tainted as they are with deceit
+and even with sin, be obliterated, and in the perfect
+society will that alone remain of each man which was
+the essential part of him? Would it not perhaps result,
+according to Bonnefon's supposition, that this consciousness
+that lived in the twentieth century in this corner of
+this earth would feel itself to be the same with other such
+consciousnesses as have lived in other centuries and
+perhaps in other worlds?</p>
+
+<p>And how can we conceive of an effective and real
+union, a substantial and intimate union, soul with soul,
+of all those who have been?</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>If any two creatures grew into one</div>
+<div>They would do more than the world has done,</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>said Browning in <i>The Flight of the Duchess</i>; and Christ
+has told us that where two or three are gathered together
+in His name, there is He in the midst of them.</p>
+
+<p>Heaven, then, so it is believed by many, is society, a
+more perfect society than that of this world; it is human
+society fused into a person. And there are not wanting
+some who believe that the tendency of all human progress
+is the conversion of our species into one collective being
+with real consciousness&mdash;is not perhaps an individual
+human organism a kind of confederation of cells?&mdash;and
+that when it shall have acquired full consciousness, all
+those who have existed will come to life again in it.</p>
+
+<p>Heaven, so many think, is society. Just as no one
+can live in isolation, so no one can survive in isolation.
+<a name="Page_255" id="Page_255" />No one can enjoy God in heaven who sees his brother
+suffering in hell, for the sin and the merit were common
+to both. We think with the thoughts of others and we
+feel with the feelings of others. To see God when God
+shall be all in all is to see all things in God and to live
+in God with all things.</p>
+
+<p>This splendid dream of the final solidarity of mankind
+is the Pauline anacefaleosis and apocatastasis. We
+Christians, said the Apostle (I Cor. xii. 27) are the body
+of Christ, members of Him, flesh of His flesh and bone
+of His bone (Eph. v. 30), branches of the vine.</p>
+
+<p>But in this final solidarization, in this true and supreme
+<i>Christination</i> of all creatures, what becomes of each
+individual consciousness? what becomes of Me, of this
+poor fragile I, this I that is the slave of time and space,
+this I which reason tells me is a mere passing accident,
+but for the saving of which I live and suffer and hope
+and believe? Granting that the human finality of the
+Universe is saved, that consciousness is saved, would I
+resign myself to make the sacrifice of this poor I, by
+which and by which alone I know this finality and this
+consciousness?</p>
+
+<p>And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we
+reach the summit of the tragedy, the very heart of it&mdash;the
+sacrifice of our own individual consciousness upon
+the altar of the perfected Human Consciousness, of the
+Divine Consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>But is there really a tragedy? If we could attain to a
+clear vision of this anacefaleosis, if we could succeed in
+understanding and feeling that we were going to enrich
+Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in surrendering
+ourselves utterly to Him? Would the stream that flows
+into the sea, and feels in the freshness of its waters the
+bitterness of the salt of the ocean, wish to flow back to its
+source? would it wish to return to the cloud which drew
+its life from the sea? is not its joy to feel itself absorbed?</p>
+
+<p>And yet....</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256" />Yes, in spite of everything, this is the climax of the
+tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something
+else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement,
+it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it
+longs for a never-ending longing, for an eternal hope
+which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled.
+And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack
+of something and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a
+pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness
+and in longing. Do not write upon the gate
+of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the
+threshold of hell, <i>Lasciate ogni speranza!</i> Do not
+destroy time! Our life is a hope which is continually
+converting itself into memory and memory in its turn
+begets hope. Give us leave to live! The eternity that
+is like an eternal present, without memory and without
+hope, is death. Thus do ideas exist, but not thus do men
+live. Thus do ideas exist in the God-Idea, but not thus
+can men live in the living God, in the God-Man.</p>
+
+<p>An eternal purgatory, then, rather than a heaven of
+glory; an eternal ascent. If there is an end of all suffering,
+however pure and spiritualized we may suppose it to
+be, if there is an end of all desire, what is it that makes
+the blessed in paradise go on living? If in paradise
+they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love
+Him? And if even there, in the heaven of glory, while
+they behold God little by little and closer and closer, yet
+without ever wholly attaining to Him, there does not
+always remain something more for them to know and
+desire, if there does not always remain a substratum of
+doubt, how shall they not fall asleep?</p>
+
+<p>Or, to sum up, if in heaven there does not remain
+something of this innermost tragedy of the soul, what
+sort of a life is that? Is there perhaps any greater joy
+than that of remembering misery&mdash;and to remember it is
+to feel it&mdash;in time of felicity? Does not the prison
+<a name="Page_257" id="Page_257" />haunt the freed prisoner? Does he not miss his former
+dreams of liberty?</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Mythological dreams! it will be said. And I have not
+pretended that they are anything else. But has not the
+mythological dream its content of truth? Are not dream
+and myth perhaps revelations of an inexpressible truth,
+of an irrational truth, of a truth that cannot be proven?</p>
+
+<p>Mythology! Perhaps; but, as in the days of Plato,
+we must needs mythologize when we come to deal with
+the other life. But we have just seen that whenever we
+seek to give a form that is concrete, conceivable, or in
+other words, rational, to our primary, primordial, and
+fundamental longing for an eternal life conscious of itself
+and of its personal individuality, esthetic, logical, and
+ethical absurdities are multiplied and there is no way of
+conceiving the beatific vision and the apocatastasis that
+is free from contradictions and inconsistencies.</p>
+
+<p>And nevertheless!...</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, yes, we must needs long for it, however
+absurd it may appear to us; nay, more, we must needs
+believe in it, in some way or another, in order that we
+may live. In order that we may live, eh? not in order
+that we may understand the Universe. We must needs
+believe in it, and to believe in it is to be religious.
+Christianity, the only religion which we Europeans of
+the twentieth century are really capable of feeling, is, as
+Kierkegaard said, a desperate sortie (<i>Afsluttende
+uvidenskabelig Efterskrift</i>, ii., i., cap. i.), a sortie which
+can be successful only by means of the martyrdom of
+faith, which is, according to this same tragic thinker, the
+crucifixion of reason.</p>
+
+<p>Not without reason did he who had the right to do so
+speak of the foolishness of the cross. Foolishness, without
+doubt, foolishness. And the American humorist,
+Oliver Wendell Holmes, was not altogether wide of the
+mark in making one of the characters in his ingenious
+<a name="Page_258" id="Page_258" />conversations say that he thought better of those who
+were confined in a lunatic asylum on account of religious
+mania than of those who, while professing the same
+religious principles, kept their wits and appeared to enjoy
+life very well outside of the asylums.<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53" /><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> But those who
+are at large, are they not really, thanks to God, mad
+too? Are there not mild madnesses, which not only
+permit us to mix with our neighbours without danger to
+society, but which rather enable us to do so, for by means
+of them we are able to attribute a meaning and finality
+to life and society themselves?</p>
+
+<p>And after all, what is madness and how can we
+distinguish it from reason, unless we place ourselves
+outside both the one and the other, which for us is
+impossible?</p>
+
+<p>Madness perhaps it is, and great madness, to seek to
+penetrate into the mystery of the Beyond; madness to
+seek to superimpose the self-contradictory dreams of our
+imagination upon the dictates of a sane reason. And a
+sane reason tells us that nothing can be built up without
+foundations, and that it is not merely an idle but a subversive
+task to fill the void of the unknown with fantasies.
+And nevertheless....</p>
+
+<p>We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal
+life beyond the grave, and in an individual and personal
+life, in a life in which each one of us may feel his consciousness
+and fed that it is united, without being confounded,
+with all other consciousnesses in the Supreme
+Consciousness, in God; we must needs believe in that
+other life in order that we may live this life, and endure
+it, and give it meaning and finality. And we must needs
+believe in that other life, perhaps, in order that we may
+deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may be
+that he neither deserves it nor will obtain it who does not
+passionately desire it above reason and, if need be,
+against reason.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259" />And above all, we must feel and act as if an endless
+continuation of our earthly life awaited us after death;
+and if it be that nothingness is the fate that awaits us we
+must not, in the words of <i>Obermann</i>, so act that it shall
+be a just fate.</p>
+
+<p>And this leads us directly to the examination of the
+practical or ethical aspect of our sole problem.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47" /><a href="#FNanchor_47_47">[47]</a> <i>De natura deorum</i>, lib. i., cap. 41.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48" /><a href="#FNanchor_48_48">[48]</a> <i>Op. cit.</i></p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49" /><a href="#FNanchor_49_49">[49]</a> <i>Gu&iacute;a Espiritual que desembaraza al alma y la conduce por el interior
+camino para alcanzar la perfecta contemplaci&oacute;n y el rico tesoro de la paz interior</i>,
+book iii., chap. xviii., &sect; 185.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50" /><a href="#FNanchor_50_50">[50]</a></p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>O land of Alvargonz&aacute;lez,</div>
+<div>In the heart of Spain,</div>
+<div>Sad land, poor land,</div>
+<div>So sad that it has a soul!</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51" /><a href="#FNanchor_51_51">[51]</a></p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>To living a life of blessed quiet here on earth,</div>
+<div>Either matter or soul is a hindrance.</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52" /><a href="#FNanchor_52_52">[52]</a> Eso que llaman derecho penal, y que es todo menos derecho.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53" /><a href="#FNanchor_53_53">[53]</a> <i>The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI" /><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260" />XI</h2>
+
+<h2>THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM</h2>
+
+<blockquote><p>L'homme est p&eacute;rissable. II se peut; mais p&eacute;rissons en r&eacute;sistant, et, si le
+n&eacute;ant nous est reserv&eacute;, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice.&mdash;S&Eacute;NANCOUR:
+<i>Obermann</i>, lettre xc.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Several times in the devious course of these essays I
+have defined, in spite of my horror of definitions, my
+own position with regard to the problem that I have been
+examining; but I know there will always be some dissatisfied
+reader, educated in some dogmatism or other,
+who will say: &quot;This man comes to no conclusion, he
+vacillates&mdash;now he seems to affirm one thing and then its
+contrary&mdash;he is full of contradictions&mdash;I can't label him.
+What is he?&quot; Just this&mdash;one who affirms contraries, a
+man of contradiction and strife, as Jeremiah said of
+himself; one who says one thing with his heart and the
+contrary with his head, and for whom this conflict is the
+very stuff of life. And that is as clear as the water that
+flows from the melted snow upon the mountain tops.</p>
+
+<p>I shall be told that this is an untenable position, that a
+foundation must be laid upon which to build our action
+and our works, that it is impossible to live by contradictions,
+that unity and clarity are essential conditions of
+life and thought, and that it is necessary to unify thought.
+And this leaves us as we were before. For it is precisely
+this inner contradiction that unifies my life and gives it
+its practical purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Or rather it is the conflict itself, it is this self-same
+passionate uncertainty, that unifies my action and makes
+me live and work.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261" />We think in order that we may live, I have said; but
+perhaps it were more correct to say that we think because
+we live, and the form of our thought corresponds with
+that of our life. Once more I must repeat that our
+ethical and philosophical doctrines in general are usually
+merely the justification <i>a posteriori</i> of our conduct, of
+our actions. Our doctrines are usually the means we
+seek in order to explain and justify to others and to ourselves
+our own mode of action. And this, be it observed,
+not merely for others, but for ourselves. The man who
+does not really know why he acts as he does and not
+otherwise, feels the necessity of explaining to himself
+the motive of his action and so he forges a motive. What
+we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually
+but the pretexts for it. The very same reason which one
+man may regard as a motive for taking care to prolong
+his life may be regarded by another man as a motive for
+shooting himself.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless it cannot be denied that reasons, ideas,
+have an influence upon human actions, and sometimes
+even determine them, by a process analogous to that of
+suggestion upon a hypnotized person, and this is so
+because of the tendency in every idea to resolve itself into
+action&mdash;an idea being simply an inchoate or abortive act.
+It was this notion that suggested to Fouill&eacute;e his theory
+of idea-forces. But ordinarily ideas are forces which we
+accommodate to other forces, deeper and much less
+conscious.</p>
+
+<p>But putting all this aside for the present, what I wish
+to establish is that uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling
+with the mystery of our final destiny, mental despair,
+and the lack of any solid and stable dogmatic foundation,
+may be the basis of an ethic.</p>
+
+<p>He who bases or thinks that he bases his conduct&mdash;his
+inward or his outward conduct, his feeling or his action&mdash;upon
+a dogma or theoretical principle which he deems
+incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a fanatic,
+<a name="Page_262" id="Page_262" />and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened
+or shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If,
+the earth that he thought firm begins to rock, he himself
+trembles at the earthquake, for we do not all come up
+to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains undaunted
+among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily
+the stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him.
+For if a man should tell you that he does not defraud or
+cuckold his best friend only because he is afraid of hell,
+you may depend upon it that neither would he do so even
+if he were to cease to believe in hell, but that he would
+invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the
+honour of the human race.</p>
+
+<p>But he who believes that he is sailing, perhaps without
+a set course, on an unstable and sinkable raft, must not
+be dismayed if the raft gives way beneath his feet and
+threatens to sink. Such a one thinks that he acts, not
+because he deems his principle of action to be true, but
+in order to make it true, in order to prove its truth, in
+order to create his own spiritual world.</p>
+
+<p>My conduct must be the best proof, the moral proof,
+of my supreme desire; and if I do not end by convincing
+myself, within the bounds of the ultimate and irremediable
+uncertainty, of the truth of what I hope for,
+it is because my conduct is not sufficiently pure. Virtue,
+therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon
+virtue, and it is not faith that creates martyrs but martyrs
+who create faith. There is no security or repose&mdash;so far
+as security and repose are obtainable in this life, so essentially
+insecure and unreposeful&mdash;save in conduct that is
+passionately good.</p>
+
+<p>Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory.
+&quot;If any man will do His will&mdash;the will of Him that
+sent me,&quot; said Jesus, &quot;he shall know of the doctrine,
+whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself&quot;
+(John vii. 17); and there is a well-known saying of
+Pascal: &quot;Begin by taking holy water and you will end
+<a name="Page_263" id="Page_263" />by becoming a believer.&quot; And pursuing a similar train
+of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the
+opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to
+regard the Christian religion as void of truth so long as
+he had not put it to the proof by keeping its precepts
+and commandments (Ritschl, <i>Geschichte des Pietismus</i>,
+book vii., 43).</p>
+
+<p>What is our heart's truth, anti-rational though it be?
+The immortality of the human soul, the truth of the
+persistence of our consciousness without any termination
+whatsoever, the truth of the human finality of the
+Universe. And what is its moral proof? We may
+formulate it thus: Act so that in your own judgement
+and in the judgement of others you may merit eternity,
+act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that you
+may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you
+were to die to-morrow, but to die in order to survive and
+be eternalized. The end of morality is to give personal,
+human finality to the Universe; to discover the finality
+that belongs to it&mdash;if indeed it has any finality&mdash;and to
+discover it by acting.</p>
+
+<p>More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that
+series that constitutes the immense monody of his <i>Obermann</i>,
+S&eacute;nancour wrote the words which I have put at
+the head of this chapter&mdash;and of all the spiritual
+descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, S&eacute;nancour
+was the most profound and the most intense; of all the
+men of heart and feeling that France has produced, not
+excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic. &quot;Man is
+perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting,
+and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so
+act that it shall be a just fate.&quot; Change this sentence
+from its negative to the positive form&mdash;&quot;And if it is
+nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be
+an unjust fate&quot;&mdash;and you get the firmest basis of action
+for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.</p>
+
+<p>That which is irreligious and demoniacal, that which
+<a name="Page_264" id="Page_264" />incapacitates us for action and leaves us without any ideal
+defence against our evil tendencies, is the pessimism
+that Goethe puts into the mouth of Mephistopheles when
+he makes him say, &quot;All that has achieved existence
+deserves to be destroyed&quot; (<i>denn alles was ensteht ist
+wert doss es zugrunde geht</i>). This is the pessimism
+which we men call evil, and not that other pessimism
+that consists in lamenting what it fears to be true and
+struggling against this fear&mdash;namely, that everything is
+doomed to annihilation in the end. Mephistopheles
+asserts that everything that exists deserves to be destroyed,
+annihilated, but not that everything will be destroyed or
+annihilated; and we assert that everything that exists
+deserves to be exalted and eternalized, even though no
+such fate is in store for it. The moral attitude is the
+reverse of this.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, everything deserves to be eternalized, absolutely
+everything, even evil itself, for that which we call evil
+would lose its evilness in being eternalized, because it
+would lose its temporal nature. For the essence of evil
+consists in its temporal nature, in its not applying itself
+to any ultimate and permanent end.</p>
+
+<p>And it might not be superfluous here to say something
+about that distinction, more overlaid with confusion than
+any other, between what we are accustomed to call
+optimism and pessimism, a confusion not less than that
+which exists with regard to the distinction between
+individualism and socialism. Indeed, it is scarcely possible
+to form a clear idea as to what pessimism really is.</p>
+
+<p>I have just this very day read in the <i>Nation</i> (July 6,
+1912) an article, entitled &quot;A Dramatic Inferno,&quot; that
+deals with an English translation of the works of Strindberg,
+and it opens with the following judicious observations:
+&quot;If there were in the world a sincere and total
+pessimism, it would of necessity be silent. The despair
+which finds a voice is a social mood, it is the cry of
+misery which brother utters to brother when both are
+<a name="Page_265" id="Page_265" />stumbling through a valley of shadows which is peopled
+with&mdash;comrades. In its anguish it bears witness to
+something that is good in life, for it presupposes sympathy ... The
+real gloom, the sincere despair, is
+dumb and blind; it writes no books, and feels no impulse
+to burden an intolerable universe with a monument more
+lasting than brass.&quot; Doubtless there is something of
+sophistry in this criticism, for the man who is really in
+pain weeps and even cries aloud, even if he is alone and
+there is nobody to hear him, simply as a means of
+alleviating his pain, although this perhaps may be a
+result of social habits. But does not the lion, alone in
+the desert, roar if he has an aching tooth? But apart
+from this, it cannot be denied that there is a substance
+of truth underlying these remarks. The pessimism that
+protests and defends itself cannot be truly said to be
+pessimism. And, in truth, still less is it pessimism to
+hold that nothing ought to perish although all things
+may be doomed to annihilation, while on the other hand
+it is pessimism to affirm that all things ought to be
+annihilated even though nothing may perish.</p>
+
+<p>Pessimism, moreover, may possess different values.
+There is a eudemonistic or economic pessimism, that
+which denies happiness; there is an ethical pessimism,
+that which denies the triumph of moral good; and there
+is a religious pessimism, that which despairs of the
+human finality of the Universe, of the eternal salvation
+of the individual soul.</p>
+
+<p>All men deserve to be saved, but, as I have said in the
+previous chapter, he above all deserves immortality who
+desires it passionately and even in the face of reason.
+An English writer, H.G. Wells, who has taken upon
+himself the r&ocirc;le of the prophet (a thing not uncommon in
+his country), tells us in <i>Anticipations</i> that &quot;active and
+capable men of all forms of religious profession tend in
+practice to disregard the question of immortality
+altogether.&quot; And this is because the religious professions
+<a name="Page_266" id="Page_266" />of these active and capable men to whom Wells refers are
+usually simply a lie, and their lives are a lie, too, if they
+seek to base them upon religion. But it may be that at
+bottom there is not so much truth in what Wells asserts as
+he and others imagine. These active and capable men live
+in the midst of a society imbued with Christian principles,
+surrounded by institutions and social feelings
+that are the product of Christianity, and faith in the
+immortality of the soul exists deep down in their own
+souls like a subterranean river, neither seen nor heard,
+but watering the roots of their deeds and their motives.</p>
+
+<p>It must be admitted that there exists in truth no more
+solid foundation for morality than the foundation of the
+Catholic ethic. The end of man is eternal happiness,
+which consists in the vision and enjoyment of God <i>in
+s&aelig;cula s&aelig;culorum</i>. Where it errs, however, is in the
+choice of the means conducive to this end; for to make
+the attainment of eternal happiness dependent upon
+believing or not believing in the Procession of the Holy
+Ghost from the Father and the Son and not from the
+Father alone, or in the Divinity of Jesus, or in the theory
+of the Hypostatic Union, or even in the existence of
+God, is, as a moment's reflection will show, nothing less
+than monstrous. A human God&mdash;and that is the only
+kind of God we are able to conceive&mdash;would never reject
+him who was unable to believe in Him with his head,
+and it is not in his head but in his heart that the wicked
+man says that there is no God, which is equivalent to
+saying that he wishes that there may not be a God. If
+any belief could be bound up with the attainment of
+eternal happiness it would be the belief in this happiness
+itself and in the possibility of it.</p>
+
+<p>And what shall we say of that other proposition of the
+king of pedants, to the effect that we have not come into
+the world to be happy but to fulfil our duty (<i>Wir sind
+nicht auf der Welt, um gl&uuml;cklich zu sein, sondern um
+unsere Schuldigkeit zu tun</i>)? If we are in the world <i>for</i>
+<a name="Page_267" id="Page_267" />something (<i>um etwas</i>), whence can this <i>for</i> be derived
+but from the very essence of our own will, which asks for
+happiness and not duty as the ultimate end? And if it
+is sought to attribute some other value to this <i>for</i>, an
+objective value, as some Sadducean pedant would say,
+then it must be recognized that the objective reality, that
+which would remain even though humanity should disappear,
+is as indifferent to our duty as to our happiness,
+is as little concerned with our morality as with our
+felicity. I am not aware that Jupiter, Uranus, or Sirius
+would allow their course to be affected by the fact that
+we are or are not fulfilling our duty any more than by the
+fact that we are or are not happy.</p>
+
+<p>Such considerations must appear to these pedants to
+be characterized by a ridiculous vulgarity and a dilettante
+superficiality. (The intellectual world is divided into
+two classes&mdash;dilettanti on the one hand, and pedants on
+the other.) What choice, then, have we? The modern
+man is he who resigns himself to the truth and is content
+to be ignorant of the synthesis of culture&mdash;witness what
+Windelband says on this head in his study of the fate
+of H&ouml;lderlin (<i>Praeludien</i>, i.). Yes, these men of culture
+are resigned, but there remain a few poor savages like
+ourselves for whom resignation is impossible. We do
+not resign ourselves to the idea of having one day to
+disappear, and the criticism of the great Pedant does not
+console us.</p>
+
+<p>The quintessence of common sense was expressed by
+Galileo Galilei when he said: &quot;Some perhaps will say
+that the bitterest pain is the loss of life, but I say that
+there are others more bitter; for whosoever is deprived of
+life is deprived at the same time of the power to lament,
+not only this, but any other loss whatsoever.&quot; Whether
+Galileo was conscious or not of the humour of this sentence
+I do not know, but it is a tragic humour.</p>
+
+<p>But, to turn back, I repeat that if the attainment of
+eternal happiness could be bound up with any particular
+<a name="Page_268" id="Page_268" />belief, it would be with the belief in the possibility of its
+realization. And yet, strictly speaking, not even with
+this. The reasonable man says in his head, &quot;There is
+no other life after this,&quot; but only the wicked says it in
+his heart. But since the wicked man is possibly only a
+man who has been driven to despair, will a human God
+condemn him because of his despair? His despair alone
+is misfortune enough.</p>
+
+<p>But in any event let us adopt the Calder&oacute;nian formula
+in <i>La Vida es Sue&ntilde;o</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Que estoy so&ntilde;ando y que quiero</i></div>
+<div><i>obrar hacer bien, pues no se pierde</i></div>
+<div><i>el hacer bien aun en sue&ntilde;os</i><a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54" /><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>But are good deeds really not lost? Did Calder&oacute;n know?
+And he added:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Acudamos a lo eterno</i></div>
+<div><i>que es la fama vividora</i></div>
+<div><i>donde ni duermen las dichas</i></div>
+<div><i>no las grandezas reposan</i><a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55" /><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Is it really so? Did Calder&oacute;n know?</p>
+
+<p>Calder&oacute;n had faith, robust Catholic faith; but for him
+who lacks faith, for him who cannot believe in what
+Don Pedro Calder&oacute;n de la Barca believed, there always
+remains the attitude of <i>Obermann</i>.</p>
+
+<p>If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice
+of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without
+hope of victory; let us fight against it quixotically.</p>
+
+<p>And not only do we fight against destiny in longing
+for what is irrational, but in acting in such a way that
+we make ourselves irreplaceable, in impressing our seal
+and mark upon others, in acting upon our neighbours in
+order to dominate them, in giving ourselves to them in
+order that we may eternalize ourselves so far as we can.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269" />Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves
+irreplaceable; to make the theoretical fact&mdash;if this expression
+does not involve a contradiction in terms&mdash;the
+fact that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable, that
+no one else can fill the gap that will be left when we die,
+a practical truth.</p>
+
+<p>For in fact each man is unique and irreplaceable; there
+cannot be any other I; each one of us&mdash;our soul, that is,
+not our life&mdash;is worth the whole Universe. I say the
+spirit and not the life, for the ridiculously exaggerated
+value which those attach to human life who, not really
+believing in the spirit&mdash;that is to say, in their personal
+immortality&mdash;tirade against war and the death penalty,
+for example, is a value which they attach to it precisely
+because they do not really believe in the spirit of which
+life is the servant. For life is of use only in so far as it
+serves its lord and master, spirit, and if the master
+perishes with the servant, neither the one nor the other
+is of any great value.</p>
+
+<p>And to act in such a way as to make our annihilation
+an injustice, in such a way as to make our brothers, our
+sons, and our brothers' sons, and their sons' sons, feel
+that we ought not to have died, is something that is
+within the reach of all.</p>
+
+<p>The essence of the doctrine of the Christian redemption
+is in the fact that he who suffered agony and death
+was the unique man&mdash;that is, Man, the Son of Man, or
+the Son of God; that he, because he was sinless, did not
+deserve to have died; and that this propitiatory divine
+victim died in order that he might rise again and that
+he might raise us up from the dead, in order that he
+might deliver us from death by applying his merits to
+us and showing us the way of life. And the Christ who
+gave himself for his brothers in humanity with an
+absolute self-abnegation is the pattern for our action to
+shape itself on.</p>
+
+<p>All of us, each one of us, can and ought to determine
+<a name="Page_270" id="Page_270" />to give as much of himself as he possibly can&mdash;nay, to
+give more than he can, to exceed himself, to go beyond
+himself, to make himself irreplaceable, to give himself
+to others in order that he may receive himself back again
+from them. And each one in his own civil calling or
+office. The word office, <i>officium</i>, means obligation,
+debt, but in the concrete, and that is what it always
+ought to mean in practice. We ought not so much to
+try to seek that particular calling which we think most
+fitting and suitable for ourselves, as to make a calling of
+that employment in which chance, Providence, or our
+own will has placed us.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Luther rendered no greater service to Christian
+civilization than that of establishing the religious value
+of the civil occupation, of shattering the monastic and
+medieval idea of the religious calling, an idea involved in
+the mist of human passions and imaginations and the
+cause of terrible life tragedies. If we could but enter into
+the cloister and examine the religious vocation of those
+whom the self-interest of their parents had forced as
+children into a novice's cell and who had suddenly
+awakened to the life of the world&mdash;if indeed they ever do
+awake!&mdash;or of those whom their own self-delusions had
+led into it! Luther saw this life of the cloister at close
+quarters and suffered it himself, and therefore he was
+able to understand and feel the religious value of the
+civil calling, to which no man is bound by perpetual vows.</p>
+
+<p>All that the Apostle said in the fourth chapter of his
+Epistle to the Ephesians with regard to the respective
+functions of Christians in the Church must be transferred
+and applied to the civil or non-ecclesiastical life, for
+to-day among ourselves the Christian&mdash;whether he know
+it or not, and whether he like it or not&mdash;is the citizen, and
+just as the Apostle exclaimed, &quot;I am a Roman citizen!&quot;
+each one of us, even the atheist, might exclaim &quot;I am a
+Christian!&quot; And this demands the <i>civilizing</i>, in the
+sense of dis-ecclesiasticizing, of Christianity, which was
+<a name="Page_271" id="Page_271" />Luther's task, although he himself eventually became the
+founder of a Church.</p>
+
+<p>There is a common English phrase, &quot;the right man in
+the right place.&quot; To which we might rejoin, &quot;Cobbler,
+to thy last!&quot; Who knows what is the post that suits
+him best and for which he is most fitted? Does a man
+himself know it better than others or do they know it
+better than he? Who can measure capacities and
+aptitudes? The religious attitude, undoubtedly, is to
+endeavour to make the occupation in which we find ourselves
+our vocation, and only in the last resort to change
+it for another.</p>
+
+<p>This question of the proper vocation is possibly the
+gravest and most deep-seated of social problems, that
+which is at the root of all the others. That which is
+known <i>par excellence</i> as the social question is perhaps
+not so much a problem of the distribution of wealth, of
+the products of labour, as a problem of the distribution of
+avocations, of the modes of production. It is not aptitude&mdash;a
+thing impossible to ascertain without first putting
+it to the test and not always clearly indicated in a man, for
+with regard to the majority of callings a man is not born
+but made&mdash;it is not special aptitude, but rather social,
+political, and customary reasons that determine a man's
+occupation. At certain times and in certain countries it
+is caste and heredity; at other times and in other places,
+the guild or corporation; in later times machinery&mdash;in
+almost all cases necessity; liberty scarcely ever. And
+the tragedy of it culminates in those occupations, pandering
+to evil, in which the soul is sacrificed for the sake of
+the livelihood, in which the workman works with the
+consciousness, not of the uselessness merely, but of the
+social perversity, of his work, manufacturing the poison
+that will kill him, the weapon, perchance, with which his
+children will be murdered. This, and not the question
+of wages, is the gravest problem.</p>
+
+<p>I shall never forget a scene of which I was a witness
+<a name="Page_272" id="Page_272" />that took place on the banks of the river that flows through
+Bilbao, my native town. A workman was hammering at
+something in a shipwright's yard, working without putting
+his heart into his work, as if he lacked energy or
+worked merely for the sake of getting a wage, when
+suddenly a woman's voice was heard crying, &quot;Help!
+help!&quot; A child had fallen into the river. Instantly
+the man was transformed. With an admirable energy,
+promptitude, and sang-froid he threw off his clothes and
+plunged into the water to rescue the drowning infant.</p>
+
+<p>Possibly the reason why there is less bitterness in the
+agrarian socialist movement than in that of the towns is
+that the field labourer, although his wages and his
+standard of living are no better than those of the miner
+or artisan, has a clearer consciousness of the social value
+of his work. Sowing corn is a different thing from
+extracting diamonds from the earth.</p>
+
+<p>And it may be that the greatest social progress consists
+in a certain indifferentiation of labour, in the facility for
+exchanging one kind of work for another, and that other
+not perhaps a more lucrative, but a nobler one&mdash;for there
+are degrees of nobility in labour. But unhappily it is
+only too seldom that a man who keeps to one occupation
+without changing is concerned with making a religious
+vocation of it, or that the man who changes his occupation
+for another does so from any religious motive.</p>
+
+<p>And do you not know cases in which a man, justifying
+his action on the ground that the professional organism
+to which he belongs and in which he works is badly
+organized and does not function as it ought, will evade
+the strict performance of his duty on the pretext that he
+is thereby fulfilling a higher duty? Is not this insistence
+upon the literal carrying out of orders called disciplinarianism,
+and do not people speak disparagingly of
+bureaucracy and the Pharisaism of public officials? And
+cases occur not unlike that of an intelligent and studious
+military officer who should discover the deficiencies of
+<a name="Page_273" id="Page_273" />his country's military organization and denounce them to
+his superiors and perhaps to the public&mdash;thereby fulfilling
+his duty&mdash;and who, when on active service, should refuse
+to carry out an operation which he was ordered to undertake,
+believing that there was but scant probability of
+success or rather certainty of failure, so long as these
+deficiencies remained unremedied. He would deserve to
+be shot. And as for this question of Pharisaism ...</p>
+
+<p>And there is always a way of obeying an order while
+yet retaining the command, a way of carrying out what
+one believes to be an absurd operation while correcting
+its absurdity, even though it involve one's own death.
+When in my bureaucratic capacity I have come across
+some legislative ordinance that has fallen into desuetude
+because of its manifest absurdity, I have always
+endeavoured to apply it. There is nothing worse than a
+loaded pistol which nobody uses left lying in some corner
+of the house; a child finds it, begins to play with it, and
+kills its own father. Laws that have fallen into desuetude
+are the most terrible of all laws, when the cause of the
+desuetude is the badness of the law.</p>
+
+<p>And these are not groundless suppositions, and least
+of all in our country. For there are many who, while
+they go about looking out for I know not what ideal&mdash;that
+is to say, fictitious duties and responsibilities&mdash;neglect
+the duty of putting their whole soul into the immediate
+and concrete business which furnishes them with a
+living; and the rest, the immense majority, perform their
+task perfunctorily, merely for the sake of nominally complying
+with their duty&mdash;<i>para cumplir</i>, a terribly immoral
+phrase&mdash;in order to get themselves out of a difficulty, to
+get the job done, to qualify for their wages without earning
+them, whether these wages be pecuniary or otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>Here you have a shoemaker who lives by making shoes,
+and makes them with just enough care and attention to
+keep his client&egrave;le together without losing custom.
+Another shoemaker lives on a somewhat higher spiritual
+<a name="Page_274" id="Page_274" />plane, for he has a proper love for his work, and out of
+pride or a sense of honour strives for the reputation of
+being the best shoemaker in the town or in the kingdom,
+even though this reputation brings him no increase of
+custom or profit, but only renown and prestige. But
+there is a still higher degree of moral perfection in this
+business of shoemaking, and that is for the shoemaker to
+aspire to become for his fellow-townsmen the one and
+only shoemaker, indispensable and irreplaceable, the
+shoemaker who looks after their footgear so well that they
+will feel a definite loss when he dies&mdash;when he is &quot;dead
+to them,&quot; not merely &quot;dead&quot;<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56" /><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a>&mdash;and they will feel that
+he ought not to have died. And this will result from the
+fact that in working for them he was anxious to spare
+them any discomfort and to make sure that it should not
+be any preoccupation with their feet that should prevent
+them from being at leisure to contemplate the higher
+truths; he shod them for the love of them and for the
+love of God in them&mdash;he shod them religiously.</p>
+
+<p>I have chosen this example deliberately, although it
+may perhaps appear to you somewhat pedestrian. For
+the fact is that in this business of shoemaking, the
+religious, as opposed to the ethical, sense is at a very
+low ebb.</p>
+
+<p>Working men group themselves in associations, they
+form co-operative societies and unions for defence, they
+fight very justly and nobly for the betterment of their
+class; but it is not clear that these associations have any
+great influence on their moral attitude towards their work.
+They have succeeded in compelling employers to employ
+only such workmen, and no others, as the respective unions
+shall designate in each particular case; but in the selection
+of those designated they pay little heed to their technical
+fitness. Often the employer finds it almost impossible to
+dismiss an inefficient workman on account of his inefficiency,
+for his fellow-workers take his part. Their work,
+<a name="Page_275" id="Page_275" />moreover, is often perfunctory, performed merely as a
+pretext for receiving a wage, and instances even occur
+when they deliberately mishandle it in order to injure
+their employer.</p>
+
+<p>In attempting to justify this state of things, it may be
+said that the employers are a hundred times more blameworthy
+than the workmen, for they are not concerned to
+give a better wage to the man who does better work, or
+to foster the general education and technical proficiency
+of the workman, or to ensure the intrinsic goodness of
+the article produced. The improvement of the product&mdash;which,
+apart from reasons of industrial and mercantile
+competition, ought to be in itself and for the good of the
+consumers, for charity's sake, the chief end of the business&mdash;is
+not so regarded either by employers or employed,
+and this is because neither the one nor the other have any
+religious sense of their social function. Neither of them
+seek to make themselves irreplaceable. The evil is
+aggravated when the business takes the unhappy form of
+the impersonal limited company, for where there is no
+longer any personal signature there is no longer any of
+that pride which seeks to give the signature prestige, a
+pride which in its way is a substitute for the craving for
+eternalization. With the disappearance of the concrete
+individuality, the basis of all religion, the religious sense
+of the business calling disappears also.</p>
+
+<p>And what has been said of employers and workmen
+applies still more to members of the liberal professions
+and public functionaries. There is scarcely a single servant
+of the State who feels the religious bearing of his
+official and public duties. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory,
+nothing more confused, than the feeling
+among our people with regard to their duties towards the
+State, and this sense of duty is still further obliterated by
+the attitude of the Catholic Church, whose action so far
+as the State is concerned is in strict truth anarchical. It
+is no uncommon thing to find among its ministers
+<a name="Page_276" id="Page_276" />upholders of the moral lawfulness of smuggling and contraband
+as if in disobeying the legally constituted
+authority the smuggler and contrabandist did not sin
+against the Fourth Commandment of the law of God,
+which in commanding us to honour our father and
+mother commands us to obey all lawful authority in so
+far as the ordinances of such authority are not contrary
+(and the levying of these contributions is certainly not
+contrary) to the law of God.</p>
+
+<p>There are many who, since it is written &quot;In the sweat
+of thy face shalt thou eat bread,&quot; regard work as a
+punishment, and therefore they attribute merely an
+economico-political, or at best an esthetic, value to the
+work of everyday life. For those who take this view&mdash;and
+it is the view principally held by the Jesuits&mdash;the
+business of life is twofold: there is the inferior and
+transitory business of winning a livelihood, of winning
+bread for ourselves and our children in an honourable,
+manner&mdash;and the elasticity of this honour is well known;
+and there is the grand business of our salvation, of winning
+eternal glory. This inferior or worldly business
+is to be undertaken not only so as to permit us, without
+deceiving or seriously injuring our neighbours, to live
+decently in accordance with our social position, but also
+so as to afford us the greatest possible amount of time
+for attending to the other main business of our life.
+And there are others who, rising somewhat above this
+conception of the work of our civil occupation, a conception
+which is economical rather than ethical, attain to
+an esthetic conception and sense of it, and this involves
+endeavouring to acquire distinction and renown in our
+occupation, the converting of it into an art for art's sake,
+for beauty's sake. But it is necessary to rise still higher
+than this, to attain to an ethical sense of our civil calling,
+to a sense which derives from our religious sense, from
+our hunger of eternalization. To work at our ordinary
+civil occupation, with eyes fixed on God, for the love of
+<a name="Page_277" id="Page_277" />God, which is equivalent to saying for the love of our
+eternalization, is to make of this work a work of
+religion.</p>
+
+<p>That saying, &quot;In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat
+bread,&quot; does not mean that God condemned man to
+work, but to the painfulness of it. It would have been
+no condemnation to have condemned man to work itself,
+for work is the only practical consolation for having
+been born. And, for a Christian, the proof that God
+did not condemn man to work itself consists in the saying
+of the Scripture that, before the Fall, while he was
+still in a state of innocence, God took man and put him
+in the garden &quot;to dress it and to keep it&quot; (Gen. ii. 15).
+And how, in fact, would man have passed his time in
+Paradise if he had had no work to do in keeping it in
+order? And may it not be that the beatific vision itself
+is a kind of work?</p>
+
+<p>And even if work were our punishment, we ought to
+strive to make it, the punishment itself, our consolation
+and our redemption; and if we must needs embrace some
+cross or other, there is for each one of us no better cross
+than the cross of our own civil calling. For Christ did
+not say, &quot;Take up my cross and follow me,&quot; but &quot;Take
+up thy cross and follow me&quot;: every man his own cross,
+for the Saviour's cross the Saviour alone can bear. And
+the imitation of Christ, therefore, does not consist in
+that monastic ideal so shiningly set forth in the book
+that commonly bears the name of &agrave; Kempis, an ideal
+only applicable to a very limited number of persons and
+therefore anti-Christian; but to imitate Christ is to take
+up each one his own cross, the cross of his own civil
+occupation&mdash;civil and not merely religions&mdash;as Christ
+took up his cross, the cross of his calling, and to embrace
+it and carry it, looking towards God and striving to
+make each act of this calling a true prayer. In making
+shoes and because he makes them a man can gain
+heaven, provided that the shoemaker strives to be per<a name="Page_278" id="Page_278" />fect,
+as a shoemaker, as our Father in heaven is
+perfect.</p>
+
+<p>Fourier, the socialist dreamer, dreamed of making
+work attractive in his phalansteries by the free choice of
+vocations and in other ways. There is no other way
+than that of liberty. Wherein consists the charm of the
+game of chance, which is a kind of work, if not in the
+voluntary submission of the player to the liberty of
+Nature&mdash;that is, to chance? But do not let us lose ourselves
+in a comparison between work and play.</p>
+
+<p>And the sense of making ourselves irreplaceable, of
+not meriting death, of making our annihilation, if it is
+annihilation that awaits us, an injustice, ought to impel
+us not only to perform our own occupation religiously,
+from love of God and love of our eternity and eternalization,
+but to perform it passionately, tragically if you
+like. It ought to impel us to endeavour to stamp others
+with our seal, to perpetuate ourselves in them and in
+their children by dominating them, to leave on all things
+the imperishable impress of our signature. The most
+fruitful ethic is the ethic of mutual imposition.</p>
+
+<p>Above all, we must recast in a positive form the negative
+commandments which we have inherited from the
+Ancient Law. Thus where it is written, &quot;Thou shalt
+not lie!&quot; let us understand, &quot;Thou shalt always speak
+the truth, in season and out of season!&quot; although it is
+we ourselves, and not others, who are judges in each
+case of this seasonableness. And for &quot;Thou shalt not
+kill!&quot; let us understand, &quot;Thou shalt give life and
+increase it!&quot; And for &quot;Thou shalt not steal!&quot; let us
+say, &quot;Thou shalt increase the general wealth!&quot; And
+for &quot;Thou shalt not commit adultery!&quot; &quot;Thou shalt
+give children, healthy, strong, and good, to thy country
+and to heaven!&quot; And thus with all the other commandments.</p>
+
+<p>He who does not lose his life shall not find it. Give
+yourself then to others, but in order to give yourself to
+<a name="Page_279" id="Page_279" />them, first dominate them. For it is not possible to
+dominate except by being dominated. Everyone
+nourishes himself upon the flesh of that which he
+devours. In order that you may dominate your neighbour
+you must know and love him. It is by attempting
+to impose my ideas upon him that I become the recipient
+of his ideas. To love my neighbour is to wish that he
+may be like me, that he may be another I&mdash;that is to say,
+it is to wish that I may be he; it is to wish to obliterate
+the division between him and me, to suppress the evil.
+My endeavour to impose myself upon another, to be and
+live in him and by him, to make him mine&mdash;which is the
+same as making myself his&mdash;is that which gives religious
+meaning to human collectivity, to human solidarity.</p>
+
+<p>The feeling of solidarity originates in myself; since I
+am a society, I feel the need of making myself master of
+human society; since I am a social product, I must
+socialize myself, and from myself I proceed to God&mdash;who
+is I projected to the All&mdash;and from God to each of
+my neighbours.</p>
+
+<p>My immediate first impulse is to protest against the
+inquisitor and to prefer the merchant who comes to offer
+me his wares. But when my impressions are clarified
+by reflection, I begin to see that the inquisitor, when he
+acts from a right motive, treats me as a man, as an end
+in myself, and if he molests me it is from a charitable
+wish to save my soul; while the merchant, on the other
+hand, regards me merely as a customer, as a means to an
+end, and his indulgence and tolerance is at bottom
+nothing but a supreme indifference to my destiny.
+There is much more humanity in the inquisitor.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly there is much more humanity in war than
+in peace. Non-resistance to evil implies resistance to
+good, and to take the offensive, leaving the defensive
+out of the question, is perhaps the divinest thing in
+humanity. War is the school of fraternity and the bond
+of love; it is war that has brought peoples into touch
+<a name="Page_280" id="Page_280" />with one another, by mutual aggression and collision,
+and has been the cause of their knowing and loving one
+another. Human love knows no purer embrace, or one
+more fruitful in its consequences, than that between
+victor and vanquished on the battlefield. And even the
+purified hate that springs from war is fruitful. War is,
+in its strictest sense, the sanctification of homicide; Cain
+is redeemed as a leader of armies. And if Cain had not
+killed his brother Abel, perhaps he would have died by
+the hand of Abel. God revealed Himself above all in
+war; He began by being the God of battles; and one of
+the greatest services of the Cross is that, in the form
+of the sword-hilt, it protects the hand that wields the
+sword.</p>
+
+<p>The enemies of the State say that Cain, the fratricide,
+was the founder of the State. And we must accept the
+fact and turn it to the glory of the State, the child of
+war. Civilization began on the day on which one man,
+by subjecting another to his will and compelling him to
+do the work of two, was enabled to devote himself to the
+contemplation of the world and to set his captive upon
+works of luxury. It was slavery that enabled Plato to
+speculate upon the ideal republic, and it was war that
+brought slavery about. Not without reason was Athena
+the goddess of war and of wisdom. But is there any
+need to repeat once again these obvious truths, which,
+though they have continually been forgotten, are continually
+rediscovered?</p>
+
+<p>And the supreme commandment that arises out of love
+towards God, and the foundation of all morality, is this:
+Yield yourself up entirely, give your spirit to the end
+that you may save it, that you may eternalize it. Such
+is the sacrifice of life.</p>
+
+<p>The individual <i>qu&acirc;</i> individual, the wretched captive of
+the instinct of preservation and of the senses, cares only
+about preserving himself, and all his concern is that
+others should not force their way into his sphere, should
+<a name="Page_281" id="Page_281" />not disturb him, should not interrupt his idleness; and
+in return for their abstention or for the sake of example
+he refrains from forcing himself upon them, from interrupting
+their idleness, from disturbing them, from
+taking possession of them. &quot;Do not do unto others
+what you would not have them do unto you,&quot; he translates
+thus: I do not interfere with others&mdash;let them not
+interfere with me. And he shrinks and pines and
+perishes in this spiritual avarice and this repellent ethic
+of anarchic individualism: each one for himself. And
+as each one is not himself, he can hardly live for
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>But as soon as the individual feels himself in society,
+he feels himself in God, and kindled by the instinct of
+perpetuation he glows with love towards God, and with
+a dominating charity he seeks to perpetuate himself in
+others, to perennialize his spirit, to eternalize it, to
+unnail God, and his sole desire is to seal his spirit upon
+other spirits and to receive their impress in return. He
+has shaken off the yoke of his spiritual sloth and avarice.</p>
+
+<p>Sloth, it is said, is the mother of all the vices; and in
+fact sloth does engender two vices&mdash;avarice and envy&mdash;which
+in their turn are the source of all the rest. Sloth
+is the weight of matter, in itself inert, within us, and this
+sloth, while it professes to preserve us by economizing
+our forces, in reality attenuates us and reduces us to
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>In man there is either too much matter or too much
+spirit, or to put it better, either he feels a hunger for
+spirit&mdash;that is, for eternity&mdash;or he feels a hunger for
+matter&mdash;that is, submission to annihilation. When
+spirit is in excess and he feels a hunger for yet more of
+it, he pours it forth and scatters it abroad, and in scattering
+it abroad he amplifies it with that of others; and on
+the contrary, when a man is avaricious of himself and
+thinks that he will preserve himself better by withdrawing
+within himself, he ends by losing all&mdash;he is like the
+<a name="Page_282" id="Page_282" />man who received the single talent: he buried it in order
+that he might not lose it, and in the end he was bereft
+of it. For to him that hath shall be given, but from
+him that hath but a little shall be taken away even the
+little that he hath.</p>
+
+<p>Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect,
+we are bidden, and this terrible precept&mdash;terrible
+because for us the infinite perfection of the Father is
+unattainable&mdash;must be our supreme rule of conduct.
+Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible
+that he achieves will be scarcely worth the trouble of
+achieving. It behoves us to aspire to the impossible, to
+the absolute and infinite perfection, and to say to the
+Father, &quot;Father, I cannot&mdash;help Thou my impotence.&quot;
+And He acting in us will achieve it for us.</p>
+
+<p>And to be perfect is to be all, it is to be myself and
+to be all else, it is to be humanity, it is to be the Universe.
+And there is no other way of being all but to give oneself
+to all, and when all shall be in all, all will be in each one
+of us. The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream:
+it is a rule of action, it is a beacon beckoning us to high
+exploits.</p>
+
+<p>And from it springs the ethic of invasion, of domination,
+of aggression, of inquisition if you like. For true
+charity is a kind of invasion&mdash;it consists in putting my
+spirit into other spirits, in giving them my suffering as
+the food and consolation for their sufferings, in awakening
+their unrest with my unrest, in sharpening their hunger
+for God with my hunger for God. It is not charity to
+rock and lull our brothers to sleep in the inertia and
+drowsiness of matter, but rather to awaken them to the
+uneasiness and torment of spirit.</p>
+
+<p>To the fourteen works of mercy which we learnt in the
+Catechism of Christian Doctrine there should sometimes
+be added yet another, that of awakening the sleeper.
+Sometimes, at any rate, and surely when the sleeper
+sleeps on the brink of a precipice, it is much more merciful
+<a name="Page_283" id="Page_283" />to awaken him than to bury him after he is dead&mdash;let us
+leave the dead to bury their dead. It has been well said,
+&quot;Whosoever loves thee dearly will make thee weep,&quot;
+and charity often causes weeping. &quot;The love that does
+not mortify does not deserve so divine a name,&quot; said that
+ardent Portuguese apostle, Fr. Thom&eacute; de Jes&uacute;s,<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57" /><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> who
+was also the author of this ejaculation&mdash;&quot;O infinite fire,
+O eternal love, who weepest when thou hast naught to
+embrace and feed upon and many hearts to burn!&quot; He
+who loves his neighbour burns his heart, and the heart,
+like green wood, in burning groans and distils itself in
+tears.</p>
+
+<p>And to do this is generosity, one of the two mother
+virtues which are born when inertia, sloth, is overcome.
+Most of our miseries come from spiritual avarice.</p>
+
+<p>The cure for suffering&mdash;which, as we have said, is the
+collision of consciousness with unconsciousness&mdash;is not
+to be submerged in unconsciousness, but to be raised to
+consciousness and to suffer more. The evil of suffering
+is cured by more suffering, by higher suffering. Do not
+take opium, but put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound,
+for when you sleep and no longer feel the suffering, you
+are not. And to be, that is imperative. Do not then
+close your eyes to the agonizing Sphinx, but look her in
+the face and let her seize you in her mouth and crunch you
+with her hundred thousand poisonous teeth and swallow
+you. And when she has swallowed you, you will know
+the sweetness of the taste of suffering.</p>
+
+<p>The way thereto in practice is by the ethic of mutual
+imposition. Men should strive to impose themselves
+upon one another, to give their spirits to one another,
+to seal one another's souls.</p>
+
+<p>There is matter for thought in the fact that the
+Christian ethic has been called an ethic of slaves. By
+whom? By anarchists! It is anarchism that is an
+ethic of slaves, for it is only the slave that chants the
+<a name="Page_284" id="Page_284" />praises of anarchical liberty. Anarchism, no! but
+<i>panarchism</i>; not the creed of &quot;Nor God nor master!&quot;
+but that of &quot;All gods and all masters!&quot; all striving to
+become gods, to become immortal, and achieving this
+by dominating others.</p>
+
+<p>And there are so many ways of dominating. There is
+even a passive way, or one at least that is apparently
+passive, of fulfilling at times this law of life. Adaptation
+to environment, imitation, putting oneself in
+another's place, sympathy, in a word, besides being a
+manifestation of the unity of the species, is a mode of
+self-expansion, of being another. To be conquered, or
+at least to seem to be conquered, is often to conquer; to
+take what is another's is a way of living in him.</p>
+
+<p>And in speaking of domination, I do not mean the
+domination of the tiger. The fox also dominates by
+cunning, and the hare by flight, and the viper by poison,
+and the mosquito by its smallness, and the squid by the
+inky fluid with which it darkens the water and under
+cover of which it escapes. And no one is scandalized at
+this, for the same universal Father who gave its fierceness,
+its talons, and its jaws to the tiger, gave cunning
+to the fox, swift feet to the hare, poison to the viper,
+diminutiveness to the mosquito, and its inky fluid to the
+squid. And nobleness or ignobleness does not consist
+in the weapons we use, for every species and even every
+individual possesses its own, but rather in the way in
+which we use them, and above all in the cause in which
+we wield them.</p>
+
+<p>And among the weapons of conquest must be included
+the weapon of patience and of resignation, but a
+passionate patience and a passionate resignation, containing
+within itself an active principle and antecedent
+longings. You remember that famous sonnet of Milton&mdash;Milton,
+the great fighter, the great Puritan disturber
+of the spiritual peace, the singer of Satan&mdash;who, when
+he considered how his light was spent and that one talent
+<a name="Page_285" id="Page_285" />which it is death to hide lodged with him useless, heard
+the voice of Patience saying to him,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div class='i6'>God doth not need</div>
+<div>Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best</div>
+<div>Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best: his state</div>
+<div>Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,</div>
+<div>And post o'er land and ocean without rest;</div>
+<div>They also serve who only stand and wait.</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>They also serve who only stand and wait&mdash;yes, but it
+is when they wait for Him passionately, hungeringly,
+full of longing for immortality in Him.</p>
+
+<p>And we must impose ourselves, even though it be by
+our patience. &quot;My cup is small, but I drink out of my
+cup,&quot; said the egoistical poet of an avaricious people.<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58" /><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a>
+No, out of my cup all drink, for I wish all to drink out
+of it; I offer it to them, and my cup grows according to
+the number of those who drink out of it, and all, in putting
+it to their lips, leave in it something of their spirit.
+And while they drink out of my cup, I also drink out of
+theirs. For the more I belong to myself, and the more
+I am myself, the more I belong to others; out of the fullness
+of myself I overflow upon my brothers, and as I
+overflow upon them they enter into me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Be ye perfect, as your Father is perfect,&quot; we are
+bidden, and our Father is perfect because He is Himself
+and because He is in each one of His children who live
+and move and have their being in Him. And the end
+of perfection is that we all may be one (John xvii. 21),
+all one body in Christ (Rom. xii. 5), and that, at the last,
+when all things are subdued unto the Son, the Son himself
+may be subject to Him that put all things under
+him, that God may be all in all. And this is to make the
+Universe consciousness, to make Nature a society, and
+a human society. And then shall we be able confidently
+to call God Father.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286" />I am aware that those who say that ethics is a science
+will say that all this commentary of mine is nothing but
+rhetoric; but each man has his own language and his
+own passion&mdash;that is to say, each man who knows what
+passion is&mdash;and as for the man who knows it not, nothing
+will it avail him to know science.</p>
+
+<p>And the passion that finds its expression in this
+rhetoric, the devotees of ethical science call egotism.
+But this egotism is the only true remedy for egoism,
+spiritual avarice, the vice of preserving and reserving
+oneself and of not striving to perennialize oneself by
+giving oneself.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Be not, and ye shall be mightier than all that is,&quot;
+said Fr. Juan de los Angeles in one of his <i>Di&aacute;logos de la
+Conquista del Reina de Dios</i> (<i>Dial.</i>, iii., 8); but what does
+this &quot;Be not&quot; mean? May it not mean paradoxically&mdash;and
+such a mode of expression is common with the
+mystics&mdash;the contrary of that which, at a first and literal
+reading, it would appear to mean? Is not the whole
+ethic of submission and quietism an immense paradox,
+or rather a great tragic contradiction? Is not the
+monastic, the strictly monastic, ethic an absurdity? And
+by the monastic ethic I mean that of the solitary Carthusian,
+that of the hermit, who flees from the world&mdash;perhaps
+carrying it with him nevertheless&mdash;in order that
+he may live quite alone with a God who is lonely as
+himself; not that of the Dominican inquisitor who
+scoured Provence in search of Albigensian hearts to
+burn.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Let God do it all,&quot; someone will say; but if man
+folds his arms, God will go to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>This Carthusian ethic and that scientific ethic which is
+derived from ethical science&mdash;oh, this science of ethics!
+rational and rationalistic ethics! pedantry of pedantry,
+all is pedantry!&mdash;yes, this perhaps is egoism and coldness
+of heart.</p>
+
+<p>There are some who say that they isolate themselves
+<a name="Page_287" id="Page_287" />with God in order that they may the better work out
+their salvation, their redemption; but since sin is collective,
+redemption must be collective also. &quot;The
+religious is the determination of the whole, and everything
+outside this is an illusion of the senses, and that is
+why the greatest criminal is at bottom innocent, a good-natured
+man and a saint&quot; (Kierkegaard, <i>Afsluttende</i>,
+etc., ii., ii., cap. iv., sect. 2, <i>a</i>).</p>
+
+<p>Are we to understand, on the other hand, that men
+seek to gain the other, the eternal life, by renouncing
+this the temporal life? If the other life is anything, it
+must be a continuation of this, and only as such a continuation,
+more or less purified, is it mirrored in our
+desire; and if this is so, such as is this life of time, so will
+be the life of eternity.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This world and the other are like the two wives of
+one husband&mdash;if he pleases one he makes the other
+envious,&quot; said an Arab thinker, quoted by Windelband
+(<i>Das Heilige</i>, in vol. ii. of <i>Pr&auml;ludien</i>); but such a
+thought could only have arisen in the mind of one who
+had failed to resolve the tragic conflict between his spirit
+and the world in a fruitful warfare, a practical contradiction.
+&quot;Thy kingdom come&quot; to us; so Christ taught
+us to pray to the Father, not &quot;May we come to Thy
+kingdom&quot;; and according to the primitive Christian
+belief the eternal life was to be realized on this earth itself
+and as a continuation of the earthly life. We were made
+men and not angels in order that we might seek our
+happiness through the medium of this life, and the Christ
+of the Christian Faith became, not an angelic, but a
+human, being, redeeming us by taking upon himself a
+real and effective body and not an appearance of one
+merely. And according to this same Faith, even the
+highest of the angelical hierarchy adore the Virgin, the
+supreme symbol of terrestrial Humanity. The angelical
+ideal, therefore, is not the Christian ideal, and still less
+is it the human ideal, nor can it be. An angel, more<a name="Page_288" id="Page_288" />over,
+is a neutral being, without sex and without
+country.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible for us to feel the other life, the eternal
+life, I have already repeated more than once, as a life of
+angelical contemplation; it must be a life of action.
+Goethe said that &quot;man must believe in immortality,
+since in his nature he has a right to it.&quot; And he added:
+&quot;The conviction of our persistence arises in me from
+the concept of activity. If I work without ceasing to
+the end, Nature is obliged (<i>so ist die Natur verpflichtet</i>)
+to provide me with another form of existence, since my
+actual spirit can bear no more.&quot; Change Nature to
+God, and you have a thought that remains Christian in
+character, for the first Fathers of the Church did not
+believe that the immortality of the soul was a natural
+gift&mdash;that is to say, something rational&mdash;but a divine
+gift of grace. And that which is of grace is usually, in
+its essence, of justice, since justice is divine and
+gratuitous, not natural. And Goethe added: &quot;I could
+begin nothing with an eternal happiness before me, unless
+new tasks and new difficulties were given me to overcome.&quot;
+And true it is that there is no happiness in a
+vacuity of contemplation.</p>
+
+<p>But may there not be some justification for the morality
+of the hermit, of the Carthusian, the ethic of the
+Thebaid? Might we not say, perhaps, that it is necessary
+to preserve these exceptional types in order that
+they may stand as everlasting patterns for mankind? Do
+not men breed racehorses, which are useless for any practical
+kind of work, but which preserve the purity of the
+breed and become the sires of excellent hackneys and
+hunters? Is there not a luxury of ethics, not less justifiable
+than any other sort of luxury? But, on the other
+hand, is not all this substantially esthetics, and not ethics,
+still less religion? May not the contemplative, medieval,
+monastic ideal be esthetical, and not religious nor even
+ethical? And after all, those of the seekers after soli<a name="Page_289" id="Page_289" />tude
+who have related to us their conversation when they
+were alone with God have performed an eternalizing
+work, they have concerned themselves with the souls of
+others. And by this alone, that it has given us an
+Eckhart, a Seuse, a Tauler, a Ruysbroek, a Juan de la
+Cruz, a Catherine of Siena, an Angela of Foligno, a
+Teresa de Jes&uacute;s, is the cloister justified.</p>
+
+<p>But the chief of our Spanish Orders are the Predicadores,
+founded by Domingo de Guzm&aacute;n for the aggressive
+work of extirpating heresy; the Company of Jesus,
+a militia with the world as its field of operations (which
+explains its history); the order of the Escuelas P&iacute;as, also
+devoted to a work of an aggressive or invasive nature,
+that of instruction. I shall certainly be reminded that
+the reform of the contemplative Order of the Carmelites
+which Teresa de Jes&uacute;s undertook was a Spanish work.
+Yes, Spanish it was, and in it men sought liberty.</p>
+
+<p>It was, in fact, the yearning for liberty, for inward liberty,
+which, in the troubled days of the Inquisition, led many
+choice spirits to the cloister. They imprisoned themselves
+in order that they might be more free. &quot;Is it not a fine
+thing that a poor nun of San Jos&eacute; can attain to sovereignty
+over the whole earth and the elements?&quot; said St. Teresa
+in her <i>Life</i>. It was the Pauline yearning for liberty,
+the longing to shake off the bondage of the external law,
+which was then very severe, and, as Maestro Fray Luis
+de Le&oacute;n said, very stubborn.</p>
+
+<p>But did they actually find liberty in the cloister? It
+is very doubtful if they did, and to-day it is impossible.
+For true liberty is not to rid oneself of the external law;
+liberty is consciousness of the law. Not he who has
+shaken off the yoke of the law is free, but he who has
+made himself master of the law. Liberty must be sought
+in the midst of the world, which is the domain of the law,
+and of sin, the offspring of the law. That which we
+must be freed from is sin, which is collective.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of renouncing the world in order that we may
+<a name="Page_290" id="Page_290" />dominate it&mdash;and who does not know the collective
+instinct of domination of those religious Orders whose
+members renounce the world?&mdash;what we ought to do is
+to dominate the world in order that we may be able to
+renounce it. Not to seek poverty and submission, but to
+seek wealth in order that we may use it to increase human
+consciousness, and to seek power for the same end.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious that monks and anarchists should be at
+enmity with each other, when fundamentally they both
+profess the same ethic and are related by close ties of
+kinship. Anarchism tends to become a kind of atheistic
+monachism and a religious, rather than an ethical or
+economico-social, doctrine. The one party starts from
+the assumption that man is naturally evil, born in original
+sin, and that it is through grace that he becomes good,
+if indeed he ever does become good; and the other from
+the assumption that man is naturally good and is subsequently
+perverted by society. And these two theories
+really amount to the same thing, for in both the
+individual is opposed to society, as if the individual had
+preceded society and therefore were destined to survive
+it. And both ethics are ethics of the cloister.</p>
+
+<p>And the fact that guilt is collective must not actuate
+me to throw mine upon the shoulders of others, but
+rather to take upon myself the burden of the guilt of
+others, the guilt of all men; not to merge and sink my
+guilt in the total mass of guilt, but to make this total
+guilt my own; not to dismiss and banish my own guilt,
+but to open the doors of my heart to the guilt of all men,
+to centre it within myself and appropriate it to myself.
+And each one of us ought to help to remedy the guilt,
+and just because others do not do so. The fact that
+society is guilty aggravates the guilt of each member
+of it. &quot;Someone ought to do it, but why should I? is
+the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability.
+Someone ought to do it, so why not I? is the
+cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward
+<a name="Page_291" id="Page_291" />springing to face some perilous duty. Between these
+two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.&quot;
+Thus spoke Mrs. Annie Besant in her autobiography.
+Thus spoke theosophy.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that society is guilty aggravates the guilt of
+each one, and he is most guilty who most is sensible of
+the guilt. Christ, the innocent, since he best knew the
+intensity of the guilt, was in a certain sense the most
+guilty. In him the culpability, together with the divinity,
+of humanity arrived at the consciousness of itself. Many
+are wont to be amused when they read how, because of
+the most trifling faults, faults at which a man of the
+world would merely smile, the greatest saints counted
+themselves the greatest sinners. But the intensity of
+the fault is not measured by the external act, but by the
+consciousness of it, and an act for which the conscience
+of one man suffers acutely makes scarcely any impression
+on the conscience of another. And in a saint, conscience
+may be developed so fully and to such a degree
+of sensitiveness that the slightest sin may cause him
+more remorse than his crime causes the greatest criminal.
+And sin rests upon our consciousness of it, it is in him
+who judges and in so far as he judges. When a man
+commits a vicious act believing in good faith that he
+is doing a virtuous action, we cannot hold him morally
+guilty, while on the other hand that man is guilty
+who commits an act which he believes to be wrong,
+even though in itself the act is indifferent or perhaps
+beneficent. The act passes away, the intention remains,
+and the evil of the evil act is that it corrupts the intention,
+that in knowingly doing wrong a man is predisposed
+to go on doing it, that it blurs the conscience.
+And doing evil is not the same as being evil. Evil blurs
+the conscience, and not only the moral conscience but
+the general, psychical consciousness. And everything
+that exalts and expands consciousness is good, while that
+which depresses and diminishes it is evil.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292" />And here we might raise the question which, according
+to Plato, was propounded by Socrates, as to whether
+virtue is knowledge, which is equivalent to asking whether
+virtue is rational.</p>
+
+<p>The ethicists&mdash;those who maintain that ethics is a
+science, those whom the reading of these divagations will
+provoke to exclaim, &quot;Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric!&quot;&mdash;would
+appear to think that virtue is the fruit of knowledge,
+of rational study, and that even mathematics help
+us to be better men. I do not know, but for my part I
+feel that virtue, like religion, like the longing never to
+die&mdash;and all these are fundamentally the same thing&mdash;is
+the fruit of passion.</p>
+
+<p>But, I shall be asked, What then is passion? I do
+not know, or rather, I know full well, because I feel it,
+and since I feel it there is no need for me to define it to
+myself. Nay, more; I fear that if I were to arrive at a
+definition of it, I should cease to feel it and to possess
+it. Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates
+its object. It is easier for the fire to find something to
+burn than for something combustible to find the fire.</p>
+
+<p>That this may appear empty and sophistical well I
+know. And I shall also be told that there is the science
+of passion and the passion of science, and that it is in the
+moral sphere that reason and life unite together.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know, I do not know, I do not know....
+And perhaps I may be saying fundamentally the same
+thing, although more confusedly, that my imaginary
+adversaries say, only more clearly, more definitely, and
+more rationally, those adversaries whom I imagine in
+order that I may have someone to fight. I do not know,
+I do not know.... But what they say freezes me and
+sounds to me as though it proceeded from emptiness of
+feeling.</p>
+
+<p>And, returning to our former question, Is virtue knowledge?&mdash;Is
+knowledge virtue? For they are two distinct
+questions. Virtue may be a science, the science of
+<a name="Page_293" id="Page_293" />acting rightly, without every other science being therefore
+virtue. The virtue of Machiavelli is a science, and
+it cannot be said that his <i>virtu</i> is always moral virtue
+It is well known, moreover, that the cleverest and the
+most learned men are not the best.</p>
+
+<p>No, no, no! Physiology does not teach us how to
+digest, nor logic how to discourse, nor esthetics how to
+feel beauty or express it, nor ethics how to be good. And
+indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be hypocrites;
+for pedantry, whether it be the pedantry of logic,
+or of esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but
+hypocrisy.</p>
+
+<p>Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but
+it does not make either heroes or saints. Perhaps the
+saint is he who does good not for good's sake, but for
+God's sake, for the sake of eternalization.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, on the other hand, culture, or as I should say
+Culture&mdash;oh, this culture!&mdash;which is primarily the work
+of philosophers and men of science, is a thing which
+neither heroes nor saints have had any share in the
+making of. For saints have concerned themselves very
+little with the progress of human culture; they have concerned
+themselves rather with the salvation of the
+individual souls of those amongst whom they lived. Of
+what account in the history of human culture is our
+San Juan de la Cruz, for example&mdash;that fiery little monk,
+as culture, in perhaps somewhat uncultured phrase, has
+called him&mdash;compared with Descartes?</p>
+
+<p>All those saints, burning with religious charity towards
+their neighbours, hungering for their own and others'
+eternalization, who went about burning hearts, inquisitors,
+it may be&mdash;what have all those saints done for the
+progress of the science of ethics? Did any of them discover
+the categorical imperative, like the old bachelor of
+K&ouml;nigsberg, who, if he was not a saint, deserved to
+be one?</p>
+
+<p>The son of a famous professor of ethics, one who
+<a name="Page_294" id="Page_294" />scarcely ever opened his lips without mentioning the
+categorical imperative, was lamenting to me one day the
+fact that he lived in a desolating dryness of spirit, in a
+state of inward emptiness. And I was constrained to
+answer him thus: &quot;My friend, your father had a subterranean
+river flowing through his spirit, a fresh current
+fed by the beliefs of his early childhood, by hopes
+in the beyond; and while he thought that he was nourishing
+his soul with this categorical imperative or something
+of that sort, he was in reality nourishing it with
+those waters which had their spring in his childish days.
+And it may be that to you he has given the flower of his
+spirit, his rational doctrines of ethics, but not the root,
+not the subterranean source, not the irrational substratum.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>How was it that Krausism took root here in Spain,
+while Kantism and Hegelianism did not, although the
+two latter systems are much more profound, morally and
+philosophically, than the first? Because in transplanting
+the first, its roots were transplanted with it. The
+philosophical thought of a people or a period is, as it
+were, the flower, the thing that is external and above
+ground; but this flower, or fruit if you prefer it, draws
+its sap from the root of the plant, and this root, which is
+in and under the ground, is the religious sense. The
+philosophical thought of Kant, the supreme flower of the
+mental evolution of the Germanic people, has its roots in
+the religious feeling of Luther, and it is not possible for
+Kantism, especially the practical part of it, to take root
+and bring forth flower and fruit in peoples who have not
+undergone the experience of the Reformation and who
+perhaps were incapable of experiencing it. Kantism
+is Protestant, and we Spaniards are fundamentally
+Catholic. And if Krause struck some roots here&mdash;more
+numerous and more permanent than is commonly supposed&mdash;it
+is because Krause had roots in pietism, and
+pietism, as Ritschl has demonstrated in his <i>Geschichte
+<a name="Page_295" id="Page_295" />des Pietismus</i>, has specifically Catholic roots and may
+be described as the irruption, or rather the persistence,
+of Catholic mysticism in the heart of Protestant
+rationalism. And this explains why not a few Catholic
+thinkers in Spain became followers of Krause.</p>
+
+<p>And since we Spaniards are Catholic&mdash;whether we
+know it or not, and whether we like it or not&mdash;and
+although some of us may claim to be rationalists or
+atheists, perhaps the greatest service we can render to
+the cause of culture, and of what is of more value than
+culture, religiousness&mdash;if indeed they are not the same
+thing&mdash;is in endeavouring to formulate clearly to ourselves
+this subconscious, social, or popular Catholicism
+of ours. And that is what I have attempted to do in this
+work.</p>
+
+<p>What I call the tragic sense of life in men and peoples
+is at any rate our tragic sense of life, that of Spaniards
+and the Spanish people, as it is reflected in my consciousness,
+which is a Spanish consciousness, made in Spain.
+And this tragic sense of life is essentially the Catholic
+sense of it, for Catholicism, and above all popular
+Catholicism, is tragic. The people abhors comedy.
+When Pilate&mdash;the type of the refined gentleman, the
+superior person, the esthete, the rationalist if you like&mdash;proposes
+to give the people comedy and mockingly presents
+Christ to them, saying, &quot;Behold the man!&quot; the
+people mutinies and shouts &quot;Crucify him! Crucify
+him!&quot; The people does not want comedy but tragedy.
+And that which Dante, the great Catholic, called the
+Divine Comedy, is the most tragical tragedy that has
+ever been written.</p>
+
+<p>And as I have endeavoured in these essays to exhibit
+the soul of a Spaniard, and therewithal the Spanish soul,
+I have curtailed the number of quotations from Spanish
+writers, while scattering with perhaps too lavish a hand
+those from the writers of other countries. For all human
+souls are brother-souls.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296" />And there is one figure, a comically tragic figure, a
+figure in which is revealed all that is profoundly tragic
+in the human comedy, the figure of Our Lord Don
+Quixote, the Spanish Christ, who resumes and includes
+in himself the immortal soul of my people. Perhaps
+the passion and death of the Knight of the Sorrowful
+Countenance is the passion and death of the Spanish
+people, its death and resurrection. And there is a
+Quixotesque philosophy and even a Quixotesque metaphysic,
+there is a Quixotesque logic, and also a
+Quixotesque ethic and a Quixotesque religious sense&mdash;the
+religious sense of Spanish Catholicism. This is the
+philosophy, this is the logic, this is the ethic, this is the
+religious sense, that I have endeavoured to outline, to
+suggest rather than to develop, in this work. To develop
+it rationally, no; the Quixotesque madness does not
+submit to scientific logic.</p>
+
+<p>And now, before concluding and bidding my readers
+farewell, it remains for me to speak of the r&ocirc;le that is
+reserved for Don Quixote in the modern European tragi-comedy.</p>
+
+<p>Let us see, in the next and last essay, what this may be.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54" /><a href="#FNanchor_54_54">[54]</a> Act II., Scene 4: &quot;I am dreaming and I wish to act rightly, for good
+deeds are not lost, though they be wrought in dreams.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55" /><a href="#FNanchor_55_55">[55]</a> Act III., Scene 10: &quot;Let us aim at the eternal, the glory that does not
+wane, where bliss slumbers not and where greatness does not repose.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56" /><a href="#FNanchor_56_56">[56]</a> &quot;Se <i>les</i> muera,&quot; y no s&oacute;lo &quot;se muera.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57" /><a href="#FNanchor_57_57">[57]</a> <i>Trabalhos de Jesus</i>, part i.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58" /><a href="#FNanchor_58_58">[58]</a> De Musset.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CONCLUSION" id="CONCLUSION" /><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297" />CONCLUSION</h2>
+
+<h2>DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY
+EUROPEAN TRAGI-COMEDY</h2>
+
+<blockquote><p>&quot;A voice crying in the wilderness!&quot;&mdash;ISA. xl. 3.</p></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>Need is that I bring to a conclusion, for the present at
+any rate, these essays that threaten to become like a tale
+that has no ending. They have gone straight from my
+hands to the press in the form of a kind of improvization
+upon notes collected during a number of years, and in
+writing each essay I have not had before me any of those
+that preceded it. And thus they will go forth full of
+inward contradictions&mdash;apparent contradictions, at any
+rate&mdash;like life and like me myself.</p>
+
+<p>My sin, if any, has been that I have embellished them
+to excess with foreign quotations, many of which will
+appear to have been dragged in with a certain degree of
+violence. But I will explain this another time.</p>
+
+<p>A few years after Our Lord Don Quixote had journeyed
+through Spain, Jacob B&ouml;hme declared in his
+<i>Aurora</i> (chap xi., &sect; 142) that he did not write a story or
+history related to him by others, but that he himself had
+had to stand in the battle, which he found to be full of
+heavy strivings, and wherein he was often struck down
+to the ground like all other men; and a little further on
+(&sect; 152) he adds: &quot;Although I must become a spectacle
+of scorn to the world and the devil, yet my hope is in
+God concerning the life to come; in Him will I venture
+to hazard it and not resist or strive against the Spirit.
+Amen.&quot; And like this Quixote of the German intellectual
+world, neither will I resist the Spirit.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298" />And therefore I cry with the voice of one crying in the
+wilderness, and I send forth my cry from this University
+of Salamanca, a University that arrogantly styled itself
+<i>omnium scientiarum princeps</i>, and which Carlyle called
+a stronghold of ignorance and which a French man of
+letters recently called a phantom University; I send it
+forth from this Spain&mdash;&quot;the land of dreams that become
+realities, the rampart of Europe, the home of the
+knightly ideal,&quot; to quote from a letter which the American
+poet Archer M. Huntington sent me the other day&mdash;from
+this Spain which was the head and front of the
+Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century. And
+well they repay her for it!</p>
+
+<p>In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence
+of Catholicism. And the chief factors in <i>de-essentializing</i>
+it&mdash;that is, in de-Catholicizing Europe&mdash;have been
+the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution,
+which for the ideal of an eternal, ultra-terrestrial life,
+have substituted the ideal of progress, of reason, of
+science, or, rather, of Science with the capital letter.
+And last of all, the dominant ideal of to-day, comes
+Culture.</p>
+
+<p>And in the second half of the nineteenth century, an
+age essentially unphilosophical and technical, dominated
+by a myopic specialism and by historical materialism,
+this ideal took a practical form, not so much in the
+popularization as in the vulgarization of science&mdash;or,
+rather, of pseudo-science&mdash;venting itself in a flood of
+cheap, popular, and propagandist literature. Science
+sought to popularize itself as if it were its function to
+come down to the people and subserve their passions,
+and not the duty of the people to rise to science and
+through science to rise to higher heights, to new and
+profounder aspirations.</p>
+
+<p>All this led Bruneti&egrave;re to proclaim the bankruptcy of
+science, and this science&mdash;if you like to call it science&mdash;did
+in effect become bankrupt. And as it failed to
+<a name="Page_299" id="Page_299" />satisfy, men continued their quest for happiness, but
+without finding it, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or
+in power, or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good
+conscience, or in culture. And the result was pessimism.</p>
+
+<p>Neither did the gospel of progress satisfy. What end
+did progress serve? Man would not accommodate himself
+to rationalism; the <i>Kulturkampf</i> did not suffice him;
+he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I call
+the final finality is the real <i>&#959;&#957;&#964;&#969;&#962; &#959;&#957;</i>. And the famous
+<i>maladie du si&egrave;cle</i>, which announced itself in Rousseau
+and was exhibited more plainly in S&eacute;nancour's <i>Obermann</i>
+than in any other character, neither was nor is
+anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of
+the soul, in the human finality of the Universe.</p>
+
+<p>The truest symbol of it is to be found in a creation of
+fiction, Dr. Faustus.</p>
+
+<p>This immortal Dr. Faustus, the product of the
+Renaissance and the Reformation, first comes into our
+ken at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when
+in 1604 he is introduced to us by Christopher Marlowe.
+This is the same character that Goethe was to rediscover
+two centuries later, although in certain respects the
+earlier Faust was the fresher and more spontaneous.
+And side by side with him Mephistopheles appears, of
+whom Faust asks: &quot;What good will my soul do thy
+lord?&quot; &quot;Enlarge his kingdom,&quot; Mephistopheles replies.
+&quot;Is that the reason why he tempts us thus?&quot;
+the Doctor asks again, and the evil spirit answers:
+&quot;<i>Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris</i>,&quot; which,
+mistranslated into Romance, is the equivalent of our
+proverb&mdash;&quot;The misfortune of many is the consolation
+of fools.&quot; &quot;Where we are is hell, and where hell
+is there must we ever be,&quot; Mephistopheles continues,
+to which Faust answers that he thinks hell's a fable
+and asks him who made the world. And finally
+this tragic Doctor, tortured with our torture, meets
+Helen, who, although no doubt Marlowe never sus<a name="Page_300" id="Page_300" />pected
+it, is none other than renascent Culture. And in
+Marlowe's <i>Faust</i> there is a scene that is worth the whole
+of the second part of the <i>Faust</i> of Goethe. Faust says
+to Helen: &quot;Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a
+kiss&quot;&mdash;and he kisses her&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div>Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!</div>
+<div>Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.</div>
+<div>Here will I dwell, for Helen is in these lips,</div>
+<div>And all is dross that is not Helena.</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Give me my soul again!&mdash;the cry of Faust, the Doctor,
+when, after having kissed Helen, he is about to be lost
+eternally. For the primitive Faust has no ingenuous
+Margaret to save him. This idea of his salvation was
+the invention of Goethe. And is there not a Faust
+whom we all know, our own Faust? This Faust has
+studied Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine, and even
+Theology, only to find that we can know nothing, and
+he has sought escape in the open country (<i>hinaus ins
+weite Land</i>) and has encountered Mephistopheles, the
+embodiment of that force which, ever willing evil, ever
+achieves good in its own despite. This Faust has been
+led by Mephistopheles to the arms of Margaret, child
+of the simple-hearted people, she whom Faust, the overwise,
+had lost. And thanks to her&mdash;for she gave herself
+to him&mdash;this Faust is saved, redeemed by the people that
+believes with a simple faith. But there was a second
+part, for that Faust was the anecdotical Faust and not
+the categorical Faust of Goethe, and he gave himself
+again to Culture, to Helen, and begot Euphorion upon
+her, and everything ends among mystical choruses with
+the discovery of the eternal feminine. Poor Euphorion!</p>
+
+<p>And this Helen is the spouse of the fair Menelaus, the
+Helen whom Paris bore away, who was the cause of the
+war of Troy, and of whom the ancient Trojans said that
+no one should be incensed because men fought for a
+woman who bore so terrible a likeness to the immortal
+<a name="Page_301" id="Page_301" />gods. But I rather think that Faust's Helen was that
+other Helen who accompanied Simon Magus, and whom
+he declared to be the divine wisdom. And Faust can
+say to her: Give me my soul again!</p>
+
+<p>For Helen with her kisses takes away our soul. And
+what we long for and have need of is soul&mdash;soul of bulk
+and substance.</p>
+
+<p>But the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution
+came, bringing Helen to us, or, rather, urged on
+by Helen, and now they talk to us about Culture and
+Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Europe! This idea of Europe, primarily and immediately
+of geographical significance, has been converted
+for us by some magical process into a kind of metaphysical
+category. Who can say to-day&mdash;in Spain, at
+any rate&mdash;what Europe is? I only know that it is a
+shibboleth (<i>vide</i> my <i>Tres Ensayos</i>). And when I proceed
+to examine what it is that our Europeanizers call
+Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its
+periphery remains outside of it&mdash;Spain, of course, and
+also England, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia&mdash;and hence
+it is reduced to the central portion, Franco-Germany,
+with its annexes and dependencies.</p>
+
+<p>All this is the consequence, I repeat, of the Renaissance
+and the Reformation, which, although apparently
+they lived in a state of internecine war, were twin-brothers.
+The Italians of the Renaissance were all of
+them Socinians; the humanists, with Erasmus at their
+head, regarded Luther, the German monk, as a barbarian,
+who derived his driving force from the cloister,
+as did Bruno and Campanella. But this barbarian was
+their twin-brother, and though their antagonist he was
+also the antagonist of the common enemy. All this, I
+say, is due to the Renaissance and the Reformation, and
+to what was the offspring of these two, the Revolution,
+and to them we owe also a new Inquisition, that of
+science or culture, which turns against those who refuse
+<a name="Page_302" id="Page_302" />to submit to its orthodoxy the weapons of ridicule and
+contempt.</p>
+
+<p>When Galileo sent his treatise on the earth's motion
+to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he told him that it was
+meet that that which the higher authorities had determined
+should be believed and obeyed, and that he considered
+his treatise &quot;as poetry or as a dream, and as
+such I desire your highness to receive it.&quot; And at
+other times he calls it a &quot;chimera&quot; or a &quot;mathematical
+caprice.&quot; And in the same way in these essays, for
+fear also&mdash;why not confess it?&mdash;of the Inquisition, of
+the modern, the scientific, Inquisition, I offer as a
+poetry, dream, chimera, mystical caprice, that which
+springs from what is deepest in me. And I say with
+Galileo, <i>Eppur si muove!</i> But is it only because of
+this fear? Ah, no! for there is another, more tragic
+Inquisition, and that is the Inquisition which the modern
+man, the man of culture, the European&mdash;and such am I,
+whether I will or not&mdash;carries within him. There is a
+more terrible ridicule, and that is the ridicule with which
+a man contemplates his own self. It is my reason that
+laughs at my faith and despises it.</p>
+
+<p>And it is here that I must betake me to my Lord Don
+Quixote in order that I may learn of him how to confront
+ridicule and overcome it, and a ridicule which
+perhaps&mdash;who knows?&mdash;he never knew.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, yes&mdash;how shall my reason not smile at these
+dilettantesque, would-be mystical, pseudo-philosophical
+interpretations, in which there is anything rather than
+patient study and&mdash;shall I say scientific?&mdash;objectivity
+and method? And nevertheless ... <i>eppur si muove!</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Eppur si muove!</i> And I take refuge in dilettantism,
+in what a pedant would call <i>demi-mondaine</i> philosophy,
+as a shelter against the pedantry of specialists, against
+the philosophy of the professional philosophers. And
+who knows?... Progress usually comes from the
+barbarian, and there is nothing more stagnant than the
+<a name="Page_303" id="Page_303" />philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the
+theologians.</p>
+
+<p>Let them talk to us of Europe! The civilization of
+Thibet is parallel with ours, and men who disappear like
+ourselves have lived and are living by it. And over all
+civilizations there hovers the shadow of Ecclesiastes,
+with his admonition, &quot;How dieth the wise man?&mdash;as
+the fool&quot; (ii. 16).</p>
+
+<p>Among the people of my country there is an admirable
+reply to the customary interrogation, &quot;How are you?&quot;<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59" /><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a>
+and it is &quot;Living.&quot; And that is the truth&mdash;we are
+living, and living as much as all the rest. What can a
+man ask for more? And who does not recollect the
+verse?&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class='stanza'><div><i>Coda vez que considero</i></div>
+<div><i>que me tengo de morir,</i></div>
+<div><i>tiendo la capa en el suelo</i></div>
+<div><i>y no me harto de dormir.</i><a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60" /><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>But no, not sleeping, but dreaming&mdash;dreaming life,
+since life is a dream.</p>
+
+<p>Among us Spaniards another phrase has very rapidly
+passed into current usage, the expression &quot;It's a question
+of passing the time,&quot; or &quot;killing the time.&quot; And,
+in fact, we make time in order to kill it. But there is
+something that has always preoccupied us as much as
+or more than passing the time&mdash;a formula which denotes
+an esthetical attitude&mdash;and that is, gaining eternity,
+which is the formula of the religious attitude. The
+truth is, we leap from the esthetic and the economic to
+the religious, passing over the logical and the ethical;
+we jump from art to religion.</p>
+
+<p>One of our younger novelists, Ram&oacute;n P&eacute;rez de
+Ayala, in his recent novel, <i>La Pata de la Raposa</i>, has
+told us that the idea of death is the trap, and spirit
+<a name="Page_304" id="Page_304" />the fox or the wary virtue with which to circumvent the
+ambushes set by fatality, and he continues: &quot;Caught
+in the trap, weak men and weak peoples lie prone on the
+ground ...; to robust spirits and strong peoples the
+rude shock of danger gives clear-sightedness; they
+quickly penetrate into the heart of the immeasurable
+beauty of life, and renouncing for ever their original
+hastiness and folly, emerge from the trap with muscles
+taut for action and with the soul's vigour, power, and
+efficiency increased a hundredfold.&quot; But let us see;
+weak men ... weak peoples ... robust spirits ... strong
+peoples ... what does all this mean? I do not
+know. What I think I know is that some individuals
+and peoples have not yet really thought about death and
+immortality, have not felt them, and that others have
+ceased to think about them, or rather ceased to feel them.
+And the fact that they have never passed through the
+religious period is not, I think, a matter for either men
+or peoples to boast about.</p>
+
+<p>The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to
+write about, and there are, indeed, some who resign
+themselves to it and accept it as it is, and even some who
+would persuade us that there is no problem in the
+&quot;trap.&quot; But it has been said by Calder&oacute;n that &quot;to
+seek to persuade a man that the misfortunes which he
+suffers are not misfortunes, does not console him for
+them, but is another misfortune in addition.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61" /><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> And,
+furthermore, &quot;only the heart can speak to the heart,&quot;
+as Fray Diego de Estella said (<i>Vanidad del Mundo</i>,
+cap. xxi.).</p>
+
+<p>A short time ago a reply that I made to those who
+reproached us Spaniards for our scientific incapacity
+appeared to scandalize some people. After having remarked
+<a name="Page_305" id="Page_305" />that the electric light and the steam engine function
+here in Spain just as well as in the countries where
+they were invented, and that we make use of logarithms
+as much as they do in the country where the idea of them
+was first conceived, I exclaimed, &quot;Let others invent!&quot;&mdash;a
+paradoxical expression which I do not retract. We
+Spaniards ought to appropriate to ourselves some of
+those sage counsels which Count Joseph de Maistre gave
+to the Russians, a people not unlike ourselves. In his
+admirable letters to Count Rasoumowski on public
+education in Russia, he said that a nation should not
+think the worse of itself because it was not made for
+science; that the Romans had no understanding of the
+arts, neither did they possess a mathematician, which,
+however, did not prevent them from playing their part
+in the world; and in particular we should take to heart
+everything that he said about that crowd of arrogant
+sciolists who idolize the tastes, the fashions, and the
+languages of foreign countries, and are ever ready to
+pull down whatever they despise&mdash;and they despise
+everything.</p>
+
+<p>We have not the scientific spirit? And what of that,
+if we have some other spirit? And who can tell if the
+spirit that we have is or is not compatible with the
+scientific spirit?</p>
+
+<p>But in saying &quot;Let others invent!&quot; I did not mean to
+imply that we must be content with playing a passive
+r&ocirc;le. No. For them their science, by which we shall
+profit; for us, our own work. It is not enough to be on
+the defensive, we must attack.</p>
+
+<p>But we must attack wisely and cautiously. Reason
+must be our weapon. It is the weapon even of the fool.
+Our sublime fool and our exemplar, Don Quixote, after
+he had destroyed with two strokes of his sword that
+pasteboard visor &quot;which he had fitted to his head-piece,
+made it anew, placing certain iron bars within it, in such
+a manner that he rested satisfied with its solidity, and
+without wishing to make a second trial of it, he deputed
+<a name="Page_306" id="Page_306" />and held it in estimation of a most excellent visor.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62" /><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a> And
+with the pasteboard visor on his head he made himself
+immortal&mdash;that is to say, he made himself ridiculous.
+For it was by making himself ridiculous that Don
+Quixote achieved his immortality.</p>
+
+<p>And there are so many ways of making ourselves
+ridiculous I ... Cournot said <i>(Trait&eacute; de l'encha&icirc;nement
+des id&eacute;es fondamentales</i>, etc., &sect; 510): &quot;It is best
+not to speak to either princes or peoples of the probabilities
+of death; princes will punish this temerity with disgrace;
+the public will revenge itself with ridicule.&quot; True,
+and therefore it is said that we must live as the age lives.
+<i>Corrumpere et corrumpi s&aelig;culum vocatur</i> (Tacitus:
+<i>Germania</i> 19).</p>
+
+<p>It is necessary to know how to make ourselves ridiculous,
+and not only to others but to ourselves. And more
+than ever to-day, when there is so much chatter about
+our backwardness compared with other civilized peoples,
+to-day when a parcel of shallow-brained critics say that
+we have had no science, no art, no philosophy, no Renaissance,
+(of this we had perhaps too much), no anything,
+these same critics being ignorant of our real
+history, a history that remains yet to be written, the first
+task being to undo the web of calumniation and protest
+that has been woven around it.</p>
+
+<p>Carducci, the author of the phrase about the <i>contorcimenti
+dell'affannosa grandiosit&aacute; spagnola</i>, has
+written (in <i>Mosche Cochiere</i>) that &quot;even Spain, which
+never attained the hegemony of the world of thought,
+had her Cervantes.&quot; But was Cervantes a solitary and
+isolated phenomenon, without roots, without ancestry,
+without a foundation? That an Italian rationalist, remembering
+that it was Spain that reacted against the
+Renaissance in his country, should say that Spain <i>non
+ebbe egemonia mai di pensiero</i> is, however, readily comprehended.
+Was there no importance, was there nothing
+<a name="Page_307" id="Page_307" />akin to cultural hegemony, in the Counter-Reformation,
+of which Spain was the champion, and which in point of
+fact began with the sack of Rome by the Spaniards, a
+providential chastisement of the city of the pagan popes
+of the pagan Renaissance? Apart from the question as
+to whether the Counter-Reformation was good or bad,
+was there nothing akin to hegemony in Loyola or the
+Council of Trent? Previous to this Council, Italy
+witnessed a nefarious and unnatural union between
+Christianity and Paganism, or rather, between immortalism
+and mortalism, a union to which even some
+of the Popes themselves consented in their souls;
+theological error was philosophical truth, and all difficulties
+were solved by the accommodating formula
+<i>salva fide</i>. But it was otherwise after the Council; after
+the Council came the open and avowed struggle between
+reason and faith, science and religion. And does not the
+fact that this change was brought about, thanks principally
+to Spanish obstinacy, point to something akin to
+hegemony?</p>
+
+<p>Without the Counter-Reformation, would the Reformation
+have followed the course that it did actually follow?
+Without the Counter-Reformation might not the Reformation,
+deprived of the support of pietism, have perished in
+the gross rationalism of the <i>Aufkl&auml;rung</i>, of the age of
+Enlightenment? Would nothing have been changed
+had there been no Charles I., no Philip II., our great
+Philip?</p>
+
+<p>A negative achievement, it will be said. But what is
+that? What is negative? what is positive? At what
+point in time&mdash;a line always continuing in the same
+direction, from the past to the future&mdash;does the zero
+occur which denotes the boundary between the positive
+and the negative? Spain, which is said to be the land of
+knights and rogues&mdash;and all of them rogues&mdash;has been
+the country most slandered by history precisely because
+it championed the Counter-Reformation. And because
+<a name="Page_308" id="Page_308" />its arrogance has prevented it from stepping down into
+the public forum, into the world's vanity fair, and publishing
+its own justification.</p>
+
+<p>Let us leave on one side Spain's eight centuries of
+warfare against the Moors, during which she defended
+Europe from Mohammedanism, her work of internal
+unification, her discovery of America and the Indies&mdash;for
+this was the achievement of Spain and Portugal, and
+not of Columbus and Vasco da Gama&mdash;let us leave all
+this, and more than this, on one side, and it is not a little
+thing. Is it not a cultural achievement to have created
+a score of nations, reserving nothing for herself, and to
+have begotten, as the Conquistadores did, free men on
+poor Indian slaves? Apart from all this, does our
+mysticism count for nothing in the world of thought?
+Perhaps the peoples whose souls Helen will ravish away
+with her kisses may some day have to return to this
+mysticism to find their souls again.</p>
+
+<p>But, as everybody knows, Culture is composed of
+ideas and only of ideas, and man is only Culture's instrument.
+Man for the idea, and not the idea for man; the
+substance for the shadow. The end of man is to create
+science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be
+handed back to God in order, as I wrote years ago in my
+novel, <i>Amor y Pedagogia</i>. Man, apparently, is not
+even an idea. And at the end of all, the human race will
+fall exhausted at the foot of a pile of libraries&mdash;whole
+woods rased to the ground to provide the paper that is
+stored away in them&mdash;museums, machines, factories,
+laboratories ... in order to bequeath them&mdash;to whom?
+For God will surely not accept them.</p>
+
+<p>That horrible regenerationist literature, almost all of
+it an imposture, which the loss of our last American
+colonies provoked, led us into the pedantry of extolling
+persevering and silent effort&mdash;and this with great
+vociferation, vociferating silence&mdash;of extolling prudence,
+exactitude, moderation, spiritual fortitude, synteresis,
+<a name="Page_309" id="Page_309" />equanimity, the social virtues, and the chiefest advocates
+of them were those of us who lacked them most. Almost
+all of us Spaniards fell into this ridiculous mode of literature,
+some more and some less. And so it befell that
+that arch-Spaniard Joaqu&iacute;n Costa, one of the least
+European spirits we ever had, invented his famous saying
+that we must Europeanize Spain, and, while proclaiming
+that we must lock up the sepulchre of the Cid
+with a sevenfold lock, Cid-like urged us to&mdash;conquer
+Africa! And I myself uttered the cry, &quot;Down with
+Don Quixote!&quot; and from this blasphemy, which meant
+the very opposite of what it said&mdash;such was the fashion
+of the hour&mdash;sprang my <i>Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho</i>
+and my cult of Quixotism as the national religion.</p>
+
+<p>I wrote that book in order to rethink <i>Don Quixote</i> in
+opposition to the Cervantists and erudite persons, in
+order to make a living work of what was and still is for
+the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to me
+what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it
+and what he actually did put into it? What is living in
+it is what I myself discover in it, whether Cervantes put
+it there or not, what I myself put into and under and
+over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to hunt
+down our philosophy in it.</p>
+
+<p>For the conviction continually grows upon me that
+our philosophy, the Spanish philosophy, is liquescent
+and diffused in our literature, in our life, in our action,
+in our mysticism, above all, and not in philosophical
+systems. It is concrete. And is there not perhaps as
+much philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in
+Hegel? The poetry of Jorge Manrique, the Romancero,
+<i>Don Quijote</i>, <i>La Vida es Sue&ntilde;o</i>, the <i>Subida al Monte
+Carmelo</i>, imply an intuition of the world and a concept
+of life (<i>Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht</i>). And it
+was difficult for this philosophy of ours to formulate itself
+in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that
+was aphilosophical, positivist, technicist, devoted to
+<a name="Page_310" id="Page_310" />pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially
+materialist and pessimist.</p>
+
+<p>Our language itself, like every cultured language, contains
+within itself an implicit philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>A language, in effect, is a potential philosophy.
+Platonism is the Greek language which discourses in
+Plato, unfolding its secular metaphors; scholasticism is
+the philosophy of the dead Latin of the Middle Ages
+wrestling with the popular tongues; the French language
+discourses in Descartes, the German in Kant and
+in Hegel, and the English in Hume and in Stuart Mill.
+For the truth is that the logical starting-point of all
+philosophical speculation is not the I, neither is it representation
+(<i>Vorstellung</i>), nor the world as it presents itself
+immediately to the senses; but it is mediate or historical
+representation, humanly elaborated and such as it is
+given to us principally in the language by means of
+which we know the world; it is not psychical but spiritual
+representation. When we think, we are obliged to set
+out, whether we know it not and whether we will or not,
+from what has been thought by others who came before
+us and who environ us. Thought is an inheritance.
+Kant thought in German, and into German he translated
+Hume and Rousseau, who thought in English and
+French respectively. And did not Spinoza think in
+Judeo-Portuguese, obstructed by and contending with
+Dutch?</p>
+
+<p>Thought rests upon prejudgements, and prejudgements
+pass into language. To language Bacon rightly
+ascribed not a few of the errors of the <i>idola fori</i>. But is
+it possible to philosophize in pure algebra or even in
+Esperanto? In order to see the result of such an
+attempt one has only to read the work of Avenarius on
+the criticism of pure experience (<i>reine Erfahrung</i>), of this
+prehuman or inhuman experience. And even Avenarius,
+who was obliged to invent a language, invented one
+that was based upon the Latin tradition, with roots which
+<a name="Page_311" id="Page_311" />carry in their metaphorical implications a content of
+impure experience, of human social experience.</p>
+
+<p>All philosophy is, therefore, at bottom philology.
+And philology, with its great and fruitful law of
+analogical formations, opens wide the door to chance, to
+the irrational, to the absolutely incommensurable. History
+is not mathematics, neither is philosophy. And
+how many philosophical ideas are not strictly owing to
+something akin to rhyme, to the necessity of rightly
+placing a consonant! In Kant himself there is a great
+deal of this, of esthetic symmetry, rhyme.</p>
+
+<p>Representation is, therefore, like language, like reason
+itself&mdash;which is simply internal language&mdash;a social and
+racial product, and race, the blood of the spirit, is language,
+as Oliver Wendell Holmes has said, and as I
+have often repeated.</p>
+
+<p>It was in Athens and with Socrates that our Western
+philosophy first became mature, conscious of itself, and
+it arrived at this consciousness by means of the dialogue,
+of social conversation. And it is profoundly significant
+that the doctrine of innate ideas, of the objective and
+normative value of ideas, of what Scholasticism afterwards
+knew as Realism, should have formulated itself in
+dialogues. And these ideas, which constitute reality,
+are names, as Nominalism showed. Not that they may
+not be more than names (<i>flatus vocis</i>), but that they are
+nothing less than names. Language is that which gives
+us reality, and not as a mere vehicle of reality, but as
+its true flesh, of which all the rest, dumb or inarticulate
+representation, is merely the skeleton. And thus logic
+operates upon esthetics, the concept upon the expression,
+upon the word, and not upon the brute perception.</p>
+
+<p>And this is true even in the matter of love. Love
+does not discover that it is love until it speaks, until it
+says, I love thee! In Stendhal's novel, <i>La Chartreuse
+de Parme</i>, it is with a very profound intuition that Count
+Mosca, furious with jealousy because of the love which
+<a name="Page_312" id="Page_312" />he believes unites the Duchess of Sanseverina with his
+nephew Fabrice, is made to say, &quot;I must be calm; if my
+manner is violent the duchess, simply because her vanity
+is piqued, is capable of following Belgirate, and then,
+during the journey, chance may lead to a word which
+will give a name to the feelings they bear towards each
+other, and thereupon in a moment all the consequences
+will follow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Even so&mdash;all things were made by the word, and the
+word was in the beginning.</p>
+
+<p>Thought, reason&mdash;that is, living language&mdash;is an
+inheritance, and the solitary thinker of Aben Tofail, the
+Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as absurd as the ego
+of Descartes. The real and concrete truth, not the
+methodical and ideal, is: <i>homo sum, ergo cogito</i>. To
+feel oneself a man is more immediate than to think. But,
+on the other hand, History, the process of culture, finds
+its perfection and complete effectivity only in the individual;
+the end of History and Humanity is man, each
+man, each individual. <i>Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito
+ut sim Michael de Unamuno</i>. The individual is the end
+of the Universe.</p>
+
+<p>And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the
+individual is the end of the Universe. The introspective
+individuality of the Spaniard was pointed out by Martin
+A.S. Hume in a passage in <i>The Spanish People</i>,<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63" /><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a> upon
+which I commented in an essay published in <i>La Espa&ntilde;a
+Moderna</i>.<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64" /><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a></p>
+
+<p>And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism
+which has not permitted the growth on Spanish soil
+of strictly philosophical&mdash;or, rather, metaphysical&mdash;systems.
+And this in spite of Su&aacute;rez, whose formal
+subtilties do not merit the name of philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Our metaphysics, if we can be said to possess such a
+thing, has been metanthropics, and our metaphysicians
+<a name="Page_313" id="Page_313" />have been philologists&mdash;or, rather, humanists&mdash;in the
+most comprehensive sense of the term.</p>
+
+<p>Men&eacute;ndez de Pelayo, as Benedetto Croce very truly
+said (<i>Estetica</i>, bibliographical appendix), was inclined
+towards metaphysical idealism, but he appeared to
+wish to take something from other systems, even from
+empirical theories. For this reason Croce considers that
+his work (referring to his <i>Historia de las ideas est&eacute;ticas
+de Espa&ntilde;a</i>) suffers from a certain uncertainty, from the
+theoretical point of view of its author, Men&eacute;ndez de
+Pelayo, which was that of a perfervid Spanish humanist,
+who, not wishing to disown the Renaissance, invented
+what he called Vivism, the philosophy of Luis Vives,
+and perhaps for no other reason than because he himself,
+like Vives, was an eclectic Spaniard of the Renaissance.
+And it is true that Men&eacute;ndez de Pelayo, whose
+philosophy is certainly all uncertainty, educated in
+Barcelona in the timidities of the Scottish philosophy as
+it had been imported into the Catalan spirit&mdash;that creeping
+philosophy of common sense, which was anxious not
+to compromise itself and yet was all compromise, and
+which is so well exemplified in Balmes&mdash;always shunned
+all strenuous inward combat and formed his consciousness
+upon compromises.</p>
+
+<p>Angel Ganivet, a man all divination and instinct, was
+more happily inspired, in my opinion, when he proclaimed
+that the Spanish philosophy was that of Seneca,
+the pagan Stoic of Cordoba, whom not a few Christians
+regarded as one of themselves, a philosophy lacking in
+originality of thought but speaking with great dignity of
+tone and accent. His accent was a Spanish, Latino-African
+accent, not Hellenic, and there are echoes of him
+in Tertullian&mdash;Spanish, too, at heart&mdash;who believed in
+the corporal and substantial nature of God and the soul,
+and who was a kind of Don Quixote in the world of
+Christian thought in the second century.</p>
+
+<p>But perhaps we must look for the hero of Spanish
+<a name="Page_314" id="Page_314" />thought, not in any actual flesh-and-bone philosopher,
+but in a creation of fiction, a man of action, who is more
+real than all the philosophers&mdash;Don Quixote. There is
+undoubtedly a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also
+a Quixotic philosophy. May it not perhaps be that the
+philosophy of the Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers,
+of Loyola, and above all, in the order of
+abstract but deeply felt thought, that of our mystics,
+was, in its essence, none other than this? What was
+the mysticism of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry
+of the heart in the divine warfare?</p>
+
+<p>And the philosophy of Don Quixote cannot strictly be
+called idealism; he did not fight for ideas. It was of the
+spiritual order; he fought for the spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Imagine Don Quixote turning his heart to religious
+speculation&mdash;as he himself once dreamed of doing when
+he met those images in bas-relief which certain peasants
+were carrying to set up in the retablo of their village
+church<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65" /><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a>&mdash;imagine Don Quixote given up to meditation
+upon eternal truths, and see him ascending Mount
+Carmel in the middle of the dark night of the soul, to
+watch from its summit the rising of that sun which never
+sets, and, like the eagle that was St. John's companion
+in the isle of Patmos, to gaze upon it face to face and
+scrutinize its spots. He leaves to Athena's owl&mdash;the
+goddess with the glaucous, or owl-like, eyes, who sees
+in the dark but who is dazzled by the light of noon&mdash;he
+leaves to the owl that accompanied Athena in Olympus
+the task of searching with keen eyes in the shadows for
+the prey wherewith to feed its young.</p>
+
+<p>And the speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like
+the practical Quixotism, madness, a daughter-madness
+to the madness of the Cross. And therefore it is
+despised by the reason. At bottom, philosophy abhors
+<a name="Page_315" id="Page_315" />Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius
+prove it.</p>
+
+<p>The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the
+tragedy of the Cross. Pilate, the sceptic, the man of
+culture, by making a mockery of it, sought to convert
+it into a comedy; he conceived the farcical idea of the
+king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, and cried
+&quot;Behold the man!&quot; But the people, more human than
+he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, shouted, &quot;Crucify
+him! crucify him!&quot; And the human, the intra-human,
+tragedy is the tragedy of Don Quixote, whose face was
+daubed with soap in order that he might make sport for
+the servants of the dukes and for the dukes themselves,
+as servile as their servants. &quot;Behold the madman!&quot;
+they would have said. And the comic, the irrational,
+tragedy is the tragedy of suffering caused by ridicule and
+contempt.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest height of heroism to which an individual,
+like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule;
+better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and
+not to shrink from the ridicule.</p>
+
+<p>I have already spoken of the forceful sonnets of that
+tragic Portuguese, Antero de Quental, who died by his
+own hand. Feeling acutely for the plight of his country
+on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890, he
+wrote as follows:<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66" /><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a> &quot;An English statesman of the last
+century, who was also undoubtedly a perspicacious
+observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that
+for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy for
+those who think. Very well, then, if we are destined to
+end tragically, we Portuguese, we who <i>feel</i>, we would
+far rather prefer this terrible, but noble, destiny, to that
+which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future
+<a name="Page_316" id="Page_316" />date, for England, the country that <i>thinks</i> and <i>calculates</i>,
+whose destiny it is to finish miserably and comically.&quot;
+We may leave on one side the assertion that the English
+are a thinking and calculating people, implying thereby
+their lack of feeling, the injustice of which is explained
+by the occasion which provoked it, and also the assertion
+that the Portuguese feel, implying that they do not think
+or calculate&mdash;for we twin-brothers of the Atlantic seaboard
+have always been distinguished by a certain
+pedantry of feeling; but there remains a basis of truth
+underlying this terrible idea&mdash;namely, that some peoples,
+those who put thought above feeling, I should say reason
+above faith, die comically, while those die tragically who
+put faith above reason. For the mockers are those who
+die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending,
+while the nobler part, the part of tragedy, is theirs who
+endured the mockery.</p>
+
+<p>The mockery that underlies the career of Don Quixote
+is what we must endeavour to discover.</p>
+
+<p>And shall we be told yet again that there has never
+been any Spanish philosophy in the technical sense of
+the word? I will answer by asking, What is this sense?
+What does philosophy mean? Windelband, the historian
+of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of
+philosophy (<i>Was ist Philosophie</i>? in the first volume of
+his <i>Pr&auml;ludien</i>) tells us that &quot;the history of the word
+'philosophy' is the history of the cultural significance
+of science.&quot; He continues: &quot;When scientific thought
+attains an independent existence as a desire for knowledge
+for the sake of knowledge, it takes the name of
+philosophy; when subsequently knowledge as a whole
+divides into its various branches, philosophy is the
+general knowledge of the world that embraces all other
+knowledge. As soon as scientific thought stoops again
+to becoming a means to ethics or religious contemplation,
+philosophy is transformed into an art of life or into a
+formulation of religious beliefs. And when afterwards
+<a name="Page_317" id="Page_317" />the scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires
+once again its character as an independent knowledge of
+the world, and in so far as it abandons the attempt to
+solve this problem, it is changed into a theory of knowledge
+itself.&quot; Here you have a brief recapitulation of
+the history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including
+the medieval scholasticism upon which it endeavoured
+to establish religious beliefs. But has philosophy no
+other office to perform, and may not its office be to reflect
+upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been
+studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason
+and faith, between science and religion, and deliberately
+to perpetuate this conflict?</p>
+
+<p>Later on Windelband says: &quot;By philosophy in the
+systematic, not in the historical, sense, I understand the
+critical knowledge of values of universal validity
+(<i>allgemeingiltigen Werten</i>).&quot; But what values are there
+of more universal validity than that of the human will
+seeking before all else the personal, individual, and concrete
+immortality of the soul&mdash;or, in other words, the
+human finality of the Universe&mdash;and that of the human
+reason denying the rationality and even the possibility
+of this desire? What values are there of more universal
+validity than the rational or mathematical value and the
+volitional or teleological value of the Universe in conflict
+with one another?</p>
+
+<p>For Windelband, as for Kantians and neo-Kantians
+in general, there are only three normative categories,
+three universal norms&mdash;those of the true or the false, the
+beautiful or the ugly, and the morally good or evil.
+Philosophy is reduced to logics, esthetics, and ethics,
+accordingly as it studies science, art, or morality.
+Another category remains excluded&mdash;namely, that of the
+pleasing and the unpleasing, or the agreeable and the
+disagreeable: in other words, the hedonic. The hedonic
+cannot, according to them, pretend to universal validity,
+it cannot be normative. &quot;Whosoever throws upon
+<a name="Page_318" id="Page_318" />philosophy,&quot; wrote Windelband, &quot;the burden of
+deciding the question of optimism and pessimism, whosoever
+demands that philosophy should pronounce
+judgement on the question as to whether the world is
+more adapted to produce pain than pleasure, or <i>vice
+versa</i>&mdash;such a one, if his attitude is not merely that of a
+dilettante, sets himself the fantastic task of finding an
+absolute determination in a region in which no reasonable
+man has ever looked for one.&quot; It remains to be
+seen, nevertheless, whether this is as clear as it seems, in
+the case of a man like myself, who am at the same time
+reasonable and yet nothing but a dilettante, which of
+course would be the abomination of desolation.</p>
+
+<p>It was with a very profound insight that Benedetto
+Croce, in his philosophy of the spirit in relation to
+esthetics as the science of expression and to logic as the
+science of pure concept, divided practical philosophy into
+two branches&mdash;economics and ethics. He recognizes, in
+effect, the existence of a practical grade of spirit, purely
+economical, directed towards the singular and unconcerned
+with the universal. Its types of perfection, of
+economic genius, are Iago and Napoleon, and this grade
+remains outside morality. And every man passes
+through this grade, because before all else he must wish
+to be himself, as an individual, and without this grade
+morality would be inexplicable, just as without esthetics
+logic would lack meaning. And the discovery of the
+normative value of the economic grade, which seeks the
+hedonic, was not unnaturally the work of an Italian, a
+disciple of Machiavelli, who speculated so fearlessly with
+regard to <i>virt&ugrave;</i>, practical efficiency, which is not exactly
+the same as moral virtue.</p>
+
+<p>But at bottom this economic grade is but the rudimentary
+state of the religious grade. The religious is
+the transcendental economic or hedonic. Religion is a
+transcendental economy and hedonistic. That which man
+seeks in religion, in religious faith, is to save his own
+<a name="Page_319" id="Page_319" />individuality, to eternalize it, which he achieves neither
+by science, nor by art, nor by ethics. God is a necessity
+neither for science, nor art, nor ethics; what necessitates
+God is religion. And with an insight that amounts to genius
+our Jesuits speak of the grand business of our salvation.
+Business&mdash;yes, business; something belonging to the
+economic, hedonistic order, although transcendental.
+We do not need God in order that He may teach us the
+truth of things, or the beauty of them, or in order that He
+may safeguard morality by means of a system of penalties
+and punishments, but in order that He may save us,
+in order that He may not let us die utterly. And because
+this unique longing is the longing of each and every
+normal man&mdash;those who are abnormal by reason of their
+barbarism or their hyperculture may be left out of the
+reckoning&mdash;it is universal and normative.</p>
+
+<p>Religion, therefore, is a transcendental economy, or,
+if you like, metaphysic. Together with its logical,
+esthetic, and ethical values, the Universe has for man an
+economic value also, which, when thus made universal
+and normative, is the religious value. We are not concerned
+only with truth, beauty, and goodness: we are
+concerned also and above all with the salvation of the
+individual, with perpetuation, which those norms do not
+secure for us. That science of economy which is called
+political teaches us the most adequate, the most
+economical way of satisfying our needs, whether these
+needs are rational or irrational, beautiful or ugly, moral
+or immoral&mdash;a business economically good may be a
+swindle, something that in the long run kills the soul&mdash;and
+the supreme human <i>need</i> is the need of not dying,
+the need of enjoying for ever the plenitude of our own
+individual limitation. And if the Catholic eucharistic
+doctrine teaches that the substance of the body of Jesus
+Christ is present whole and entire in the consecrated
+Host, and in each part of it, this means that God is
+wholly and entirely in the whole Universe and also in
+<a name="Page_320" id="Page_320" />each one of the individuals that compose it. And this
+is, fundamentally, not a logical, nor an esthetic, nor an
+ethical principle, but a transcendental economic or religious
+principle. And with this norm, philosophy is able
+to judge of optimism and pessimism. <i>If the human soul
+is immortal, the world is economically or hedonistically
+good; if not, it is bad</i>. And the meaning which pessimism
+and optimism give to the categories of good and evil is
+not an ethical sense, but an economic or hedonistic sense.
+Good is that which satisfies our vital longing and evil
+is that which does not satisfy it.</p>
+
+<p>Philosophy, therefore, is also the science of the tragedy
+of life, a reflection upon the tragic sense of it. An essay
+in this philosophy, with its inevitable internal contradictions
+and antinomies, is what I have attempted in these
+essays. And the reader must not overlook the fact that
+I have been operating upon myself; that this work partakes
+of the nature of a piece of self-surgery, and without
+any other anesthetic than that of the work itself. The
+enjoyment of operating upon myself has ennobled the
+pain of being operated upon.</p>
+
+<p>And as for my other claim&mdash;the claim that this is a
+Spanish philosophy, perhaps <i>the</i> Spanish philosophy,
+that if it was an Italian who discovered the normative
+and universal value of the economic grade, it is a
+Spaniard who announces that this grade is merely the
+beginning of the religious grade, and that the essence
+of our religion, of our Spanish Catholicism, consists precisely
+in its being neither a science, nor an art, nor an
+ethic, but an economy of things eternal&mdash;that is to say, of
+things divine: as for this claim that all this is Spanish,
+I must leave the task of substantiating it to another and
+an historical work. But leaving aside the external and
+written tradition, that which can be demonstrated by
+reference to historical documents, is there not some
+present justification of this claim in the fact that I am a
+Spaniard&mdash;and a Spaniard who has scarcely ever been
+<a name="Page_321" id="Page_321" />outside Spain; a product, therefore, of the Spanish tradition
+of the living tradition, of the tradition which is
+transmitted in feelings and ideas that dream, and not in
+texts that sleep?</p>
+
+<p>The philosophy in the soul of my people appears to
+me as the expression of an inward tragedy analogous to
+the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression
+of a conflict between what the world is as scientific reason
+shows it to be, and what we wish that it might be, as our
+religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy
+is to be found the explanation of what is usually said
+about us&mdash;namely, that we are fundamentally irreducible
+to <i>Kultur</i>&mdash;or, in other words, that we refuse to submit
+to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either
+to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics,
+or to morality or ethics.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And the upshot of all this,&quot; so I have been told more
+than once and by more than one person, &quot;will be simply
+that all you will succeed in doing will be to drive people
+to the wildest Catholicism.&quot; And I have been accused
+of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so!
+And what then?</p>
+
+<p>Yes, I know, I know very well, that it is madness to
+seek to turn the waters of the river back to their source,
+and that it is only the ignorant who seek to find in the
+past a remedy for their present ills; but I know too that
+everyone who fights for any ideal whatever, although his
+ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world
+on to the future, and that the only reactionaries are those
+who find themselves at home in the present. Every supposed
+restoration of the past is a creation of the future,
+and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream,
+something imperfectly known, so much the better. The
+march, as ever, is towards the future, and he who
+marches is getting there, even though he march walking
+backwards. And who knows if that is not the better
+way!...</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322" />I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I
+believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it
+has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the
+Reformation, and the Revolution&mdash;learning from them,
+yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving
+the spiritual inheritance which has come down
+from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is
+simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between
+the Middle Ages and the Renaissance which was the offspring
+of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>And if some accuse me of subserving the cause of
+Catholic reaction, others perhaps, the official Catholics.... But
+these, in Spain, trouble themselves little
+about anything, and are interested only in their own
+quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor folk, they
+have neither eyes nor ears!</p>
+
+<p>But the truth is that my work&mdash;I was going to say my
+mission&mdash;is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and
+everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and
+faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of
+faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who
+submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism,
+or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of
+inquietude and passionate desire.</p>
+
+<p>Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote
+believe in the immediate apparential efficacy of his work?
+It is very doubtful, and at any rate he did not by any
+chance put his visor to the test by slashing it a second
+time. And many passages in his history show that he
+did not look with much confidence to the immediate
+success of his design to restore knight-errantry. And
+what did it matter to him so long as thus he lived and
+immortalized himself? And he must have surmised,
+and did in fact surmise, that his work would have another
+and higher efficacy, and that was that it would ferment
+in the minds of all those who in a pious spirit read of
+his exploits.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323" />Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he
+know the most tragic ridicule of all, the inward ridicule,
+the ridiculousness of a man's self to himself, in the eyes
+of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's battlefield
+to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his
+soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to
+preserve the treasure of his infancy; imagine him an
+inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho, at his side, inward
+and heroical too&mdash;and tell me if you find anything comic
+in the tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I
+answer, he has left himself, and a man, a living and
+eternal man, is worth all theories and all philosophies.
+Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books; we
+have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any
+<i>Critique of Pure Reason</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But Don Quixote was converted. Yes&mdash;and died,
+poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who
+remained on earth and lives amongst us, animating us
+with his spirit&mdash;this Don Quixote was not converted,
+this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves
+ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die. And the
+conversion of the other Don Quixote&mdash;he who was converted
+only to die&mdash;was possible because he was mad,
+and it was his madness, and not his death nor his conversion
+that immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for
+the crime of having been born.<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67" /><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> <i>Felix culpa!</i> And
+neither was his madness cured, but only transformed.
+His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he
+stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.</p>
+
+<p>This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell,
+which he entered lance on rest, and freed all the condemned,
+as he had freed the galley slaves, and he shut
+the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that Dante saw
+there and replaced it by one on which was written &quot;Long
+<a name="Page_324" id="Page_324" />live hope!&quot; and escorted by those whom he had freed,
+and they laughing at him, he went to heaven. And God
+laughed paternally at him, and this divine laughter filled
+his soul with eternal happiness.</p>
+
+<p>And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us,
+fighting with desperation. And does he not fight out of
+despair? How is it that among the words that English
+has borrowed from our language, such as <i>siesta,
+camarilla, guerrilla</i>, there is to be found this word
+<i>desperdo</i>? Is not this inward Don Quixote that I spoke
+of, conscious of his own tragic comicness, a man of
+despair (<i>desesperado</i>). A <i>desperado</i>&mdash;yes, like Pizarro
+and like Loyola. But &quot;despair is the master of impossibilities,&quot;
+as we learn from Salazar y Torres (<i>Elegir al
+enemigo</i>, Act I.), and it is despair and despair alone that
+begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope. <i>Spero
+quia absurdum</i>, it ought to have been said, rather than
+<i>credo</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And Don Quixote, who lived in solitude, sought more
+solitude still; he sought the solitudes of the Pe&ntilde;a Pobre,
+in order that there, alone, without witnesses, he might
+give himself up to greater follies with which to assuage
+his soul. But he was not quite alone, for Sancho accompanied
+him&mdash;Sancho the good, Sancho the believing,
+Sancho the simple. If, as some say, in Spain Don
+Quixote is dead and Sancho lives, then we are saved, for
+Sancho, his master dead, will become a knight-errant
+himself. And at any rate he is waiting for some other
+mad knight to follow again.</p>
+
+<p>And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other
+Sancho, the Sancho who journeyed with the mortal Don
+Quixote&mdash;it is not certain that he died, although some
+think that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his lance
+and believing in the truth of all those things which
+his dying and converted master had denounced and
+abominated as lies. But neither is it certain that the
+bachelor Sans&oacute;n Carrasco, or the curate, or the barber,
+<a name="Page_325" id="Page_325" />or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with these
+that the heroical Sancho has to contend.</p>
+
+<p>Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho,
+alone with his solitude. And shall we not also journey
+alone, we his lovers, creating for ourselves a Quixotesque
+Spain which only exists in our imagination?</p>
+
+<p>And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote
+bequeathed to <i>Kultur</i>? I answer: Quixotism, and that
+is no little thing! It is a whole method, a whole
+epistemology, a whole esthetic, a whole logic, a whole
+ethic&mdash;above all, a whole religion&mdash;that is to say, a
+whole economy of things eternal and things divine, a
+whole hope in what is rationally absurd.</p>
+
+<p>For what did Don Quixote fight? For Dulcinea, for
+glory, for life, for survival. Not for Iseult, who is the
+eternal flesh; not for Beatrice, who is theology; not for
+Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen, who is culture.
+He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he
+lives.</p>
+
+<p>And the greatest thing about him was his having been
+mocked and vanquished, for it was in being overcome
+that he overcame; he overcame the world by giving the
+world cause to laugh at him.</p>
+
+<p>And to-day? To-day he feels his own comicness and
+the vanity of his endeavours so far as their temporal
+results are concerned; he sees himself from without&mdash;culture
+has taught him to objectify himself, to alienate
+himself from himself instead of entering into himself&mdash;and
+in seeing himself from without he laughs at himself,
+but with a bitter laughter. Perhaps the most tragic
+character would be that of a Margutte of the inner man,
+who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die of laughter,
+but of laughter at himself. <i>E rider&aacute; in eterno</i>, he will
+laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte.
+Do you not hear the laughter of God?</p>
+
+<p>The mortal Don Quixote, in dying, realized his own
+comicness and bewept his sins; but the immortal Quixote,
+<a name="Page_326" id="Page_326" />realizing his own comicness, superimposes himself upon
+it and triumphs over it without renouncing it.</p>
+
+<p>And Don Quixote does not surrender, because he is
+not a pessimist, and he fights on. He is not a pessimist,
+because pessimism is begotten by vanity, it is a matter of
+fashion, pure intellectual snobbism, and Don Quixote is
+neither vain nor modern with any sort of modernity (still
+less is he a modernist), and he does not understand the
+meaning of the word &quot;snob&quot; unless it be explained to
+him in old Christian Spanish. Don Quixote is not a
+pessimist, for since he does not understand what is meant
+by the <i>joie de vivre</i> he does not understand its opposite.
+Neither does he understand futurist fooleries. In spite
+of Clavile&ntilde;o,<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68" /><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a> he has not got as far as the aeroplane,
+which seems to tend to put not a few fools at a still
+greater distance from heaven. Don Quixote has not
+arrived at the age of the tedium of life, a condition that
+not infrequently takes the form of that topophobia so
+characteristic of many modern spirits, who pass their
+lives running at top speed from one place to another,
+not from any love of the place to which they are going,
+but from hatred of the place they are leaving behind, and
+so flying from all places: which is one of the forms of
+despair.</p>
+
+<p>But Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the
+divine laughter, and since he is not a pessimist, since
+he believes in life eternal, he has to fight, attacking the
+modern, scientific, inquisitorial orthodoxy in order to
+bring in a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic,
+contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola, an
+Italian Quixote of the end of the fifteenth century, he
+fights against this Modern Age that began with
+Machiavelli and that will end comically. He fights
+against the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth
+<a name="Page_327" id="Page_327" />century. Peace of mind, reconciliation between reason
+and faith&mdash;this, thanks to the providence of God, is no
+longer possible. The world must be as Don Quixote
+wishes it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will
+fight with it and will, to all appearances, be vanquished,
+but he will triumph by making himself ridiculous.
+And he will triumph by laughing at himself and
+making himself the object of his own laughter.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Reason speaks and feeling bites&quot; said Petrarch; but
+reason also bites and bites in the inmost heart. And
+more light does not make more warmth. &quot;Light, light,
+more light!&quot; they tell us that the dying Goethe cried.
+No, warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we die of cold
+and not of darkness. It is not the night kills, but the
+frost. We must liberate the enchanted princess and
+destroy the stage of Master Peter.<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69" /><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a></p>
+
+<p>But God! may there not be pedantry too in thinking
+ourselves the objects of mockery and in making Don
+Quixotes of ourselves? Kierkegaard said that the
+regenerate (<i>Opvakte</i>) desire that the wicked world should
+mock at them for the better assurance of their own
+regeneracy, for the enjoyment of being able to bemoan
+the wickedness of the world (<i>Afsluttende uvidenskabelig
+Efterskrift</i>, ii., Afsnit ii., cap. 4, sect. 2, b).</p>
+
+<p>The question is, how to avoid the one or the other
+pedantry, or the one or the other affectation, if the
+natural man is only a myth and we are all artificial.</p>
+
+<p>Romanticism! Yes, perhaps that is partly the word.
+And there is an advantage in its very lack of precision.
+Against romanticism the forces of rationalist and
+classicist pedantry, especially in France, have latterly
+been unchained. Romanticism itself is merely another
+form of pedantry, the pedantry of sentiment? Perhaps.
+In this world a man of culture is either a dilettante or a
+pedant: you have to take your choice. Yes, Ren&eacute; and
+Adolphe and Obermann and Lara, perhaps they were all
+<a name="Page_328" id="Page_328" />pedants.... The question is to seek consolation in
+disconsolation.</p>
+
+<p>The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist
+restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque,
+has been called a <i>demi-mondaine</i> philosophy. Leave
+out the <i>demi</i>; call it <i>mondaine</i>, mundane. Mundane&mdash;yes,
+a philosophy for the world and not for philosophers,
+just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The
+world desires illusion (<i>mundus vult decipi</i>)&mdash;either the
+illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the
+illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And
+Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude
+will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed
+are they who are easily befooled! A Frenchman, Jules
+de Gaultier, said that it was the privilege of his countrymen
+<i>n'&ecirc;tre pas dupe</i>&mdash;not to be taken in. A sorry
+privilege!</p>
+
+<p>Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands
+of it. &quot;Then let him not make the demand,&quot; it will be
+said, &quot;let him resign himself, let him accept life and
+truth as they are.&quot; But he does not accept them as they
+are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho, who
+stands by his side. And it is not that Don Quixote does
+not understand what those understand who talk thus to
+him, those who succeed in resigning themselves and
+accepting rational life and rational truth. No, it is that
+the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who
+knows!...</p>
+
+<p>And in this critical century, Don Quixote, who has
+also contaminated himself with criticism, has to attack
+his own self, the victim of intellectualism and of sentimentalism,
+and when he wishes to be most spontaneous
+he appears to be most affected. And he wishes, unhappy
+man, to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the
+rational. And he sinks into the despair of the critical
+century whose two greatest victims were Nietzsche and
+Tolstoi. And through this despair he reaches the heroic
+<a name="Page_329" id="Page_329" />fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke&mdash;that intellectual
+Don Quixote who escaped from the cloister&mdash;and
+becomes an awakener of sleeping souls (<i>dormitantium
+animorum excubitor</i>), as the ex-Dominican said of himself&mdash;he
+who wrote: &quot;Heroic love is the property of
+those superior natures who are called insane (<i>insano</i>) not
+because they do not know (<i>no sanno</i>), but because they
+over-know (<i>soprasanno</i>).&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines; at
+any rate the inscription at the foot of his statue in the
+Campo dei Fiori, opposite the Vatican, states that it has
+been dedicated to him by the age which he had foretold
+(<i>il secolo da lui divinato</i>). But our Don Quixote, the
+inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own
+comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will
+triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And
+it is better that they should not triumph. And if the
+world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would
+retire alone to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making
+and king-killing crowds, as Christ retired alone
+to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and
+fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the
+title of king for the inscription written over the Cross.</p>
+
+<p>What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote,
+to-day, in this world? To cry aloud, to cry aloud in the
+wilderness. But though men hear not, the wilderness
+hears, and one day it will be transformed into a resounding
+forest, and this solitary voice that goes scattering
+over the wilderness like seed, will fructify into a gigantic
+cedar, which with its hundred thousand tongues will sing
+an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of death.</p>
+
+<p>And now to you, the younger generation, bachelor
+Carrascos of a Europeanizing regenerationism, you who
+are working after the best European fashion, with scientific
+method and criticism, to you I say: Create wealth,
+create nationality, create art, create science, create ethics,
+above all create&mdash;or rather, translate&mdash;<i>Kultur</i>, and thus
+<a name="Page_330" id="Page_330" />kill in yourselves both life and death. Little will it all
+last you!...</p>
+
+<p>And with this I conclude&mdash;high time that I did!&mdash;for
+the present at any rate, these essays on the tragic sense
+of life in men and in peoples, or at least in myself&mdash;who
+am a man&mdash;and in the soul of my people as it is reflected
+in mine.</p>
+
+<p>I hope, reader, that some time while our tragedy is still
+playing, in some interval between the acts, we shall
+meet again. And we shall recognize one another. And
+forgive me if I have troubled you more than was needful
+and inevitable, more than I intended to do when I took
+up my pen proposing to distract you for a while from
+your distractions. And may God deny you peace, but
+give you glory!</p>
+
+<p>SALAMANCA,<br />
+<i>In the year of grace</i> 1912.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59" /><a href="#FNanchor_59_59">[59]</a> &quot;Que tal?&quot; o &quot;como va?&quot; y es aquella que responde: &quot;se vive!&quot;</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60" /><a href="#FNanchor_60_60">[60]</a> Whenever I consider that I needs must die, I stretch my cloak upon the
+ground and am not surfeited with sleeping.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61" /><a href="#FNanchor_61_61">[61]></a> No es consuelo de desdichas&mdash;es otra desdicha aparte&mdash;querer a quien las
+padece&mdash;persuadir que no son tales (<i>Gustos y diogustos no son ni&eacute;s que imaginati&oacute;n</i>,
+Act I., Scene 4).</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62" /><a href="#FNanchor_62_62">[62]</a> <i>Don Quijote</i>, part i., chap, i.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63" /><a href="#FNanchor_63_63">[63]</a> Preface.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64" /><a href="#FNanchor_64_64">[64]></a> <i>El individualismo espa&ntilde;ol</i>, in vol. clxxi., March 1, 1903.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65" /><a href="#FNanchor_65_65">[65]</a> See <i>El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha</i>, part ii.,
+chap. lviii., and the corresponding chapter in my <i>Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66" /><a href="#FNanchor_66_66">[66]</a> In an article which was to have been published on the occasion of the
+ultimatum, and of which the original is in the possession of the Conde do
+Ameal. This fragment appeared in the Portuguese review, <i>A Agu&iacute;a</i> (No. 3), March, 1912.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67" /><a href="#FNanchor_67_67">[67]</a> An allusion to the phrase in Calder&oacute;n's <i>La Vida es Sue&ntilde;o</i>, &quot;Que delito
+comet&iacute; contra vosotros naciendo?&quot;&mdash;J.E.C.F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68" /><a href="#FNanchor_68_68">[68]</a> The wooden horse upon which Don Quixote imagined that he and Sancho
+had been carried in the air. See <i>Don Quijote</i>, part ii., chaps. 40 and 41.&mdash;J.E.C.F.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69" /><a href="#FNanchor_69_69">[69]</a> <i>Don Quijote</i>, part ii., chap. 26.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331" /><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX" />INDEX</h2>
+
+<ul>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+
+	<li>&AElig;schylus,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_246'>246</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Alexander of Aphrodisias,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_88'>88</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Amiel,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_18'>18,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_68'>68,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_228'>228</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Anaxagoras,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_143'>143</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Angelo of Foligno,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_289'>289</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Antero de Quintal,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_240'>240,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_315'>315</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Ardigo, Roberto,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_238'>238</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Aristotle,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_1'>1,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_21'>21,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_80'>80,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_144'>144,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_165'>165,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_171'>171,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_232'>232,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_235'>235</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Arnold, Matthew,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_103'>103</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Athanasius,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_63'>63-65</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Avenarius, Richard,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_144'>144,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_310'>310</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Athanasius,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_63'>63-65</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>de Ayala, Ram&oacute;n P&eacute;rez,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_303'>303</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Bacon,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_310'>310</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Balfour, A.J.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_27'>27</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Balmes,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_84'>84,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_85'>85</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Bergson,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_144'>144,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_328'>328</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Berkeley, Bishop,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_87'>87,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_146'>146</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Besant, Mrs. A.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_291'>291</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Boccaccio,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_52'>52</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>B&ouml;hme, Jacob,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_227'>227,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_297'>297</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Bonnefon,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_250'>250,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_254'>254</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Bossuet,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_226'>226,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_231'>231</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Brooks, Phillips,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_76'>76,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_190'>190</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Browning, Robert,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_112'>112,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_181'>181,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_249'>249,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_254'>254</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Bruneti&egrave;re,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_103'>103,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_298'>298</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Brunhes, B.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_235'>235,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_237'>237,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_238'>238</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Bruno,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_301'>301,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_329'>329</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>B&uuml;chner,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_95'>95</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Butler, Joseph,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_5'>5,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_6'>6,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_87'>87</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Byron, Lord,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_94'>94,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_102'>102,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_103'>103,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_132'>132</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Calder&oacute;n,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_39'>39,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_268'>268,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_323'>323</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Calvin,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_121'>121,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_246'>246</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Campanella,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_301'>301</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Carducci,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_102'>102,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_306'>306</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Carlyle,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_231'>231,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_298'>298</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Catherine of Sienna,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_289'>289</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Cauchy,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_236'>236</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Cervantes,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_220'>220,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_306'>306</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Channing, W.E.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_78'>78</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Cicero,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_165'>165,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_216'>216,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_221'>221</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Clement of Alexandria,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_32'>32</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Cort&eacute;s, Donoso,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_74'>74</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Costa, Joaquin,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_309'>309</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Cournot,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_192'>192,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_217'>217,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_222'>222,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_306'>306</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Cowper,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_43'>43</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Croce, Benedetto,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_313'>313,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_318'>318</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Dante,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_42'>42,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_51'>51,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_140'>140,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_223'>223,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_233'>233,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_256'>256,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_295'>295</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Darwin,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_72'>72,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_147'>147</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Descartes,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_34'>34,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_86'>86,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_107'>107,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_224'>224,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_237'>237,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_293'>293,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_310'>310,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_312'>312</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Diderot,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_99'>99</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Diego de Estella,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_304'>304</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Dionysius the Areopagite,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_160'>160</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Domingo de Guzm&aacute;n,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_289'>289</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Duns Scotus,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_76'>76</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Eckhart,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_289'>289</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Empedocles,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_61'>61</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Erasmus,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_112'>112,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_301'>301</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Erigena,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_160'>160,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_167'>167</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>F&eacute;nelon,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_224'>224</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Fichte,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_8'>8,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_29'>29</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Flaubert,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_94'>94,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_219'>219</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Fouill&eacute;e,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_261'>261</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Fourier,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_278'>278</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Francesco de Sanctis,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_220'>220</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Francke, August,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_120'>120</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Franklin,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_248'>248</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Galileo,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_72'>72,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_267'>267,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_302'>302</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Ganivet, Angel,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_313'>313</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>de Gaultier, Jules,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_328'>328</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Goethe,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_218'>218,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_264'>264,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_288'>288,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_299'>299,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_309'>309</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Gounod,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_56'>56</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Gratry, P&egrave;re,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_236'>236</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Haeckel,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_95'>95</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Harnack,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_59'>59,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_64'>64,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_65'>65,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_69'>69,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_75'>75</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Hartmann,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_146'>146</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Hegel,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_5'>5,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_111'>111,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_170'>170,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_294'>294,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_309'>309,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_310'>310</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Heraclitus,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_165'>165</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Hermann,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_69'>69,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_70'>70,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_77'>77,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_165'>165,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_217'>217</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Herodotus,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_140'>140</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Hippocrates,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_143'>143</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Hodgson, S.H.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_30'>30</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Holberg,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_109'>109</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Holmes, Oliver Wendell,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_257'>257,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_311'>311</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Hume, David,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_79'>79,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_86'>86,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_104'>104,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_310'>310</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Hume, Martin A.S.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_312'>312</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Huntingdon, A.M.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_298'>298</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>James, William,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_5'>5,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_81'>81,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_86'>86</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Jansen,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_121'>121</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Juan de los Angeles,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_1'>1,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_207'>207,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_286'>286</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Juan de la Cruz,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_67'>67,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_289'>289,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_293'>293</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Justin Martyr,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_63'>63</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Kaftan,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_68'>68,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_222'>222</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Kant, Immanuel,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_3'>3,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_4'>4,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_11'>11,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_13'>13,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_67'>67,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_68'>68,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_73'>73,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_79'>79,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_114'>114,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_143'>143,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_166'>166,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_294'>294,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_310'>310,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_311'>311,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_317'>317</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>&agrave; Kempis,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_51'>51,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_99'>99,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_277'>277</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Kierkegaard,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_3'>3,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_109'>109,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_115'>115,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_123'>123,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_153'>153,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_178'>178,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_198'>198,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_257'>257,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_287'>287,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_327'>327</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Krause,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_294'>294</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Lactantius,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_59'>59,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_74'>74,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_165'>165,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_169'>169</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Lamarck,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_147'>147</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Lamennais,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_74'>74,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_117'>117,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_165'>165,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_246'>246</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Laplace,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_161'>161</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Leibnitz,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_247'>247</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Leo XIII.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_75'>75</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Leopardi,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_44'>44,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_47'>47,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_123'>123,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_132'>132,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_240'>240,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_248'>248</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Le Roy,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_73'>73</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Lessing,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_229'>229</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Linn&aelig;us,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_1'>1</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Loisy,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_72'>72</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Loyola,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_122'>122,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_307'>307,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_314'>314,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_324'>324</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Loyson, Hyacinthe,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_116'>116</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Lucretius,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_94'>94,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_102'>102</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Luis de Le&oacute;n,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_289'>289</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Luther,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_3'>3,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_121'>121,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_270'>270,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_294'>294,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_301'>301</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Mach, Dr. E.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_114'>114</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Machado, Antonio,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_241'>241</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Machiavelli,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_296'>296,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_326'>326,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_328'>328</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>de Maistre, Count Joseph,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_74'>74,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_305'>305</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Malebranche,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_63'>63</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Mal&oacute;n de Chaide,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_66'>66</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Manrique, Jorge
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_309'>309</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Marcus Aurelius,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_315'>315</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Marlowe, Christopher,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_299'>299</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Martins, Oliveira,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_68'>68</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Mazzini,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_153'>153</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Melanchthon,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_69'>69</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Men&eacute;ndez de Pelayo,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_313'>313</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Michelet,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_45'>45</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Miguel de Molinos,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_216'>216,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_219'>219,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_228'>228</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Mill, Stuart,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_104'>104,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_310'>310</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Milton,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_284'>284</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Moser, Johann Jacob,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_252'>252,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_263'>263</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Myers, W.H.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_88'>88</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Nietzsche,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_50'>50,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_61'>61,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_100'>100,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_231'>231,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_239'>239,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_328'>328</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Nimesius,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_59'>59</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Obermann,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_11'>11,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_47'>47,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_259'>259,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_263'>263,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_268'>268</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_252'>252,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_253'>253</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Ord&oacute;&ntilde;ez de Lara,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_56'>56</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Origen,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_245'>245</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Papini,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_238'>238</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Pascal,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_40'>40,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_45'>45,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_74'>74,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_262'>262,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_263'>263</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Petrarch,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_327'>327</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Pfleiderer,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_61'>61</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Pius IX.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_72'>72</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Pizarro,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_324'>324</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Plato,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_38'>38,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_45'>45,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_48'>48,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_61'>61,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_90'>90,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_125'>125,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_143'>143,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_216'>216,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_217'>217,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_221'>221,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_292'>292,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_310'>310</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Pliny,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_165'>165</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Plotinus,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_209'>209,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_230'>230,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_243'>243</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Pohle, Joseph,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_77'>77</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Pomponazzi, Pietro,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_88'>88</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Renan,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_51'>51,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_68'>68</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Ritschl, Albrecht,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_68'>68,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_114'>114,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_121'>121,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_167'>167,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_238'>238,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_253'>253,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_263'>263,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_294'>294</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Robertson, F.W.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_180'>180</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Robespierre,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_41'>41</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Rohde, Erwin,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_60'>60,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_61'>61</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Rousseau,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_53'>53,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_263'>263,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_299'>299,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_310'>310</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Ruysbroek,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_289'>289</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Saint Augustine,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_74'>74,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_192'>192,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_247'>247</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Saint Bonaventura,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_220'>220</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Saint Francis of Assissi,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_52'>52,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_210'>210</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Saint Paul,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_48'>48,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_49'>49,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_62'>62,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_94'>94,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_112'>112,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_188'>188,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_209'>209,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_225'>225,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_241'>241,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_253'>253,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_255'>255,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_270'>270</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Saint Teresa,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_67'>67,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_75'>75,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_210'>210,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_226'>226,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_228'>228,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_289'>289,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_323'>323</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Saint Thomas Aquinas,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_83'>83,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_92'>92,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_233'>233</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Salazar y Torres,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_324'>324</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Schleiermacher,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_89'>89,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_156'>156,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_217'>217</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Schopenhauer,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_146'>146,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_147'>147,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_247'>247</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Seeberg, Reinold,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_188'>188</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>S&eacute;nancour,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_43'>43,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_47'>47,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_260'>260,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_263'>263,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_299'>299</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Seneca,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_231'>231,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_313'>313</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Seuse, Heinrich,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_75'>75,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_289'>289</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Shakespeare,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_39'>39</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Socrates,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_29'>29,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_143'>143,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_145'>145</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Solon,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_17'>17</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Soloviev,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_95'>95</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Spencer, Herbert,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_89'>89,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_124'>124,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_238'>238,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_253'>253</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Spener,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_253'>253</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Spinoza, Benedict,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_6'>6,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_7'>7,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_22'>22,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_24'>24,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_31'>31,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_38'>38,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_40'>40,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_89'>89,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_97'>97-99,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_101'>101,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_208'>208,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_234'>234,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_310'>310</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Stanley, Dean,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_91'>91</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Stendhal,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_311'>311</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Stirmer, Max,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_29'>29</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Su&aacute;rez,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_312'>312</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Swedenborg,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_153'>153,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_221'>221,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_225'>225</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Tacitus,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_56'>56,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_94'>94,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_142'>142,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_216'>216,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_306'>306</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Tauler,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_289'>289</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Tennyson, Lord,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_33'>33,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_103'>103</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Tertullian,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_74'>74,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_94'>94,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_104'>104</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Thales of Miletus,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_143'>143,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_317'>317</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Thom&eacute; de Jes&uacute;s,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_283'>283</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Tolstoi,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_328'>328</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Troeltsch, Ernst,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_70'>70,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_112'>112</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Velasquez,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_70'>70</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Vico, Giovanni Baptista,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_142'>142,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_143'>143</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Vinet, A.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_93'>93,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_113'>113,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_160'>160</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Virchow,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_95'>95</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Virgil,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_249'>249</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Vives, Luis,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_313'>313</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Vogt,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_95'>95</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Walpole, Horace,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_315'>315</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Weizs&auml;cker,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_62'>62,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_77'>77</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Wells, H.G.,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_265'>265</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Whitman, Walt,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_125'>125</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>Windelband,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_267'>267,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_316'>316,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_317'>317</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	<li>
+	<ul>
+	<li>Xenophon,
+	<ul>
+		<li><a href='#Page_29'>29,</a></li>
+		<li><a href='#Page_143'>143</a></li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+	</ul>
+	</li>
+</ul>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Tragic Sense Of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tragic Sense Of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Tragic Sense Of Life
+
+Author: Miguel de Unamuno
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2005 [EBook #14636]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Starner, Martin Pettit and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE
+
+MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
+
+translator, J.E. CRAWFORD FLITCH
+
+
+DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC
+
+New York
+
+This Dover edition, first published in 1954, is an unabridged and
+unaltered republication of the English translation originally published
+by Macmillan and Company, Ltd., in 1921. This edition is published by
+special arrangement with Macmillan and Company, Ltd.
+
+The publisher is grateful to the Library of the University of
+Pennsylvania for supplying a copy of this work for the purpose of
+reproduction.
+
+_Standard Book Number: 486-20257-7 Library of Congress Catalog Card
+Number: 54-4730_
+
+Manufactured in the United States of America
+Dover Publications, Inc.
+180 Varick Street
+New York, N.Y. 10014
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                   PAGES
+INTRODUCTORY ESSAY                                              xi-xxxii
+
+AUTHOR'S PREFACE                                             xxxiii-xxxv
+
+I
+
+THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE
+
+     Philosophy and the concrete man--The man Kant, the man Butler, and
+     the man Spinoza--Unity and continuity of the person--Man an end not
+     a means--Intellectual necessities and necessities of the heart and
+     the will--Tragic sense of life in men and in peoples           1-18
+
+II
+
+THE STARTING-POINT
+
+     Tragedy of Paradise--Disease an element of progress--Necessity of
+     knowing in order to live--Instinct of preservation and instinct of
+     perpetuation--The sensible world and the ideal world--Practical
+     starting-point of all philosophy--Knowledge an end in itself?--The
+     man Descartes--The longing not to die                         19-37
+
+III
+
+THE HUNGER OF IMMORTALITY
+
+     Thirst of being--Cult of immortality--Plato's "glorious
+     risk"--Materialism--Paul's discourse to the Athenians--Intolerance
+     of the intellectuals--Craving for fame--Struggle for survival 38-57
+
+IV
+
+THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM
+
+     Immortality and resurrection--Development of idea of immortality in
+     Judaic and Hellenic religions--Paul and the dogma of the
+     resurrection--Athanasius--Sacrament of the
+     Eucharist--Lutheranism--Modernism--The Catholic
+     ethic--Scholasticism--The Catholic solution                   58-78
+
+V
+
+THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION
+
+     Materialism--Concept of substance--Substantiality of the
+     soul--Berkeley--Myers--Spencer--Combat of life with
+     reason--Theological advocacy--_Odium anti-theologicum_--The
+     rationalist attitude--Spinoza--Nietzsche--Truth and consolation
+                                                                  79-105
+
+VI
+
+IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS
+
+     Passionate doubt and Cartesian doubt--Irrationality of the problem
+     of immortality--Will and intelligence--Vitalism and
+     rationalism--Uncertainty as basis of faith--The ethic of
+     despair--Pragmatical justification of despair--Summary of preceding
+     criticism                                                   106-131
+
+VII
+
+LOVE, SUFFERING, PITY, AND PERSONALITY
+
+     Sexual love--Spiritual love--Tragic love--Love and
+     pity--Personalizing faculty of love--God the Personalization of the
+     All--Anthropomorphic tendency--Consciousness of the Universe--What
+     is Truth?--Finality of the Universe                         132-155
+
+VIII
+
+FROM GOD TO GOD
+
+     Concept and feeling of Divinity--Pantheism--Monotheism--The
+     rational God--Proofs of God's existence--Law of necessity--Argument
+     from _Consensus gentium_--The living God--Individuality and
+     personality--God a multiplicity--The God of Reason--The God of
+     Love--Existence of God                                      156-185
+
+IX
+
+FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY
+
+     Personal element in faith--Creative power of faith--Wishing that
+     God may exist--Hope the form of faith--Love and suffering--The
+     suffering God--Consciousness revealed through
+     suffering--Spiritualization of matter                       186-215
+
+X
+
+RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND, AND THE APOCATASTASIS
+
+     What is religion?--The longing for immortality--Concrete
+     representation of a future life--Beatific vision--St.
+     Teresa--Delight requisite for happiness--Degradation of
+     energy--Apocatastasis--Climax of the tragedy--Mystery of the Beyond
+                                                                 216-259
+
+XI
+
+THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM
+
+     Conflict as basis of conduct--Injustice of annihilation--Making
+     ourselves irreplaceable--Religious value of the civil
+     occupation--Business of religion and religion of business--Ethic of
+     domination--Ethic of the cloister--Passion and culture--The Spanish
+     soul                                                        260-296
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN TRAGI-COMEDY
+
+     Culture--Faust--The modern Inquisition--Spain and the scientific
+     spirit--Cultural achievement of Spain--Thought and language--Don
+     Quixote the hero of Spanish thought--Religion a transcendental
+     economy--Tragic ridicule--Quixotesque philosophy--Mission of Don
+     Quixote to-day                                              297-330
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
+
+DON MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
+
+
+I sat, several years ago, at the Welsh National Eisteddfod, under the
+vast tent in which the Bard of Wales was being crowned. After the small
+golden crown had been placed in unsteady equilibrium on the head of a
+clever-looking pressman, several Welsh bards came on the platform and
+recited little epigrams. A Welsh bard is, if young, a pressman, and if
+of maturer years, a divine. In this case, as England was at war, they
+were all of the maturer kind, and, while I listened to the music of
+their ditties--the sense thereof being, alas! beyond my reach--I was
+struck by the fact that all of them, though different, closely resembled
+Don Miguel de Unamuno. It is not my purpose to enter into the wasp-nest
+of racial disquisitions. If there is a race in the world over which more
+sense and more nonsense can be freely said for lack of definite
+information than the Welsh, it is surely this ancient Basque people,
+whose greatest contemporary figure is perhaps Don Miguel de Unamuno. I
+am merely setting down that intuitional fact for what it may be worth,
+though I do not hide my opinion that such promptings of the inner,
+untutored man are worth more than cavefuls of bones and tombfuls of
+undecipherable papers.
+
+This reminiscence, moreover, which springs up into the light of my
+memory every time I think of Don Miguel de Unamuno, has to my mind a
+further value in that in it the image of Don Miguel does not appear as
+evoked by one man, but by many, though many of one species, many who in
+depth are but one man, one type, the Welsh divine. Now, this unity
+underlying a multiplicity, these many faces, moods, and movements,
+traceable to one only type, I find deeply connected in my mind with
+Unamuno's person and with what he signifies in Spanish life and letters.
+And when I further delve into my impression, I first realize an
+undoubtedly physical relation between the many-one Welsh divines and the
+many-one Unamuno. A tall, broad-shouldered, bony man, with high cheeks,
+a beak-like nose, pointed grey beard, and a complexion the colour of the
+red hematites on which Bilbao, his native town, is built, and which
+Bilbao ruthlessly plucks from its very body to exchange for gold in the
+markets of England--and in the deep sockets under the high aggressive
+forehead prolonged by short iron-grey hair, two eyes like gimlets
+eagerly watching the world through spectacles which seem to be purposely
+pointed at the object like microscopes; a fighting expression, but of
+noble fighting, above the prizes of the passing world, the contempt for
+which is shown in a peculiar attire whose blackness invades even that
+little triangle of white which worldly men leave on their breast for the
+necktie of frivolity and the decorations of vanity, and, blinding it,
+leaves but the thinnest rim of white collar to emphasize, rather than
+relieve, the priestly effect of the whole. Such is Don Miguel de
+Unamuno.
+
+Such is, rather, his photograph. For Unamuno himself is ever changing. A
+talker, as all good Spaniards are nowadays, but a talker in earnest and
+with his heart in it, he is varied, like the subjects of his
+conversation, and, still more, like the passions which they awake in
+him. And here I find an unsought reason in intellectual support of that
+intuitional observation which I noted down in starting--that Unamuno
+resembles the Welsh in that he is not ashamed of showing his
+passions--a thing which he has often to do, for he is very much alive
+and feels therefore plenty of them. But a word of caution may here be
+necessary, since that term, "passion," having been diminished--that is,
+made meaner--by the world, an erroneous impression might be conveyed by
+what precedes, of the life and ways of Unamuno. So that it may not be
+superfluous to say that Don Miguel de Unamuno is a Professor of Greek in
+the University of Salamanca, an ex-Rector of it who left behind the
+reputation of being a strong ruler; a father of a numerous family, and a
+man who has sung the quiet and deep joys of married life with a
+restraint, a vigour, and a nobility which it would be difficult to match
+in any literature. _Yet_ a passionate man--or, as he would perhaps
+prefer to say, _therefore_ a passionate man. But in a major, not in a
+minor key; of strong, not of weak passions.
+
+The difference between the two lies perhaps in that the man with strong
+passions lives them, while the man with weak passions is lived by them,
+so that while weak passions paralyze the will, strong passions urge man
+to action. It is such an urge towards life, such a vitality ever awake,
+which inspires Unamuno's multifarious activities in the realm of the
+mind. The duties of his chair of Greek are the first claim upon his
+time. But then, his reading is prodigious, as any reader of this book
+will realize for himself. Not only is he familiar with the
+stock-in-trade of every intellectual worker--the Biblical, Greek, Roman,
+and Italian cultures--but there is hardly anything worth reading in
+Europe and America which he has not read, and, but for the Slav
+languages, in the original. Though never out of Spain, and seldom out of
+Salamanca, he has succeeded in establishing direct connections with most
+of the intellectual leaders of the world, and in gathering an
+astonishingly accurate knowledge of the spirit and literature of foreign
+peoples. It was in his library at Salamanca that he once explained to
+an Englishman the meaning of a particular Scotticism in Robert Burns;
+and it was there that he congratulated another Englishman on his having
+read _Rural Rides_, "the hall-mark," he said, "of the man of letters who
+is no mere man of letters, but also a man." From that corner of Castile,
+he has poured out his spirit in essays, poetry, criticism, novels,
+philosophy, lectures, and public meetings, and that daily toil of press
+article writing which is the duty rather than the privilege of most
+present-day writers in Spain. Such are the many faces, moods, and
+movements in which Unamuno appears before Spain and the world. And yet,
+despite this multiplicity and this dispersion, the dominant impression
+which his personality leaves behind is that of a vigorous unity, an
+unswerving concentration both of mind and purpose. Bagaria, the national
+caricaturist, a genius of rhythm and character which the war revealed,
+but who was too good not to be overshadowed by the facile art of
+Raemaekers (imagine Goya overshadowed by Reynolds!), once represented
+Unamuno as an owl. A marvellous thrust at the heart of Unamuno's
+character. For all this vitality and ever-moving activity of mind is
+shot through by the absolute immobility of two owlish eyes piercing the
+darkness of spiritual night. And this intense gaze into the mystery is
+the steel axis round which his spirit revolves and revolves in
+desperation; the unity under his multiplicity; the one fire under his
+passions and the inspiration of his whole work and life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was Unamuno himself who once said that the Basque is the alkaloid of
+the Spaniard. The saying is true, so far as it goes. But it would be
+more accurate to say "one of the two alkaloids." It is probable that if
+the Spanish character were analyzed--always provided that the
+Mediterranean aspect of it be left aside as a thing apart--two main
+principles would be recognized in it--_i.e._, the Basque, richer in
+concentration, substance, strength; and the Andalusian, more given to
+observation, grace, form. The two types are to this day socially
+opposed. The Andalusian is a people which has lived down many
+civilizations, and in which even illiterate peasants possess a kind of
+innate education. The Basques are a primitive people of mountaineers and
+fishermen, in which even scholars have a peasant-like roughness not
+unlike the roughness of Scotch tweeds--or character. It is the even
+balancing of these two elements--the force of the Northerner with the
+grace of the Southerner--which gives the Castilian his admirable poise
+and explains the graceful virility of men such as Fray Luis de Leon and
+the feminine strength of women such as Queen Isabel and Santa Teresa. We
+are therefore led to expect in so forcible a representative of the
+Basque race as Unamuno the more substantial and earnest features of the
+Spanish spirit.
+
+Our expectation is not disappointed. And to begin with it appears in
+that very concentration of his mind and soul on the mystery of man's
+destiny on earth. Unamuno is in earnest, in dead earnest, as to this
+matter. This earnestness is a distinct Spanish, nay, Basque feature in
+him. There is something of the stern attitude of Loyola about his
+"tragic sense of life," and on this subject--under one form or another,
+his only subject--he admits no joke, no flippancy, no subterfuge. A true
+heir of those great Spanish saints and mystics whose lifework was
+devoted to the exploration of the kingdoms of faith, he is more human
+than they in that he has lost hold of the firm ground where they had
+stuck their anchor. Yet, though loose in the modern world, he refuses to
+be drawn away from the main business of the Christian, the saving of his
+soul, which, in his interpretation, means the conquest of his
+immortality, his own immortality.
+
+An individualist. Certainly. And he proudly claims the title. Nothing
+more refreshing in these days of hoggish communistic cant than this
+great voice asserting the divine, the eternal rights of the individual.
+But it is not with political rights that he is concerned. Political
+individualism, when not a mere blind for the unlimited freedom of civil
+privateering, is but the outcome of that abstract idea of man which he
+so energetically condemns as pedantic--that is, inhuman. His opposition
+of the individual to society is not that of a puerile anarchist to a no
+less puerile socialist. There is nothing childish about Unamuno. His
+assertion that society is for the individual, not the individual for
+society, is made on a transcendental plane. It is not the argument of
+liberty against authority--which can be easily answered on the
+rationalistic plane by showing that authority is in its turn the liberty
+of the social or collective being, a higher, more complex, and
+longer-living "individual" than the individual pure and simple. It is
+rather the unanswerable argument of eternity against duration. Now that
+argument must rest on a religious basis. And it is on a religious basis
+that Unamuno founds his individualism. Hence the true Spanish flavour of
+his social theory, which will not allow itself to be set down and
+analyzed into principles of ethics and politics, with their inevitable
+tendency to degenerate into mere economics, but remains free and fluid
+and absolute, like the spirit.
+
+Such an individualism has therefore none of the features of that
+childish half-thinking which inspires most anarchists. It is, on the
+contrary, based on high thinking, the highest of all, that which refuses
+to dwell on anything less than man's origin and destination. We are here
+confronted with that humanistic tendency of the Spanish mind which can
+be observed as the dominant feature of her arts and literature. All
+races are of course predominantly concerned with man. But they all
+manifest their concern with a difference. Man is in Spain a concrete
+being, the man of flesh and bones, and the whole man. He is neither
+subtilized into an idea by pure thinking nor civilized into a gentleman
+by social laws and prejudices. Spanish art and letters deal with
+concrete, tangible persons. Now, there is no more concrete, no more
+tangible person for every one of us than ourself. Unamuno is therefore
+right in the line of Spanish tradition in dealing predominantly--one
+might almost say always--with his own person. The feeling of the
+awareness of one's own personality has seldom been more forcibly
+expressed than by Unamuno. This is primarily due to the fact that he is
+himself obsessed by it. But in his expression of it Unamuno derives also
+some strength from his own sense of matter and the material--again a
+typically Spanish element of his character. Thus his human beings are as
+much body as soul, or rather body and soul all in one, a union which he
+admirably renders by bold mixtures of physical and spiritual metaphors,
+as in _gozarse uno la carne del alma_ (to enjoy the flesh of one's own
+soul).
+
+In fact, Unamuno, as a true Spaniard which he is, refuses to surrender
+life to ideas, and that is why he runs shy of abstractions, in which he
+sees but shrouds wherewith we cover dead thoughts. He is solely
+concerned with his own life, nothing but his life, and the whole of his
+life. An egotistical position? Perhaps. Unamuno, however, can and does
+answer the charge. We can only know and feel humanity in the one human
+being which we have at hand. It is by penetrating deep into ourselves
+that we find our brothers in us--branches of the same trunk which can
+only touch each other by seeking their common origin. This searching
+within, Unamuno has undertaken with a sincerity, a fearlessness which
+cannot be excelled. Nowhere will the reader find the inner
+contradictions of a modern human being, who is at the same time healthy
+and capable of thought set down with a greater respect for truth. Here
+the uncompromising tendency of the Spanish race, whose eyes never turn
+away from nature, however unwelcome the sight, is strengthened by that
+passion for life which burns in Unamuno. The suppression of the
+slightest thought or feeling for the sake of intellectual order would
+appear to him as a despicable worldly trick. Thus it is precisely
+because he does sincerely feel a passionate love of his own life that he
+thinks out with such scrupulous accuracy every argument which he finds
+in his mind--his own mind, a part of his life--against the possibility
+of life after death; but it is also because he feels that, despite such
+conclusive arguments, his will to live perseveres, that he refuses to
+his intellect the power to kill his faith. A knight-errant of the
+spirit, as he himself calls the Spanish mystics, he starts for his
+adventures after having, like Hernan Cortes, burnt his ships. But, is it
+necessary to enhance his figure by literary comparison? He is what he
+wants to be, a man--in the striking expression which he chose as a title
+for one of his short stories, _nothing less than a whole man_. Not a
+mere thinking machine, set to prove a theory, nor an actor on the world
+stage, singing a well-built poem, well built at the price of many a
+compromise; but a whole man, with all his affirmations and all his
+negations, all the pitiless thoughts of a penetrating mind that denies,
+and all the desperate self-assertions of a soul that yearns for eternal
+life.
+
+This strife between enemy truths, the truth thought and the truth felt,
+or, as he himself puts it, between veracity and sincerity, is Unamuno's
+_raison d'etre_. And it is because the "_Tragic Sense of Life_" is the
+most direct expression of it that this book is his masterpiece. The
+conflict is here seen as reflected in the person of the author. The book
+opens by a definition of the Spanish man, the "man of flesh and bones,"
+illustrated by the consideration of the real living men who stood behind
+the bookish figures of great philosophers and consciously or
+unconsciously shaped and misshaped their doctrines in order to satisfy
+their own vital yearnings. This is followed by the statement of the will
+to live or hunger for immortality, in the course of which the usual
+subterfuges with which this all-important issue is evaded in philosophy,
+theology, or mystic literature, are exposed and the real, concrete,
+"flesh and bones" character of the immortality which men desire is
+reaffirmed. The Catholic position is then explained as the _vital_
+attitude in the matter, summed up in Tertullian's _Credo quia absurdum_,
+and this is opposed to the critical attitude which denies the
+possibility of individual survival in the sense previously defined. Thus
+Unamuno leads us to his inner deadlock: his reason can rise no higher
+than scepticism, and, unable to become vital, dies sterile; his faith,
+exacting anti-rational affirmations and unable therefore to be
+apprehended by the logical mind, remains incommunicable. From the bottom
+of this abyss Unamuno builds up his theory of life. But is it a theory?
+Unamuno does not claim for it such an intellectual dignity. He knows too
+well that in the constructive part of his book his vital self takes the
+leading part and repeatedly warns his reader of the fact, lest critical
+objections might be raised against this or that assumption or
+self-contradiction. It is on the survival of his will to live, after all
+the onslaughts of his critical intellect, that he finds the basis for
+his belief--or rather for his effort to believe. Self-compassion leads
+to self-love, and this self-love, founded as it is on a universal
+conflict, widens into love of all that lives and therefore wants to
+survive. So, by an act of love, springing from our own hunger for
+immortality, we are led to give a conscience to the Universe--that is,
+to create God.
+
+Such is the process by which Unamuno, from the transcendental pessimism
+of his inner contradiction, extracts an everyday optimism founded on
+love. His symbol of this attitude is the figure of Don Quixote, of whom
+he truly says that his creed "can hardly be called idealism, since he
+did not fight for ideas: it was spiritualism, for he fought for the
+spirit." Thus he opposes a synthetical to an analytical attitude; a
+religious to an ethico-scientific ideal; Spain, his Spain--_i.e._, the
+spiritual manifestation of the Spanish race--to Europe, his
+Europe--_i.e._, the intellectual manifestation of the white race, which
+he sees in Franco-Germany; and heroic love, even when comically
+unpractical, to culture, which, in this book, written in 1912, is
+already prophetically spelt Kultura.
+
+This courageous work is written in a style which is the man--for
+Buffon's saying, seldom true, applies here to the letter. It is written
+as Carlyle wrote, not merely with the brain, but with the whole soul and
+the whole body of the man, and in such a vivid manner that one can
+without much effort imagine the eager gesticulation which now and then
+underlines, interprets, despises, argues, denies, and above all asserts.
+In his absolute subservience to the matter in hand this manner of
+writing has its great precedent in Santa Teresa. The differences, and
+they are considerable, are not of art, absent in either case, but of
+nature. They are such deep and obvious differences as obtain between the
+devout, ignorant, graceful nun of sixteenth-century Avila and the
+free-thinking, learned, wilful professor of twentieth-century Salamanca.
+In the one case, as in the other, the language is the most direct and
+simple required. It is also the least literary and the most popular.
+Unamuno, who lives in close touch with the people, has enriched the
+Spanish literary language by returning to it many a popular term. His
+vocabulary abounds in racy words of the soil, and his writings gain from
+them an almost peasant-like pith and directness which suits his own
+Basque primitive nature. His expression occurs simultaneously with the
+thoughts and feelings to be expressed, the flow of which, but loosely
+controlled by the critical mind, often breaks through the meshes of
+established diction and gives birth to new forms created under the
+pressure of the moment. This feature Unamuno has also in common with
+Santa Teresa, but what in the Saint was a self-ignorant charm becomes in
+Unamuno a deliberate manner inspired, partly by an acute sense of the
+symbolical and psychological value of word-connections, partly by that
+genuine need for expansion of the language which all true original
+thinkers or "feelers" must experience, but partly also by an acquired
+habit of juggling with words which is but natural in a philologist
+endowed with a vigorous imagination. Unamuno revels in words. He
+positively enjoys stretching them beyond their usual meaning, twisting
+them, composing, opposing, and transposing them in all sorts of possible
+ways. This game--not wholly unrewarded now and then by striking
+intellectual finds--seems to be the only relaxation which he allows his
+usually austere mind. It certainly is the only light feature of a style
+the merit of which lies in its being the close-fitting expression of a
+great mind earnestly concentrated on a great idea.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The earnestness, the intensity, and the oneness of his predominant
+passion are the main cause of the strength of Unamuno's philosophic
+work. They remain his main asset, yet become also the principal cause of
+his weakness, as a creative artist. Great art can only flourish in the
+temperate zone of the passions, on the return journey from the torrid.
+Unamuno, as a creator, has none of the failings of those artists who
+have never felt deeply. But he does show the limitations of those
+artists who cannot cool down. And the most striking of them is that at
+bottom he is seldom able to put himself in a purely esthetical mood. In
+this, as in many other features, Unamuno curiously resembles
+Wordsworth--whom, by the way, he is one of the few Spaniards to read
+and appreciate.[1] Like him, Unamuno is an essentially purposeful and
+utilitarian mind. Of the two qualities which the work of art requires
+for its inception--earnestness and detachment--both Unamuno and
+Wordsworth possess the first; both are deficient in the second. Their
+interest in their respective leading thought--survival in the first,
+virtue in the second--is too direct, too pressing, to allow them the
+"distance" necessary for artistic work. Both are urged to work by a
+lofty utilitarianism--the search for God through the individual soul in
+Unamuno, the search for God through the social soul in Wordsworth--so
+that their thoughts and sensations are polarized and their spirit loses
+that impartial transparence for nature's lights without which no great
+art is possible. Once suggested, this parallel is too rich in sidelights
+to be lightly dropped. This single-mindedness which distinguishes them
+explains that both should have consciously or unconsciously chosen a
+life of semi-seclusion, for Unamuno lives in Salamanca very much as
+Wordsworth lived in the Lake District--
+
+                       in a still retreat
+    Sheltered, but not to social duties lost,
+
+hence in both a certain proclivity towards ploughing a solitary furrow
+and becoming self-centred. There are no doubt important differences. The
+Englishman's sense of nature is both keener and more concrete; while the
+Spaniard's knowledge of human nature is not barred by the subtle
+inhibitions and innate limitations which tend to blind its more
+unpleasant aspects to the eye of the Englishman. There is more courage
+and passion in the Spaniard; more harmony and goodwill in the
+Englishman; the one is more like fire, the other like light. For
+Wordsworth, a poem is above all an essay, a means for conveying a lesson
+in forcible and easily remembered terms to those who are in need of
+improvement. For Unamuno, a poem or a novel (and he holds that a novel
+is but a poem) is the outpouring of a man's passion, the overflow of the
+heart which cannot help itself and lets go. And it may be that the
+essential difference between the two is to be found in this difference
+between their respective purposes: Unamuno's purpose is more intimately
+personal and individual; Wordsworth's is more social and objective. Thus
+both miss the temperate zone, where emotion takes shape into the moulds
+of art; but while Wordsworth is driven by his ideal of social service
+this side of it, into the cold light of both moral and intellectual
+self-control, Unamuno remains beyond, where the molten metal is too near
+the fire of passion, and cannot cool down into shape.
+
+Unamuno is therefore not unlike Wordsworth in the insufficiency of his
+sense of form. We have just seen the essential cause of this
+insufficiency to lie in the nonesthetical attitude of his mind, and we
+have tried to show one of the roots of such an attitude in the very
+loftiness and earnestness of his purpose. Yet, there are others, for
+living nature is many-rooted as it is many-branched. It cannot be
+doubted that a certain refractoriness to form is a typical feature of
+the Basque character. The sense of form is closely in sympathy with the
+feminine element in human nature, and the Basque race is strongly
+masculine. The predominance of the masculine element--strength without
+grace--is as typical of Unamuno as it is of Wordsworth. The literary
+gifts which might for the sake of synthesis be symbolized in a smile are
+absent in both. There is as little humour in the one as in the other.
+Humour, however, sometimes occurs in Unamuno, but only in his
+ill-humoured moments, and then with a curious bite of its own which adds
+an unconscious element to its comic effect. Grace only visits them in
+moments of inspiration, and then it is of a noble character, enhanced as
+it is by the ever-present gift of strength. And as for the sense for
+rhythm and music, both Unamuno and Wordsworth seem to be limited to the
+most vigorous and masculine gaits. This feature is particularly
+pronounced in Unamuno, for while Wordsworth is painstaking,
+all-observant, and too good a "teacher" to underestimate the importance
+of pleasure in man's progress, Unamuno knows no compromise. His aim is
+not to please but to strike, and he deliberately seeks the naked, the
+forceful, even the brutal word for truth. There is in him, however, a
+cause of formlessness from which Wordsworth is free--namely, an
+eagerness for sincerity and veracity which brushes aside all
+preparation, ordering or planning of ideas as suspect of "dishing up,"
+intellectual trickery, and juggling with spontaneous truths.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such qualities--both the positive and the negative--are apparent in his
+poetry. In it, the appeal of force and sincerity is usually stronger
+than that of art. This is particularly the case in his first volume
+(_Poesias_, 1907), in which a lofty inspiration, a noble attitude of
+mind, a rich and racy vocabulary, a keen insight into the spirit of
+places, and above all the overflowing vitality of a strong man in the
+force of ripeness, contend against the still awkward gait of the Basque
+and a certain rebelliousness of rhyme. The dough of the poetic language
+is here seen heavily pounded by a powerful hand, bent on reducing its
+angularities and on improving its plasticity. Nor do we need to wait for
+further works in order to enjoy the reward of such efforts, for it is
+attained in this very volume more than once, as for instance in _Muere
+en el mar el ave que volo del nido_, a beautiful poem in which emotion
+and thought are happily blended into exquisite form.
+
+In his last poem, _El Cristo de Velazquez_ (1920), Unamuno undertakes
+the task of giving a poetical rendering of his tragic sense of life, in
+the form of a meditation on the Christ of Velazquez, the beautiful and
+pathetic picture in the Prado. Why Velazquez's and not Christ himself?
+The fact is that, though in his references to actual forms, Unamuno
+closely follows Velazquez's picture, the spiritual interpretation of it
+which he develops as the poem unfolds itself is wholly personal. It
+would be difficult to find two great Spaniards wider apart than Unamuno
+and Velazquez, for if Unamuno is the very incarnation of the masculine
+spirit of the North--all strength and substance--Velazquez is the image
+of the feminine spirit of the South--all grace and form. Velazquez is a
+limpid mirror, with a human depth, yet a mirror. That Unamuno has
+departed from the image of Christ which the great Sevillian reflected on
+his immortal canvas was therefore to be expected. But then Unamuno has,
+while speaking of Don Quixote, whom he has also freely and personally
+interpreted,[2] taken great care to point out that a work of art is, for
+each of us, all that we see in it. And, moreover, Unamuno has not so
+much departed from Velazquez's image of Christ as delved into its
+depths, expanded, enlarged it, or, if you prefer, seen in its limpid
+surface the immense figure of his own inner Christ. However free and
+unorthodox in its wide scope of images and ideas, the poem is in its
+form a regular meditation in the manner approved by the Catholic Church,
+and it is therefore meet that it should rise from a concrete, tangible
+object as it is recommended to the faithful. To this concrete character
+of its origin, the poem owes much of its suggestiveness, as witness the
+following passage quoted here, with a translation sadly unworthy of the
+original, as being the clearest link between the poetical meditation
+and the main thought that underlies all the work and the life of
+Unamuno.
+
+NUBE NEGRA
+
+    O es que una nube negra de los cielos
+    ese negror le dio a tu cabellera
+    de nazareno, cual de mustio sauce
+    de una noche sin luna sobre el rio?
+    ?Es la sombra del ala sin perfiles
+    del angel de la nada negadora,
+    de Luzbel, que en su caida inacabable
+    --fondo no puede dar--su eterna cuita
+    clava en tu frente, en tu razon? ?Se vela,
+    el claro Verbo en Ti con esa nube,
+    negra cual de Luzbel las negras alas,
+    mientras brilla el Amor, todo desnudo,
+    con tu desnudo pecho por cendal?
+
+BLACK CLOUD
+
+    Or was it then that a black cloud from heaven
+    Such blackness gave to your Nazarene's hair,
+    As of a languid willow o'er the river
+    Brooding in moonless night? Is it the shadow
+    Of the profileless wing of Luzbel, the Angel
+    Of denying nothingness, endlessly falling--
+    Bottom he ne'er can touch--whose grief eternal
+    He nails on to Thy forehead, to Thy reason?
+    Is the clear Word in Thee with that cloud veiled
+    --A cloud as black as the black wings of Luzbel--
+    While Love shines naked within Thy naked breast?
+
+The poem, despite its length, easily maintains this lofty level
+throughout, and if he had written nothing else Unamuno would still
+remain as having given to Spanish letters the noblest and most sustained
+lyrical flight in the language. It abounds in passages of ample beauty
+and often strikes a note of primitive strength in the true Old Testament
+style. It is most distinctively a poem in a major key, in a group with
+_Paradise Lost_ and _The Excursion_, but in a tone halfway between the
+two; and, as coming from the most Northern-minded and substantial poet
+that Spain ever had, wholly free from that tendency towards
+grandiloquence and Ciceronian drapery which blighted previous similar
+efforts in Spain. Its weakness lies in a certain monotony due to the
+interplay of Unamuno's two main limitations as an artist: the absolute
+surrender to one dominant thought and a certain deficiency of form
+bordering here on contempt. The plan is but a loose sequence of
+meditations on successive aspects of Christ as suggested by images or
+advocations of His divine person, or even of parts of His human body:
+Lion, Bull, Lily, Sword, Crown, Head, Knees. Each meditation is treated
+in a period of blank verse, usually of a beautiful texture, the
+splendour of which is due less to actual images than to the inner vigour
+of ideas and the eagerness with which even the simplest facts are
+interpreted into significant symbols. Yet, sometimes, this blank verse
+becomes hard and stony under the stubborn hammering of a too insistent
+mind, and the device of ending each meditation with a line accented on
+its last syllable tends but to increase the monotony of the whole.
+
+Blank verse is never the best medium for poets of a strong masculine
+inspiration, for it does not sufficiently correct their usual deficiency
+in form. Such poets are usually at their best when they bind themselves
+to the discipline of existing forms and particularly when they limit the
+movements of their muse to the "sonnet's scanty plot of ground."
+Unamuno's best poetry, as Wordsworth's, is in his sonnets. His _Rosario
+de Sonetos Liricos_, published in 1911, contains some of the finest
+sonnets in the Spanish language. There is variety in this volume--more
+at least than is usual in Unamuno: from comments on events of local
+politics (sonnet lii.) which savour of the more prosaic side of
+Wordsworth, to meditations on space and time such as that sonnet
+xxxvii., so reminiscent of Shelley's _Ozymandias of Egypt_; from a
+suggestive homily to a "Don Juan of Ideas" whose thirst for knowledge is
+"not love of truth, but intellectual lust," and whose "thought is
+therefore sterile" (sonnet cvii.), to an exquisitely rendered moonlight
+love scene (sonnet civ.). The author's main theme itself, which of
+course occupies a prominent part in the series, appears treated under
+many different lights and in genuinely poetical moods which truly do
+justice to the inherent wealth of poetical inspiration which it
+contains. Many a sonnet might be quoted here, and in particular that
+sombre and fateful poem _Nihil Novum sub Sole_ (cxxiii.), which defeats
+its own theme by the striking originality of its inspiration.
+
+So active, so positive is the inspiration of this poetry that the
+question of outside influences does not even arise. Unamuno is probably
+the Spanish contemporary poet whose manner owes least, if anything at
+all, to modern developments of poetry such as those which take their
+source in Baudelaire and Verlaine. These over-sensitive and over-refined
+artists have no doubt enriched the sensuous, the formal, the
+sentimental, even the intellectual aspects of verse with an admirable
+variety of exquisite shades, lacking which most poetry seems
+old-fashioned to the fastidious palate of modern men. Unamuno is too
+genuine a representative of the spiritual and masculine variety of
+Spanish genius, ever impervious to French, and generally, to
+intellectual, influences, to be affected by the esthetic excellence of
+this art. Yet, for all his disregard of the modern resources which it
+adds to the poetic craft, Unamuno loses none of his modernity. He is
+indeed more than modern. When, as he often does, he strikes the true
+poetic note, he is outside time. His appeal is not in complexity but in
+strength. He is not refined: he is final.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the Preface to his _Tres Novelas Ejemplares y un Prologo_ (1921)
+Unamuno says: " ... novelist--that is, poet ... a novel--that is, a
+poem." Thus, with characteristic decision, he sides with the lyrical
+conception of the novel. There is of course an infinite variety of
+types of novels. But they can probably all be reduced to two
+classes--_i.e._, the dramatic or objective, and the lyrical or
+subjective, according to the mood or inspiration which predominates in
+them. The present trend of the world points towards the dramatic or
+objective type. This type is more in tune with the detached and
+scientific character of the age. The novel is often nowadays considered
+as a document, a "slice of life," a piece of information, a literary
+photograph representing places and people which purse or time prevents
+us from seeing with our own eyes. It is obvious, given what we now know
+of him, that such a view of the novel cannot appeal to Unamuno. He is a
+utilitarian, but not of worldly utilities. His utilitarianism transcends
+our daily wants and seeks to provide for our eternal ones. He is,
+moreover, a mind whose workings turn in spiral form towards a central
+idea and therefore feels an instinctive antagonism to the dispersive
+habits of thought and sensation which such detailed observation of life
+usually entails. For at bottom the opposition between the lyrical and
+the dramatic novel may be reduced to that between the poet and the
+dramatist. Both the dramatist and the poet create in order to link up
+their soul and the world in one complete circle of experience, but this
+circle is travelled in opposite directions. The poet goes inwards first,
+then out to nature full of his inner experience, and back home. The
+dramatist goes outwards first, then comes back to himself, his harvest
+of wisdom gathered in reality. It is the recognition of his own lyrical
+inward-looking nature which makes Unamuno pronounce the identity of the
+novel and the poem.
+
+Whatever we may think of it as a general theory, there is little doubt
+that this opinion is in the main sound in so far as it refers to
+Unamuno's own work. His novels are created within. They are--and their
+author is the first to declare it so--novels which happen in the
+kingdom of the spirit. Outward points of reference in time and space
+are sparingly given--in fact, reduced to a bare minimum. In some of
+them, as for instance _Niebla_ (1914), the name of the town in which the
+action takes place is not given, and such scanty references to the
+topography and general features as are supplied would equally apply to
+any other provincial town of Spain. Action, in the current sense of the
+word, is correspondingly simplified, since the material and local
+elements on which it usually exerts itself are schematized, and in their
+turn made, as it were, spiritual. Thus a street, a river of colour for
+some, for others a series of accurately described shops and dwellings,
+becomes in Unamuno (see _Niebla_) a loom where the passions and desires
+of men and women cross and recross each other and weave the cloth of
+daily life. Even the physical description of characters is reduced to a
+standard of utmost simplicity. So that, in fine, Unamuno's novels, by
+eliminating all other material, appear, if the boldness of the metaphor
+be permitted, as the spiritual skeletons of novels, conflicts between
+souls.
+
+Nor is this the last stage in his deepening and narrowing of the
+creative furrow. For these souls are in their turn concentrated so that
+the whole of their vitality burns into one passion. If a somewhat
+fanciful comparison from another art may throw any light on this feature
+of his work we might say that his characters are to those of Galdos, for
+instance, as counterpoint music to the complex modern symphony. Joaquin
+Monegro, the true hero of his _Abel Sanchez_ (1917), is the
+personification of hatred. Raquel in _Dos Madres_[1] and Catalina in _El
+Marques de Lumbria_[1] are two widely different but vigorous, almost
+barbarous, "maternities." Alejandro, the hero of his powerful _Nada
+Menos que Todo un Hombre_,[3] is masculine will, pure and unconquerable,
+save by death. Further still, in most if not all of his main
+characters, we can trace the dominant passion which is their whole being
+to a mere variety of the one and only passion which obsesses Unamuno
+himself, the hunger for life, a full life, here and after. Here is, for
+instance, _Abel Sanchez_, a sombre study of hatred, a modern paraphrase
+of the story of Cain. Joaquin Monegro, the Cain of the novel, has been
+reading Byron's poem, and writes in his diary: "It was when I read how
+Lucifer declared to Cain that he, Cain, was immortal, that I began in
+terror to wonder whether I also was immortal and whether in me would be
+also immortal my hatred. 'Have I a soul?' I said to myself then. 'Is
+this my hatred soul?' And I came to think that it could not be
+otherwise, that such a hatred cannot be the function of a body.... A
+corruptible organism could not hate as I hated."
+
+Thus Joaquin Monegro, like every other main character in his work,
+appears preoccupied by the same central preoccupation of Unamuno. In one
+word, all Unamuno's characters are but incarnations of himself. But that
+is what we expected to find in a lyrical novelist.
+
+There are critics who conclude from this observation that these
+characters do not exist, that they are mere arguments on legs,
+personified ideas. Here and there, in Unamuno's novels, there are
+passages which lend some colour of plausibility to this view. Yet, it is
+in my opinion mistaken. Unamuno's characters may be schematized,
+stripped of their complexities, reduced to the mainspring of their
+nature; they may, moreover, reveal mainsprings made of the same steel.
+But that they are alive no one could deny who has a sense for life. The
+very restraint in the use of physical details which Unamuno has made a
+feature of his creative work may have led his critics to forget the
+intensity of those--admirably chosen--which are given. It is significant
+that the eyes play an important part in his description of characters
+and in his narrative too. His sense of the interpenetration of body and
+soul is so deep that he does not for one moment let us forget how bodily
+his "souls" are, and how pregnant with spiritual significance is every
+one of their words and gestures. No. These characters are not arguments
+on legs. They truly are men and women of "flesh and bones," human,
+terribly human.
+
+In thus emphasizing a particular feature in their nature, Unamuno
+imparts to his creations a certain deformity which savours of romantic
+days. Yet Unamuno is not a romanticist, mainly because Romanticism was
+an esthetic attitude, and his attitude is seldom purely esthetic. For
+all their show of passion, true Romanticists seldom gave their real
+selves to their art. They created a stage double of their own selves for
+public exhibitions. They sought the picturesque. Their form was lyrical,
+but their substance was dramatic. Unamuno, on the contrary, even though
+he often seeks expression in dramatic form, is essentially lyrical. And
+if he is always intense, he never is exuberant. He follows the Spanish
+tradition for restraint--for there is one, along its opposite tradition
+for grandiloquence--and, true to the spirit of it, he seeks the maximum
+of effect through the minimum of means. Then, he never shouts. Here is
+an example of his quiet method, the rhythmical beauty of which is
+unfortunately almost untranslatable:
+
+"Y asi pasaron dias de llanto y de negrura hasta que las lagrimas fueron
+yendose hacia adentro y la casa fue derritiendo los negrores" (_Niebla_)
+(And thus, days of weeping and mourning went by, till the tears began to
+flow inward and the blackness to melt in the home).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miguel de Unamuno is to-day the greatest literary figure of Spain.
+Baroja may surpass him in variety of external experience, Azorin in
+delicate art, Ortega y Gasset in philosophical subtlety, Ayala in
+intellectual elegance, Valle Inclan in rhythmical grace. Even in
+vitality he may have to yield the first place to that over-whelming
+athlete of literature, Blasco Ibanez. But Unamuno is head and shoulders
+above them all in the highness of his purpose and in the earnestness and
+loyalty with which, Quixote-like, he has served all through his life his
+unattainable Dulcinea. Then there is another and most important reason
+which explains his position as first, _princeps_, of Spanish letters,
+and it is that Unamuno, by the cross which he has chosen to bear,
+incarnates the spirit of modern Spain. His eternal conflict between
+faith and reason, between life and thought, between spirit and
+intellect, between heaven and civilization, is the conflict of Spain
+herself. A border country, like Russia, in which East and West mix their
+spiritual waters, Spain wavers between two life-philosophies and cannot
+rest. In Russia, this conflict emerges in literature during the
+nineteenth century, when Dostoievsky and Tolstoy stand for the East
+while Turgeniev becomes the West's advocate. In Spain, a country less
+articulate, and, moreover, a country in which the blending of East and
+West is more intimate, for both found a common solvent in centuries of
+Latin civilization, the conflict is less clear, less on the surface.
+To-day Ortega y Gasset is our Turgeniev--not without mixture. Unamuno is
+our Dostoievsky, but painfully aware of the strength of the other side
+within him, and full of misgivings. Nor is it sure that when we speak of
+East in this connection we really mean East. There is a third country in
+Europe in which the "Eastern" view is as forcibly put and as deeply
+understood as the "Western," a third border country--England. England,
+particularly in those of her racial elements conventionally named
+Celtic, is closely in sympathy with the "East." Ireland is almost purely
+"Eastern" in this respect. That is perhaps why Unamuno feels so strong
+an attraction for the English language and its literature, and why, even
+to this day, he follows so closely the movements of English thought.[4]
+For his own nature, of a human being astride two enemy ideals, draws him
+instinctively towards minds equally placed in opposition, yet a
+co-operating opposition, to progress. Thus Unamuno, whose literary
+qualities and defects make him a genuine representative of the more
+masculine variety of the Spanish genius, becomes in his spiritual life
+the true living symbol of his country and his time. And that he is great
+enough to bear this incarnation is a sufficient measure of his
+greatness.
+
+S. DE MADARIAGA.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] In what follows, I confess to refer not so much to the generally
+admitted opinion on Wordsworth as to my own views on him and his poetry,
+which I tried to explain in my essay: "The Case of Wordsworth" (_Shelley
+and Calderon, and other Essays_, Constable and Co., 1920).
+
+[2] _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, explicada y comentada_, por M. de
+Unamuno: Madrid, Fernando Fe, 1905.
+
+[3] These three novels appeared together as _Tres Novelas y un Prologo_
+Calpe, Madrid, 1921.
+
+[4] "Me va interesando ese Dean Inge," he wrote to me last year.
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+I intended at first to write a short Prologue to this English
+translation of my _Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida_, which has been
+undertaken by my friend Mr. J.E. Crawford Flitch. But upon further
+consideration I have abandoned the idea, for I reflected that after all
+I wrote this book not for Spaniards only, but for all civilized and
+Christian men--Christian in particular, whether consciously so or
+not--of whatever country they may be.
+
+Furthermore, if I were to set about writing an Introduction in the light
+of all that we see and feel now, after the Great War, and, still more,
+of what we foresee and forefeel, I should be led into writing yet
+another book. And that is a thing to be done with deliberation and only
+after having better digested this terrible peace, which is nothing else
+but the war's painful convalescence.
+
+As for many years my spirit has been nourished upon the very core of
+English literature--evidence of which the reader may discover in the
+following pages--the translator, in putting my _Sentimiento Tragico_
+into English, has merely converted not a few of the thoughts and
+feelings therein expressed back into their original form of expression.
+Or retranslated them, perhaps. Whereby they emerge other than they
+originally were, for an idea does not pass from one language to another
+without change.
+
+The fact that this English translation has been carefully revised here,
+in my house in this ancient city of Salamanca, by the translator and
+myself, implies not merely some guarantee of exactitude, but also
+something more--namely, a correction, in certain respects, of the
+original.
+
+The truth is that, being an incorrigible Spaniard, I am naturally given
+to a kind of extemporization and to neglectfulness of a filed niceness
+in my works. For this reason my original work--and likewise the Italian
+and French translations of it--issued from the press with a certain
+number of errors, obscurities, and faulty references. The labour which
+my friend Mr. J.E. Crawford Flitch fortunately imposed upon me in making
+me revise his translation obliged me to correct these errors, to clarify
+some obscurities, and to give greater exactitude to certain quotations
+from foreign writers. Hence this English translation of my _Sentimiento
+Tragico_ presents in some ways a more purged and correct text than that
+of the original Spanish. This perhaps compensates for what it may lose
+in the spontaneity of my Spanish thought, which at times, I believe, is
+scarcely translatable.
+
+It would advantage me greatly if this translation, in opening up to me a
+public of English-speaking readers, should some day lead to my writing
+something addressed to and concerned with this public. For just as a new
+friend enriches our spirit, not so much by what he gives us of himself,
+as by what he causes us to discover in our own selves, something which,
+if we had never known him, would have lain in us undeveloped, so it is
+with a new public. Perhaps there may be regions in my own Spanish
+spirit--my Basque spirit, and therefore doubly Spanish--unexplored by
+myself, some corner hitherto uncultivated, which I should have to
+cultivate in order to offer the flowers and fruits of it to the peoples
+of English speech.
+
+And now, no more.
+
+God give my English readers that inextinguishable thirst for truth which
+I desire for myself.
+
+MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO.
+
+SALAMANCA,
+_April, 1921._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
+
+Footnotes added by the Translator, other than those which merely
+supplement references to writers or their works mentioned in the text,
+are distinguished by his initials.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE
+
+
+_Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto_, said the Latin playwright.
+And I would rather say, _Nullum hominem a me alienum puto_: I am a man;
+no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective _humanus_ is
+no less suspect than its abstract substantive _humanitas_, humanity.
+Neither "the human" nor "humanity," neither the simple adjective nor the
+substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive--man. The man of
+flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who
+dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and
+wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.
+
+For there is another thing which is also called man, and he is the
+subject of not a few lucubrations, more or less scientific. He is the
+legendary featherless biped, the _zoon politikhon_ of Aristotle,
+the social contractor of Rousseau, the _homo economicus_ of the
+Manchester school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnaeus, or, if you like, the
+vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age
+nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief,
+merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man.
+
+The man we have to do with is the man of flesh and bone--I, you, reader
+of mine, the other man yonder, all of us who walk solidly on the earth.
+
+And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the
+subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain
+self-styled philosophers like it or not.
+
+In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems
+are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously, and
+their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inner
+biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a
+secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that
+explains for us most things.
+
+It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry
+than to science. All philosophic systems which have been constructed as
+a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have
+in every age possessed much less consistency and life than those which
+expressed the integral spiritual yearning of their authors.
+
+And, though they concern us so greatly, and are, indeed, indispensable
+for our life and thought, the sciences are in a certain sense more
+foreign to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end--that is
+to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are fundamentally a
+matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind called
+theoretical, is, like a mechanical discovery--that of the steam-engine,
+the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane--a thing which is useful
+for something else. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in enabling
+us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But she,
+wherefore is she useful to us? A man takes an electric tram to go to
+hear an opera, and asks himself, Which, in this case, is the more
+useful, the tram or the opera?
+
+Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary
+conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception,
+a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to outward
+action. But the fact is that this feeling, instead of being a
+consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our
+philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the
+world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And life,
+like everything affective, has roots in subconsciousness, perhaps in
+unconsciousness.
+
+It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it
+is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps
+pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.
+
+Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been
+defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which
+differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason.
+More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps
+or laughs inwardly--but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves
+equations of the second degree.
+
+And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man.
+
+Take Kant, the man Immanuel Kant, who was born and lived at Koenigsberg,
+in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
+nineteenth. In the philosophy of this man Kant, a man of heart and
+head--that is to say, a man--there is a significant somersault, as
+Kierkegaard, another man--and what a man!--would have said, the
+somersault from the _Critique of Pure Reason_ to the _Critique of
+Practical Reason_. He reconstructs in the latter what he destroyed in
+the former, in spite of what those may say who do not see the man
+himself. After having examined and pulverized with his analysis the
+traditional proofs of the existence of God, of the Aristotelian God, who
+is the God corresponding to the _zoon politikon_, the abstract
+God, the unmoved prime Mover, he reconstructs God anew; but the God of
+the conscience, the Author of the moral order--the Lutheran God, in
+short. This transition of Kant exists already in embryo in the Lutheran
+notion of faith.
+
+The first God, the rational God, is the projection to the outward
+infinite of man as he is by definition--that is to say, of the abstract
+man, of the man no-man; the other God, the God of feeling and volition,
+is the projection to the inward infinite of man as he is by life, of the
+concrete man, the man of flesh and bone.
+
+Kant reconstructed with the heart that which with the head he had
+overthrown. And we know, from the testimony of those who knew him and
+from his testimony in his letters and private declarations, that the man
+Kant, the more or less selfish old bachelor who professed philosophy at
+Koenigsberg at the end of the century of the Encyclopedia and the goddess
+of Reason, was a man much preoccupied with the problem--I mean with the
+only real vital problem, the problem that strikes at the very root of
+our being, the problem of our individual and personal destiny, of the
+immortality of the soul. The man Kant was not resigned to die utterly.
+And because he was not resigned to die utterly he made that leap, that
+immortal somersault,[5] from the one Critique to the other.
+
+Whosoever reads the _Critique of Practical Reason_ carefully and without
+blinkers will see that, in strict fact, the existence of God is therein
+deduced from the immortality of the soul, and not the immortality of the
+soul from the existence of God. The categorical imperative leads us to a
+moral postulate which necessitates in its turn, in the teleological or
+rather eschatological order, the immortality of the soul, and in order
+to sustain this immortality God is introduced. All the rest is the
+jugglery of the professional of philosophy.
+
+The man Kant felt that morality was the basis of eschatology, but the
+professor of philosophy inverted the terms.
+
+Another professor, the professor and man William James, has somewhere
+said that for the generality of men God is the provider of immortality.
+Yes, for the generality of men, including the man Kant, the man James,
+and the man who writes these lines which you, reader, are reading.
+
+Talking to a peasant one day, I proposed to him the hypothesis that
+there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a
+Consciousness[6] of the Universe, but that for all that the soul of
+every man may not be immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. He
+replied: "Then wherefore God?" So answered, in the secret tribunal of
+their consciousness, the man Kant and the man James. Only in their
+capacity as professors they were compelled to justify rationally an
+attitude in itself so little rational. Which does not mean, of course,
+that the attitude is absurd.
+
+Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the
+real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel,
+continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that
+reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of
+definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe,
+like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a
+hole and enclosing it with steel.
+
+Another man, the man Joseph Butler, the Anglican bishop who lived at the
+beginning of the eighteenth century and whom Cardinal Newman declared to
+be the greatest man in the Anglican Church, wrote, at the conclusion of
+the first chapter of his great work, _The Analogy of Religion_, the
+chapter which treats of a future life, these pregnant words: "This
+credibility of a future life, which has been here insisted upon, how
+little soever it may satisfy our curiosity, seems to answer all the
+purposes of religion, in like manner as a demonstrative proof would.
+Indeed a proof, even a demonstrative one, of a future life, would not be
+a proof of religion. For, that we are to live hereafter, is just as
+reconcilable with the scheme of atheism, and as well to be accounted for
+by it, as that we are now alive is: and therefore nothing can be more
+absurd than to argue from that scheme that there can be no future
+state."
+
+The man Butler, whose works were perhaps known to the man Kant, wished
+to save the belief in the immortality of the soul, and with this object
+he made it independent of belief in God. The first chapter of his
+_Analogy_ treats, as I have said, of the future life, and the second of
+the government of God by rewards and punishments. And the fact is that,
+fundamentally, the good Anglican bishop deduces the existence of God
+from the immortality of the soul. And as this deduction was the good
+Anglican bishop's starting-point, he had not to make that somersault
+which at the close of the same century the good Lutheran philosopher had
+to make. Butler, the bishop, was one man and Kant, the professor,
+another man.
+
+To be a man is to be something concrete, unitary, and substantive; it is
+to be a thing--_res_. Now we know what another man, the man Benedict
+Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew who was born and lived in Holland in the
+middle of the seventeenth century, wrote about the nature of things. The
+sixth proposition of Part III. of his _Ethic_ states: _unaquoeque res,
+quatenus in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur_--that is,
+Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its
+own being. Everything in so far as it is in itself--that is to say, in
+so far as it is substance, for according to him substance is _id quod in
+se est et per se concipitur_--that which is in itself and is conceived
+by itself. And in the following proposition, the seventh, of the same
+part, he adds: _conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare
+conatur, nihil est proeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam_--that is, the
+endeavour wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being is
+nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself. This means that your
+essence, reader, mine, that of the man Spinoza, that of the man Butler,
+of the man Kant, and of every man who is a man, is nothing but the
+endeavour, the effort, which he makes to continue to be a man, not to
+die. And the other proposition which follows these two, the eighth,
+says: _conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur,
+nullum tempus finitum, sed indefinitum involvit_--that is, The endeavour
+whereby each individual thing endeavours to persist involves no finite
+time but indefinite time. That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza wish
+never to die and that this longing of ours never to die is our actual
+essence. Nevertheless, this poor Portuguese Jew, exiled in the mists of
+Holland, could never attain to believing in his own personal
+immortality, and all his philosophy was but a consolation which he
+contrived for his lack of faith. Just as other men have a pain in hand
+or foot, heart-ache or head-ache, so he had God-ache. Unhappy man! And
+unhappy fellow-men!
+
+And man, this thing, is he a thing? How absurd soever the question may
+appear, there are some who have propounded it. Not long ago there went
+abroad a certain doctrine called Positivism, which did much good and
+much ill. And among other ills that it wrought was the introduction of a
+method of analysis whereby facts were pulverized, reduced to a dust of
+facts. Most of the facts labelled as such by Positivism were really only
+fragments of facts. In psychology its action was harmful. There were
+even scholastics meddling in literature--I will not say philosophers
+meddling in poetry, because poet and philosopher are twin brothers, if
+not even one and the same--who carried this Positivist psychological
+analysis into the novel and the drama, where the main business is to
+give act and motion to concrete men, men of flesh and bone, and by dint
+of studying states of consciousness, consciousness itself disappeared.
+The same thing happened to them which is said often to happen in the
+examination and testing of certain complicated, organic, living chemical
+compounds, when the reagents destroy the very body which it was proposed
+to examine and all that is obtained is the products of its
+decomposition.
+
+Taking as their starting-point the evident fact that contradictory
+states pass through our consciousness, they did not succeed in
+envisaging consciousness itself, the "I." To ask a man about his "I" is
+like asking him about his body. And note that in speaking of the "I," I
+speak of the concrete and personal "I," not of the "I" of Fichte, but of
+Fichte himself, the man Fichte.
+
+That which determines a man, that which makes him one man, one and not
+another, the man he is and not the man he is not, is a principle of
+unity and a principle of continuity. A principle of unity firstly in
+space, thanks to the body, and next in action and intention. When we
+walk, one foot does not go forward and the other backward, nor, when we
+look, if we are normal, does one eye look towards the north and the
+other towards the south. In each moment of our life we entertain some
+purpose, and to this purpose the synergy of our actions is directed.
+Notwithstanding the next moment we may change our purpose. And in a
+certain sense a man is so much the more a man the more unitary his
+action. Some there are who throughout their whole life follow but one
+single purpose, be it what it may.
+
+Also a principle of continuity in time. Without entering upon a
+discussion--an unprofitable discussion--as to whether I am or am not he
+who I was twenty years ago, it appears to me to be indisputable that he
+who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of
+consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is
+the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of
+the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by
+memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our
+memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past
+to transform itself into our future.
+
+All this, I know well, is sheer platitude; but in going about in the
+world one meets men who seem to have no feeling of their own
+personality. One of my best friends with whom I have walked and talked
+every day for many years, whenever I spoke to him of this sense of one's
+own personality, used to say: "But I have no sense of myself; I don't
+know what that is."
+
+On a certain occasion this friend remarked to me: "I should like to be
+So-and-so" (naming someone), and I said: "That is what I shall never be
+able to understand--that one should want to be someone else. (To want to
+be someone else is to want to cease to be he who one is.) I understand
+that one should wish to have what someone else has, his wealth or his
+knowledge; but to be someone else, that is a thing I cannot comprehend."
+It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes
+prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be
+someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their
+normality in their misfortune--that is to say, when they endeavour to
+persist in their own being--prefer misfortune to non-existence. For
+myself I can say that as a youth, and even as a child, I remained
+unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then
+nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a
+furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as
+one of our ascetics has put it.[7]
+
+To propose to a man that he should be someone else, that he should
+become someone else, is to propose to him that he should cease to be
+himself. Everyone defends his own personality, and only consents to a
+change in his mode of thinking or of feeling in so far as this change is
+able to enter into the unity of his spirit and become involved in its
+continuity; in so far as this change can harmonize and integrate itself
+with all the rest of his mode of being, thinking and feeling, and can at
+the same time knit itself with his memories. Neither of a man nor of a
+people--which is, in a certain sense, also a man--can a change be
+demanded which breaks the unity and continuity of the person. A man can
+change greatly, almost completely even, but the change must take place
+within his continuity.
+
+It is true that in certain individuals there occur what are called
+changes of personality; but these are pathological cases, and as such
+are studied by alienists. In these changes of personality, memory, the
+basis of consciousness, is completely destroyed, and all that is left to
+the sufferer as the substratum of his individual continuity, which has
+now ceased to be personal, is the physical organism. For the subject who
+suffers it, such an infirmity is equivalent to death--it is not
+equivalent to death only for those who expect to inherit his fortune, if
+he possesses one! And this infirmity is nothing less than a revolution,
+a veritable revolution.
+
+A disease is, in a certain sense, an organic dissociation; it is a
+rebellion of some element or organ of the living body which breaks the
+vital synergy and seeks an end distinct from that which the other
+elements co-ordinated with it seek. Its end, considered in itself--that
+is to say, in the abstract--may be more elevated, more noble, more
+anything you like; but it is different. To fly and breathe in the air
+may be better than to swim and breathe in the water; but if the fins of
+a fish aimed at converting themselves into wings, the fish, as a fish,
+would perish. And it is useless to say that it would end by becoming a
+bird, if in this becoming there was not a process of continuity. I do
+not precisely know, but perhaps it may be possible for a fish to
+engender a bird, or another fish more akin to a bird than itself; but a
+fish, this fish, cannot itself and during its own lifetime become a
+bird.
+
+Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my
+life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. Every
+individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and
+continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as
+a part of that people. What if some other people is better than our own?
+Very possibly, although perhaps we do not clearly understand what is
+meant by better or worse. Richer? Granted. More cultured? Granted
+likewise. Happier? Well, happiness ... but still, let it pass! A
+conquering people (or what is called conquering) while we are conquered?
+Well and good. All this is good--but it is something different. And that
+is enough. Because for me the becoming other than I am, the breaking of
+the unity and continuity of my life, is to cease to be he who I am--that
+is to say, it is simply to cease to be. And that--no! Anything rather
+than that!
+
+Another, you say, might play the part that I play as well or better?
+Another might fulfil my function in society? Yes, but it would not be I.
+
+"I, I, I, always I!" some reader will exclaim; "and who are you?" I
+might reply in the words of Obermann, that tremendous man Obermann: "For
+the universe, nothing--for myself, everything"; but no, I would rather
+remind him of a doctrine of the man Kant--to wit, that we ought to think
+of our fellow-men not as means but as ends. For the question does not
+touch me alone, it touches you also, grumbling reader, it touches each
+and all. Singular judgments have the value of universal judgments, the
+logicians say. The singular is not particular, it is universal.
+
+Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to man, to
+each man, to each I. What is that idol, call it Humanity or call it what
+you like, to which all men and each individual man must be sacrificed?
+For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen, for
+my children, and these sacrifice themselves in their turn for theirs,
+and theirs again for those that come after them, and so on in a
+never-ending series of generations. And who receives the fruit of this
+sacrifice?
+
+Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication
+without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live.
+What is this right to live? They tell me I am here to realize I know not
+what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here
+to realize myself, to live.
+
+Yes, yes, I see it all!--an enormous social activity, a mighty
+civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of
+morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial
+marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums, and libraries, we
+shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist--for
+whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
+
+"Why!" the reader will exclaim again, "we are coming back to what the
+Catechism says: '_Q_. For whom did God create the world? _A_. For man.'"
+Well, why not?--so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it
+took account of these matters and were a person, would reply "For the
+ant," and it would reply rightly. The world is made for consciousness,
+for each consciousness.
+
+A human soul is worth all the universe, someone--I know not whom--has
+said and said magnificently. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life.
+Not this life. And it happens that the less a man believes in the
+soul--that is to say in his conscious immortality, personal and
+concrete--the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory
+life. This is the source from which springs all that effeminate,
+sentimental ebullition against war. True, a man ought not to wish to
+die, but the death to be renounced is the death of the soul. "Whosoever
+will save his life shall lose it," says the Gospel; but it does not say
+"whosoever will save his soul," the immortal soul--or, at any rate,
+which we believe and wish to be immortal.
+
+And what all the objectivists do not see, or rather do not wish to see,
+is that when a man affirms his "I," his personal consciousness, he
+affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true humanism--the
+humanism of man, not of the things of man--and in affirming man he
+affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of which we have
+consciousness is that of man.
+
+The world is for consciousness. Or rather this _for_, this notion of
+finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling, is
+born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are
+fundamentally the same thing.
+
+If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it
+lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above
+all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them light
+and enjoy itself in giving them light and so live. And it would think
+well.
+
+And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal craving
+for immortality which caused the man Kant to make that immortal leap of
+which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for consciousness. If
+consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a
+flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing
+more execrable than existence.
+
+Some may espy a fundamental contradiction in everything that I am
+saying, now expressing a longing for unending life, now affirming that
+this earthly life does not possess the value that is given to it.
+Contradiction? To be sure! The contradiction of my heart that says Yes
+and of my head that says No! Of course there is contradiction. Who does
+not recollect those words of the Gospel, "Lord, I believe, help thou my
+unbelief"? Contradiction! Of course! Since we only live in and by
+contradictions, since life is tragedy and the tragedy is perpetual
+struggle, without victory or the hope of victory, life is contradiction.
+
+The values we are discussing are, as you see, values of the heart, and
+against values of the heart reasons do not avail. For reasons are only
+reasons--that is to say, they are not even truths. There is a class of
+pedantic label-mongers, pedants by nature and by grace, who remind me of
+that man who, purposing to console a father whose son has suddenly died
+in the flower of his years, says to him, "Patience, my friend, we all
+must die!" Would you think it strange if this father were offended at
+such an impertinence? For it is an impertinence. There are times when
+even an axiom can become an impertinence. How many times may it not be
+said--
+
+    _Para pensar cual tu, solo es preciso
+    no tener nada mas que inteligencia_.[8]
+
+There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or
+with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think
+with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of
+the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the
+life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into
+definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought. And you
+know what a professional is? You know what a product of the
+differentiation of labour is?
+
+Take a professional boxer. He has learnt to hit with such economy of
+effort that, while concentrating all his strength in the blow, he only
+brings into play just those muscles that are required for the immediate
+and definite object of his action--to knock out his opponent. A blow
+given by a non-professional will not have so much immediate, objective
+efficiency; but it will more greatly vitalize the striker, causing him
+to bring into play almost the whole of his body. The one is the blow of
+a boxer, the other that of a man. And it is notorious that the Hercules
+of the circus, the athletes of the ring, are not, as a rule, healthy.
+They knock out their opponents, they lift enormous weights, but they die
+of phthisis or dyspepsia.
+
+If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is
+above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. The
+cultivation of any branch of science--of chemistry, of physics, of
+geometry, of philology--may be a work of differentiated specialization,
+and even so only within very narrow limits and restrictions; but
+philosophy, like poetry, is a work of integration and synthesis, or else
+it is merely pseudo-philosophical erudition.
+
+All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowledge for the sake of
+knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the
+question. We learn something either for an immediate practical end, or
+in order to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the knowledge that
+appears to us to be most theoretical--that is to say, of least immediate
+application to the non-intellectual necessities of life--answers to a
+necessity which is no less real because it is intellectual, to a reason
+of economy in thinking, to a principle of unity and continuity of
+consciousness. But just as a scientific fact has its finality in the
+rest of knowledge, so the philosophy that we would make our own has also
+its extrinsic object--it refers to our whole destiny, to our attitude in
+face of life and the universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy
+is to reconcile intellectual necessities with the necessities of the
+heart and the will. For it is on this rock that every philosophy that
+pretends to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction, the basis of
+our existence, breaks to pieces. But do all men face this contradiction
+squarely?
+
+Little can be hoped from a ruler, for example, who has not at some time
+or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first
+beginning and the ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with
+the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny.
+
+And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must
+involve the heart. It is not enough to think about our destiny: it must
+be felt. And the would-be leader of men who affirms and proclaims that
+he pays no heed to the things of the spirit, is not worthy to lead them.
+By which I do not mean, of course, that any ready-made solution is to be
+required of him. Solution? Is there indeed any?
+
+So far as I am concerned, I will never willingly yield myself, nor
+entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who is not penetrated with
+the feeling that he who orders a people orders men, men of flesh and
+bone, men who are born, suffer, and, although they do not wish to die,
+die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who must be
+themselves and not others; men, in fine, who seek that which we call
+happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of
+men to the generation which follows, without having any feeling for the
+destiny of those who are sacrificed, without having any regard, not for
+their memory, not for their names, but for them themselves.
+
+All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in
+the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only
+those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be
+persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess
+great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as
+regards the feelings and even morally imbecile. There have been
+instances.
+
+These clever-witted, affectively stupid persons are wont to say that it
+is useless to seek to delve in the unknowable or to kick against the
+pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has had to be
+amputated that it does not help him at all to think about it. And we all
+lack something; only some of us feel the lack and others do not. Or they
+pretend not to feel the lack, and then they are hypocrites.
+
+A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him,
+"Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?" And the sage answered
+him, "Precisely for that reason--because it does not avail." It is
+manifest that weeping avails something, even if only the alleviation of
+distress; but the deep sense of Solon's reply to the impertinent
+questioner is plainly seen. And I am convinced that we should solve many
+things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs,
+which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined
+together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling
+upon God. And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would
+hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to
+which men go to weep in common. A _miserere_ sung in common by a
+multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a philosophy. It is
+not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it. Yes, we
+must learn to weep! Perhaps that is the supreme wisdom. Why? Ask Solon.
+
+There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the
+tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life
+itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated,
+more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is
+possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. And this
+sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though
+afterwards, as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it.
+Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness--dyspepsia, for example;
+but at other times it is constitutional. And it is useless to speak, as
+we shall see, of men who are healthy and men who are not healthy. Apart
+from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved
+that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the
+very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison
+with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.
+
+Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those
+who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St.
+Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, _Rene, Obermann_, Thomson,[9] Leopardi,
+Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard--men burdened with
+wisdom rather than with knowledge.
+
+And there are, I believe, peoples who possess this tragic sense of life
+also.
+
+It is to this that we must now turn our attention, beginning with this
+matter of health and disease.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] "_Salto inmortal_." There is a play here upon the term _salto
+mortal_, used to denote the dangerous aerial somersault of the acrobat,
+which cannot be rendered in English.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[6] "_Conciencia_." The same word is used in Spanish to denote both
+consciousness and conscience. If the latter is specifically intended,
+the qualifying adjective "_moral_" or "_religiosa_" is commonly
+added.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[7] San Juan de los Angeles.
+
+[8] To be lacking in everything but intelligence is the necessary
+qualification for thinking like you.
+
+[9] James Thomson, author of _The City of Dreadful Night_.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE STARTING-POINT
+
+
+To some, perhaps, the foregoing reflections may seem to possess a
+certain morbid character. Morbid? But what is disease precisely? And
+what is health?
+
+May not disease itself possibly be the essential condition of that which
+we call progress and progress itself a disease?
+
+Who does not know the mythical tragedy of Paradise? Therein dwelt our
+first parents in a state of perfect health and perfect innocence, and
+Jahwe gave them to eat of the tree of life and created all things for
+them; but he commanded them not to taste of the fruit of the tree of the
+knowledge of good and evil. But they, tempted by the serpent--Christ's
+type of prudence--tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of
+good and evil, and became subject to all diseases, and to death, which
+is their crown and consummation, and to labour and to progress. For
+progress, according to this legend, springs from original sin. And thus
+it was the curiosity of Eve, of woman, of her who is most thrall to the
+organic necessities of life and of the conservation of life, that
+occasioned the Fall and with the Fall the Redemption, and it was the
+Redemption that set our feet on the way to God and made it possible for
+us to attain to Him and to be in Him.
+
+Do you want another version of our origin? Very well then. According to
+this account, man is, strictly speaking, merely a species of gorilla,
+orang-outang, chimpanzee, or the like, more or less hydrocephalous. Once
+on a time an anthropoid monkey had a diseased offspring--diseased from
+the strictly animal or zoological point of view, really diseased; and
+this disease, although a source of weakness, resulted in a positive gain
+in the struggle for survival. The only vertical mammal at last succeeded
+in standing erect--man. The upright position freed him from the
+necessity of using his hands as means of support in walking; he was
+able, therefore, to oppose the thumb to the other four fingers, to seize
+hold of objects and to fashion tools; and it is well known that the
+hands are great promoters of the intelligence. This same position gave
+to the lungs, trachea, larynx, and mouth an aptness for the production
+of articulate speech, and speech is intelligence. Moreover, this
+position, causing the head to weigh vertically upon the trunk,
+facilitated its development and increase of weight, and the head is the
+seat of the mind. But as this necessitated greater strength and
+resistance in the bones of the pelvis than in those of species whose
+head and trunk rest upon all four extremities, the burden fell upon
+woman, the author of the Fall according to Genesis, of bringing forth
+larger-headed offspring through a harder framework of bone. And Jahwe
+condemned her, for having sinned, to bring forth her children in sorrow.
+
+The gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-outang, and their kind, must look
+upon man as a feeble and infirm animal, whose strange custom it is to
+store up his dead. Wherefore?
+
+And this primary disease and all subsequent diseases--are they not
+perhaps the capital element of progress? Arthritis, for example, infects
+the blood and introduces into it scoriae, a kind of refuse, of an
+imperfect organic combustion; but may not this very impurity happen to
+make the blood more stimulative? May not this impure blood promote a
+more active cerebration precisely because it is impure? Water that is
+chemically pure is undrinkable. And may not also blood that is
+physiologically pure be unfit for the brain of the vertical mammal that
+has to live by thought?
+
+The history of medicine, moreover, teaches us that progress consists
+not so much in expelling the germs of disease, or rather diseases
+themselves, as in accommodating them to our organism and so perhaps
+enriching it, in dissolving them in our blood. What but this is the
+meaning of vaccination and all the serums, and immunity from infection
+through lapse of time?
+
+If this notion of absolute health were not an abstract category,
+something which does not strictly exist, we might say that a perfectly
+healthy man would be no longer a man, but an irrational animal.
+Irrational, because of the lack of some disease to set a spark to his
+reason. And this disease which gives us the appetite of knowing for the
+sole pleasure of knowing, for the delight of tasting of the fruit of the
+tree of the knowledge of good and evil, is a real disease and a tragic
+one.
+
+_Pantes anthropoi ton eidenai oregontai phusei_, "all men
+naturally desire to know." Thus Aristotle begins his Metaphysic, and it
+has been repeated a thousand times since then that curiosity or the
+desire to know, which according to Genesis led our first mother to sin,
+is the origin of knowledge.
+
+But it is necessary to distinguish here between the desire or appetite
+for knowing, apparently and at first sight for the love of knowledge
+itself, between the eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of
+knowledge, and the necessity of knowing for the sake of living. The
+latter, which gives us direct and immediate knowledge, and which in a
+certain sense might be called, if it does not seem too paradoxical,
+unconscious knowledge, is common both to men and animals, while that
+which distinguishes us from them is reflective knowledge, the knowing
+that we know.
+
+Man has debated at length and will continue to debate at length--the
+world having been assigned as a theatre for his debates--concerning the
+origin of knowledge; but, apart from the question as to what the real
+truth about this origin may be, which we will leave until later, it is
+a certainly ascertained fact that in the apparential order of things, in
+the life of beings who are endowed with a certain more or less cloudy
+faculty of knowing and perceiving, or who at any rate appear to act as
+if they were so endowed, knowledge is exhibited to us as bound up with
+the necessity of living and of procuring the wherewithal to maintain
+life. It is a consequence of that very essence of being, which according
+to Spinoza consists in the effort to persist indefinitely in its own
+being. Speaking in terms in which concreteness verges upon grossness, it
+may be said that the brain, in so far as its function is concerned,
+depends upon the stomach. In beings which rank in the lowest scale of
+life, those actions which present the characteristics of will, those
+which appear to be connected with a more or less clear consciousness,
+are actions designed to procure nourishment for the being performing
+them.
+
+Such then is what we may call the historical origin of knowledge,
+whatever may be its origin from another point of view. Beings which
+appear to be endowed with perception, perceive in order to be able to
+live, and only perceive in so far as they require to do so in order to
+live. But perhaps this stored-up knowledge, the utility in which it had
+its origin being exhausted, has come to constitute a fund of knowledge
+far exceeding that required for the bare necessities of living.
+
+Thus we have, first, the necessity of knowing in order to live, and
+next, arising out of this, that other knowledge which we might call
+superfluous knowledge or knowledge _de luxe_, which may in its turn come
+to constitute a new necessity. Curiosity, the so-called innate desire of
+knowing, only awakes and becomes operative after the necessity of
+knowing for the sake of living is satisfied; and although sometimes in
+the conditions under which the human race is actually living it may not
+so befall, but curiosity may prevail over necessity and knowledge over
+hunger, nevertheless the primordial fact is that curiosity sprang from
+the necessity of knowing in order to live, and this is the dead weight
+and gross matter carried in the matrix of science. Aspiring to be
+knowledge for the sake of knowledge, to know the truth for the sake of
+the truth itself, science is forced by the necessities of life to turn
+aside and put it itself at their service. While men believe themselves
+to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in
+truth. The variations of science depend upon the variations of human
+needs, and men of science are wont to work, willingly or unwillingly,
+wittingly or unwittingly, in the service of the powerful or in that of a
+people that demands from them the confirmation of its own desires.
+
+But is this really a dead weight that impedes the progress of science,
+or is it not rather its innermost redeeming essence? It is in fact the
+latter, and it is a gross stupidity to presume to rebel against the very
+condition of life.
+
+Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and
+primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. This
+necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge
+and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches,
+tastes, and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear,
+touch, taste, and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or the
+loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is
+environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in
+which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch,
+and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could
+not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common
+sense.
+
+Man, then, in his quality of an isolated individual, only sees, hears,
+touches, tastes, and smells in so far as is necessary for living and
+self-preservation. If he does not perceive colours below red or above
+violet, the reason perhaps is that the colours which he does perceive
+suffice for the purposes of self-preservation. And the senses themselves
+are simplifying apparati which eliminate from objective reality
+everything that it is not necessary to know in order to utilize objects
+for the purpose of preserving life. In complete darkness an animal, if
+it does not perish, ends by becoming blind. Parasites which live in the
+intestines of other animals upon the nutritive juices which they find
+ready prepared for them by these animals, as they do not need either to
+see or hear, do in fact neither see nor hear; they simply adhere, a kind
+of receptive bag, to the being upon whom they live. For these parasites
+the visible and audible world does not exist. It is enough for them that
+the animals, in whose intestines they live, see and hear.
+
+Knowledge, then, is primarily at the service of the instinct of
+self-preservation, which is indeed, as we have said with Spinoza, its
+very essence. And thus it may be said that it is the instinct of
+self-preservation that makes perceptible for us the reality and truth of
+the world; for it is this instinct that cuts out and separates that
+which exists for us from the unfathomable and illimitable region of the
+possible. In effect, that which has existence for us is precisely that
+which, in one way or another, we need to know in order to exist
+ourselves; objective existence, as we know it, is a dependence of our
+own personal existence. And nobody can deny that there may not exist,
+and perhaps do exist, aspects of reality unknown to us, to-day at any
+rate, and perhaps unknowable, because they are in no way necessary to us
+for the preservation of our own actual existence.
+
+But man does not live alone; he is not an isolated individual, but a
+member of society. There is not a little truth in the saying that the
+individual, like the atom, is an abstraction. Yes, the atom apart from
+the universe is as much an abstraction as the universe apart from the
+atom. And if the individual maintains his existence by the instinct of
+self-preservation, society owes its being and maintenance to the
+individual's instinct of perpetuation. And from this instinct, or rather
+from society, springs reason.
+
+Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the
+distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.
+
+It owes its origin, perhaps, to language. We think articulately--_i.e._,
+reflectively--thanks to articulate language, and this language arose out
+of the need of communicating our thought to our neighbours. To think is
+to talk with oneself, and each one of us talks with himself, thanks to
+our having had to talk with one another. In everyday life it frequently
+happens that we hit upon an idea that we were seeking and succeed in
+giving it form--that is to say, we obtain the idea, drawing it forth
+from the mist of dim perceptions which it represents, thanks to the
+efforts which we make to present it to others. Thought is inward
+language, and the inward language originates in the outward. Hence it
+results that reason is social and common. A fact pregnant with
+consequences, as we shall have occasion to see.
+
+Now if there is a reality which, in so far as we have knowledge of it,
+is the creation of the instinct of personal preservation and of the
+senses at the service of this instinct, must there not be another
+reality, not less real than the former, the creation, in so far as we
+have knowledge of it, of the instinct of perpetuation, the instinct of
+the species, and of the senses at the service of this instinct? The
+instinct of preservation, hunger, is the foundation of the human
+individual; the instinct of perpetuation, love, in its most rudimentary
+and physiological form, is the foundation of human society. And just as
+man knows that which he needs to know in order that he may preserve his
+existence, so society, or man in so far as he is a social being, knows
+that which he needs to know in order that he may perpetuate himself in
+society.
+
+There is a world, the sensible world, that is the child of hunger, and
+there is another world, the ideal world, that is the child of love. And
+just as there are senses employed in the service of the knowledge of the
+sensible world, so there are also senses, at present for the most part
+dormant, for social consciousness has scarcely awakened, employed in the
+service of the knowledge of the ideal world. And why must we deny
+objective reality to the creations of love, of the instinct of
+perpetuation, since we allow it to the creations of hunger or the
+instinct of preservation? For if it be said that the former creations
+are only the creations of our imagination, without objective value, may
+it not equally be said of the latter that they are only the creations of
+our senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible and intangible
+world, perceived by the inward sense that lives in the service of the
+instinct of perpetuation?
+
+Human society, as a society, possesses senses which the individual, but
+for his existence in society, would lack, just as the individual, man,
+who is in his turn a kind of society, possesses senses lacking in the
+cells of which he is composed. The blind cells of hearing, in their dim
+consciousness, must of necessity be unaware of the existence of the
+visible world, and if they should hear it spoken of they would perhaps
+deem it to be the arbitrary creation of the deaf cells of sight, while
+the latter in their turn would consider as illusion the audible world
+which the hearing cells create.
+
+We have remarked before that the parasites which live in the intestines
+of higher animals, feeding upon the nutritive juices which these animals
+supply, do not need either to see or hear, and therefore for them the
+visible and audible world does not exist. And if they possessed a
+certain degree of consciousness and took account of the fact that the
+animal at whose expense they live believed in a world of sight and
+hearing, they would perhaps deem such belief to be due merely to the
+extravagance of its imagination. And similarly there are social
+parasites, as Mr. A.J. Balfour admirably observes,[10] who, receiving
+from the society in which they live the motives of their moral conduct,
+deny that belief in God and the other life is a necessary foundation for
+good conduct and for a tolerable life, society having prepared for them
+the spiritual nutriment by which they live. An isolated individual can
+endure life and live it well and even heroically without in any sort
+believing either in the immortality of the soul or in God, but he lives
+the life of a spiritual parasite. What we call the sense of honour is,
+even in non-Christians, a Christian product. And I will say further,
+that if there exists in a man faith in God joined to a life of purity
+and moral elevation, it is not so much the believing in God that makes
+him good, as the being good, thanks to God, that makes him believe in
+Him. Goodness is the best source of spiritual clear-sightedness.
+
+I am well aware that it may be objected that all this talk of man
+creating the sensible world and love the ideal world, of the blind cells
+of hearing and the deaf cells of sight, of spiritual parasites, etc., is
+merely metaphor. So it is, and I do not claim to discuss otherwise than
+by metaphor. And it is true that this social sense, the creature of
+love, the creator of language, of reason, and of the ideal world that
+springs from it, is at bottom nothing other than what we call fancy or
+imagination. Out of fancy springs reason. And if by imagination is
+understood a faculty which fashions images capriciously, I will ask:
+What is caprice? And in any case the senses and reason are also
+fallible.
+
+We shall have to enquire what is this inner social faculty, the
+imagination which personalizes everything, and which, employed in the
+service of the instinct of perpetuation, reveals to us God and the
+immortality of the soul--God being thus a social product.
+
+But this we will reserve till later.
+
+And now, why does man philosophize?--that is to say, why does he
+investigate the first causes and ultimate ends of things? Why does he
+seek the disinterested truth? For to say that all men have a natural
+tendency to know is true; but wherefore?
+
+Philosophers seek a theoretic or ideal starting-point for their human
+work, the work of philosophizing; but they are not usually concerned to
+seek the practical and real starting-point, the purpose. What is the
+object in making philosophy, in thinking it and then expounding it to
+one's fellows? What does the philosopher seek in it and with it? The
+truth for the truth's own sake? The truth, in order that we may subject
+our conduct to it and determine our spiritual attitude towards life and
+the universe comformably with it?
+
+Philosophy is a product of the humanity of each philosopher, and each
+philosopher is a man of flesh and bone who addresses himself to other
+men of flesh and bone like himself. And, let him do what he will, he
+philosophizes not with the reason only, but with the will, with the
+feelings, with the flesh and with the bones, with the whole soul and the
+whole body. It is the man that philosophizes.
+
+I do not wish here to use the word "I" in connection with
+philosophizing, lest the impersonal "I" should be understood in place of
+the man that philosophizes; for this concrete, circumscribed "I," this
+"I" of flesh and bone, that suffers from tooth-ache and finds life
+insupportable if death is the annihilation of the personal
+consciousness, must not be confounded with that other counterfeit "I,"
+the theoretical "I" which Fichte smuggled into philosophy, nor yet with
+the Unique, also theoretical, of Max Stirner. It is better to say "we,"
+understanding, however, the "we" who are circumscribed in space.
+
+Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is
+inhuman. And if we say that theoretical philosophy addresses itself to
+practical philosophy, truth to goodness, science to ethics, I will ask:
+And to what end is goodness? Is it, perhaps, an end in itself? Good is
+simply that which contributes to the preservation, perpetuation, and
+enrichment of consciousness. Goodness addresses itself to man, to the
+maintenance and perfection of human society which is composed of men.
+And to what end is this? "So act that your action may be a pattern to
+all men," Kant tells us. That is well, but wherefore? We must needs seek
+for a wherefore.
+
+In the starting-point of all philosophy, in the real starting-point, the
+practical not the theoretical, there is a wherefore. The philosopher
+philosophizes for something more than for the sake of philosophizing.
+_Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_, says the old Latin adage; and as
+the philosopher is a man before he is a philosopher, he must needs live
+before he can philosophize, and, in fact, he philosophizes in order to
+live. And usually he philosophizes either in order to resign himself to
+life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget
+his griefs, or for pastime and amusement. A good illustration of this
+last case is to be found in that terrible Athenian ironist, Socrates, of
+whom Xenophon relates in his _Memorabilia_ that he discovered to
+Theodata, the courtesan, the wiles that she ought to make use of in
+order to lure lovers to her house so aptly, that she begged him to act
+as her companion in the chase, _suntherates_, her pimp, in a
+word. And philosophy is wont, in fact, not infrequently to convert
+itself into a kind of art of spiritual pimping. And sometimes into an
+opiate for lulling sorrows to sleep.
+
+I take at random a book of metaphysics, the first that comes to my hand,
+_Time and Space, a Metaphysical Essay_, by Shadworth H. Hodgson. I open
+it, and in the fifth paragraph of the first chapter of the first part I
+read:
+
+"Metaphysics is, properly speaking, not a science but a philosophy--that
+is, it is a science whose end is in itself, in the gratification and
+education of the minds which carry it on, not in external purpose, such
+as the founding of any art conducive to the welfare of life." Let us
+examine this. We see that metaphysics is not, properly speaking, a
+science--that is, it is a science whose end is in itself. And this
+science, which, properly speaking, is not a science, has its end in
+itself, in the gratification and education of the minds that cultivate
+it. But what are we to understand? Is its end in itself or is it to
+gratify and educate the minds that cultivate it? Either the one or the
+other! Hodgson afterwards adds that the end of metaphysics is not any
+external purpose, such as that of founding an art conducive to the
+welfare of life. But is not the gratification of the mind of him who
+cultivates philosophy part of the well-being of his life? Let the reader
+consider this passage of the English metaphysician and tell me if it is
+not a tissue of contradictions.
+
+Such a contradiction is inevitable when an attempt is made to define
+humanly this theory of science, of knowledge, whose end is in itself, of
+knowing for the sake of knowing, of attaining truth for the sake of
+truth. Science exists only in personal consciousness and thanks to it;
+astronomy, mathematics, have no other reality than that which they
+possess as knowledge in the minds of those who study and cultivate them.
+And if some day all personal consciousness must come to an end on the
+earth; if some day the human spirit must return to the nothingness--that
+is to say, to the absolute unconsciousness--from whence it sprang; and
+if there shall no more be any spirit that can avail itself of all our
+accumulated knowledge--then to what end is this knowledge? For we must
+not lose sight of the fact that the problem of the personal immortality
+of the soul involves the future of the whole human species.
+
+This series of contradictions into which the Englishman falls in his
+desire to explain the theory of a science whose end is in itself, is
+easily understood when it is remembered that it is an Englishman who
+speaks, and that the Englishman is before everything else a man. Perhaps
+a German specialist, a philosopher who had made philosophy his
+speciality, who had first murdered his humanity and then buried it in
+his philosophy, would be better able to explain this theory of a science
+whose end is in itself and of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
+
+Take the man Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland; read his
+_Ethic_ as a despairing elegiac poem, which in fact it is, and tell me
+if you do not hear, beneath the disemburdened and seemingly serene
+propositions _more geometrico_, the lugubrious echo of the prophetic
+psalms. It is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair. And when
+he wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and
+that his wisdom consists in meditating not on death but on life--homo
+liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat et eius sapientia non
+mortis, sed vitae meditatio est (_Ethic_, Part IV., Prop. LXVII.)--when
+he wrote that, he felt, as we all feel, that we are slaves, and he did
+in fact think about death, and he wrote it in a vain endeavour to free
+himself from this thought. Nor in writing Proposition XLII. of Part V.,
+that "happiness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself," did he
+feel, one may be sure, what he wrote. For this is usually the reason why
+men philosophize--in order to convince themselves, even though they fail
+in the attempt. And this desire of convincing oneself--that is to say,
+this desire of doing violence to one's own human nature--is the real
+starting-point of not a few philosophies.
+
+Whence do I come and whence comes the world in which and by which I
+live? Whither do I go and whither goes everything that environs me? What
+does it all mean? Such are the questions that man asks as soon as he
+frees himself from the brutalizing necessity of labouring for his
+material sustenance. And if we look closely, we shall see that beneath
+these questions lies the wish to know not so much the "why" as the
+"wherefore," not the cause but the end. Cicero's definition of
+philosophy is well known--"the knowledge of things divine and human and
+of the causes in which these things are contained," _rerum divinarum et
+humanarum, causarumque quibus hae res continentur_; but in reality these
+causes are, for us, ends. And what is the Supreme Cause, God, but the
+Supreme End? The "why" interests us only in view of the "wherefore." We
+wish to know whence we came only in order the better to be able to
+ascertain whither we are going.
+
+This Ciceronian definition, which is the Stoic definition, is also found
+in that formidable intellectualist, Clement of Alexandria, who was
+canonized by the Catholic Church, and he expounds it in the fifth
+chapter of the first of his _Stromata_. But this same Christian
+philosopher--Christian?--in the twenty-second chapter of his fourth
+_Stroma_ tells us that for the gnostic--that is to say, the
+intellectual--knowledge, _gnosis_, ought to suffice, and he adds: "I
+will dare aver that it is not because he wishes to be saved that he, who
+devotes himself to knowledge for the sake of the divine science itself,
+chooses knowledge. For the exertion of the intellect by exercise is
+prolonged to a perpetual exertion. And the perpetual exertion of the
+intellect is the essence of an intelligent being, which results from an
+uninterrupted process of admixture, and remains eternal contemplation, a
+living substance. Could we, then, suppose anyone proposing to the
+gnostic whether he would choose the knowledge of God or everlasting
+salvation, and if these, which are entirely identical, were separable,
+he would without the least hesitation choose the knowledge of God?" May
+He, may God Himself, whom we long to enjoy and possess eternally,
+deliver us from this Clementine gnosticism or intellectualism!
+
+Why do I wish to know whence I come and whither I go, whence comes and
+whither goes everything that environs me, and what is the meaning of it
+all? For I do not wish to die utterly, and I wish to know whether I am
+to die or not definitely. If I do not die, what is my destiny? and if I
+die, then nothing has any meaning for me. And there are three solutions:
+(_a_) I know that I shall die utterly, and then irremediable despair, or
+(_b_) I know that I shall not die utterly, and then resignation, or
+(_c_) I cannot know either one or the other, and then resignation in
+despair or despair in resignation, a desperate resignation or a resigned
+despair, and hence conflict.
+
+"It is best," some reader will say, "not to concern yourself with what
+cannot be known." But is it possible? In his very beautiful poem, _The
+Ancient Sage_, Tennyson said:
+
+    Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
+    Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
+    Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
+    Thou canst not prove that thou art spirit alone,
+    Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
+    Nor canst thou prove thou art immortal, no,
+    Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son,
+    Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
+    Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
+    For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
+    Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
+    Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
+    Cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
+
+Yes, perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy proving can be proven,
+nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to
+wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which may conduce
+to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge, as the
+Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is
+another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition
+between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational,
+not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And
+this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.
+
+The defect of Descartes' _Discourse of Method_ lies not in the
+antecedent methodical doubt; not in his beginning by resolving to doubt
+everything, a merely intellectual device; but in his resolution to begin
+by emptying himself of himself, of Descartes, of the real man, the man
+of flesh and bone, the man who does not want to die, in order that he
+might be a mere thinker--that is, an abstraction. But the real man
+returned and thrust himself into the philosophy.
+
+"_Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagee_." Thus begins the
+_Discourse of Method_, and this good sense saved him. He continues
+talking about himself, about the man Descartes, telling us among other
+things that he greatly esteemed eloquence and loved poetry; that he
+delighted above all in mathematics because of the evidence and certainty
+of its reasons, and that he revered our theology and claimed as much as
+any to attain to heaven--_et pretendais autant qu'aucun autre a gagner
+le ciel_. And this pretension--a very laudable one, I think, and above
+all very natural--was what prevented him from deducing all the
+consequences of his methodical doubt. The man Descartes claimed, as much
+as any other, to attain to heaven, "but having learned as a thing very
+sure that the way to it is not less open to the most ignorant than to
+the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead thither are
+beyond our intelligence, I did not dare submit them to my feeble
+reasonings, and I thought that to undertake to examine them and to
+succeed therein, I should want some extraordinary help from heaven and
+need to be more than man." And here we have the man. Here we have the
+man who "did not feel obliged, thank God, to make a profession
+(_metier_) of science in order to increase his means, and who did not
+pretend to play the cynic and despise glory." And afterwards he tells us
+how he was compelled to make a sojourn in Germany, and there, shut up in
+a stove (_poele_) he began to philosophize his method. But in Germany,
+shut up in a stove! And such his discourse is, a stove-discourse, and
+the stove a German one, although the philosopher shut up in it was a
+Frenchman who proposed to himself to attain to heaven.
+
+And he arrives at the _cogito ergo sum_, which St. Augustine had already
+anticipated; but the _ego_ implicit in this enthymeme, _ego cogito, ergo
+ego sum_, is an unreal--that is, an ideal--_ego_ or I, and its _sum_,
+its existence, something unreal also. "I think, therefore I am," can
+only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of the "I am,"
+which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is
+knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think,
+but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this
+living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek
+to join in wedlock life and reason!
+
+The truth is _sum, ergo cogito_--I am, therefore I think, although not
+everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all
+consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness
+of self, without personality? Can there exist pure knowledge without
+feeling, without that species of materiality which feeling lends to it?
+Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act
+of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove have said: "I
+feel, therefore I am"? or "I will, therefore I am"? And to feel oneself,
+is it not perhaps to feel oneself imperishable? To will oneself, is it
+not to wish oneself eternal--that is to say, not to wish to die? What
+the sorrowful Jew of Amsterdam called the essence of the thing, the
+effort that it makes to persist indefinitely in its own being,
+self-love, the longing for immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and
+fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is it
+not therefore the true base, the real starting-point, of all philosophy,
+although the philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, may not
+recognize it?
+
+And, moreover, it was the _cogito_ that introduced a distinction which,
+although fruitful of truths, has been fruitful also of confusions, and
+this distinction is that between object, _cogito_, and subject, _sum_.
+There is scarcely any distinction that does not also lead to confusion.
+But we will return to this later.
+
+For the present let us remain keenly suspecting that the longing not to
+die, the hunger for personal immortality, the effort whereby we tend to
+persist indefinitely in our own being, which is, according to the tragic
+Jew, our very essence, that this is the affective basis of all knowledge
+and the personal inward starting-point of all human philosophy, wrought
+by a man and for men. And we shall see how the solution of this inward
+affective problem, a solution which may be but the despairing
+renunciation of the attempt at a solution, is that which colours all the
+rest of philosophy. Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge
+there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the enquiry into
+the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore,"
+the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive
+others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself.
+
+And this personal and affective starting-point of all philosophy and all
+religion is the tragic sense of life. Let us now proceed to consider
+this.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[10] _The Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study
+of Theology_, by the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour London, 1895: "So
+it is with those persons who claim to show by their example that
+naturalism is practically consistent with the maintenance of ethical
+ideals with which naturalism has no natural affinity. Their spiritual
+life is parasitic: it is sheltered by convictions which belong, not to
+them, but to the society of which they form a part; it is nourished by
+processes in which they take no share. And when those convictions decay,
+and those processes come to an end, the alien life which they have
+maintained can scarce be expected to outlast them" (Chap. iv.).
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE HUNGER OF IMMORTALITY
+
+
+Let us pause to consider this immortal yearning for immortality--even
+though the gnostics or intellectuals may be able to say that what
+follows is not philosophy but rhetoric. Moreover, the divine Plato, when
+he discussed the immortality of the soul in his _Phaedo_, said that it
+was proper to clothe it in legend, _muthologein_.
+
+First of all let us recall once again--and it will not be for the last
+time--that saying of Spinoza that every being endeavours to persist in
+itself, and that this endeavour is its actual essence, and implies
+indefinite time, and that the soul, in fine, sometimes with a clear and
+distinct idea, sometimes confusedly, tends to persist in its being with
+indefinite duration, and is aware of its persistency (_Ethic_, Part
+III., Props. VI.-X.).
+
+It is impossible for us, in effect, to conceive of ourselves as not
+existing, and no effort is capable of enabling consciousness to realize
+absolute unconsciousness, its own annihilation. Try, reader, to imagine
+to yourself, when you are wide awake, the condition of your soul when
+you are in a deep sleep; try to fill your consciousness with the
+representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility
+of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.
+We cannot conceive ourselves as not existing.
+
+The visible universe, the universe that is created by the instinct of
+self-preservation, becomes all too narrow for me. It is like a cramped
+cell, against the bars of which my soul beats its wings in vain. Its
+lack of air stifles me. More, more, and always more! I want to be
+myself, and yet without ceasing to be myself to be others as well, to
+merge myself into the totality of things visible and invisible, to
+extend myself into the illimitable of space and to prolong myself into
+the infinite of time. Not to be all and for ever is as if not to be--at
+least, let me be my whole self, and be so for ever and ever. And to be
+the whole of myself is to be everybody else. Either all or nothing!
+
+All or nothing! And what other meaning can the Shakespearean "To be or
+not to be" have, or that passage in _Coriolanus_ where it is said of
+Marcius "He wants nothing of a god but eternity"? Eternity,
+eternity!--that is the supreme desire! The thirst of eternity is what is
+called love among men, and whosoever loves another wishes to eternalize
+himself in him. Nothing is real that is not eternal.
+
+From the poets of all ages and from the depths of their souls this
+tremendous vision of the flowing away of life like water has wrung
+bitter cries--from Pindar's "dream of a shadow," _skias onar_, to
+Calderon's "life is a dream" and Shakespeare's "we are such stuff as
+dreams are made on," this last a yet more tragic sentence than
+Calderon's, for whereas the Castilian only declares that our life is a
+dream, but not that we ourselves are the dreamers of it, the Englishman
+makes us ourselves a dream, a dream that dreams.
+
+The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and
+heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which
+neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling
+of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing
+that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills
+life again and eternalizes it. In appearance at any rate, for in
+reality.... And love, above all when it struggles against destiny,
+overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of
+appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is
+overcome and liberty is law.
+
+Everything passes! Such is the refrain of those who have drunk, lips to
+the spring, of the fountain of life, of those who have tasted of the
+fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
+
+To be, to be for ever, to be without ending! thirst of being, thirst of
+being more! hunger of God! thirst of love eternalizing and eternal! to
+be for ever! to be God!
+
+"Ye shall be as gods!" we are told in Genesis that the serpent said to
+the first pair of lovers (Gen. iii. 5). "If in this life only we have
+hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable," wrote the Apostle (1
+Cor. xv. 19); and all religion has sprung historically from the cult of
+the dead--that is to say, from the cult of immortality.
+
+The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that the free man thinks of
+nothing less than of death; but this free man is a dead man, free from
+the impulse of life, for want of love, the slave of his liberty. This
+thought that I must die and the enigma of what will come after death is
+the very palpitation of my consciousness. When I contemplate the green
+serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through
+which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the
+diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows
+about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery
+whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me
+with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depths of my
+spirit with the blood of divinity.
+
+Like Pascal, I do not understand those who assert that they care not a
+farthing for these things, and this indifference "in a matter that
+touches themselves, their eternity, their all, exasperates me rather
+than moves me to compassion, astonishes and shocks me," and he who feels
+thus "is for me," as for Pascal, whose are the words just quoted, "a
+monster."
+
+It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand books that
+ancestor-worship is for the most part the source of primitive religions,
+and it may be strictly said that what most distinguishes man from the
+other animals is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and
+does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother earth; he is an
+animal that guards its dead. And from what does he thus guard them? From
+what does he so futilely protect them? The wretched consciousness
+shrinks from its own annihilation, and, just as an animal spirit, newly
+severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the
+world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs
+desire to possess another life than that of the world itself. And so the
+earth would run the risk of becoming a vast cemetery before the dead
+themselves should die again.
+
+When mud huts or straw shelters, incapable of resisting the inclemency
+of the weather, sufficed for the living, tumuli were raised for the
+dead, and stone was used for sepulchres before it was used for houses.
+It is the strong-builded houses of the dead that have withstood the
+ages, not the houses of the living; not the temporary lodgings but the
+permanent habitations.
+
+This cult, not of death but of immortality, originates and preserves
+religions. In the midst of the delirium of destruction, Robespierre
+induced the Convention to declare the existence of the Supreme Being and
+"the consolatory principle of the immortality of the soul," the
+Incorruptible being dismayed at the idea of having himself one day to
+turn to corruption.
+
+A disease? Perhaps; but he who pays no heed to his disease is heedless
+of his health, and man is an animal essentially and substantially
+diseased. A disease? Perhaps it may be, like life itself to which it is
+thrall, and perhaps the only health possible may be death; but this
+disease is the fount of all vigorous health. From the depth of this
+anguish, from the abyss of the feeling of our mortality, we emerge into
+the light of another heaven, as from the depth of Hell Dante emerged to
+behold the stars once again--
+
+    _e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle._
+
+Although this meditation upon mortality may soon induce in us a sense of
+anguish, it fortifies us in the end. Retire, reader, into yourself and
+imagine a slow dissolution of yourself--the light dimming about you--all
+things becoming dumb and soundless, enveloping you in silence--the
+objects that you handle crumbling away between your hands--the ground
+slipping from under your feet--your very memory vanishing as if in a
+swoon--everything melting away from you into nothingness and you
+yourself also melting away--the very consciousness of nothingness,
+merely as the phantom harbourage of a shadow, not even remaining to you.
+
+I have heard it related of a poor harvester who died in a hospital bed,
+that when the priest went to anoint his hands with the oil of extreme
+unction, he refused to open his right hand, which clutched a few dirty
+coins, not considering that very soon neither his hand nor he himself
+would be his own any more. And so we close and clench, not our hand, but
+our heart, seeking to clutch the world in it.
+
+A friend confessed to me that, foreseeing while in the full vigour of
+physical health the near approach of a violent death, he proposed to
+concentrate his life and spend the few days which he calculated still
+remained to him in writing a book. Vanity of vanities!
+
+If at the death of the body which sustains me, and which I call mine to
+distinguish it from the self that is I, my consciousness returns to the
+absolute unconsciousness from which it sprang, and if a like fate
+befalls all my brothers in humanity, then is our toil-worn human race
+nothing but a fatidical procession of phantoms, going from nothingness
+to nothingness, and humanitarianism the most inhuman thing known.
+
+And the remedy is not that suggested in the quatrain that runs--
+
+    _Cada vez que considero
+    que me tengo de morir,
+    tiendo la capa en el suelo
+    y no me harto de dormir._[11]
+
+No! The remedy is to consider our mortal destiny without flinching, to
+fasten our gaze upon the gaze of the Sphinx, for it is thus that the
+malevolence of its spell is discharmed.
+
+If we all die utterly, wherefore does everything exist? Wherefore? It is
+the Wherefore of the Sphinx; it is the Wherefore that corrodes the
+marrow of the soul; it is the begetter of that anguish which gives us
+the love of hope.
+
+Among the poetic laments of the unhappy Cowper there are some lines
+written under the oppression of delirium, in which, believing himself to
+be the mark of the Divine vengeance, he exclaims--
+
+    Hell might afford my miseries a shelter.
+
+This is the Puritan sentiment, the preoccupation with sin and
+predestination; but read the much more terrible words of Senancour,
+expressive of the Catholic, not the Protestant, despair, when he makes
+his Obermann say, "L'homme est perissable. Il se peut; mais perissons en
+resistant, et, si le neant nous est reserve, ne faisons pas que ce soit
+une justice." And I must confess, painful though the confession be, that
+in the days of the simple faith of my childhood, descriptions of the
+tortures of hell, however terrible, never made me tremble, for I always
+felt that nothingness was much more terrifying. He who suffers lives,
+and he who lives suffering, even though over the portal of his abode is
+written "Abandon all hope!" loves and hopes. It is better to live in
+pain than to cease to be in peace. The truth is that I could not
+believe in this atrocity of Hell, of an eternity of punishment, nor did
+I see any more real hell than nothingness and the prospect of it. And I
+continue in the belief that if we all believed in our salvation from
+nothingness we should all be better.
+
+What is this _joie de vivre_ that they talk about nowadays? Our hunger
+for God, our thirst of immortality, of survival, will always stifle in
+us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not. It is
+the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life to be unending,
+that most often urges us to long for death. "If it is true that I am to
+die utterly," we say to ourselves, "then once I am annihilated the world
+has ended so far as I am concerned--it is finished. Why, then, should it
+not end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed to suffer the
+tormenting illusion of a transient and apparential existence, may come
+into being? If, the illusion of living being shattered, living for the
+mere sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise doomed to
+die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the good of living? Our best
+remedy is death." And thus it is that we chant the praises of the
+never-ending rest because of our dread of it, and speak of liberating
+death.
+
+Leopardi, the poet of sorrow, of annihilation, having lost the ultimate
+illusion, that of believing in his immortality--
+
+        _Peri l'inganno estremo
+    ch'eterno io mi credei_,
+
+spoke to his heart of _l'infinita vanita del tutto_, and perceived how
+close is the kinship between love and death, and how "when love is born
+deep down in the heart, simultaneously a languid and weary desire to die
+is felt in the breast." The greater part of those who seek death at
+their own hand are moved thereto by love; it is the supreme longing for
+life, for more life, the longing to prolong and perpetuate life, that
+urges them to death, once they are persuaded of the vanity of this
+longing.
+
+The problem is tragic and eternal, and the more we seek to escape from
+it, the more it thrusts itself upon us. Four-and-twenty centuries ago,
+in his dialogue on the immortality of the soul, the serene Plato--but
+was he serene?--spoke of the uncertainty of our dream of being immortal
+and of the _risk_ that the dream might be vain, and from his own soul
+there escaped this profound cry--Glorious is the risk!--_kalos
+gar o kindunos_, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our
+souls never dying--a sentence that was the germ of Pascal's famous
+argument of the wager.
+
+Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to
+eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the
+immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression
+upon me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is
+not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die--no; I
+neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for
+ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live--this poor "I" that I am
+and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of
+the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.
+
+I am the centre of my universe, the centre of the universe, and in my
+supreme anguish I cry with Michelet, "Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!"
+What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own
+soul? (Matt. xvi. 26). Egoism, you say? There is nothing more universal
+than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of
+all. Each man is worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do
+to sacrifice each to all save in so far as all sacrifice themselves to
+each. That which we call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the
+necessary postulate. "Love thy neighbour as thyself," we are told, the
+presupposition being that each man loves himself; and it is not said
+"Love thyself." And, nevertheless, we do not know how to love ourselves.
+
+Put aside the persistence of your own self and ponder what they tell
+you. Sacrifice yourself to your children! And sacrifice yourself to them
+because they are yours, part and prolongation of yourself, and they in
+their turn will sacrifice themselves to their children, and these
+children to theirs, and so it will go on without end, a sterile
+sacrifice by which nobody profits. I came into the world to create my
+self, and what is to become of all our selves? Live for the True, the
+Good, the Beautiful! We shall see presently the supreme vanity and the
+supreme insincerity of this hypocritical attitude.
+
+"That art thou!" they tell me with the Upanishads. And I answer: Yes, I
+am that, if that is I and all is mine, and mine the totality of things.
+As mine I love the All, and I love my neighbour because he lives in me
+and is part of my consciousness, because he is like me, because he is
+mine.
+
+Oh, to prolong this blissful moment, to sleep, to eternalize oneself in
+it! Here and now, in this discreet and diffused light, in this lake of
+quietude, the storm of the heart appeased and stilled the echoes of the
+world! Insatiable desire now sleeps and does not even dream; use and
+wont, blessed use and wont, are the rule of my eternity; my disillusions
+have died with my memories, and with my hopes my fears.
+
+And they come seeking to deceive us with a deceit of deceits, telling us
+that nothing is lost, that everything is transformed, shifts and
+changes, that not the least particle of matter is annihilated, not the
+least impulse of energy is lost, and there are some who pretend to
+console us with this! Futile consolation! It is not my matter or my
+energy that is the cause of my disquiet, for they are not mine if I
+myself am not mine--that is, if I am not eternal. No, my longing is not
+to be submerged in the vast All, in an infinite and eternal Matter or
+Energy, or in God; not to be possessed by God, but to possess Him, to
+become myself God, yet without ceasing to be I myself, I who am now
+speaking to you. Tricks of monism avail us nothing; we crave the
+substance and not the shadow of immortality.
+
+Materialism, you say? Materialism? Without doubt; but either our spirit
+is likewise some kind of matter or it is nothing. I dread the idea of
+having to tear myself away from my flesh; I dread still more the idea of
+having to tear myself away from everything sensible and material, from
+all substance. Yes, perhaps this merits the name of materialism; and if
+I grapple myself to God with all my powers and all my senses, it is that
+He may carry me in His arms beyond death, looking into these eyes of
+mine with the light of His heaven when the light of earth is dimming in
+them for ever. Self-illusion? Talk not to me of illusion--let me live!
+
+They also call this pride--"stinking pride" Leopardi called it--and they
+ask us who are we, vile earthworms, to pretend to immortality; in virtue
+of what? wherefore? by what right? "In virtue of what?" you ask; and I
+reply, In virtue of what do we now live? "Wherefore?"--and wherefore do
+we now exist? "By what right?"--and by what right are we? To exist is
+just as gratuitous as to go on existing for ever. Do not let us talk of
+merit or of right or of the wherefore of our longing, which is an end in
+itself, or we shall lose our reason in a vortex of absurdities. I do not
+claim any right or merit; it is only a necessity; I need it in order to
+live.
+
+And you, who are you? you ask me; and I reply with Obermann, "For the
+universe, nothing; for myself, everything!" Pride? Is it pride to want
+to be immortal? Unhappy men that we are! 'Tis a tragic fate, without a
+doubt, to have to base the affirmation of immortality upon the insecure
+and slippery foundation of the desire for immortality; but to condemn
+this desire on the ground that we believe it to have been proved to be
+unattainable, without undertaking the proof, is merely supine. I am
+dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me
+from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for
+immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really
+believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me,
+wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask
+the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the
+principle.
+
+But these are things which it is impossible to discuss.
+
+It is related in the book of the Acts of the Apostles how wherever Paul
+went the Jews, moved with envy, were stirred up to persecute him. They
+stoned him in Iconium and Lystra, cities of Lycaonia, in spite of the
+wonders that he worked therein; they scourged him in Philippi of
+Macedonia and persecuted his brethren in Thessalonica and Berea. He
+arrived at Athens, however, the noble city of the intellectuals, over
+which brooded the sublime spirit of Plato--the Plato of the gloriousness
+of the risk of immortality; and there Paul disputed with Epicureans and
+Stoics. And some said of him, "What doth this babbler (_spermologos_)
+mean?" and others, "He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods"
+(Acts xvii. 18), "and they took him and brought him unto Areopagus,
+saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is?
+for thou bringest certain strange things to our ears; we would know,
+therefore, what these things mean" (verses 19-20). And then follows that
+wonderful characterization of those Athenians of the decadence, those
+dainty connoisseurs of the curious, "for all the Athenians and strangers
+which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or
+to hear some new thing" (verse 21). A wonderful stroke which depicts for
+us the condition of mind of those who had learned from the _Odyssey_
+that the gods plot and achieve the destruction of mortals in order that
+their posterity may have something to narrate!
+
+Here Paul stands, then, before the subtle Athenians, before the
+_graeuli_, men of culture and tolerance, who are ready to welcome and
+examine every doctrine, who neither stone nor scourge nor imprison any
+man for professing these or those doctrines--here he stands where
+liberty of conscience is respected and every opinion is given an
+attentive hearing. And he raises his voice in the midst of the Areopagus
+and speaks to them as it was fitting to speak to the cultured citizens
+of Athens, and all listen to him, agog to hear the latest novelty. But
+when he begins to speak to them of the resurrection of the dead their
+stock of patience and tolerance comes to an end, and some mock him, and
+others say: "We will hear thee again of this matter!" intending not to
+hear him. And a similar thing happened to him at Caesarea when he came
+before the Roman praetor Felix, likewise a broad-minded and cultured man,
+who mitigated the hardships of his imprisonment, and wished to hear and
+did hear him discourse of righteousness and of temperance; but when he
+spoke of the judgement to come, Felix said, terrified (_emphobos
+genomenos_): "Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season
+I will call for thee" (Acts xxiv. 22-25). And in his audience before
+King Agrippa, when Festus the governor heard him speak of the
+resurrection of the dead, he exclaimed: "Thou art mad, Paul; much
+learning hath made thee mad" (Acts xxvi. 24).
+
+Whatever of truth there may have been in Paul's discourse in the
+Areopagus, and even if there were none, it is certain that this
+admirable account plainly shows how far Attic tolerance goes and where
+the patience of the intellectuals ends. They all listen to you, calmly
+and smilingly, and at times they encourage you, saying: "That's
+strange!" or, "He has brains!" or "That's suggestive," or "How fine!" or
+"Pity that a thing so beautiful should not be true!" or "this makes one
+think!" But as soon as you speak to them of resurrection and life after
+death, they lose their patience and cut short your remarks and exclaim,
+"Enough of this! we will talk about this another day!" And it is about
+this, my poor Athenians, my intolerant intellectuals, it is about this
+that I am going to talk to you here.
+
+And even if this belief be absurd, why is its exposition less tolerated
+than that of others much more absurd? Why this manifest hostility to
+such a belief? Is it fear? Is it, perhaps, spite provoked by inability
+to share it?
+
+And sensible men, those who do not intend to let themselves be deceived,
+keep on dinning into our ears the refrain that it is no use giving way
+to folly and kicking against the pricks, for what cannot be is
+impossible. The manly attitude, they say, is to resign oneself to fate;
+since we are not immortal, do not let us want to be so; let us submit
+ourselves to reason without tormenting ourselves about what is
+irremediable, and so making life more gloomy and miserable. This
+obsession, they add, is a disease. Disease, madness, reason ... the
+everlasting refrain! Very well then--No! I do not submit to reason, and
+I rebel against it, and I persist in creating by the energy of faith my
+immortalizing God, and in forcing by my will the stars out of their
+courses, for if we had faith as a grain of mustard seed we should say to
+that mountain, "Remove hence," and it would remove, and nothing would be
+impossible to us (Matt. xvii. 20).
+
+There you have that "thief of energies," as he[12] so obtusely called
+Christ who sought to wed nihilism with the struggle for existence, and
+he talks to you about courage. His heart craved the eternal all while
+his head convinced him of nothingness, and, desperate and mad to defend
+himself from himself, he cursed that which he most loved. Because he
+could not be Christ, he blasphemed against Christ. Bursting with his own
+self, he wished himself unending and dreamed his theory of eternal
+recurrence, a sorry counterfeit of immortality, and, full of pity for
+himself, he abominated all pity. And there are some who say that his is
+the philosophy of strong men! No, it is not. My health and my strength
+urge me to perpetuate myself. His is the doctrine of weaklings who
+aspire to be strong, but not of the strong who are strong. Only the
+feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire
+for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for
+perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance
+of life overflows upon the other side of death.
+
+Before this terrible mystery of mortality, face to face with the Sphinx,
+man adopts different attitudes and seeks in various ways to console
+himself for having been born. And now it occurs to him to take it as a
+diversion, and he says to himself with Renan that this universe is a
+spectacle that God presents to Himself, and that it behoves us to carry
+out the intentions of the great Stage-Manager and contribute to make the
+spectacle the most brilliant and the most varied that may be. And they
+have made a religion of art, a cure for the metaphysical evil, and
+invented the meaningless phrase of art for art's sake.
+
+And it does not suffice them. If the man who tells you that he writes,
+paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to
+the public, he lies; he lies if he puts his name to his writing,
+painting, statue, or song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a
+shadow of his spirit, something that may survive him. If the _Imitation
+of Christ_ is anonymous, it is because its author sought the eternity of
+the soul and did not trouble himself about that of the name. The man of
+letters who shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying rascal. Of
+Dante, the author of those three-and-thirty vigorous verses (_Purg._ xi.
+85-117) on the vanity of worldly glory, Boccaccio says that he relished
+honours and pomps more perhaps than suited with his conspicuous virtue.
+The keenest desire of his condemned souls is that they may be remembered
+and talked of here on earth, and this is the chief solace that lightens
+the darkness of his Inferno. And he himself confessed that his aim in
+expounding the concept of Monarchy was not merely that he might be of
+service to others, but that he might win for his own glory the palm of
+so great prize (_De Monarchia_, lib. i., cap. i.). What more? Even of
+that holy man, seemingly the most indifferent to worldly vanity, the
+Poor Little One of Assisi, it is related in the _Legenda Trium Sociorum_
+that he said: _Adhuc adorabor per totum mundum!_--You will see how I
+shall yet be adored by all the world! (II. _Celano_, i. 1). And even of
+God Himself the theologians say that He created the world for the
+manifestation of His glory.
+
+When doubts invade us and cloud our faith in the immortality of the
+soul, a vigorous and painful impulse is given to the anxiety to
+perpetuate our name and fame, to grasp at least a shadow of immortality.
+And hence this tremendous struggle to singularize ourselves, to survive
+in some way in the memory of others and of posterity. It is this
+struggle, a thousand times more terrible than the struggle for life,
+that gives its tone, colour, and character to our society, in which the
+medieval faith in the immortal soul is passing away. Each one seeks to
+affirm himself, if only in appearance.
+
+Once the needs of hunger are satisfied--and they are soon satisfied--the
+vanity, the necessity--for it is a necessity--arises of imposing
+ourselves upon and surviving in others. Man habitually sacrifices his
+life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity. He boasts
+even of his weaknesses and his misfortunes, for want of anything better
+to boast of, and is like a child who, in order to attract attention,
+struts about with a bandaged finger. And vanity, what is it but
+eagerness for survival?
+
+The vain man is in like case with the avaricious--he takes the means for
+the end; forgetting the end he pursues the means for its own sake and
+goes no further. The seeming to be something, conducive to being it,
+ends by forming our objective. We need that others should believe in our
+superiority to them in order that we may believe in it ourselves, and
+upon their belief base our faith in our own persistence, or at least in
+the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him who
+congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are
+to him who recognizes the truth or the goodness of the cause itself. A
+rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and
+characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius
+than hit the mark with the crowd. Rousseau has said in his _Emile_ (book
+iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the
+truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well
+that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports
+it because it is his. There is not a single one of them who, if he came
+to know the true and the false, would not prefer the falsehood that he
+had found to the truth discovered by another. Where is the philosopher
+who would not willingly deceive mankind for his own glory? Where is he
+who in the secret of his heart does not propose to himself any other
+object than to distinguish himself? Provided that he lifts himself above
+the vulgar, provided that he outshines the brilliance of his
+competitors, what does he demand more? The essential thing is to think
+differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists
+he would be a believer." How much substantial truth there is in these
+gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity!
+
+This violent struggle for the perpetuation of our name extends backwards
+into the past, just as it aspires to conquer the future; we contend
+with the dead because we, the living, are obscured beneath their shadow.
+We are jealous of the geniuses of former times, whose names, standing
+out like the landmarks of history, rescue the ages from oblivion. The
+heaven of fame is not very large, and the more there are who enter it
+the less is the share of each. The great names of the past rob us of our
+place in it; the space which they fill in the popular memory they usurp
+from us who aspire to occupy it. And so we rise up in revolt against
+them, and hence the bitterness with which all those who seek after fame
+in the world of letters judge those who have already attained it and are
+in enjoyment of it. If additions continue to be made to the wealth of
+literature, there will come a day of sifting, and each one fears lest he
+be caught in the meshes of the sieve. In attacking the masters,
+irreverent youth is only defending itself; the iconoclast or
+image-breaker is a Stylite who erects himself as an image, an _icon_.
+"Comparisons are odious," says the familiar adage, and the reason is
+that we wish to be unique. Do not tell Fernandez that he is one of the
+most talented Spaniards of the younger generation, for though he will
+affect to be gratified by the eulogy he is really annoyed by it; if,
+however, you tell him that he is the most talented man in Spain--well
+and good! But even that is not sufficient: one of the worldwide
+reputations would be more to his liking, but he is only fully satisfied
+with being esteemed the first in all countries and all ages. The more
+alone, the nearer to that unsubstantial immortality, the immortality of
+the name, for great names diminish one another.
+
+What is the meaning of that irritation which we feel when we believe
+that we are robbed of a phrase, or a thought, or an image, which we
+believed to be our own, when we are plagiarized? Robbed? Can it indeed
+be ours once we have given it to the public? Only because it is ours we
+prize it; and we are fonder of the false money that preserves our
+impress than of the coin of pure gold from which our effigy and our
+legend has been effaced. It very commonly happens that it is when the
+name of a writer is no longer in men's mouths that he most influences
+his public, his mind being then disseminated and infused in the minds of
+those who have read him, whereas he was quoted chiefly when his thoughts
+and sayings, clashing with those generally received, needed the
+guarantee of a name. What was his now belongs to all, and he lives in
+all. But for him the garlands have faded, and he believes himself to
+have failed. He hears no more either the applause or the silent tremor
+of the heart of those who go on reading him. Ask any sincere artist
+which he would prefer, whether that his work should perish and his
+memory survive, or that his work should survive and his memory perish,
+and you will see what he will tell you, if he is really sincere. When a
+man does not work merely in order to live and carry on, he works in
+order to survive. To work for the work's sake is not work but play. And
+play? We will talk about that later on.
+
+A tremendous passion is this longing that our memory may be rescued, if
+it is possible, from the oblivion which overtakes others. From it
+springs envy, the cause, according to the biblical narrative, of the
+crime with which human history opened: the murder of Abel by his brother
+Cain. It was not a struggle for bread--it was a struggle to survive in
+God, in the divine memory. Envy is a thousand times more terrible than
+hunger, for it is spiritual hunger. If what we call the problem of life,
+the problem of bread, were once solved, the earth would be turned into a
+hell by the emergence in a more violent form of the struggle for
+survival.
+
+For the sake of a name man is ready to sacrifice not only life but
+happiness--life as a matter of course. "Let me die, but let my fame
+live!" exclaimed Rodrigo Arias in _Las Mocedades del Cid_ when he fell
+mortally wounded by Don Ordonez de Lara. "Courage, Girolamo, for you
+will long be remembered; death is bitter, but fame eternal!" cried
+Girolamo Olgiati, the disciple of Cola Montano and the murderer,
+together with his fellow-conspirators Lampugnani and Visconti, of
+Galeazzo Sforza, tyrant of Milan. And there are some who covet even the
+gallows for the sake of acquiring fame, even though it be an infamous
+fame: _avidus malae famae_, as Tacitus says.
+
+And this erostratism, what is it at bottom but the longing for
+immortality, if not for substantial and concrete immortality, at any
+rate for the shadowy immortality of the name?
+
+And in this there are degrees. If a man despises the applause of the
+crowd of to-day, it is because he seeks to survive in renewed minorities
+for generations. "Posterity is an accumulation of minorities," said
+Gounod. He wishes to prolong himself in time rather than in space. The
+crowd soon overthrows its own idols and the statue lies broken at the
+foot of the pedestal without anyone heeding it; but those who win the
+hearts of the elect will long be the objects of a fervent worship in
+some shrine, small and secluded no doubt, but capable of preserving them
+from the flood of oblivion. The artist sacrifices the extensiveness of
+his fame to its duration; he is anxious rather to endure for ever in
+some little corner than to occupy a brilliant second place in the whole
+universe; he prefers to be an atom, eternal and conscious of himself,
+rather than to be for a brief moment the consciousness of the whole
+universe; he sacrifices infinitude to eternity.
+
+And they keep on wearying our ears with this chorus of Pride! stinking
+Pride! Pride, to wish to leave an ineffaceable name? Pride? It is like
+calling the thirst for riches a thirst for pleasure. No, it is not so
+much the longing for pleasure that drives us poor folk to seek money as
+the terror of poverty, just as it was not the desire for glory but the
+terror of hell that drove men in the Middle Ages to the cloister with
+its _acedia_. Neither is this wish to leave a name pride, but terror of
+extinction. We aim at being all because in that we see the only means of
+escaping from being nothing. We wish to save our memory--at any rate,
+our memory. How long will it last? At most as long as the human race
+lasts. And what if we shall save our memory in God?
+
+Unhappy, I know well, are these confessions; but from the depth of
+unhappiness springs new life, and only by draining the lees of spiritual
+sorrow can we at last taste the honey that lies at the bottom of the cup
+of life. Anguish leads us to consolation.
+
+This thirst for eternal life is appeased by many, especially by the
+simple, at the fountain of religious faith; but to drink of this is not
+given to all. The institution whose primordial end is to protect this
+faith in the personal immortality of the soul is Catholicism; but
+Catholicism has sought to rationalize this faith by converting religion
+into theology, by offering a philosophy, and a philosophy of the
+thirteenth century, as a basis for vital belief. This and its
+consequences we will now proceed to examine.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[11] Each time that I consider that it is my lot to die, I spread my
+cloak upon the ground and am never surfeited with sleeping.
+
+[12] Nietzsche.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM
+
+
+Let us now approach the Christian, Catholic, Pauline, or Athanasian
+solution of our inward vital problem, the hunger of immortality.
+
+Christianity sprang from the confluence of two mighty spiritual
+streams--the one Judaic, the other Hellenic--each of which had already
+influenced the other, and Rome finally gave it a practical stamp and
+social permanence.
+
+It has been asserted, perhaps somewhat precipitately, that primitive
+Christianity was an-eschatological, that faith in another life after
+death is not clearly manifested in it, but rather a belief in the
+proximate end of the world and establishment of the kingdom of God, a
+belief known as chiliasm. But were they not fundamentally one and the
+same thing? Faith in the immortality of the soul, the nature of which
+was not perhaps very precisely defined, may be said to be a kind of
+tacit understanding or supposition underlying the whole of the Gospel;
+and it is the mental orientation of many of those who read it to-day, an
+orientation contrary to that of the Christians from among whom the
+Gospel sprang, that prevents them from seeing this. Without doubt all
+that about the second coming of Christ, when he shall come among the
+clouds, clothed with majesty and great power, to judge the quick and the
+dead, to open to some the kingdom of heaven and to cast others into
+Gehenna, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, may be
+understood in a chiliastic sense; and it is even said of Christ in the
+Gospel (Mark ix. I), that there were with him some who should not taste
+of death till they had seen the kingdom of God--that is, that the
+kingdom should come during their generation. And in the same chapter,
+verse 10, it is said of Peter and James and John, who went up with Jesus
+to the Mount of Transfiguration and heard him say that he would rise
+again from the dead, that "they kept that saying within themselves,
+questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean."
+And at all events the Gospel was written when this belief, the basis and
+_raison d'etre_ of Christianity, was in process of formation. See Matt.
+xxii. 29-32; Mark xii. 24-27; Luke xvi. 22-31; xx. 34-37; John v. 24-29;
+vi. 40, 54, 58; viii. 51; xi. 25, 56; xiv. 2, 19. And, above all, that
+passage in Matt. xxvii. 52, which tells how at the resurrection of
+Christ "many bodies of the saints which slept arose."
+
+And this was not a natural resurrection. No; the Christian faith was
+born of the faith that Jesus did not remain dead, but that God raised
+him up again, and that this resurrection was a fact; but this did not
+presuppose a mere immortality of the soul in the philosophical sense
+(see Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, Prolegomena, v. 4). For the first
+Fathers of the Church themselves the immortality of the soul was not a
+thing pertaining to the natural order; the teaching of the Divine
+Scriptures, as Nimesius said, sufficed for its demonstration, and it
+was, according to Lactantius, a gift--and as such gratuitous--of God.
+But more of this later.
+
+Christianity sprang, as we have said, from two great spiritual
+streams--the Judaic and the Hellenic--each one of which had arrived on
+its account, if not at a precise definition of, at any rate at a
+definite yearning for, another life. Among the Jews faith in another
+life was neither general nor clear; but they were led to it by faith in
+a personal and living God, the formation of which faith comprises all
+their spiritual history.
+
+Jahwe, the Judaic God, began by being one god among many others--the
+God of the people of Israel, revealed among the thunders of the tempest
+on Mount Sinai. But he was so jealous that he demanded that worship
+should be paid to him alone, and it was by way of monocultism that the
+Jews arrived at monotheism. He was adored as a living force, not as a
+metaphysical entity, and he was the god of battles. But this God of
+social and martial origin, to whose genesis we shall have to return
+later, became more inward and personal in the prophets, and in becoming
+more inward and personal he thereby became more individual and more
+universal. He is the Jahwe who, instead of loving Israel because Israel
+is his son, takes Israel for a son because he loves him (Hosea xi. 1).
+And faith in the personal God, in the Father of men, carries with it
+faith in the eternalization of the individual man--a faith which had
+already dawned in Pharisaism even before Christ.
+
+Hellenic culture, on its side, ended by discovering death; and to
+discover death is to discover the hunger of immortality. This longing
+does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final,
+in their character, marking not the start but the close of a
+civilization. They indicate the transition from the old religion of
+Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo--of
+redemption. But the popular and inward religion of the Eleusinian
+mysteries, the worship of souls and ancestors, always persisted
+underneath. "In so far as it is possible to speak of a Delphic theology,
+among its more important elements must be counted the belief in the
+continuation of the life of souls after death in its popular forms, and
+in the worship of the souls of the dead."[13] There were the Titanic and
+the Dionysiac elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the
+Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which
+the soul was like a captive in a prison (see Rohde, _Psyche_, "Die
+Orphiker," 4). The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic
+idea. But the idea of the immortality of the soul was not a
+philosophical principle. The attempt of Empedocles to harmonize a
+hylozoistic system with spiritualism proved that a philosophical natural
+science cannot by itself lead to a corroboration of the axiom of the
+perpetuity of the individual soul; it could only serve as a support to a
+theological speculation. It was by a contradiction that the first Greek
+philosophers affirmed immortality, by abandoning natural philosophy and
+intruding into theology, by formulating not an Apollonian but a
+Dionysiac and Orphic dogma. But "an immortality of the soul as such, in
+virtue of its own nature and condition as an imperishable divine force
+in the mortal body, was never an object of popular Hellenic belief"
+(Rohde, _op. cit._).
+
+Recall the _Phaedo_ of Plato and the neo-platonic lucubrations. In them
+the yearning for personal immortality already shows itself--a yearning
+which, as it was left totally unsatisfied by reason, produced the
+Hellenic pessimism. For, as Pfleiderer very well observes
+(_Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtliche Grundlage_, 3. Berlin, 1896),
+"no people ever came upon the earth so serene and sunny as the Greeks in
+the youthful days of their historical existence ... but no people
+changed so completely their idea of the value of life. The Hellenism
+which ended in the religious speculations of neo-pythagorism and
+neo-platonism viewed this world, which had once appeared to it so joyous
+and radiant, as an abode of darkness and error, and earthly existence as
+a period of trial which could never be too quickly traversed." Nirvana
+is an Hellenic idea.
+
+Thus Jews and Greeks each arrived independently at the real discovery
+of death--a discovery which occasions, in peoples as in men, the
+entrance into spiritual puberty, the realization of the tragic sense of
+life, and it is then that the living God is begotten by humanity. The
+discovery of death is that which reveals God to us, and the death of the
+perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation of death, being the
+death of the man who ought not to have died yet did die.
+
+Such a discovery--that of immortality--prepared as it was by the Judaic
+and Hellenic religious processes, was a specifically Christian
+discovery. And its full achievement was due above all to Paul of Tarsus,
+the hellenizing Jew and Pharisee. Paul had not personally known Jesus,
+and hence he discovered him as Christ. "It may be said that the theology
+of the Apostle Paul is, in general, the first Christian theology. For
+him it was a necessity; it was, in a certain sense, his substitution for
+the lack of a personal knowledge of Jesus," says Weizsaecker (_Das
+apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche_. Freiburg-i.-B., 1892).
+He did not know Jesus, but he felt him born again in himself, and thus
+he could say, "Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in
+me."[14] And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and
+unto the Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for
+the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ. The
+important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died
+and had risen again, and not what he did in his life--not his ethical
+work as a teacher, but his religious work as a giver of immortality. And
+he it was who wrote those immortal words: "Now if Christ be preached
+that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no
+resurrection from the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead,
+then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our
+preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.... Then they also which are
+fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope
+in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (I Cor. xv. 12-19).
+
+And it is possible to affirm that thenceforward he who does not believe
+in the bodily resurrection of Christ may be Christophile but cannot be
+specifically Christian. It is true that a Justin Martyr could say that
+"all those are Christians who live in accordance with reason, even
+though they may be deemed to be atheists, as, among the Greeks, Socrates
+and Heraclitus and other such"; but this martyr, is he a martyr--that is
+to say a witness--of Christianity? No.
+
+And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced by Paul, the dogma of
+the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of the
+resurrection and immortality of each believer, that the whole of
+Christology was built up. The God-man, the incarnate Word, came in order
+that man, according to his mode, might be made God--that is, immortal.
+And the Christian God, the Father of Christ, a God necessarily
+anthropomorphic, is He who--as the Catechism of Christian Doctrine which
+we were made to learn by heart at school says--created the world for
+man, for each man. And the end of redemption, in spite of appearances
+due to an ethical deflection of a dogma properly religious, was to save
+us from death rather than from sin, or from sin in so far as sin implies
+death. And Christ died, or rather rose again, for _me_, for each one of
+us. And a certain solidarity was established between God and His
+creature. Malebranche said that the first man fell _in order that_
+Christ might redeem us, rather than that Christ redeemed us _because_
+man had fallen.
+
+After the death of Paul years passed, and generations of Christianity
+wrought upon this central dogma and its consequences in order to
+safeguard faith in the immortality of the individual soul, and the
+Council of Nicaea came, and with it the formidable Athanasius, whose
+name is still a battle-cry, an incarnation of the popular faith.
+Athanasius was a man of little learning but of great faith, and above
+all of popular faith, devoured by the hunger of immortality. And he
+opposed Arianism, which, like Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism,
+threatened, although unknowingly and unintentionally, the foundation of
+that belief. For the Arians, Christ was first and foremost a teacher--a
+teacher of morality, the wholly perfect man, and therefore the guarantee
+that we may all attain to supreme perfection; but Athanasius felt that
+Christ cannot make us gods if he has not first made himself God; if his
+Divinity had been communicated, he could not have communicated it to us.
+"He was not, therefore," he said, "first man and then became God; but He
+was first God and then became man in order that He might the better
+deify us (_theopoiese_)" (_Orat._ i. 39). It was not the Logos of
+the philosophers, the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and
+adored;[15] and thus he instituted a separation between nature and
+revelation. The Athanasian or Nicene Christ, who is the Catholic Christ,
+is not the cosmological, nor even, strictly, the ethical Christ; he is
+the eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ. Harnack says of
+this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is
+essentially docetic--that is, apparential--because the process of the
+divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of
+eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called
+historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a
+myth or in a social atom?
+
+This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or
+Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it to
+cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the
+learned might pass over to Catholicism--that is to say, from reason to
+faith. To this same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an
+indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who
+saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with God,
+should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus,
+whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor yet Harnack
+himself. Among Protestants, this historical Jesus is subjected to the
+scalpel of criticism, while the Catholic Christ lives, the really
+historical Christ, he who lives throughout the centuries guaranteeing
+the faith in personal immortality and personal salvation.
+
+And Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith, that of asserting
+things mutually contradictory: "The complete contradiction that exists
+in the _homoousios_ carried in its train a whole army of
+contradictions which increased as thought advanced," says Harnack. Yes,
+so it was, and so it had to be. And he adds: "Dogma took leave for ever
+of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and habituated itself to the
+contra-rational." In truth, it drew closer to life, which is
+contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Not only are judgements
+of worth never rationalizable--they are anti-rational.
+
+At Nicaea, then, as afterwards at the Vatican, victory rested with the
+idiots--taking this word in its proper, primitive, and etymological
+sense--the simple-minded, the rude and headstrong bishops, the
+representatives of the genuine human spirit, the popular spirit, the
+spirit that does not want to die, in spite of whatever reason may say,
+and that seeks a guarantee, the most material possible, for this desire.
+
+_Quid ad aeternitatem?_ This is the capital question. And the Creed ends
+with that phrase, _resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi
+saeculi_--the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
+In the cemetery of Mallona, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a
+tombstone on which this verse is carved:
+
+    _Aunque estamos en polvo convertidos,
+    en Ti, Senor, nuestra esperanza fia,
+    que tornaremos a vivir vestidos
+    con la carne y la piel que nos cubria._[16]
+
+"With the same bodies and souls that they had," as the Catechism says.
+So much so, that it is orthodox Catholic doctrine that the happiness of
+the blessed is not perfectly complete until they recover their bodies.
+They lament in heaven, says our Brother Pedro Malon de Chaide of the
+Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque,[17] and "this lament
+springs from their not being perfectly whole in heaven, for only the
+soul is there; and although they cannot suffer, because they see God, in
+whom they unspeakably delight, yet with all this it appears that they
+are not wholly content. They will be so when they are clothed with their
+own bodies."
+
+And to this central dogma of the resurrection in Christ and by Christ
+corresponds likewise a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic
+piety--the Sacrament of the Eucharist. In it is administered the body of
+Christ, which is the bread of immortality.
+
+This sacrament is genuinely realist--_dinglich_, as the Germans would
+say--which may without great violence be translated "material." It is
+the sacrament most genuinely _ex opere operato_, for which is
+substituted among Protestants the idealistic sacrament of the word.
+Fundamentally it is concerned with--and I say it with all possible
+respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the expressiveness of the
+phrase--the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding
+upon Him. Little wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when she was
+communicating in the monastery of the Incarnation and in the second year
+of her being Prioress there, on the octave of St. Martin, and the
+Father, Fr. Juan de la Cruz, divided the Host between her and another
+sister, she thought that it was done not because there was any want of
+Hosts, but because he wished to mortify her, "for I had told him how
+much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that
+the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole
+and entire in the smallest particle." Here reason pulls one way, feeling
+another. And what importance for this feeling have the thousand and one
+difficulties that arise from reflecting rationally upon the mystery of
+this sacrament? What is a divine body? And the body, in so far as it is
+the body of Christ, is it divine? What is an immortal and immortalizing
+body? What is substance separated from the accidents? Nowadays we have
+greatly refined our notion of materiality and substantiality; but there
+were even some among the Fathers of the Church to whom the immateriality
+of God Himself was not a thing so clear and definite as it is for us.
+And this sacrament of the Eucharist is the immortalizing sacrament _par
+excellence_, and therefore the axis of popular Catholic piety, and if it
+may be so said, the most specifically religious of sacraments.
+
+For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not
+justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical.
+It was from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of
+him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions--namely,
+that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in
+Catholicism.
+
+The preoccupation of sin has never been such a matter of anguish, or at
+any rate has never displayed itself with such an appearance of anguish,
+among Catholics. The sacrament of Confession contributes to this. And
+there persists, perhaps, among Catholics more than among Protestants
+the substance of the primitive Judaic and pagan conception of sin as
+something material and infectious and hereditary, which is cured by
+baptism and absolution. In Adam all his posterity sinned, almost
+materially, and his sin was transmitted as a material disease is
+transmitted. Renan, whose education was Catholic, was right, therefore,
+in calling to account the Protestant Amiel who accused him of not giving
+due importance to sin. And, on the other hand, Protestantism, absorbed
+in this preoccupation with justification, which in spite of its
+religious guise was taken more in an ethical sense than anything else,
+ends by neutralizing and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons
+the Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure religious
+individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or cultured religiosity.
+What we may call "other-worldliness" (_Jenseitigkeit_) was obliterated
+little by little by "this-worldliness" (_Diesseitigkeit_); and this in
+spite of Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it. To its
+earthly vocation and passive trust in God is due the religious
+coarseness of Lutheranism, which was almost at the point of expiring in
+the age of the Enlightenment, of the _Aufklaerung_, and which pietism,
+infusing into it something of the religious sap of Catholicism, barely
+succeeded in galvanizing a little. Hence the exactness of the remarks of
+Oliveira Martins in his magnificent _History of Iberian Civilization_,
+in which he says (book iv., chap, iii.) that "Catholicism produced
+heroes and Protestantism produced societies that are sensible, happy,
+wealthy, free, as far as their outer institutions go, but incapable of
+any great action, because their religion has begun by destroying in the
+heart of man all that made him capable of daring and noble
+self-sacrifice."
+
+Take any of the dogmatic systems that have resulted from the latest
+Protestant dissolvent analysis--that of Kaftan, the follower of Ritschl,
+for example--and note the extent to which eschatology is reduced. And
+his master, Albrecht Ritschl, himself says: "The question regarding the
+necessity of justification or forgiveness can only be solved by
+conceiving eternal life as the direct end and aim of that divine
+operation. But if the idea of eternal life be applied merely to our
+state in the next life, then its content, too, lies beyond all
+experience, and cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind.
+Hopes and desires, though marked by the strongest subjective certainty,
+are not any the clearer for that, and contain in themselves no guarantee
+of the completeness of what one hopes or desires. Clearness and
+completeness of idea, however, are the conditions of comprehending
+anything--_i.e._, of understanding the necessary connection between the
+various elements of a thing, and between the thing and its given
+presuppositions. The Evangelical article of belief, therefore, that
+justification by faith establishes or brings with it assurance of
+eternal life, is of no use theologically, so long as this purposive
+aspect of justification cannot be verified in such experience as is
+possible now" (_Rechtfertigung und Versoehnung_, vol. iii., chap. vii.,
+52). All this is very rational, but ...
+
+In the first edition of Melanchthon's _Loci Communes_, that of 1521, the
+first Lutheran theological work, its author omits all Trinitarian and
+Christological speculations, the dogmatic basis of eschatology. And Dr.
+Hermann, professor at Marburg, the author of a book on the Christian's
+commerce with God (_Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_)--a book the
+first chapter of which treats of the opposition between mysticism and
+the Christian religion, and which is, according to Harnack, the most
+perfect Lutheran manual--tells us in another place,[18] referring to
+this Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that "the effective
+knowledge of God and of Christ, in which knowledge faith lives, is
+something entirely different. Nothing ought to find a place in Christian
+doctrine that is not capable of helping man to recognize his sins, to
+obtain the grace of God, and to serve Him in truth. Until that
+time--that is to say, until Luther--the Church had accepted much as
+_doctrina sacra_ which cannot absolutely contribute to confer upon man
+liberty of heart and tranquillity of conscience." For my part, I cannot
+conceive the liberty of a heart or the tranquillity of a conscience that
+are not sure of their perdurability after death. "The desire for the
+soul's salvation," Hermann continues, "must at last have led men to the
+knowledge and understanding of the effective doctrine of salvation." And
+in his book on the Christian's commerce with God, this eminent Lutheran
+doctor is continually discoursing upon trust in God, peace of
+conscience, and an assurance of salvation that is not strictly and
+precisely certainty of everlasting life, but rather certainty of the
+forgiveness of sins.
+
+And I have read in a Protestant theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, that in the
+conceptual order Protestantism has attained its highest reach in music,
+in which art Bach has given it its mightiest artistic expression. This,
+then, is what Protestantism dissolves into--celestial music![19] On the
+other hand we may say that the highest artistic expression of
+Catholicism, or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is in the art that is
+most material, tangible, and permanent--for the vehicle of sounds is
+air--in sculpture and painting, in the Christ of Velasquez, that Christ
+who is for ever dying, yet never finishes dying, in order that he may
+give us life.
+
+And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can
+leave ethics on one side. But our religion--although its doctors may
+protest against this--is fundamentally and for the most part a
+compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed
+into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the
+eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline
+apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind those words which the _Theologica
+Germanica_, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the
+mouth of God: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with
+good, for I am and have none other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive
+them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps
+knows what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the
+social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and
+hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly
+eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is
+a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element
+preponderating. The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism,
+is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual
+soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of
+virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to
+perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?
+The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And, strictly, what is
+important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not. It is not
+necessary to take very literally, but as a lyrical, or rather
+rhetorical, effusion, the words of our famous sonnet--
+
+    _No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
+    el cielo que me tienes prometido,_[20]
+
+and the rest that follows.
+
+The real sin--perhaps it is the sin against the Holy Ghost for which
+there is no remission--is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for
+oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be
+a liberal--that is, a heretic--is worse than being an assassin, a thief,
+or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose
+infallibility protects us from reason.
+
+And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What
+difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible--the
+Bible, or a society of men--the Church, or a single man? Does it make
+any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the
+infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than
+that of a single man, this supreme offence in the eyes of reason had to
+be posited.
+
+It is the vital asserting itself, and in order to assert itself it
+creates, with the help of its enemy, the rational, a complete dogmatic
+structure, and this the Church defends against rationalism, against
+Protestantism, and against Modernism. The Church defends life. It stood
+up against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its
+inception and until it became assimilated to the general body of human
+knowledge, tended to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the
+universe was created for man. It opposed Darwin, and it did right, for
+Darwinism tends to shatter our belief that man is an exceptional animal,
+created expressly to be eternalized. And lastly, Pius IX., the first
+Pontiff to be proclaimed infallible, declared that he was irreconcilable
+with the so-called modern civilization. And he did right.
+
+Loisy, the Catholic ex-abbe, said: "I say simply this, that the Church
+and theology have not looked with favour upon the scientific movement,
+and that on certain decisive occasions, so far as it lay in their power,
+they have hindered it. I say, above all, that Catholic teaching has not
+associated itself with, or accommodated itself to, this movement.
+Theology has conducted itself, and conducts itself still, as if it were
+self-possessed of a science of nature and a science of history,
+together with that general philosophy of nature and history which
+results from a scientific knowledge of them. It might be supposed that
+the domain of theology and that of science, distinct in principle and
+even as defined by the Vatican Council, must not be distinct in
+practice. Everything proceeds almost as if theology had nothing to learn
+from modern science, natural or historical, and as if by itself it had
+the power and the right to exercise a direct and absolute control over
+all the activities of the human mind" (_Autour d'un Petit Livre_, 1903,
+p. 211).
+
+And such must needs be, and such in fact is, the Church's attitude in
+its struggle with Modernism, of which Loisy was the learned and leading
+exponent.
+
+The recent struggle against Kantian and fideist Modernism is a struggle
+for life. Is it indeed possible for life, life that seeks assurance of
+survival, to tolerate that a Loisy, a Catholic priest, should affirm
+that the resurrection of the Saviour is not a fact of the historical
+order, demonstrable and demonstrated by the testimony of history alone?
+Read, moreover, the exposition of the central dogma, that of the
+resurrection of Jesus, in E. Le Roy's excellent work, _Dogme et
+Critique_, and tell me if any solid ground is left for our hope to build
+on. Do not the Modernists see that the question at issue is not so much
+that of the immortal life of Christ, reduced, perhaps, to a life in the
+collective Christian consciousness, as that of a guarantee of our own
+personal resurrection of body as well as soul? This new psychological
+apologetic appeals to the moral miracle, and we, like the Jews, seek for
+a sign, something that can be taken hold of with all the powers of the
+soul and with all the senses of the body. And with the hands and the
+feet and the mouth, if it be possible.
+
+But alas! we do not get it. Reason attacks, and faith, which does not
+feel itself secure without reason, has to come to terms with it. And
+hence come those tragic contradictions and lacerations of
+consciousness. We need security, certainty, signs, and they give us
+_motiva credibilitatis_--motives of credibility--upon which to establish
+the _rationale obsequium_, and although faith precedes reason (_fides
+praecedit rationem_), according to St. Augustine, this same learned
+doctor and bishop sought to travel by faith to understanding (_per fidem
+ad intellectum_), and to believe in order to understand (_credo ut
+intelligam_). How far is this from that superb expression of
+Tertullian--_et sepultus resurrexit, certum est quia impossibile
+est!_--"and he was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is
+impossible!" and his sublime _credo quia absurdum!_--the scandal of the
+rationalists. How far from the _il faut s'abetir_ of Pascal and from the
+"human reason loves the absurd" of our Donoso Cortes, which he must have
+learned from the great Joseph de Maistre!
+
+And a first foundation-stone was sought in the authority of tradition
+and the revelation of the word of God, and the principle of unanimous
+consent was arrived at. _Quod apud multos unum invenitur, non est
+erratum, sed traditum_, said Tertullian; and Lamennais added, centuries
+later, that "certitude, the principle of life and intelligence ... is,
+if I may be allowed the expression, a social product."[21] But here, as
+in so many cases, the supreme formula was given by that great Catholic,
+whose Catholicism was of the popular and vital order, Count Joseph de
+Maistre, when he wrote: "I do not believe that it is possible to show a
+single opinion of universal utility that is not true."[22] Here you have
+the Catholic hall-mark--the deduction of the truth of a principle from
+its supreme goodness or utility. And what is there of greater, of more
+sovereign utility, than the immortality of the soul? "As all is
+uncertain, either we must believe all men or none," said Lactantius; but
+that great mystic and ascetic, Blessed Heinrich Seuse, the Dominican,
+implored the Eternal Wisdom for one word affirming that He was love, and
+when the answer came, "All creatures proclaim that I am love," Seuse
+replied, "Alas! Lord, that does not suffice for a yearning soul." Faith
+feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition,
+nor with authority. It seeks the support of its enemy, reason.
+
+And thus scholastic theology was devised, and with it its
+handmaiden--_ancilla theologiae_--scholastic philosophy, and this
+handmaiden turned against her mistress. Scholasticism, a magnificent
+cathedral, in which all the problems of architectonic mechanism were
+resolved for future ages, but a cathedral constructed of unbaked bricks,
+gave place little by little to what is called natural theology and is
+merely Christianity depotentialized. The attempt was even made, where it
+was possible, to base dogmas upon reason, to show at least that if they
+were indeed super-rational they were not contra-rational, and they were
+reinforced with a philosophical foundation of Aristotelian-Neoplatonic
+thirteenth-century philosophy. And such is the Thomism recommended by
+Leo XIII. And now the question is not one of the enforcement of dogma
+but of its philosophical, medieval, and Thomist interpretation. It is
+not enough to believe that in receiving the consecrated Host we receive
+the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; we must needs negotiate all
+those difficulties of transubstantiation and substance separated from
+accidents, and so break with the whole of the modern rational conception
+of substantiality.
+
+But for this, implicit faith suffices--the faith of the coalheaver,[23]
+the faith of those who, like St. Teresa (_Vida_, cap. xxv. 2), do not
+wish to avail themselves of theology. "Do not ask me the reason of
+that, for I am ignorant; Holy Mother Church possesses doctors who will
+know how to answer you," as we were made to learn in the Catechism. It
+was for this, among other things, that the priesthood was instituted,
+that the teaching Church might be the depositary--"reservoir instead of
+river," as Phillips Brooks said--of theological secrets. "The work of
+the Nicene Creed," says Harnack (_Dogmengeschichte_, ii. 1, cap. vii.
+3), "was a victory of the priesthood over the faith of the Christian
+people. The doctrine of the Logos had already become unintelligible to
+those who were not theologians. The setting up of the Niceno-Cappadocian
+formula as the fundamental confession of the Church made it perfectly
+impossible for the Catholic laity to get an inner comprehension of the
+Christian Faith, taking as their guide the form in which it was
+presented in the doctrine of the Church. The idea became more and more
+deeply implanted in men's minds that Christianity was the revelation of
+the unintelligible." And so, in truth, it is.
+
+And why was this? Because faith--that is, Life--no longer felt sure of
+itself. Neither traditionalism nor the theological positivism of Duns
+Scotus sufficed for it; it sought to rationalize itself. And it sought
+to establish its foundation--not, indeed, over against reason, where it
+really is, but upon reason--that is to say, within reason--itself. The
+nominalist or positivist or voluntarist position of Scotus--that which
+maintains that law and truth depend, not so much upon the essence as
+upon the free and inscrutable will of God--by accentuating its supreme
+irrationality, placed religion in danger among the majority of believers
+endowed with mature reason and not mere coalheavers. Hence the triumph
+of the Thomist theological rationalism. It is no longer enough to
+believe in the existence of God; but the sentence of anathema falls on
+him who, though believing in it, does not believe that His existence is
+demonstrable by rational arguments, or who believes that up to the
+present nobody by means of these rational arguments has ever
+demonstrated it irrefutably. However, in this connection the remark of
+Pohle is perhaps capable of application: "If eternal salvation depended
+upon mathematical axioms, we should have to expect that the most odious
+human sophistry would attack their universal validity as violently as it
+now attacks God, the soul, and Christ."[24]
+
+The truth is, Catholicism oscillates between mysticism, which is the
+inward experience of the living God in Christ, an intransmittible
+experience, the danger of which, however, is that it absorbs our own
+personality in God, and so does not save our vital longing--between
+mysticism and the rationalism which it fights against (see Weizsaecker,
+_op. cit._); it oscillates between religionized science and
+scientificized religion. The apocalyptic enthusiasm changed little by
+little into neo-platonic mysticism, which theology thrust further into
+the background. It feared the excesses of the imagination which was
+supplanting faith and creating gnostic extravagances. But it had to sign
+a kind of pact with gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither
+imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished. And
+thus the body of Catholic dogma became a system of contradictions, more
+or less successfully harmonized. The Trinity was a kind of pact between
+monotheism and polytheism, and humanity and divinity sealed a peace in
+Christ, nature covenanted with grace, grace with free will, free will
+with the Divine prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps true, as
+Hermann says (_loc. cit._), that "as soon as we develop religious
+thought to its logical conclusions, it enters into conflict with other
+ideas which belong equally to the life of religion." And this it is that
+gives to Catholicism its profound vital dialectic. But at what a cost?
+
+At the cost, it must needs be said, of doing violence to the mental
+exigencies of those believers in possession of an adult reason. It
+demands from them that they shall believe all or nothing, that they
+shall accept the complete totality of dogma or that they shall forfeit
+all merit if the least part of it be rejected. And hence the result, as
+the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out,[25] that in France
+and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery
+to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd
+doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget scepticism in
+those who received them without reflection. None are so likely to
+believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here
+is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the
+terrible danger comes from another quarter--from seeking to believe with
+the reason and not with life.
+
+The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the
+problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the individual soul,
+satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to
+rationalize it by means of dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the
+reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It
+is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what
+clearly appears to us to be contra-rational, neither is it any good
+wishing to become coalheavers when we are not coalheavers.
+Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a
+rationalistic category.
+
+Let us now consider the rationalist or scientific solution--or, more
+properly, dissolution--of our problem.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[13] Erwin Rohde, _Psyche_, "Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der
+Griechen." Tuebingen, 1907. Up to the present this is the leading work
+dealing with the belief of the Greeks in the immortality of the soul.
+
+[14] Gal. ii. 20.
+
+[15] On all relating to this question see, among others, Harnack,
+_Dogmengeschichte_, ii., Teil i., Buch vii., cap. i.
+
+[16]
+
+    Though we are become dust,
+    In thee, O Lord, our hope confides,
+    That we shall live again clad
+    In the flesh and skin that once covered us.
+
+[17] _Libra de la Conversion de la Magdelena_, part iv., chap. ix.
+
+[18] In his exposition of Protestant dogma in _Systematische christliche
+Religion_, Berlin, 1909, one of the series entitled _Die Kultur der
+Gegenwart_, published by P. Hinneberg.
+
+[19] The common use of the expression _musica celestial_ to denote
+"nonsense, something not worth listening to," lends it a satirical
+byplay which disappears in the English rendering.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[20] It is not Thy promised heaven, my God, that moves me to love Thee.
+(Anonymous, sixteenth or seventeenth century. See _Oxford Book of
+Spanish Verse_, No. 106.)
+
+[21] _Essai sur l'indifference en matiere de religion_, part iii., chap.
+i.
+
+[22] _Les Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg_, x^{me} entretien.
+
+[23] The allusion is to the traditional story of the coalheaver whom the
+devil sought to convince of the irrationality of belief in the Trinity.
+The coalheaver took the cloak that he was wearing and folded it in three
+folds. "Here are three folds," he said, "and the cloak though threefold
+is yet one." And the devil departed baffled.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[24] Joseph Pohle, "Christlich Katolische Dogmatik," in _Systematische
+Christliche Religion_, Berlin, 1909. _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_ series.
+
+[25] "Objections to Unitarian Christianity Considered," 1816, in _The
+Complete Works of William Ellery Channing, D.D._, London, 1884.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION
+
+
+The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his
+essay "On the Immortality of the Soul" with these decisive words: "It
+appears difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality
+of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from
+metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really the
+Gospel, and only the Gospel, that has brought to light life and
+immortality." Which is equivalent to denying the rationality of the
+belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal.
+
+Kant, whose criticism found its point of departure in Hume, attempted to
+establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the belief
+that it imports; and this is the real origin, the inward origin, of his
+_Critique of Practical Reason_, and of his categorical imperative and of
+his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation of Hume
+holds good. There is no way of proving the immortality of the soul
+rationally. There are, on the other hand, ways of proving rationally its
+mortality.
+
+It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to enlarge here upon
+the extent to which the individual human consciousness is dependent upon
+the physical organism, pointing out how it comes to birth by slow
+degrees according as the brain receives impressions from the outside
+world, how it is temporarily suspended during sleep, swoons, and other
+accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture that
+death carries with it the loss of consciousness. And just as before our
+birth we were not, nor have we any personal pre-natal memory, so after
+our death we shall cease to be. This is the rational position.
+
+The designation "soul" is merely a term used to denote the individual
+consciousness in its integrity and continuity; and that this soul
+undergoes change, that in like manner as it is integrated so it is
+disintegrated, is a thing very evident. For Aristotle it was the
+substantial form of the body--the entelechy, but not a substance. And
+more than one modern has called it an epiphenomenon--an absurd term. The
+appellation phenomenon suffices.
+
+Rationalism--and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely
+by reason, by objective truth--is necessarily materialist. And let not
+idealists be scandalized thereby.
+
+The truth is--it is necessary to be perfectly explicit in this
+matter--that what we call materialism means for us nothing else but the
+doctrine which denies the immortality of the individual soul, the
+persistence of personal consciousness after death.
+
+In another sense it may be said that, as we know what matter is no more
+than we know what spirit is, and as matter is for us merely an idea,
+materialism is idealism. In fact, and as regards our problem--the most
+vital, the only really vital problem--it is all the same to say that
+everything is matter as to say that everything is idea, or that
+everything is energy, or whatever you please. Every monist system will
+always seem to us materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only
+by the dualist systems--those which teach that human consciousness is
+something substantially distinct and different from the other
+manifestations of phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is
+the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in
+order to understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the
+soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of explaining and
+understanding our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the
+soul is unnecessary. What was formerly called rational psychology, in
+opposition to empirical psychology, is not psychology but metaphysics,
+and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it rational, but profoundly
+irrational, or rather contra-rational.
+
+The pretended rational doctrine of the substantiality and spirituality
+of the soul, with all the apparatus that accompanies it, is born simply
+of the necessity which men feel of grounding upon reason their
+inexpugnable longing for immortality and the subsequent belief in it.
+All the sophistries which aim at proving that the soul is substance,
+simple and incorruptible, proceed from this source. And further, the
+very concept of substance, as it was fixed and defined by scholasticism,
+a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept,
+designed expressly to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.
+
+William James, in the third of the lectures which he devoted to
+pragmatism in the Lowell Institute in Boston, in December, 1906, and
+January, 1907[26]--the weakest thing in all the work of the famous
+American thinker, an extremely weak thing indeed--speaks as follows:
+"Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and
+made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have
+fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are
+from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved
+the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I
+refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance
+here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents
+of the wafer do not change in the Lord's Supper, and yet it has become
+the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance
+solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn and the Divine
+substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate
+sensible properties. But though these do not alter, a tremendous
+difference has been made--no less a one than this, that we who take the
+sacrament now feed upon the very substance of Divinity. The
+substance-notion breaks into life, with tremendous effect, if once you
+allow that substances can separate from their accidents and exchange
+these latter. This is the only pragmatic application of the
+substance-idea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it
+will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the 'real
+presence' on independent grounds."
+
+Now, leaving on one side the question as to whether it is good
+theology--and I do not say good reasoning because all this lies outside
+the sphere of reason--to confound the substance of the body--the body,
+not the soul--of Christ with the very substance of Divinity--that is to
+say, with God Himself--it would appear impossible that one so ardently
+desirous of the immortality of the soul as William James, a man whose
+whole philosophy aims simply at establishing this belief on rational
+grounds, should not have perceived that the pragmatic application of the
+concept of substance to the doctrine of the Eucharistic
+transubstantiation is merely a consequence of its anterior application
+to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. As I explained in the
+preceding chapter, the Sacrament of the Eucharist is simply the
+reflection of the belief in immortality; it is, for the believer, the
+proof, by a mystical experience, that the soul is immortal and will
+enjoy God eternally. And the concept of substance was born, above all
+and before all, of the concept of the substantiality of the soul, and
+the latter was affirmed in order to confirm faith in the persistence of
+the soul after its separation from the body. Such was at the same time
+its first pragmatic application and its origin. And subsequently we
+have transferred this concept to external things. It is because I feel
+myself to be substance--that is to say, permanent in the midst of my
+changes--that I attribute substantiality to those agents exterior to me,
+which are also permanent in the midst of their changes--just as the
+concept of force is born of my sensation of personal effort in putting a
+thing in motion.
+
+Read carefully in the first part of the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas
+Aquinas the first six articles of question lxxv., which discuss whether
+the human soul is body, whether it is something self-subsistent, whether
+such also is the soul of the lower animals, whether the soul is the man,
+whether the soul is composed of matter and form, and whether it is
+incorruptible, and then say if all this is not subtly intended to
+support the belief that this incorruptible substantiality of the soul
+renders it capable of receiving from God immortality, for it is clear
+that as He created it when He implanted it in the body, as St. Thomas
+says, so at its separation from the body He could annihilate it. And as
+the criticism of these proofs has been undertaken a hundred times, it is
+unnecessary to repeat it here.
+
+Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to conclude that our soul is
+a substance from the fact that our consciousness of our identity--and
+this within very narrow and variable limits--persists through all the
+changes of our body? We might as well say of a ship that put out to sea
+and lost first one piece of timber, which was replaced by another of the
+same shape and dimensions, then lost another, and so on with all her
+timbers, and finally returned to port the same ship, with the same
+build, the same sea-going qualities, recognizable by everybody as the
+same--we might as well say of such a ship that it had a substantial
+soul. Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to infer the simplicity
+of the soul from the fact that we have to judge and unify our thoughts?
+Thought is not one but complex, and for the reason the soul is nothing
+but the succession of co-ordinated states of consciousness.
+
+In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it
+is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a
+simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in
+me a principle which thinks, wills, and feels.... Now this implies a
+begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth
+that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I
+think, will, and feel. And I--the I that thinks, wills, and feels--am
+immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it
+sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills, and feels. How? How
+you please.
+
+And they proceed to seek to establish the substantiality of the soul,
+hypostatizing the states of consciousness, and they begin by saying that
+this substance must be simple--that is, by opposing thought to
+extension, after the manner of the Cartesian dualism. And as Balmes was
+one of the spiritualist writers who have given the clearest and most
+concise form to the argument, I will present it as he expounds it in the
+second chapter of his _Curso de Filosofia Elemental_. "The human soul is
+simple," he says, and adds: "Simplicity consists in the absence of
+parts, and the soul has none. Let us suppose that it has three parts--A,
+B, C. I ask, Where, then, does thought reside? If in A only, then B and
+C are superfluous; and consequently the simple subject A will be the
+soul. If thought resides in A, B, and C, it follows that thought is
+divided into parts, which is absurd. What sort of a thing is a
+perception, a comparison, a judgement, a ratiocination, distributed
+among three subjects?" A more obvious begging of the question cannot be
+conceived. Balmes begins by taking it for granted that the whole, as a
+whole, is incapable of making a judgement. He continues: "The unity of
+consciousness is opposed to the division of the soul. When we think,
+there is a subject which knows everything that it thinks, and this is
+impossible if parts be attributed to it. Of the thought that is in A, B
+and C will know nothing, and so in the other cases respectively. There
+will not, therefore, be _one_ consciousness of the whole thought: each
+part will have its special consciousness, and there will be within us as
+many thinking beings as there are parts." The begging of the question
+continues; it is assumed without any proof that a whole, as a whole,
+cannot perceive as a unit. Balmes then proceeds to ask if these parts A,
+B, and C are simple or compound, and repeats his argument until he
+arrives at the conclusion that the thinking subject must be a part which
+is not a whole--that is, simple. The argument is based, as will be seen,
+upon the unity of apperception and of judgement. Subsequently he
+endeavours to refute the hypothesis of a communication of the parts
+among themselves.
+
+Balmes--and with him the _a priori_ spiritualists who seek to
+rationalize faith in the immortality of the soul--ignore the only
+rational explanation, which is that apperception and judgement are a
+resultant, that perceptions or ideas themselves are components which
+agree. They begin by supposing something external to and distinct from
+the states of consciousness, something that is not the living body which
+supports these states, something that is not I but is within me.
+
+The soul is simple, others say, because it reflects upon itself as a
+complete whole. No; the state of consciousness A, in which I think of my
+previous state of consciousness B, is not the same as its predecessor.
+Or if I think of my soul, I think of an idea distinct from the act by
+which I think of it. To think that one thinks and nothing more, is not
+to think.
+
+The soul is the principle of life, it is said. Yes; and similarly the
+category of force or energy has been conceived as the principle of
+movement. But these are concepts, not phenomena, not external realities.
+Does the principle of movement move? And only that which moves has
+external reality. Does the principle of life live? Hume was right when
+he said that he never encountered this idea of himself--that he only
+observed himself desiring or performing or feeling something.[27] The
+idea of some individual thing--of this inkstand in front of me, of that
+horse standing at my gate, of these two and not of any other individuals
+of the same class--is the fact, the phenomenon itself. The idea of
+myself is myself.
+
+All the efforts to substantiate consciousness, making it independent of
+extension--remember that Descartes opposed thought to extension--are but
+sophistical subtilties intended to establish the rationality of faith in
+the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective
+reality to that which does not possess it--to that whose reality exists
+only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal
+immortality--it is the continuation of this present life.
+
+The unity of consciousness is for scientific psychology--the only
+rational psychology--simply a phenomenal unity. No one can say what a
+substantial unity is. And, what is more, no one can say what a substance
+is. For the notion of substance is a non-phenomenal category. It is a
+noumenon and belongs properly to the unknowable--that is to say,
+according to the sense in which it is understood. But in its
+transcendental sense it is something really unknowable and strictly
+irrational. It is precisely this concept of substance that an
+unforewarned mind reduces to a use that is very far from that pragmatic
+application to which William James referred.
+
+And this application is not saved by understanding it in an idealistic
+sense, according to the Berkeleyan principle that to be is to be
+perceived (_esse est percipi_). To say that everything is idea or that
+everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or
+that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or everything
+spirit, and if, therefore, this diamond is idea or spirit, just as my
+consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for
+ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures for
+ever.
+
+George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne and brother in spirit to the
+Anglican bishop Joseph Butler, was equally as anxious to save the belief
+in the immortality of the soul. In the first words of the Preface to his
+_Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge_, he tells us
+that he considers that this treatise will be useful, "particularly to
+those who are tainted with scepticism, or want a demonstration of the
+existence and immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the
+soul." In paragraph cxl. he lays it down that we have an idea, or rather
+a notion, of spirit, and that we know other spirits by means of our own,
+from which follows--so in the next paragraph he roundly affirms--the
+natural immortality of the soul. And here he enters upon a series of
+confusions arising from the ambiguity with which he invests the term
+notion. And after having established the immortality of the soul, almost
+as it were _per saltum_, on the ground that the soul is not passive like
+the body, he proceeds to tell us in paragraph cxlvii. that the existence
+of God is more evident than that of man. And yet, in spite of this,
+there are still some who are doubtful!
+
+The question was complicated by making consciousness a property of the
+soul, consciousness being something more than soul--that is to say, a
+substantial form of the body, the originator of all the organic
+functions of the body. The soul not only thinks, feels, and wills, but
+moves the body and prompts its vital functions; in the human soul are
+united the vegetative, animal, and rational functions. Such is the
+theory. But the soul separated from the body can have neither
+vegetative nor animal functions.
+
+A theory, in short, which for the reason is a veritable contexture of
+confusions.
+
+After the Renaissance and the restoration of purely rational thought,
+emancipated from all theology, the doctrine of the mortality of the soul
+was re-established by the newly published writings of the second-century
+philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias and by Pietro Pomponazzi and
+others. And in point of fact, little or nothing can be added to what
+Pomponazzi has written in his _Tractatus de immortalitate animae_. It is
+reason itself, and it serves nothing to reiterate his arguments.
+
+Attempts have not been wanting, however, to find an empirical support
+for belief in the immortality of the soul, and among these may be
+counted the work of Frederic W.H. Myers on _Human Personality and its
+Survival of Bodily Death_. No one ever approached more eagerly than
+myself the two thick volumes of this work in which the leading spirit of
+the Society for Psychical Research resumed that formidable mass of data
+relating to presentiments, apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of
+dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism, ecstasy, and all the
+rest that goes to furnish the spiritualist arsenal. I entered upon the
+reading of it not only without that temper of cautious suspicion which
+men of science maintain in investigations of this character, but even
+with a predisposition in its favour, as one who comes to seek the
+confirmation of his innermost longings; but for this reason was my
+disillusion all the greater. In spite of its critical apparatus it does
+not differ in any respect from medieval miracle-mongering. There is a
+fundamental defect of method, of logic.
+
+And if the belief in the immortality of the soul has been unable to find
+vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with
+pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die we return
+to God, or, more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing
+nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were
+born, and if when we die we return to where we were before being born,
+then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And
+since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of
+Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the
+guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said, to
+be merely atheism disguised; and, in my opinion, undisguised. And they
+were right in calling Spinoza an atheist, for his is the most logical,
+the most rational, system of pantheism.
+
+Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and
+submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable, which,
+when it has professed to wish to leave religious feelings scathless, has
+always been inspired by the most refined hypocrisy. The whole of the
+first part of Spencer's _First Principles_, and especially the fifth
+chapter entitled "Reconciliation"--that between reason and faith or
+science and religion being understood--is a model at the same time of
+philosophical superficiality and religious insincerity, of the most
+refined British cant. The unknowable, if it is something more than the
+merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of
+limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up.
+
+The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion considered as an
+individual and social psychic phenomenon irrespective of the
+transcendental objective validity of religious affirmations, is a
+science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul is
+something that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the
+rationality of this belief. However much the religious man may repeat
+with Schleiermacher, "Science can teach thee nothing; it is for science
+to learn from thee," inwardly he thinks otherwise.
+
+From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that
+reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts
+it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of
+life.
+
+A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to
+stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely
+individual, is, strictly, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce
+everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no
+more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or
+relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains the same
+for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different
+each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of
+the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes
+it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to
+arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or
+destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it,
+to lay it out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas,
+even though life may issue from them. Worms also feed upon corpses. My
+own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the innermost recesses of my
+soul, once they are torn from their roots in the heart, poured out on to
+this paper and there fixed in unalterable shape, are already only the
+corpses of thoughts. How, then, shall reason open its portals to the
+revelation of life? It is a tragic combat--it is the very essence of
+tragedy--this combat of life with reason. And truth? Is truth something
+that is lived or that is comprehended?
+
+It is only necessary to read the terrible _Parmenides_ of Plato to
+arrive at his tragic conclusion that "the one is and is not, and both
+itself and others, in relation to themselves and one another, are and
+are not, and appear to be and appear not to be." All that is vital is
+irrational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is
+essentially sceptical.
+
+The rational, in effect, is simply the relational; reason is limited to
+relating irrational elements. Mathematics is the only perfect science,
+inasmuch as it adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers, but not
+real and substantial things, inasmuch as it is the most formal of the
+sciences. Who can extract the cube root of an ash-tree?
+
+Nevertheless we need logic, this terrible power, in order to communicate
+thoughts and perceptions and even in order to think and perceive, for we
+think with words, we perceive with forms. To think is to converse with
+oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and logic. But may
+they not perhaps possess a content, an individual matter, incommunicable
+and untranslatable? And may not this be the source of their power?
+
+The truth is that man, the prisoner of logic, without which he cannot
+think, has always sought to make logic subservient to his desires, and
+principally to his fundamental desire. He has always sought to hold fast
+to logic, and especially in the Middle Ages, in the interests of
+theology and jurisprudence, both of which based themselves on what was
+established by authority. It was not until very much later that logic
+propounded the problem of knowledge, the problem of its own validity,
+the scrutiny of the metalogical foundations.
+
+"The Western theology," Dean Stanley wrote, "is essentially logical in
+form and based on law. The Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and
+based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate.
+The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist."[28]
+
+And all the laboured arguments in support of our hunger of immortality,
+which pretend to be grounded on reason or logic, are merely advocacy and
+sophistry.
+
+The property and characteristic of advocacy is, in effect, to make use
+of logic in the interests of a thesis that is to be defended, while, on
+the other hand, the strictly scientific method proceeds from the facts,
+the data, presented to us by reality, in order that it may arrive, or
+not arrive, as the case may be, at a certain conclusion. What is
+important is to define the problem clearly, whence it follows that
+progress consists not seldom in undoing what has been done. Advocacy
+always supposes a _petitio principii_, and its arguments are _ad
+probandum_. And theology that pretends to be rational is nothing but
+advocacy.
+
+Theology proceeds from dogma, and dogma, _dogma_, in its
+primitive and most direct sense, signifies a decree, something akin to
+the Latin _placitum_, that which has seemed to the legislative authority
+fitting to be law. This juridical concept is the starting-point of
+theology. For the theologian, as for the advocate, dogma, law, is
+something given--a starting-point which admits of discussion only in
+respect of its application and its most exact interpretation. Hence it
+follows that the theological or advocatory spirit is in its principle
+dogmatical, while the strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is
+sceptical, _skeptikos_--that is, investigative. It is so at least
+in its principle, for there is the other sense of the term scepticism,
+that which is most usual to-day, that of a system of doubt, suspicion,
+and uncertainty, and this has arisen from the theological or advocatory
+use of reason, from the abuse of dogmatism. The endeavour to apply the
+law of authority, the _placitum_, the dogma, to different and sometimes
+contraposed practical necessities, is what has engendered the scepticism
+of doubt. It is advocacy, or what amounts to the same thing, theology,
+that teaches the distrust of reason--not true science, not the science
+of investigation, sceptical in the primitive and direct meaning of the
+word, which hastens towards no predetermined solution nor proceeds save
+by the testing of hypotheses.
+
+Take the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas, the classical monument of the
+theology--that is, of the advocacy--of Catholicism, and open it where
+you please. First comes the thesis--_utrum_ ... whether such a thing be
+thus or otherwise; then the objections--_ad primum sic proceditur_; next
+the answers to these objections--_sed contra est_ ... or _respondeo
+dicendum_.... Pure advocacy! And underlying many, perhaps most, of its
+arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be expressed _more
+scholastico_ by this syllogism: I do not understand this fact save by
+giving it this explanation; it is thus that I must understand it,
+therefore this must be its explanation. The alternative being that I am
+left without any understanding of it at all. True science teaches, above
+all, to doubt and to be ignorant; advocacy neither doubts nor believes
+that it does not know. It requires a solution.
+
+To the mentality that assumes, more or less consciously, that we must of
+necessity find a solution to every problem, belongs the argument based
+on the disastrous consequences of a thing. Take any book of
+apologetics--that is to say, of theological advocacy--and you will see
+how many times you will meet with this phrase--"the disastrous
+consequences of this doctrine." Now the disastrous consequences of a
+doctrine prove at most that the doctrine is disastrous, but not that it
+is false, for there is no proof that the true is necessarily that which
+suits us best. The identification of the true and the good is but a
+pious wish. In his _Etudes sur Blaise Pascal_, A. Vinet says: "Of the
+two needs that unceasingly belabour human nature, that of happiness is
+not only the more universally felt and the more constantly experienced,
+but it is also the more imperious. And this need is not only of the
+senses; it is intellectual. It is not only for the _soul_; it is for the
+_mind_ that happiness is a necessity. Happiness forms a part of truth."
+This last proposition--_le bonheur fait partie de la verite_--is a
+proposition of pure advocacy, but not of science or of pure reason. It
+would be better to say that truth forms a part of happiness in a
+Tertullianesque sense, in the sense of _credo quia absurdum_, which
+means actually _credo quia consolans_--I believe because it is a thing
+consoling to me.
+
+No, for reason, truth is that of which it can be proved that it is, that
+it exists, whether it console us or not. And reason is certainly not a
+consoling faculty. That terrible Latin poet Lucretius, whose apparent
+serenity and Epicurean _ataraxia_ conceal so much despair, said that
+piety consists in the power to contemplate all things with a serene
+soul--_pacata posse mente omnia tueri_. And it was the same Lucretius
+who wrote that religion can persuade us into so great evils--_tantum
+religio potuit suadere malorum_. And it is true that religion--above all
+the Christian religion--has been, as the Apostle says, to the Jews a
+stumbling-block, and to the intellectuals foolishness.[29] The Christian
+religion, the religion of the immortality of the soul, was called by
+Tacitus a pernicious superstition (_exitialis superstitio_), and he
+asserted that it involved a hatred of mankind (_odium generis humani_).
+
+Speaking of the age in which these men lived, the most genuinely
+rationalistic age in the world's history, Flaubert, writing to Madame
+Roger des Genettes, uttered these pregnant words: "You are right; we
+must speak with respect of Lucretius; I see no one who can compare with
+him except Byron, and Byron has not his gravity nor the sincerity of his
+sadness. The melancholy of the ancients seems to me more profound than
+that of the moderns, who all more or less presuppose an immortality on
+the yonder side of the _black hole_. But for the ancients this black
+hole was the infinite itself; the procession of their dreams is imaged
+against a background of immutable ebony. The gods being no more and
+Christ being not yet, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius a
+unique moment in which man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find this
+grandeur; but what renders Lucretius intolerable is his physics, which
+he gives as if positive. If he is weak, it is because he did not doubt
+enough; he wished to explain, to arrive at a conclusion!"[30]
+
+Yes, Lucretius wished to arrive at a conclusion, a solution, and, what
+is worse, he wished to find consolation in reason. For there is also an
+anti-theological advocacy, and an _odium anti-theologicum_.
+
+Many, very many, men of science, the majority of those who call
+themselves rationalists, are afflicted by it.
+
+The rationalist acts rationally--that is to say, he does not speak out
+of his part--so long as he confines himself to denying that reason
+satisfies our vital hunger for immortality; but, furious at not being
+able to believe, he soon becomes a prey to the vindictiveness of the
+_odium anti-theologicum_, and exclaims with the Pharisees: "This people
+who knoweth not the law are cursed." There is much truth in these words
+of Soloviev: "I have a foreboding of the near approach of a time when
+Christians will gather together again in the Catacombs, because of the
+persecution of the faith--a persecution less brutal, perhaps, than that
+of Nero's day, but not less refined in its severity, consummated by
+mendacity, derision, and all the hypocrisies."
+
+The anti-theological hate, the scientificist--I do not say
+scientific--fury, is manifest. Consider, not the more detached
+scientific investigators, those who know how to doubt, but the fanatics
+of rationalism, and observe with what gross brutality they speak of
+faith. Vogt considered it probable that the cranial structure of the
+Apostles was of a pronounced simian character; of the indecencies of
+Haeckel, that supreme incomprehender, there is no need to speak, nor yet
+of those of Buechner; even Virchow is not free from them. And others work
+with more subtilty. There are people who seem not to be content with
+not believing that there is another life, or rather, with believing that
+there is none, but who are vexed and hurt that others should believe in
+it or even should wish that it might exist. And this attitude is as
+contemptible as that is worthy of respect which characterizes those who,
+though urged by the need they have of it to believe in another life, are
+unable to believe. But of this most noble attitude of the spirit, the
+most profound, the most human, and the most fruitful, the attitude of
+despair, we will speak later on.
+
+And the rationalists who do not succumb to the anti-theological fury are
+bent on convincing men that there are motives for living and
+consolations for having been born, even though there shall come a time,
+at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all
+human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for
+living and working, this thing which some call humanism, are the amazing
+products of the affective and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of
+its stupendous hypocrisy--a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing sincerity to
+veracity, and sworn not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and
+disconsolatory power.
+
+Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this business of
+manufacturing culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and
+beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those
+who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, and all
+this without our taking thought for the ultimate end of each one of us?
+Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of science,
+of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these
+beautiful conceptions, if at the last, in four days or in four millions
+of centuries--it matters not which--no human consciousness shall exist
+to appropriate this civilization, this science, art, good, truth,
+beauty, justice, and all the rest?
+
+Many and very various have been the rationalist devices--more or less
+rational--by means of which from the days of the Epicureans and the
+Stoics it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and
+to convince men, although those who sought so to do remained themselves
+unconvinced, that there are motives for working and lures for living,
+even though the human consciousness be destined some day to disappear.
+
+The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is
+"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," or the Horatian _carpe
+diem_, which may be rendered by "Live for the day," does not differ in
+its essence from the Stoic attitude with its "Accomplish what the moral
+conscience dictates to thee, and afterward let it be as it may be." Both
+attitudes have a common base; and pleasure for pleasure's sake comes to
+the same as duty for duty's sake.
+
+Spinoza, the most logical and consistent of atheists--I mean of those
+who deny the persistence of individual consciousness through indefinite
+future time--and at the same time the most pious, Spinoza devoted the
+fifth and last part of his _Ethic_ to elucidating the path that leads to
+liberty and to determining the concept of happiness. The concept!
+Concept, not feeling! For Spinoza, who was a terrible intellectualist,
+happiness (_beatitudo_) is a concept, and the love of God an
+intellectual love. After establishing in proposition xxi. of the fifth
+part that "the mind can imagine nothing, neither can it remember
+anything that is past, save during the continuance of the body"--which
+is equivalent to denying the immortality of the soul, since a soul
+which, disjoined from the body in which it lived, does not remember its
+past, is neither immortal nor is it a soul--he goes on to affirm in
+proposition xxiii. that "the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed
+with the body, but there remains of it something which is _eternal_,"
+and this eternity of the mind is a certain mode of thinking. But do not
+let yourselves be deceived; there is no such eternity of the individual
+mind. Everything is _sub aeternitatis specie_--that is to say, pure
+illusion. Nothing could be more dreary, nothing more desolating, nothing
+more anti-vital than this happiness, this _beatitudo_, of Spinoza, that
+consists in the intellectual love of the mind towards God, which is
+nothing else but the very love with which God loves Himself (prop,
+xxxvi.). Our happiness--that is to say, our liberty--consists in the
+constant and eternal love of God towards men. So affirms the corollary
+to this thirty-sixth proposition. And all this in order to arrive at the
+conclusion, which is the final and crowning proposition of the whole
+_Ethic_, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.
+The everlasting refrain! Or, to put it plainly, we proceed from God and
+to God we return, which, translated into concrete language, the language
+of life and feeling, means that my personal consciousness sprang from
+nothingness, from my unconsciousness, and to nothingness it will return.
+
+And this most dreary and desolating voice of Spinoza is the very voice
+of reason. And the liberty of which he tells us is a terrible liberty.
+And against Spinoza and his doctrine of happiness there is only one
+irresistible argument, the argument _ad hominem_. Was he happy, Benedict
+Spinoza, while, to allay his inner unhappiness, he was discoursing of
+happiness? Was he free?
+
+In the corollary to proposition xli. of this same final and most tragic
+part of that tremendous tragedy of his _Ethic_, the poor desperate Jew
+of Amsterdam discourses of the common persuasion of the vulgar of the
+truth of eternal life. Let us hear what he says: "It would appear that
+they esteem piety and religion--and, indeed, all that is referred to
+fortitude or strength of mind--as burdens which they expect to lay down
+after death, when they hope to receive a reward for their servitude, not
+for their piety and religion in this life. Nor is it even this hope
+alone that leads them; the fear of frightful punishments with which they
+are menaced after death also influences them to live--in so far as their
+impotence and poverty of spirit permits--in conformity with the
+prescription of the Divine law. And were not this hope and this fear
+infused into the minds of men--but, on the contrary, did they believe
+that the soul perished with the body, and that, beyond the grave, there
+was no other life prepared for the wretched who had borne the burden _of
+piety_ in this--they would return to their natural inclinations,
+preferring to accommodate everything to their own liking, and would
+follow fortune rather than reason. But all this appears no less absurd
+than it would be to suppose that a man, because he did not believe that
+he could nourish his body eternally with wholesome food, would saturate
+himself with deadly poisons; or than if because believing that his soul
+was not eternal and immortal, he should therefore prefer to be without a
+soul (_amens_) and to live without reason; all of which is so absurd as
+to be scarcely worth refuting (_quae adeo absurda sunt, ut vix recenseri
+mereantur_)."
+
+When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that
+either it is flagrantly stupid--in which case all comment is
+superfluous--or it is something formidable, the very crux of the
+problem. And this it is in this case. Yes! poor Portuguese Jew exiled in
+Holland, yes! that he who is convinced without a vestige of doubt,
+without the faintest hope of any saving uncertainty, that his soul is
+not immortal, should prefer to be without a soul (_amens_), or
+irrational, or idiot, that he should prefer not to have been born, is a
+supposition that has nothing, absolutely nothing, absurd in it. Was he
+happy, the poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and
+of happiness? For that and no other is the problem. "What does it profit
+thee to know the definition of compunction if thou dost not feel it?"
+says a Kempis. And what profits it to discuss or to define happiness if
+you cannot thereby achieve happiness? Not inapposite in this connection
+is that terrible story that Diderot tells of a eunuch who desired to
+take lessons in esthetics from a native of Marseilles in order that he
+might be better qualified to select the slaves destined for the harem of
+the Sultan, his master. At the end of the first lesson, a physiological
+lesson, brutally and carnally physiological, the eunuch exclaimed
+bitterly, "It is evident that I shall never know esthetics!" Even so,
+and just as eunuchs will never know esthetics as applied to the
+selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever
+know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for
+happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is
+reasoned about or defined.
+
+And you have another rationalist, one not sad or submissive, like
+Spinoza, but rebellious, and though concealing a despair not less
+bitter, making a hypocritical pretence of light-heartedness, you have
+Nietzsche, who discovered _mathematically_ (!!!) that counterfeit of the
+immortality of the soul which is called "eternal recurrence," and which
+is in fact the most stupendous tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy. The number
+of atoms or irreducible primary elements being finite and the universe
+eternal, a combination identical with that which at present exists must
+at some future time be reproduced, and therefore that which now is must
+be repeated an infinite number of times. This is evident, and just as I
+shall live again the life that I am now living, so I have already lived
+it before an infinite number of times, for there is an eternity that
+stretches into the past--_a parte ante_--just as there will be one
+stretching into the future--_a parte post_. But, unfortunately, it
+happens that I remember none of my previous existences, and perhaps it
+is impossible that I should remember them, for two things absolutely and
+completely identical are but one. Instead of supposing that we live in a
+finite universe, composed of a finite number of irreducible primary
+elements, suppose that we live in an infinite universe, without limits
+in space--which concrete infinity is not less inconceivable than the
+concrete eternity in time--then it will follow that this system of
+ours, that of the Milky Way, is repeated an infinite number of times in
+the infinite of space, and that therefore I am now living an infinite
+number of lives, all exactly identical. A jest, as you see, but one not
+less comic--that is to say, not less tragic--than that of Nietzsche,
+that of the laughing lion. And why does the lion laugh? I think he
+laughs with rage, because he can never succeed in finding consolation in
+the thought that he has been the same lion before and is destined to be
+the same lion again.
+
+But if Spinoza and Nietzsche were indeed both rationalists, each after
+his own manner, they were not spiritual eunuchs; they had heart,
+feeling, and, above all, hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for
+immortality. The physical eunuch does not feel the need of reproducing
+himself carnally, in the body, and neither does the spiritual eunuch
+feel the hunger for self-perpetuation.
+
+Certain it is that there are some who assert that reason suffices them,
+and they counsel us to desist from seeking to penetrate into the
+impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith
+in an eternal personal life to furnish them with incentives to living
+and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from
+birth may also assure us that he feels no great longing to enjoy the
+world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it,
+and we must needs believe him, for what is wholly unknown cannot be the
+object of desire--_nihil volitum quin praecognitum_, there can be no
+volition save of things already known. But I cannot be persuaded that he
+who has once in his life, either in his youth or for some other brief
+space of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will
+ever find peace without it. And of this sort of blindness from birth
+there are but few instances among us, and then only by a kind of strange
+aberration. For the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration
+and nothing but an aberration.
+
+More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say: "We must not talk
+about it, for in talking about it we only waste our time and weaken our
+will; let us do our duty here and hereafter let come what may." But this
+sincerity hides a yet deeper insincerity. May it perhaps be that by
+saying "We must not talk about it," they succeed in not thinking about
+it? Our will is weakened? And what then? We lose the capacity for human
+action? And what then? It is very convenient to tell a man whom a fatal
+disease condemns to an early death, and who knows it, not to think about
+it.
+
+    _Meglio oprando obliar, senza indagarlo,
+    Questo enorme mister del universo!_
+
+"Better to work and to forget and not to probe into this vast mystery of
+the universe!" Carducci wrote in his _Idilio Maremmano_, the same
+Carducci who at the close of his ode _Sul Monte Mario_ tells us how the
+earth, the mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory
+and sorrow round the sun "until, worn out beneath the equator, mocked by
+the last flames of dying heat, the exhausted human race is reduced to a
+single man and woman, who, standing in the midst of dead woods,
+surrounded by sheer mountains, livid, with glassy eyes watch thee, O
+sun, set across the immense frozen waste."
+
+But is it possible for us to give ourselves to any serious and lasting
+work, forgetting the vast mystery of the universe and abandoning all
+attempt to understand it? Is it possible to contemplate the vast All
+with a serene soul, in the spirit of the Lucretian piety, if we are
+conscious of the thought that a time must come when this All will no
+longer be reflected in any human consciousness?
+
+Cain, in Byron's poem, asks of Lucifer, the prince of the intellectuals,
+"Are ye happy?" and Lucifer replies, "We are mighty." Cain questions
+again, "Are ye happy?" and then the great Intellectual says to him: "No;
+art thou?" And further on, this same Lucifer says to Adah, the sister
+and wife of Cain: "Choose betwixt love and knowledge--since there is no
+other choice." And in the same stupendous poem, when Cain says that the
+tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a lying tree, for "we know
+nothing; at least it promised knowledge at the price of death," Lucifer
+answers him: "It may be death leads to the highest knowledge"--that is
+to say, to nothingness.
+
+To this word _knowledge_ which Lord Byron uses in the above quotations,
+the Spanish _ciencia_, the French _science_, the German _Wissenschaft_,
+is often opposed the word _wisdom, sabiduria, sagesse, Weisheit_.
+
+    Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
+    Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest,
+
+says another lord, Tennyson, in his _Locksley Hall_. And what is this
+wisdom which we have to seek chiefly in the poets, leaving knowledge on
+one side? It is well enough to say with Matthew Arnold in his
+Introduction to Wordsworth's poems, that poetry is reality and
+philosophy illusion; but reason is always reason and reality is always
+reality, that which can be proved to exist externally to us, whether we
+find in it consolation or despair.
+
+I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be
+scandalized, when Brunetiere proclaimed again the bankruptcy of science.
+For science as a substitute for religion and reason as a substitute for
+faith have always fallen to pieces. Science will be able to satisfy, and
+in fact does satisfy in an increasing measure, our increasing logical or
+intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but
+science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, and far
+from satisfying our hunger for immortality it contradicts it. Rational
+truth and life stand in opposition to one another. And is it possible
+that there is any other truth than rational truth?
+
+It must remain established, therefore, that reason--human reason--within
+its limits, not only does not prove rationally that the soul is
+immortal or that the human consciousness shall preserve its
+indestructibility through the tracts of time to come, but that it proves
+rather--within its limits, I repeat--that the individual consciousness
+cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it
+depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves
+this, are the limits of rationality, of what is known by demonstration.
+Beyond these limits is the irrational, which, whether it be called the
+super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational, is all the
+same thing. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the
+impossible of the _certum est, quia impossibile est_. And this absurd
+can only base itself upon the most absolute uncertainty.
+
+The rational dissolution ends in dissolving reason itself; it ends in
+the most absolute scepticism, in the phenomenalism of Hume or in the
+doctrine of absolute contingencies of Stuart Mill, the most consistent
+and logical of the positivists. The supreme triumph of reason, the
+analytical--that is, the destructive and dissolvent--faculty, is to cast
+doubt upon its own validity. The stomach that contains an ulcer ends by
+digesting itself; and reason ends by destroying the immediate and
+absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept of
+necessity. Both concepts are relative; there is no absolute truth, no
+absolute necessity. We call a concept true which agrees with the general
+system of all our concepts; and we call a perception true which does not
+contradict the system of our perceptions. Truth is coherence. But as
+regards the whole system, the aggregate, as there is nothing outside of
+it of which we have knowledge, we cannot say whether it is true or not.
+It is conceivable that the universe, as it exists in itself, outside of
+our consciousness, may be quite other than it appears to us, although
+this is a supposition that has no meaning for reason. And as regards
+necessity, is there an absolute necessity? By necessary we mean merely
+that which is, and in so far as it is, for in another more
+transcendental sense, what absolute necessity, logical and independent
+of the fact that the universe exists, is there that there should be a
+universe or anything else at all?
+
+Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than scepticism, in
+the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the
+reasoning reason.
+
+Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does
+reason succeed in converting truth into consolation. But reason going
+beyond truth itself, beyond the concept of reality itself, succeeds in
+plunging itself into the depths of scepticism. And in this abyss the
+scepticism of the reason encounters the despair of the heart, and this
+encounter leads to the discovery of a basis--a terrible basis!--for
+consolation to build on.
+
+Let us examine it.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[26] _Pragmatism, a New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking_. Popular
+lectures on philosophy by William James, 1907.
+
+[27] _Treatise of Human Nature_, book i., part iv., sect. vi., "Of
+Personal Identity": "I never can catch _myself_ at any time without a
+perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."
+
+[28] Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, _Lectures on the History of the Eastern
+Church_, lecture i., sect. iii.
+
+[29] 1 Cor. i. 23.
+
+[30] Gustave Flaubert, _Correspondance_, troisieme serie (1854-1869).
+Paris, 1910.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS
+
+_Parce unicae spes totius orbis._--TERTULLIANUS, Adversus Marcionem, 5.
+
+
+We have seen that the vital longing for human immortality finds no
+consolation in reason and that reason leaves us without incentive or
+consolation in life and life itself without real finality. But here, in
+the depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and of the will and
+the scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace like brothers.
+And we shall see it is from this embrace, a tragic--that is to say, an
+intimately loving--embrace, that the wellspring of life will flow, a
+life serious and terrible. Scepticism, uncertainty--the position to
+which reason, by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own
+validity, at last arrives--is the foundation upon which the heart's
+despair must build up its hope.
+
+Disillusioned, we had to abandon the position of those who seek to give
+consolation the force of rational and logical truth, pretending to prove
+the rationality, or at any rate the non-irrationality, of consolation;
+and we had to abandon likewise the position of those who seek to give
+rational truth the force of consolation and of a motive for life.
+Neither the one nor the other of these positions satisfied us. The one
+is at variance with our reason, the other with our feeling. These two
+powers can never conclude peace and we must needs live by their war. We
+must make of this war, of war itself, the very condition of our
+spiritual life.
+
+Neither does this high debate admit of that indecent and repugnant
+expedient which the more or less parliamentary type of politician has
+devised and dubbed "a formula of agreement," the property of which is to
+render it impossible for either side to claim to be victorious. There
+is no place here for a time-serving compromise. Perhaps a degenerate and
+cowardly reason might bring itself to propose some such formula of
+agreement, for in truth reason lives by formulas; but life, which cannot
+be formulated, life which lives and seeks to live for ever, does not
+submit to formulas. Its sole formula is: all or nothing. Feeling does
+not compound its differences with middle terms.
+
+_Initium sapientiae timor Domini_, it is said, meaning perhaps _timor
+mortis_, or it may be, _timor vitae_, which is the same thing. Always it
+comes about that the beginning of wisdom is a fear.
+
+Is it true to say of this saving scepticism which I am now going to
+discuss, that it is doubt? It is doubt, yes, but it is much more than
+doubt. Doubt is commonly something very cold, of very little vitalizing
+force, and above all something rather artificial, especially since
+Descartes degraded it to the function of a method. The conflict between
+reason and life is something more than a doubt. For doubt is easily
+resolved into a comic element.
+
+The methodical doubt of Descartes is a comic doubt, a doubt purely
+theoretical and provisional--that is to say, the doubt of a man who acts
+as if he doubted without really doubting. And because it was a
+stove-excogitated doubt, the man who deduced that he existed from the
+fact that he thought did not approve of "those turbulent
+(_brouillonnes_) and restless persons who, being called neither by birth
+nor by fortune to the management of public affairs, are perpetually
+devising some new reformation," and he was pained by the suspicion that
+there might be something of this kind in his own writings. No, he,
+Descartes, proposed only to "reform his own thoughts and to build upon
+ground that was wholly his." And he resolved not to accept anything as
+true when he did not recognize it clearly to be so, and to make a clean
+sweep of all prejudices and received ideas, to the end that he might
+construct his intellectual habitation anew. But "as it is not enough,
+before beginning to rebuild one's dwelling-house, to pull it down and to
+furnish materials and architects, or to study architecture oneself ...
+but it is also necessary to be provided with some other wherein to lodge
+conveniently while the work is in progress," he framed for himself a
+provisional ethic--_une morale de provision_--the first law of which was
+to observe the customs of his country and to keep always to the religion
+in which, by the grace of God, he had been instructed from his infancy,
+governing himself in all things according to the most moderate opinions.
+Yes, exactly, a provisional religion and even a provisional God! And he
+chose the most moderate opinions "because these are always the most
+convenient for practice." But it is best to proceed no further.
+
+This methodical or theoretical Cartesian doubt, this philosophical doubt
+excogitated in a stove, is not the doubt, is not the scepticism, is not
+the incertitude, that I am talking about here. No! This other doubt is a
+passionate doubt, it is the eternal conflict between reason and feeling,
+science and life, logic and biotic. For science destroys the concept of
+personality by reducing it to a complex in continual flux from moment to
+moment--that is to say, it destroys the very foundation of the spiritual
+and emotional life, which ranges itself unyieldingly against reason.
+
+And this doubt cannot avail itself of any provisional ethic, but has to
+found its ethic, as we shall see, on the conflict itself, an ethic of
+battle, and itself has to serve as the foundation of religion. And it
+inhabits a house which is continually being demolished and which
+continually it has to rebuild. Without ceasing the will, I mean the will
+never to die, the spirit of unsubmissiveness to death, labours to build
+up the house of life, and without ceasing the keen blasts and stormy
+assaults of reason beat it down.
+
+And more than this, in the concrete vital problem that concerns us,
+reason takes up no position whatever. In truth, it does something worse
+than deny the immortality of the soul--for that at any rate would be one
+solution--it refuses even to recognize the problem as our vital desire
+presents it to us. In the rational and logical sense of the term
+problem, there is no such problem. This question of the immortality of
+the soul, of the persistence of the individual consciousness, is not
+rational, it falls outside reason. As a problem, and whatever solution
+it may receive, it is irrational. Rationally even the very propounding
+of the problem lacks sense. The immortality of the soul is as
+unconceivable as, in all strictness, is its absolute mortality. For the
+purpose of explaining the world and existence--and such is the task of
+reason--it is not necessary that we should suppose that our soul is
+either mortal or immortal. The mere enunciation of the problem is,
+therefore, an irrationality.
+
+Let us hear what our brother Kierkegaard has to say. "The danger of
+abstract thought is seen precisely in respect of the problem of
+existence, the difficulty of which it solves by going round it,
+afterwards boasting that it has completely explained it. It explains
+immortality in general, and it does so in a remarkable way by
+identifying it with eternity--with the eternity which is essentially the
+medium of thought. But with the immortality of each individually
+existing man, wherein precisely the difficulty lies, abstraction does
+not concern itself, is not interested in it. And yet the difficulty of
+existence lies just in the interest of the existing being--the man who
+exists is infinitely interested in existing. Abstract thought besteads
+immortality only in order that it may kill me as an individual being
+with an individual existence, and so make me immortal, pretty much in
+the same way as that famous physician in one of Holberg's plays, whose
+medicine, while it took away the patient's fever, took away his life at
+the same time. An abstract thinker, who refuses to disclose and admit
+the relation that exists between his abstract thought and the fact that
+he is an existing being, produces a comic impression upon us, however
+accomplished and distinguished he may be, for he runs the risk of
+ceasing to be a man. While an effective man, compounded of infinitude
+and finitude, owes his effectiveness precisely to the conjunction of
+these two elements and is infinitely interested in existing, an abstract
+thinker, similarly compounded, is a double being, a fantastical being,
+who lives in the pure being of abstraction, and at times presents the
+sorry figure of a professor who lays aside this abstract essence as he
+lays aside his walking-stick. When one reads the Life of a thinker of
+this kind--whose writings may be excellent--one trembles at the thought
+of what it is to be a man. And when one reads in his writings that
+thinking and being are the same thing, one thinks, remembering his life,
+that that being, which is identical with thinking, is not precisely the
+same thing as being a man" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_,
+chap. iii.).
+
+What intense passion--that is to say, what truth--there is in this
+bitter invective against Hegel, prototype of the rationalist!--for the
+rationalist takes away our fever by taking away our life, and promises
+us, instead of a concrete, an abstract immortality, as if the hunger for
+immortality that consumes us were an abstract and not a concrete hunger!
+
+It may indeed be said that when once the dog is dead there is an end to
+the rabies, and that after I have died I shall no more be tortured by
+this rage of not dying, and that the fear of death, or more properly, of
+nothingness, is an irrational fear, but ... Yes, but ... _Eppur si
+muove!_ And it will go on moving. For it is the source of all movement!
+
+I doubt, however, whether our brother Kierkegaard is altogether in the
+right, for this same abstract thinker, or thinker of abstractions,
+thinks _in order that_ he may exist, that he may not cease to exist, or
+thinks perhaps in order to forget that he will have to cease to exist.
+This is the root of the passion for abstract thought. And possibly Hegel
+was as infinitely interested as Kierkegaard in his own concrete,
+individual existence, although the professional decorum of the
+state-philosopher compelled him to conceal the fact.
+
+Faith in immortality is irrational. And, notwithstanding, faith, life,
+and reason have mutual need of one another. This vital longing is not
+properly a problem, cannot assume a logical status, cannot be formulated
+in propositions susceptible of rational discussion; but it announces
+itself in us as hunger announces itself. Neither can the wolf that
+throws itself with the fury of hunger upon its prey or with the fury of
+instinct upon the she-wolf, enunciate its impulse rationally and as a
+logical problem. Reason and faith are two enemies, neither of which can
+maintain itself without the other. The irrational demands to be
+rationalized and reason only can operate on the irrational. They are
+compelled to seek mutual support and association. But association in
+struggle, for struggle is a mode of association.
+
+In the world of living beings the struggle for life establishes an
+association, and a very close one, not only between those who unite
+together in combat against a common foe, but between the combatants
+themselves. And is there any possible association more intimate than
+that uniting the animal that eats another and the animal that is eaten,
+between the devourer and the devoured? And if this is clearly seen in
+the struggle between individuals, it is still more evident in the
+struggle between peoples. War has always been the most effective factor
+of progress, even more than commerce. It is through war that conquerors
+and conquered learn to know each other and in consequence to love each
+other.
+
+Christianity, the foolishness of the Cross, the irrational faith that
+Christ rose from the dead in order to raise us from the dead, was saved
+by the rationalistic Hellenic culture, and this in its turn was saved by
+Christianity. Without Christianity the Renaissance would have been
+impossible. Without the Gospel, without St. Paul, the peoples who had
+traversed the Middle Ages would have understood neither Plato nor
+Aristotle. A purely rationalist tradition is as impossible as a
+tradition purely religious. It is frequently disputed whether the
+Reformation was born as the child of the Renaissance or as a protest
+against it, and both propositions may be said to be true, for the son is
+always born as a protest against the father. It is also said that it was
+the revived Greek classics that led men like Erasmus back to St. Paul
+and to primitive Christianity, which is the most irrational form of
+Christianity; but it may be retorted that it was St. Paul, that it was
+the Christian irrationality underlying his Catholic theology, that led
+them back to the classics. "Christianity is what it has come to be," it
+has been said, "only through its alliance with antiquity, while with the
+Copts and Ethiopians it is but a kind of buffoonery. Islam developed
+under the influence of Persian and Greek culture, and under that of the
+Turks it has been transformed into a destructive barbarism."[31]
+
+We have emerged from the Middle Ages, from the medieval faith as ardent
+as it was at heart despairing, and not without its inward and abysmal
+incertitudes, and we have entered upon the age of rationalism, likewise
+not without its incertitudes. Faith in reason is exposed to the same
+rational indefensibility as all other faith. And we may say with Robert
+Browning,
+
+    All we have gained, then, by our unbelief
+    Is a life of doubt diversified by faith
+    For one of faith diversified by doubt.
+
+                     (_Bishop Blougram's Apology_.)
+
+And if, as I have said, faith, life, can only sustain itself by leaning
+upon reason, which renders it transmissible--and above all transmissible
+from myself to myself--that is to say, reflective and conscious--it is
+none the less true that reason in its turn can only sustain itself by
+leaning upon faith, upon life, even if only upon faith in reason, faith
+in its availability for something more than mere knowing, faith in its
+availability for living. Nevertheless, neither is faith transmissible or
+rational, nor is reason vital.
+
+The will and the intelligence have need of one another, and the reverse
+of that old aphorism, _nihil volitum quin praecognitum_, nothing is
+willed but what is previously known, is not so paradoxical as at first
+sight it may appear--_nihil cognitum quin praevolitum_, nothing is known
+but what is previously willed. Vinet, in his study of Cousin's book on
+the _Pensees_ of Pascal, says: "The very knowledge of the mind as such
+has need of the heart. Without the desire to see there is no seeing; in
+a great materialization of life and of thought there is no believing in
+the things of the spirit." We shall see presently that to believe is, in
+the first instance, to wish to believe.
+
+The will and the intelligence seek opposite ends: that we may absorb the
+world into ourselves, appropriate it to ourselves, is the aim of the
+will; that we may be absorbed into the world, that of the intelligence.
+Opposite ends?--are they not rather one and the same? No, they are not,
+although they may seem to be so. The intelligence is monist or
+pantheist, the will monotheist or egoist. The intelligence has no need
+of anything outside it to exercise itself upon; it builds its foundation
+with ideas themselves, while the will requires matter. To know something
+is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it,
+to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself.
+
+Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they
+have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophic
+basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. Each lives by its
+contrary. The history of philosophy is, strictly speaking, a history of
+religion. And the attacks which are directed against religion from a
+presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks
+from another but opposing religious point of view. "The opposition which
+professedly exists between natural science and Christianity really
+exists between an impulse derived from natural religion blended with the
+scientific investigation of nature, and the validity of the Christian
+view of the world, which assures to spirit its pre-eminence over the
+entire world of nature," says Ritschl (_Rechtfertgung und Versoehnung_,
+iii. chap. iv. Sec. 28). Now this instinct is the instinct of rationality
+itself. And the critical idealism of Kant is of religious origin, and it
+is in order to save religion that Kant enlarged the limits of reason
+after having in a certain sense dissolved it in scepticism. The system
+of antitheses, contradictions, and antinomies, upon which Hegel
+constructed his absolute idealism, has its root and germ in Kant
+himself, and this root is an irrational root.
+
+We shall see later on, when we come to deal with faith, that faith is in
+its essence simply a matter of will, not of reason, that to believe is
+to wish to believe, and to believe in God is, before all and above all,
+to wish that there may be a God. In the same way, to believe in the
+immortality of the soul is to wish that the soul may be immortal, but to
+wish it with such force that this volition shall trample reason under
+foot and pass beyond it. But reason has its revenge.
+
+The instinct of knowing and the instinct of living, or rather of
+surviving, come into conflict. In his work on the _Analysis of the
+Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical_,[32] Dr.
+E. Mach tells us that not even the investigator, the savant, _der
+Forscher_, is exempted from taking his part in the struggle for
+existence, that even the roads of science lead mouth-wards, and that in
+the actual conditions of the society in which we live the pure instinct
+of knowing, _der reine Erkenntnisstrieb_, is still no more than an
+ideal. And so it always will be. _Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_,
+or perhaps better, _primum supervivere_ or _superesse_.
+
+Every position of permanent agreement or harmony between reason and
+life, between philosophy and religion, becomes impossible. And the
+tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle
+between reason and life--reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing
+it to submit to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing
+reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its own vital desires.
+And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of
+religion.
+
+Our sense of the world of objective reality is necessarily subjective,
+human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will always rise up against
+rationalism; reason will always find itself confronted by will. Hence
+the rhythm of the history of philosophy and the alternation of periods
+in which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual forms, with
+those in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to materialist forms,
+although both of these classes of forms of belief may be disguised by
+other names. Neither reason nor life ever acknowledges itself
+vanquished. But we will return to this in the next chapter.
+
+The vital consequence of rationalism would be suicide. Kierkegaard puts
+it very well: "The consequence for existence[33] of pure thought is
+suicide.... We do not praise suicide but passion. The thinker, on the
+contrary, is a curious animal--for a few spells during the day he is
+very intelligent, but, for the rest, he has nothing in common with man"
+(_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, chap iii., Sec. 1).
+
+As the thinker, in spite of all, does not cease to be a man, he employs
+reason in the interests of life, whether he knows it or not. Life cheats
+reason and reason cheats life. Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy
+fabricated in the interest of life a teleologic-evolutionist system,
+rational in appearance, which might serve as a support for our vital
+longing. This philosophy, the basis of the orthodox Christian
+supernaturalism, whether Catholic or Protestant, was, in its essence,
+merely a trick on the part of life to force reason to lend it its
+support. But reason supported it with such pressure that it ended by
+pulverizing it.
+
+I have read that the ex-Carmelite, Hyacinthe Loyson, declared that he
+could present himself before God with tranquillity, for he was at peace
+with his conscience and with his reason. With what conscience? If with
+his religious conscience, then I do not understand. For it is a truth
+that no man can serve two masters, and least of all when, though they
+may sign truces and armistices and compromises, these two are enemies
+because of their conflicting interests.
+
+To all this someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself
+to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is
+unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought,
+therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur:
+"Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason,
+because the end of life is living and not understanding.
+
+Again, there are those who talk of the religious duty of resignation to
+mortality. This is indeed the very summit of aberration and insincerity.
+But someone is sure to oppose the idea of veracity to that of sincerity.
+Granted, and yet the two may very well be reconciled. Veracity, the
+homage I owe to what I believe to be rational, to what logically we
+call truth, moves me to affirm, in this case, that the immortality of
+the individual soul is a contradiction in terms, that it is something,
+not only irrational, but contra-rational; but sincerity leads me to
+affirm also my refusal to resign myself to this previous affirmation and
+my protest against its validity. What I feel is a truth, at any rate as
+much a truth as what I see, touch, hear, or what is demonstrated to
+me--nay, I believe it is more of a truth--and sincerity obliges me not
+to hide what I feel.
+
+And life, quick to defend itself, searches for the weak point in reason
+and finds it in scepticism, which it straightway fastens upon, seeking
+to save itself by means of this stranglehold. It needs the weakness of
+its adversary.
+
+Nothing is sure. Everything is elusive and in the air. In an outburst of
+passion Lamennais exclaims: "But what! Shall we, losing all hope, shut
+our eyes and plunge into the voiceless depths of a universal scepticism?
+Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature does not
+allow it; she forces us to believe even when our reason is not
+convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both alike
+forbidden to us. We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes, as
+between being and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be the
+extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man. But it is not
+given to man to annihilate himself; there is in him something which
+invincibly resists destruction, I know not what vital faith, indomitable
+even by his will. Whether he likes it or not, he must believe, because
+he must act, because he must preserve himself. His reason, if he
+listened only to that, teaching him to doubt everything, itself
+included, would reduce him to a state of absolute inaction; he would
+perish before even he had been able to prove to himself that he existed"
+(_Essai sur l'indifference en matiere de religion_, iii^e partie, chap.
+lxvii.).
+
+Reason, however, does not actually lead us to absolute scepticism. No!
+Reason does not lead me and cannot lead me to doubt that I exist.
+Whither reason does lead me is to vital scepticism, or more properly, to
+vital negation--not merely to doubt, but to deny, that my consciousness
+survives my death. Scepticism is produced by the clash between reason
+and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and
+scepticism, is born that holy, that sweet, that saving incertitude,
+which is our supreme consolation.
+
+The absolute and complete certainty, on the one hand, that death is a
+complete, definite, irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness,
+a certainty of the same order as the certainty that the three angles of
+a triangle are equal to two right angles, or, on the other hand, the
+absolute and complete certainty that our personal consciousness is
+prolonged beyond death in these present or in other conditions, and
+above all including in itself that strange and adventitious addition of
+eternal rewards and punishments--both of these certainties alike would
+make life impossible for us. In the most secret chamber of the spirit of
+him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his
+personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him
+perhaps, there lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of shadow, of
+uncertainty, and while he says within himself, "Well, let us live this
+life that passes away, for there is no other!" the silence of this
+secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs, "Who knows!..." He may not
+think he hears it, but he hears it nevertheless. And likewise in some
+secret place of the soul of the believer who most firmly holds the
+belief in a future life, there is a muffled voice, a voice of
+uncertainty, which whispers in the ear of his spirit, "Who knows!..."
+These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when the south-west wind
+roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint
+humming, yet nevertheless, merged in the clamour of the storm, it
+reaches the ear. Otherwise, without this uncertainty, how could we live?
+
+_"Is there?" "Is there not?"_--these are the bases of our inner life.
+There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of
+the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never
+wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would only
+prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those
+who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their
+intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great
+their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me
+that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst
+loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their
+consciousness. I do not understand those men who tell me that the
+prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the
+thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do
+not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith
+and my reason--I wish rather that there should be war between them!
+
+In the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to Mark it is related how a
+man brought unto Jesus his son who was possessed by a dumb spirit, and
+wheresoever the spirit took him it tore him, causing him to foam and
+gnash his teeth and pine away, wherefore he sought to bring him to Jesus
+that he might cure him. And the Master, impatient of those who sought
+only for signs and wonders, exclaimed: "O faithless generation, how long
+shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto me"
+(ver. 19), and they brought him unto him. And when the Master saw him
+wallowing on the ground, he asked his father how long it was ago since
+this had come unto him and the father replied that it was since he was &
+child. And Jesus said unto him: "If thou canst believe, all things are
+possible to him that believeth" (ver. 23). And then the father of the
+epileptic or demoniac uttered these pregnant and immortal words: "Lord,
+I believe; help thou mine unbelief!"--_Pisteyo, kyrie, boethei te
+hapistia mou_ (ver. 24).
+
+"Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!" A contradiction seemingly,
+for if he believes, if he trusts, how is it that he beseeches the Lord
+to help his lack of trust? Nevertheless, it is this contradiction that
+gives to the heart's cry of the father of the demoniac its most profound
+human value. His faith is a faith that is based upon incertitude.
+Because he believes--that is to say, because he wishes to believe,
+because he has need that his son should be cured--he beseeches the Lord
+to help his unbelief, his doubt that such a cure could be effected. Of
+such kind is human faith; of such kind was the heroic faith that Sancho
+Panza had in his master, the knight Don Quijote de la Mancha, as I think
+I have shown in my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_; a faith based upon
+incertitude, upon doubt. Sancho Panza was indeed a man, a whole and a
+true man, and he was not stupid, for only if he had been stupid would he
+have believed, without a shadow of doubt, in the follies of his master.
+And his master himself did not believe in them without a shadow of
+doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though mad, stupid. He was at heart
+a man of despair, as I think I have shown in my above-mentioned book.
+And because he was a man of an heroical despair, the hero of that inward
+and resigned despair, he stands as the eternal exemplar of every man
+whose soul is the battle-ground of reason and immortal desire. Our Lord
+Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose faith is based upon
+uncertainty, and Sancho is the prototype of the rationalist who doubts
+his own reason.
+
+Tormented by torturing doubts, August Hermann Francke resolved to call
+upon God, a God in whom he did not believe, or rather in whom he
+believed that he did not believe, imploring Him to take pity upon him,
+upon the poor pietist Francke, if perchance He really existed.[34] And
+from a similar state of mind came the inspiration of the sonnet entitled
+"The Atheist's Prayer," which is included in my _Rosario de Sonetos
+Liricos_, and closes with these lines:
+
+    _Sufro yo a tu costa,
+    Dios no existiente, pues si tu existieras
+    existieria yo tambien de veras._[35]
+
+Yes, if God the guarantor of our personal immortality existed, then
+should we ourselves really exist. And if He exists not, neither do we
+exist.
+
+That terrible secret, that hidden will of God which, translated into the
+language of theology, is known as predestination, that idea which
+dictated to Luther his _servum arbitrium_, and which gives to Calvinism
+its tragic sense, that doubt of our own salvation, is in its essence
+nothing but uncertainty, and this uncertainty, allied with despair,
+forms the basis of faith. Faith, some say, consists in not thinking
+about it, in surrendering ourselves trustingly to the arms of God, the
+secrets of whose providence are inscrutable. Yes, but infidelity also
+consists in not thinking about it. This absurd faith, this faith that
+knows no shadow of uncertainty, this faith of the stupid coalheaver,
+joins hands with an absurd incredulity, the incredulity that knows no
+shadow of uncertainty, the incredulity of the intellectuals who are
+afflicted with affective stupidity in order that they may not think
+about it.
+
+And what but uncertainty, doubt, the voice of reason, was that abyss,
+that terrible _gouffre_, before which Pascal trembled? And it was that
+which led him to pronounce his terrible sentence, _il faut
+s'abetir_--need is that we become fools!
+
+All Jansenism, the Catholic adaptation of Calvinism, bears the same
+impress. Port-Royal, which owed its existence to a Basque, the Abbe de
+Saint-Cyran, a man of the same race as Inigo de Loyola and as he who
+writes these lines, always preserved deep down a sediment of religious
+despair, of the suicide of reason. Loyola also slew his reason in
+obedience.
+
+Our affirmation is despair, our negation is despair, and from despair we
+abstain from affirming and denying. Note the greater part of our
+atheists and you will see that they are atheists from a kind of rage,
+rage at not being able to believe that there is a God. They are the
+personal enemies of God. They have invested Nothingness with substance
+and personality, and their No-God is an Anti-God.
+
+And concerning that abject and ignoble saying, "If there were not a God
+it would be necessary to invent Him," we shall say nothing. It is the
+expression of the unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look
+upon religion merely as a means of government and whose interest it is
+that in the other life there shall be a hell for those who oppose their
+worldly interests in this life. This repugnant and Sadducean phrase is
+worthy of the time-serving sceptic to whom it is attributed.
+
+No, with all this the deep vital sense has nothing to do. It has nothing
+to do with a transcendental police regimen, or with securing order--and
+what an order!--upon earth by means of promises and threats of eternal
+rewards and punishments after death. All this belongs to a lower
+plane--that is to say, it is merely politics, or if you like, ethics.
+The vital sense has to do with living.
+
+But it is in our endeavour to represent to ourselves what the life of
+the soul after death really means that uncertainty finds its surest
+foundation. This it is that most shakes our vital desire and most
+intensifies the dissolvent efficacy of reason. For even if by a mighty
+effort of faith we overcome that reason which tells and teaches us that
+the soul is only a function of the physical organism, it yet remains
+for our imagination to conceive an image of the immortal and eternal
+life of the soul. This conception involves us in contradictions and
+absurdities, and it may be that we shall arrive with Kierkegaard at the
+conclusion that if the mortality of the soul is terrible, not less
+terrible is its immortality.
+
+But when we have overcome the first, the only real difficulty, when we
+have overcome the impediment of reason, when we have achieved the faith,
+however painful and involved in uncertainty it may be, that our personal
+consciousness shall continue after death, what difficulty, what
+impediment, lies in the way of our imagining to ourselves this
+persistence of self in harmony with our desire? Yes, we can imagine it
+as an eternal rejuvenescence, as an eternal growth of ourselves, and as
+a journeying towards God, towards the Universal Consciousness, without
+ever an arrival, we can imagine it as ... But who shall put fetters upon
+the imagination, once it has broken the chain of the rational?
+
+I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it
+is all necessary. And I must repeat once again that we have nothing to
+do with a transcendental police system or with the conversion of God
+into a great Judge or Policeman--that is to say, we are not concerned
+with heaven or hell considered as buttresses to shore up our poor
+earthly morality, nor are we concerned with anything egoistic or
+personal. It is not I myself alone, it is the whole human race that is
+involved, it is the ultimate finality of all our civilization. I am but
+one, but all men are I's.
+
+Do you remember the end of that _Song of the Wild Cock_ which Leopardi
+wrote in prose?--the despairing Leopardi, the victim of reason, who
+never succeeded in achieving belief. "A time will come," he says, "when
+this Universe and Nature itself will be extinguished. And just as of the
+grandest kingdoms and empires of mankind and the marvellous things
+achieved therein, very famous in their own time, no vestige or memory
+remains to-day, so, in like manner, of the entire world and of the
+vicissitudes and calamities of all created things there will remain not
+a single trace, but a naked silence and a most profound stillness will
+fill the immensity of space. And so before ever it has been uttered or
+understood, this admirable and fearful secret of universal existence
+will be obliterated and lost." And this they now describe by a
+scientific and very rationalistic term--namely, _entropia_. Very pretty,
+is it not? Spencer invented the notion of a primordial homogeneity, from
+which it is impossible to conceive how any heterogeneity could
+originate. Well now, this _entropia_ is a kind of ultimate homogeneity,
+a state of perfect equilibrium. For a soul avid of life, it is the most
+like nothingness that the mind can conceive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To this point, through a series of dolorous reflections, I have brought
+the reader who has had the patience to follow me, endeavouring always to
+do equal justice to the claims of reason and of feeling. I have not
+wished to keep silence on matters about which others are silent; I have
+sought to strip naked, not only my own soul, but the human soul, be its
+nature what it may, its destiny to disappear or not to disappear. And we
+have arrived at the bottom of the abyss, at the irreconcilable conflict
+between reason and vital feeling. And having arrived here, I have told
+you that it is necessary to accept the conflict as such and to live by
+it. Now it remains for me to explain to you how, according to my way of
+feeling, and even according to my way of thinking, this despair may be
+the basis of a vigorous life, of an efficacious activity, of an ethic,
+of an esthetic, of a religion and even of a logic. But in what follows
+there will be as much of imagination as of ratiocination, or rather,
+much more.
+
+I do not wish to deceive anyone, or to offer as philosophy what it may
+be is only poetry or phantasmagoria, in any case a kind of mythology.
+The divine Plato, after having discussed the immortality of the soul in
+his dialogue _Phaedo_ (an ideal--that is to say, a lying--immortality),
+embarked upon an interpretation of the myths which treat of the other
+life, remarking that it was also necessary to mythologize. Let us, then,
+mythologize.
+
+He who looks for reasons, strictly so called, scientific arguments,
+technically logical reflections, may refuse to follow me further.
+Throughout the remainder of these reflections upon the tragic sense, I
+am going to fish for the attention of the reader with the naked,
+unbaited hook; whoever wishes to bite, let him bite, but I deceive no
+one. Only in the conclusion I hope to gather everything together and to
+show that this religious despair which I have been talking about, and
+which is nothing other than the tragic sense of life itself, is, though
+more or less hidden, the very foundation of the consciousness of
+civilized individuals and peoples to-day--that is to say, of those
+individuals and those peoples who do not suffer from stupidity of
+intellect or stupidity of feeling.
+
+And this tragic sense is the spring of heroic achievements.
+
+If in that which follows you shall meet with arbitrary apothegms,
+brusque transitions, inconsecutive statements, veritable somersaults of
+thought, do not cry out that you have been deceived. We are about to
+enter--if it be that you wish to accompany me--upon a field of
+contradictions between feeling and reasoning, and we shall have to avail
+ourselves of the one as well as of the other.
+
+That which follows is not the outcome of reason but of life, although in
+order that I may transmit it to you I shall have to rationalize it after
+a fashion. The greater part of it can be reduced to no logical theory or
+system; but like that tremendous Yankee poet, Walt Whitman, "I charge
+that there be no theory or school founded out of me" (_Myself and
+Mine_).
+
+Neither am I the only begetter of the fancies I am about to set forth.
+By no means. They have also been conceived by other men, if not
+precisely by other thinkers, who have preceded me in this vale of tears,
+and who have exhibited their life and given expression to it. Their
+life, I repeat, not their thought, save in so far as it was thought
+inspired by life, thought with a basis of irrationality.
+
+Does this mean that in all that follows, in the efforts of the
+irrational to express itself, there is a total lack of rationality, of
+all objective value? No; the absolutely, the irrevocably irrational, is
+inexpressible, is intransmissible. But not the contra-rational. Perhaps
+there is no way of rationalizing the irrational; but there is a way of
+rationalizing the contra-rational, and that is by trying to explain it.
+Since only the rational is intelligible, really intelligible, and since
+the absurd, being devoid of sense, is condemned to be incommunicable,
+you will find that whenever we succeed in giving expression and
+intelligibility to anything apparently irrational or absurd we
+invariably resolve it into something rational, even though it be into
+the negation of that which we affirm.
+
+The maddest dreams of the fancy have some ground of reason, and who
+knows if everything that the imagination of man can conceive either has
+not already happened, or is not now happening or will not happen some
+time, in some world or another? The possible combinations are perhaps
+infinite. It only remains to know whether all that is imaginable is
+possible.
+
+It may also be said, and with justice, that much of what I am about to
+set forth is merely a repetition of ideas which have been expressed a
+hundred times before and a hundred times refuted; but the repetition of
+an idea really implies that its refutation has not been final. And as I
+do not pretend that the majority of these fancies are new, so neither do
+I pretend, obviously, that other voices before mine have not spoken to
+the winds the same laments. But when yet another voice echoes the same
+eternal lament it can only be inferred that the same grief still dwells
+in the heart.
+
+And it comes not amiss to repeat yet once again the same eternal
+lamentations that were already old in the days of Job and Ecclesiastes,
+and even to repeat them in the same words, to the end that the devotees
+of progress may see that there is something that never dies. Whosoever
+repeats the "Vanity of vanities" of Ecclesiastes or the lamentations of
+Job, even though without changing a letter, having first experienced
+them in his soul, performs a work of admonition. Need is to repeat
+without ceasing the _memento mori_.
+
+"But to what end?" you will ask. Even though it be only to the end that
+some people should be irritated and should see that these things are not
+dead and, so long as men exist, cannot die; to the end that they should
+be convinced that to-day, in the twentieth century, all the bygone
+centuries and all of them alive, are still subsisting. When a supposed
+error reappears, it must be, believe me, that it has not ceased to be
+true in part, just as when one who was dead reappears, it must be that
+he was not wholly dead.
+
+Yes, I know well that others before me have felt what I feel and
+express; that many others feel it to-day, although they keep silence
+about it. Why do I not keep silence about it too? Well, for the very
+reason that most of those who feel it are silent about it; and yet,
+though they are silent, they obey in silence that inner voice. And I do
+not keep silence about it because it is for many the thing which must
+not be spoken, the abomination of abominations--_infandum_--and I
+believe that it is necessary now and again to speak the thing which must
+not be spoken. But if it leads to nothing? Even if it should lead only
+to irritating the devotees of progress, those who believe that truth is
+consolation, it would lead to not a little. To irritating them and
+making them say: Poor fellow! if he would only use his intelligence to
+better purpose!... Someone perhaps will add that I do not know what I
+say, to which I shall reply that perhaps he may be right--and being
+right is such a little thing!--but that I feel what I say and I know
+what I feel and that suffices me. And that it is better to be lacking in
+reason than to have too much of it.
+
+And the reader who perseveres in reading me will also see how out of
+this abyss of despair hope may arise, and how this critical position may
+be the well-spring of human, profoundly human, action and effort, and of
+solidarity and even of progress. He will see its pragmatic
+justification. And he will see how, in order to work, and to work
+efficaciously and morally, there is no need of either of these two
+conflicting certainties, either that of faith or that of reason, and how
+still less is there any need--this never under any circumstances--to
+shirk the problem of the immortality of the soul, or to distort it
+idealistically--that is to say, hypocritically. The reader will see how
+this uncertainty, with the suffering that accompanies it, and the
+fruitless struggle to escape from it, may be and is a basis for action
+and morals.
+
+And in the fact that it serves as a basis for action and morals, this
+feeling of uncertainty and the inward struggle between reason on the one
+hand and faith and the passionate longing for eternal life on the other,
+should find their justification in the eyes of the pragmatist. But it
+must be clearly stated that I do not adduce this practical consequence
+in order to justify the feeling, but merely because I encounter it in my
+inward experience. I neither desire to seek, nor ought I to seek, any
+justification for this state of inward struggle and uncertainty and
+longing; it is a fact and that suffices. And if anyone finding himself
+in this state, in the depth of the abyss, fails to find there motives
+for and incentives to life and action, and concludes by committing
+bodily or spiritual suicide, whether he kills himself or he abandons all
+co-operation with his fellows in human endeavour, it will not be I who
+will pass censure upon him. And apart from the fact that the evil
+consequences of a doctrine, or rather those which we call evil, only
+prove, I repeat, that the doctrine is disastrous for our desires, but
+not that it is false in itself, the consequences themselves depend not
+so much upon the doctrine as upon him who deduces them. The same
+principle may furnish one man with grounds for action and another man
+with grounds for abstaining from action, it may lead one man to direct
+his effort towards a certain end and another man towards a directly
+opposite end. For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the
+justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, or else they are our way of
+trying to explain that conduct to ourselves.
+
+Man, in effect, is unwilling to remain in ignorance of the motives of
+his own conduct. And just as a man who has been led to perform a certain
+action by hypnotic suggestion will afterwards invent reasons which would
+justify it and make it appear logical to himself and others, being
+unaware all the time of the real cause of his action, so every man--for
+since "life is a dream" every man is in a condition of hypnotism--seeks
+to find reasons for his conduct. And if the pieces on a chessboard were
+endowed with consciousness, they would probably have little difficulty
+in ascribing their moves to freewill--that is to say, they would claim
+for them a finalist rationality. And thus it comes about that every
+philosophic theory serves to explain and justify an ethic, a doctrine of
+conduct, which has its real origin in the inward moral feeling of the
+author of the theory. But he who harbours this feeling may possibly
+himself have no clear consciousness of its true reason or cause.
+
+Consequently, if my reason, which is in a certain sense a part of the
+reason of all my brothers in humanity in time and space, teaches me this
+absolute scepticism in respect of what concerns my longing for
+never-ending life, I think that I can assume that my feeling of life,
+which is the essence of life itself, my vitality, my boundless appetite
+for living and my abhorrence of dying, my refusal to submit to
+death--that it is this which suggests to me the doctrines with which I
+try to counter-check the working of the reason. Have these doctrines an
+objective value? someone will ask me, and I shall answer that I do not
+understand what this objective value of a doctrine is. I will not say
+that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines that I am
+about to set forth are those which make me live; but I will venture to
+say that it is my longing to live and to live for ever that inspires
+these doctrines within me. And if by means of them I succeed in
+strengthening and sustaining this same longing in another, perhaps when
+it was all but dead, then I shall have performed a man's work and, above
+all, I shall have lived. In a word, be it with reason or without reason
+or against reason, I am resolved not to die. And if, when at last I die
+out, I die out altogether, then I shall not have died out of
+myself--that is, I shall not have yielded myself to death, but my human
+destiny will have killed me. Unless I come to lose my head, or rather my
+heart, I will not abdicate from life--life will be wrested from me.
+
+To have recourse to those, ambiguous words, "optimism" and "pessimism,"
+does not assist us in any way, for frequently they express the very
+contrary of what those who use them mean to express. To ticket a
+doctrine with the label of pessimism is not to impugn its validity, and
+the so-called optimists are not the most efficient in action. I believe,
+on the contrary, that many of the greatest heroes, perhaps the greatest
+of all, have been men of despair and that by despair they have
+accomplished their mighty works. Apart from this, however, and accepting
+in all their ambiguity these denominations of optimism and pessimism,
+that there exists a certain transcendental pessimism which may be the
+begetter of a temporal and terrestrial optimism, is a matter that I
+propose to develop in the following part of this treatise.
+
+Very different, well I know, is the attitude of our progressives, the
+partisans of "the central current of contemporary European thought"; but
+I cannot bring myself to believe that these individuals do not
+voluntarily close their eyes to the grand problem of existence and that,
+in endeavouring to stifle this feeling of the tragedy of life, they
+themselves are not living a lie.
+
+The foregoing reflections are a kind of practical summary of the
+criticism developed in the first six chapters of this treatise, a kind
+of definition of the practical position to which such a criticism is
+capable of leading whosoever will not renounce life and will not
+renounce reason and who is compelled to live and act between these upper
+and nether millstones which grind upon the soul. The reader who follows
+me further is now aware that I am about to carry him into the region of
+the imagination, of imagination not destitute of reason, for without
+reason nothing subsists, but of imagination founded on feeling. And as
+regards its truth, the real truth, that which is independent of
+ourselves, beyond the reach of our logic and of our heart--of this truth
+who knows aught?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[31] See Troeltsch, _Systematische christliche Religion_, in _Die Kultur
+der Gegenwart_ series.
+
+[32] _Die Analyse der Empfindigungen und das Verhaeltniss des Physischen
+zum Psychischen_, i., Sec. 12, note.
+
+[33] I have left the original expression here, almost without
+translating it--_Existents-Consequents_. It means the existential or
+practical, not the purely rational or logical, consequence. (Author's
+note.)
+
+[34] Albrecht Ritschl: _Geschichte des Pietismus_, ii., Abt. i., Bonn,
+1884, p. 251.
+
+[35] Thou art the cause of my suffering, O non-existing God, for if Thou
+didst exist, then should I also really exist.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+LOVE, SUFFERING, PITY, AND PERSONALITY
+
+    CAIN: Let me, or happy or unhappy, learn
+          To anticipate my immortality.
+
+    LUCIFER: Thou didst before I came upon thee.
+
+    CAIN:                                       How?
+
+    LUCIFER: By suffering.
+
+                BYRON: _Cain_, Act II., Scene I.
+
+
+The most tragic thing in the world and in life, readers and brothers of
+mine, is love. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of
+disillusion; love is consolation in desolation; it is the sole medicine
+against death, for it is death's brother.
+
+    _Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte
+    Ingenero la sorte_,
+
+as Leopardi sang.
+
+Love seeks with fury, through the medium of the beloved, something
+beyond, and since it finds it not, it despairs.
+
+Whenever we speak of love there is always present in our memory the idea
+of sexual love, the love between man and woman, whose end is the
+perpetuation of the human race upon the earth. Hence it is that we never
+succeed in reducing love either to a purely intellectual or to a purely
+volitional element, putting aside that part in it which belongs to the
+feeling, or, if you like, to the senses. For, in its essence, love is
+neither idea nor volition; rather it is desire, feeling; it is something
+carnal in spirit itself. Thanks to love, we feel all that spirit has of
+flesh in it.
+
+Sexual love is the generative type of every other love. In love and by
+love we seek to perpetuate ourselves, and we perpetuate ourselves on the
+earth only on condition that we die, that we yield up our life to
+others. The humblest forms of animal life, the lowest of living beings,
+multiply by dividing themselves, by splitting into two, by ceasing to be
+the unit which they previously formed.
+
+But when at last the vitality of the being that multiplies itself by
+division is exhausted, the species must renew the source of life from
+time to time by means of the union of two wasting individuals, by means
+of what is called, among protozoaria, conjugation. They unite in order
+to begin dividing again with more vigour. And every act of generation
+consists in a being's ceasing to be what it was, either wholly or in
+part, in a splitting up, in a partial death. To live is to give oneself,
+to perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself and to give oneself is
+to die. The supreme delight of begetting is perhaps nothing but a
+foretaste of death, the eradication of our own vital essence. We unite
+with another, but it is to divide ourselves; this most intimate embrace
+is only a most intimate sundering. In its essence, the delight of sexual
+love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of renewing our
+life in another, for only in others can we renew our life and so
+perpetuate ourselves.
+
+Without doubt there is something tragically destructive in the essence
+of love, as it presents itself to us in its primitive animal form, in
+the unconquerable instinct which impels the male and the female to mix
+their being in a fury of conjunction. The same impulse that joins their
+bodies, separates, in a certain sense, their souls; they hate one
+another, while they embrace, no less than they love, and above all they
+contend with one another, they contend for a third life, which as yet is
+without life. Love is a contention, and there are animal species in
+which the male maltreats the female in his union with her, and other in
+which the female devours the male after being fertilized by him.
+
+It has been said that love is a mutual selfishness; and, in fact, each
+one of the lovers seeks to possess the other, and in seeking his own
+perpetuation through the instrumentality of the other, though without
+being at the time conscious of it or purposing it, he thereby seeks his
+own enjoyment. Each one of the lovers is an immediate instrument of
+enjoyment and a mediate instrument of perpetuation, for the other. And
+thus they are tyrants and slaves, each one at once the tyrant and slave
+of the other.
+
+Is there really anything strange in the fact that the deepest religious
+feeling has condemned carnal love and exalted virginity? Avarice, said
+the Apostle, is the root of all evil, and the reason is because avarice
+takes riches, which are only a means, for an end; and therein lies the
+essence of sin, in taking means for ends, in not recognizing or in
+disesteeming the end. And since it takes enjoyment for the end, whereas
+it is only the means, and not perpetuation, which is the true end, what
+is carnal love but avarice? And it is possible that there are some who
+preserve their virginity in order the better to perpetuate themselves,
+and in order to perpetuate something more human than the flesh.
+
+For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers
+perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father
+of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that
+in the depth of love there is a depth of eternal despair, out of which
+spring hope and consolation. For out of this carnal and primitive love
+of which I have been speaking, out of this love of the whole body with
+all its senses, which is the animal origin of human society, out of this
+loving-fondness, rises spiritual and sorrowful love.
+
+This other form of love, this spiritual love, is born of sorrow, is
+born of the death of carnal love, is born also of the feeling of
+compassion and protection which parents feel in the presence of a
+stricken child. Lovers never attain to a love of self abandonment, of
+true fusion of soul and not merely of body, until the heavy pestle of
+sorrow has bruised their hearts and crushed them in the same mortar of
+suffering. Sensual love joined their bodies but disjoined their souls;
+it kept their souls strangers to one another; but of this love is
+begotten a fruit of their flesh--a child. And perchance this child,
+begotten in death, falls sick and dies. Then it comes to pass that over
+the fruit of their carnal fusion and spiritual separation and
+estrangement, their bodies now separated and cold with sorrow but united
+by sorrow their souls, the lovers, the parents, join in an embrace of
+despair, and then is born, of the death of the child of their flesh, the
+true spiritual love. Or rather, when the bond of flesh which united them
+is broken, they breathe with a sigh of relief. For men love one another
+with a spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow
+together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground
+bowed beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they
+know one another and feel one another, and feel with one another in
+their common anguish, they pity one another and love one another. For to
+love is to pity; and if bodies are united by pleasure, souls are united
+by pain.
+
+And this is felt with still more clearness and force in the seeding, the
+taking root, and the blossoming of one of those tragic loves which are
+doomed to contend with the diamond-hard laws of Destiny--one of those
+loves which are born out of due time and season, before or after the
+moment, or out of the normal mode in which the world, which is custom,
+would have been willing to welcome them. The more barriers Destiny and
+the world and its law interpose between the lovers, the stronger is the
+impulse that urges them towards one another, and their happiness in
+loving one another turns to bitterness, and their unhappiness in not
+being able to love freely and openly grows heavier, and they pity one
+another from the bottom of their hearts; and this common pity, which is
+their common misery and their common happiness, gives fire and fuel to
+their love. And they suffer their joy, enjoying their suffering. And
+they establish their love beyond the confines of the world, and the
+strength of this poor love suffering beneath the yoke of Destiny gives
+them intuition of another world where there is no other law than the
+liberty of love--another world where there are no barriers because there
+is no flesh. For nothing inspires us more with hope and faith in another
+world than the impossibility of our love truly fructifying in this world
+of flesh and of appearances.
+
+And what is maternal love but compassion for the weak, helpless,
+defenceless infant that craves the mother's milk and the comfort of her
+breast? And woman's love is all maternal.
+
+To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.
+Men aflame with a burning charity towards their neighbours are thus
+enkindled because they have touched the depth of their own misery, their
+own apparentiality, their own nothingness, and then, turning their newly
+opened eyes upon their fellows, they have seen that they also are
+miserable, apparential, condemned to nothingness, and they have pitied
+them and loved them.
+
+Man yearns to be loved, or, what is the same thing, to be pitied. Man
+wishes others to feel and share his hardships and his sorrows. The
+roadside beggar's exhibition of his sores and gangrened mutilations is
+something more than a device to extort alms from the passer-by. True
+alms is pity rather than the pittance that alleviates the material
+hardships of life. The beggar shows little gratitude for alms thrown to
+him by one who hurries past with averted face; he is more grateful to
+him who pities him but does not help than to him who helps but does not
+pity, although from another point of view he may prefer the latter.
+Observe with what satisfaction he relates his woes to one who is moved
+by the story of them. He desires to be pitied, to be loved.
+
+Woman's love, above all, as I have remarked, is always compassionate in
+its essence--maternal. Woman yields herself to the lover because she
+feels that his desire makes him suffer. Isabel had compassion upon
+Lorenzo, Juliet upon Romeo, Francesca upon Paolo. Woman seems to say:
+"Come, poor one, thou shalt not suffer so for my sake!" And therefore is
+her love more loving and purer than that of man, braver and more
+enduring.
+
+Pity, then, is the essence of human spiritual love, of the love that is
+conscious of being love, of the love that is not purely animal, of the
+love, in a word, of a rational person. Love pities, and pities most when
+it loves most.
+
+Reversing the terms of the adage _nihil volitum quin praecognitum_, I
+have told you that _nihil cognitum quin praevolitum_, that we know
+nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it
+may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save
+what we pity.
+
+As love grows, this restless yearning to pierce to the uttermost and to
+the innermost, so it continually embraces all that it sees, and pities
+all that it embraces. According as you turn inwards and penetrate more
+deeply into yourself, you will discover more and more your own
+emptiness, that you are not all that you are not, that you are not what
+you would wish to be, that you are, in a word, only a nonentity. And in
+touching your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent base, in
+not reaching your own infinity, still less your own eternity, you will
+have a whole-hearted pity for yourself, and you will burn with a
+sorrowful love for yourself--a love that will consume your so-called
+self-love, which is merely a species of sensual self-delectation, the
+self-enjoyment, as it were, of the flesh of your soul.
+
+Spiritual self-love, the pity that one feels for oneself, may perhaps be
+called egotism; but nothing could be more opposed to ordinary egoism.
+For this love or pity for yourself, this intense despair, bred of the
+consciousness that just as before you were born you were not, so after
+your death you will cease to be, will lead you to pity--that is, to
+love--all your fellows and brothers in this world of appearance, these
+unhappy shadows who pass from nothingness to nothingness, these sparks
+of consciousness which shine for a moment in the infinite and eternal
+darkness. And this compassionate feeling for other men, for your
+fellows, beginning with those most akin to you, those with whom you
+live, will expand into a universal pity for all living things, and
+perhaps even for things that have not life but merely existence. That
+distant star which shines up there in the night will some day be
+quenched and will turn to dust and will cease to shine and cease to
+exist. And so, too, it will be with the whole of the star-strewn
+heavens. Unhappy heavens!
+
+And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it
+would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more
+than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without
+being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to
+be all.
+
+If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you are able
+to look--that is to say, if you look within yourself; if you not only
+contemplate but feel all things in your own consciousness, upon which
+all things have traced their painful impression--you will arrive at the
+abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of something more: at the
+tedium of existence, at the bottomless pit of the vanity of vanities.
+And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal
+love.
+
+In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and
+extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within
+yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves,
+everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only pity--that is to
+say, we only love--that which is like ourselves and in so far as it is
+like ourselves, and the more like it is the more we love; and thus our
+pity for things, and with it our love, grows in proportion as we
+discover in them the likenesses which they have with ourselves. Or,
+rather, it is love itself, which of itself tends to grow, that reveals
+these resemblances to us. If I am moved to pity and love the luckless
+star that one day will vanish from the face of heaven, it is because
+love, pity, makes me feel that it has a consciousness, more or less dim,
+which makes it suffer because it is no more than a star, and a star that
+is doomed one day to cease to be. For all consciousness is consciousness
+of death and of suffering.
+
+Consciousness (_conscientia_) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling,
+and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only
+by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is
+so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves
+everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total
+All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness, a
+Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and
+therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe,
+which love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call
+God. And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by Him; loves
+Him and feels itself loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of
+the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and
+infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself.
+
+God is, then, the personalization of the All; He is the eternal and
+infinite Consciousness of the Universe--Consciousness taken captive by
+matter and struggling to free himself from it. We personalize the All
+in order to save ourselves from Nothingness; and the only mystery really
+mysterious is the mystery of suffering.
+
+Suffering is the path of consciousness, and by it living beings arrive
+at the possession of self-consciousness. For to possess consciousness of
+oneself, to possess personality, is to know oneself and to feel oneself
+distinct from other beings, and this feeling of distinction is only
+reached through an act of collision, through suffering more or less
+severe, through the sense of one's own limits. Consciousness of oneself
+is simply consciousness of one's own limitation. I feel myself when I
+feel that I am not others; to know and to feel the extent of my being is
+to know at what point I cease to be, the point beyond which I no longer
+am.
+
+And how do we know that we exist if we do not suffer, little or much?
+How can we turn upon ourselves, acquire reflective consciousness, save
+by suffering? When we enjoy ourselves we forget ourselves, forget that
+we exist; we pass over into another, an alien being, we alienate
+ourselves. And we become centred in ourselves again, we return to
+ourselves, only by suffering.
+
+           _Nessun maggior dolore
+    che ricordarsi del tempo felice
+    nella miseria_
+
+are the words that Dante puts into the mouth of Francesca da Rimini
+(_Inferno_, v., 121-123); but if there is no greater sorrow than the
+recollection in adversity of happy bygone days, there is, on the other
+hand, no pleasure in remembering adversity in days of prosperity.
+
+"The bitterest sorrow that man can know is to aspire to do much and to
+achieve nothing" (_polla phroneoita medenos chrateein_)--so
+Herodotus relates that a Persian said to a Theban at a banquet (book
+ix., chap. xvi.). And it is true. With knowledge and desire we can
+embrace everything, or almost everything; with the will nothing, or
+almost nothing. And contemplation is not happiness--no! not if this
+contemplation implies impotence. And out of this collision between our
+knowledge and our power pity arises.
+
+We pity what is like ourselves, and the greater and clearer our sense of
+its likeness with ourselves, the greater our pity. And if we may say
+that this likeness provokes our pity, it may also be maintained that it
+is our reservoir of pity, eager to diffuse itself over everything, that
+makes us discover the likeness of things with ourselves, the common bond
+that unites us with them in suffering.
+
+Our own struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase our own
+consciousness makes us discover in the endeavours and movements and
+revolutions of all things a struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase
+consciousness, to which everything tends. Beneath the actions of those
+most akin to myself, of my fellow-men, I feel--or, rather, I co-feel--a
+state of consciousness similar to that which lies beneath my own
+actions. On hearing my brother give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes
+and cries in the depth of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel
+the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its branches is
+being cut off, and I feel it most when my imagination is alive, for the
+imagination is the faculty of intuition, of inward vision.
+
+Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only
+consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is
+identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or
+less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for
+they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle
+to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual
+aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and
+yet to preserve their proper limits.
+
+And this process of personalization or subjectivization of everything
+external, phenomenal, or objective, is none other than the vital
+process of philosophy in the contest of life against reason and of
+reason against life. We have already indicated it in the preceding
+chapter, and we must now confirm it by developing it further.
+
+Giovanni Baptista Vico, with his profound esthetic penetration into the
+soul of antiquity, saw that the spontaneous philosophy of man was to
+make of himself the norm of the universe, guided by the _instinto
+d'animazione_. Language, necessarily anthropomorphic, mythopeic,
+engenders thought. "Poetic wisdom, which was the primitive wisdom of
+paganism," says Vico in his _Scienza Nuova_, "must have begun with a
+metaphysic, not reasoned and abstract, like that of modern educated men,
+but felt and imagined, such as must have been that of primitive men.
+This was their own poetry, which with them was inborn, an innate
+faculty, for nature had furnished them with such feelings and such
+imaginations, a faculty born of the ignorance of causes, and therefore
+begetting a universal sense of wonder, for knowing nothing they
+marvelled greatly at everything. This poetry had a divine origin, for,
+while they invented the causes of things out of their own imagination,
+at the same time they regarded these causes with feelings of wonder as
+gods. In this way the first men of the pagan peoples, as children of the
+growing human race, fashioned things out of their ideas.... This nature
+of human things has bequeathed that eternal property which Tacitus
+elucidated with a fine phrase when he said, not without reason, that men
+in their terror _fingunt simul creduntque_."
+
+And then, passing from the age of imagination, Vico proceeds to show us
+the age of reason, this age of ours in which the mind, even the popular
+mind, is too remote from the senses, "with so many abstractions of which
+all languages are full," an age in which "the ability to conceive an
+immense image of such a personage as we call sympathetic Nature is
+denied to us, for though the phrase 'Dame Nature' may be on our lips,
+there is nothing in our minds that corresponds with it, our minds being
+occupied with the false, the non-existent." "To-day," Vico continues,
+"it is naturally impossible for us to enter into the vast imagination of
+these primitive men." But is this certain? Do not we continue to live by
+the creations of their imagination, embodied for ever in the language
+with which we think, or, rather, the language which thinks in us?
+
+It was in vain that Comte declared that human thought had already
+emerged from the age of theology and was now emerging from the age of
+metaphysics into the age of positivism; the three ages coexist, and
+although antagonistic they lend one another mutual support.
+High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny and begins to
+affirm something, whenever it becomes really positive, is nothing but
+metaphysics; and metaphysics, in its essence, is always theology, and
+theology is born of imagination yoked to the service of life, of life
+with its craving for immortality.
+
+Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it,
+is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. When rationalism dawned
+with Thales of Miletus, this philosopher abandoned Oceanus and Thetis,
+gods and the progenitors of gods, and attributed the origin of things to
+water; but this water was a god in disguise. Beneath nature (_phhysist_)
+and the world (_khosmos_), mythical and anthropomorphic creations
+throbbed with life. They were implicated in the structure of language
+itself. Xenophon tells us (_Memorabilia_, i., i., 6-9) that among
+phenomena Socrates distinguished between those which were within the
+scope of human study and those which the gods had reserved for
+themselves, and that he execrated the attempt of Anaxagoras to explain
+everything rationally. His contemporary, Hippocrates, regarded diseases
+as of divine origin, and Plato believed that the sun and stars were
+animated gods with their souls (_Philebus_, cap. xvi., _Laws_, x.), and
+only permitted astronomical investigation so long as it abstained from
+blasphemy against these gods. And Aristotle in his _Physics_ tells us
+that Zeus rains not in order that the corn may grow, but by necessity
+(_ex anharchest_). They tried to mechanize and rationalize God, but God
+rebelled against them.
+
+And what is the concept of God, a concept continually renewed because
+springing out of the eternal feeling of God in man, but the eternal
+protest of life against reason, the unconquerable instinct of
+personalization? And what is the notion of substance itself but the
+objectivization of that which is most subjective--that is, of the will
+or consciousness? For consciousness, even before it knows itself as
+reason, feels itself, is palpable to itself, is most in harmony with
+itself, as will, and as will not to die. Hence that rhythm, of which we
+spoke, in the history of thought. Positivism inducted us into an age of
+rationalism--that is to say, of materialism, mechanism, or mortalism;
+and behold now the return of vitalism, of spiritualism. What was the
+effort of pragmatism but an effort to restore faith in the human
+finality of the universe? What is the effort of a Bergson, for example,
+especially in his work on creative evolution, but an attempt to
+re-integrate the personal God and eternal consciousness? Life never
+surrenders.
+
+And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic or
+anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if we thought
+only for the sake of thinking and knowing, and not for the sake of
+living. The very language with which we think prevents us from so doing.
+Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a
+mythic and anthropomorphic base. And to construct a purely rational
+philosophy it would be necessary to construct it by means of algebraic
+formulas or to create a new language for it, an inhuman language--that
+is to say, one inapt for the needs of life--as indeed Dr. Richard
+Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zuerich, attempted to do in his
+_Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung_), in order to
+avoid preconceptions. And this rigorous attempt of Avenarius, the chief
+of the critics of experience, ends strictly in pure scepticism. He
+himself says at the end of the Prologue to the work above mentioned:
+"The childish confidence that it is granted to us to discover truth has
+long since disappeared; as we progress we become aware of the
+difficulties that lie in the way of its discovery and of the limitation
+of our powers. And what is the end?... If we could only succeed in
+seeing clearly into ourselves!"
+
+Seeing clearly! seeing clearly! Clear vision would be only attainable by
+a pure thinker who used algebra instead of language and was able to
+divest himself of his own humanity--that is to say, by an unsubstantial,
+merely objective being: a no-being, in short. In spite of reason we are
+compelled to think with life, and in spite of life we are compelled to
+rationalize thought.
+
+This animation, this personification, interpenetrates our very
+knowledge. "Who is it that sends the rain? Who is it that thunders?" old
+Strepsiades asks of Socrates in _The Clouds_ of Aristophanes, and the
+philosopher replies: "Not Zeus, but the clouds." "But," questions
+Strepsiades, "who but Zeus makes the clouds sweep along?" to which
+Socrates answers: "Not a bit of it; it is atmospheric whirligig."
+"Whirligig?" muses Strepsiades; "I never thought of that--that Zeus is
+gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead." And so the old man
+goes on personifying and animating the whirlwind, as if the whirlwind
+were now a king, not without consciousness of his kingship. And in
+exchanging a Zeus for a whirlwind--God for matter, for example--we all
+do the same thing. And the reason is because philosophy does not work
+upon the objective reality which we perceive with the senses, but upon
+the complex of ideas, images, notions, perceptions, etc., embodied in
+language and transmitted to us with our language by our ancestors. That
+which we call the world, the objective world, is a social tradition. It
+is given to us ready made.
+
+Man does not submit to being, as consciousness, alone in the Universe,
+nor to being merely one objective phenomenon the more. He wishes to save
+his vital or passional subjectivity by attributing life, personality,
+spirit, to the whole Universe. In order to realize his wish he has
+discovered God and substance; God and substance continually reappear in
+his thought cloaked in different disguises. Because we are conscious, we
+feel that we exist, which is quite another thing from knowing that we
+exist, and we wish to feel the existence of everything else; we wish
+that of all the other individual things each one should also be an "I."
+
+The most consistent, although the most incongruous and vacillating,
+idealism, that of Berkeley, who denied the existence of matter, of
+something inert and extended and passive, as the cause of our sensations
+and the substratum of external phenomena, is in its essence nothing but
+an absolute spiritualism or dynamism, the supposition that every
+sensation comes to us, causatively, from another spirit--that is, from
+another consciousness. And his doctrine has a certain affinity with
+those of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The former's doctrine of the Will
+and the latter's doctrine of the Unconscious are already implied in the
+Berkeleyan theory that to be is to be perceived. To which must be added:
+and to cause others to perceive what is. Thus the old adage _operari
+sequitur esse_ (action follows being) must be modified by saying that to
+be is to act, and only that which acts--the active--exists, and in so
+far as it acts.
+
+As regards Schopenhauer, there is no need to endeavour to show that the
+will, which he posits as the essence of things, proceeds from
+consciousness. And it is only necessary to read his book on the Will in
+Nature to see how he attributed a certain spirit and even a certain
+personality to the plants themselves. And this doctrine of his carried
+him logically to pessimism, for the true property and most inward
+function of the will is to suffer. The will is a force which feels
+itself--that is, which suffers. And, someone will add, which enjoys. But
+the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity to suffer; and
+the faculty of enjoyment is one with that of pain. Whosoever does not
+suffer does not enjoy, just as whosoever is insensible to cold is
+insensible to heat.
+
+And it is also quite logical that Schopenhauer, who deduced pessimism
+from the voluntarist doctrine or doctrine of universal personalization,
+should have deduced from both of these that the foundation of morals is
+compassion. Only his lack of the social and historical sense, his
+inability to feel that humanity also is a person, although a collective
+one, his egoism, in short, prevented him from feeling God, prevented him
+from individualizing and personalizing the total and collective
+Will--the Will of the Universe.
+
+On the other hand, it is easy to understand his aversion from purely
+empirical, evolutionist, or transformist doctrines, such as those set
+forth in the works of Lamarck and Darwin which came to his notice.
+Judging Darwin's theory solely by an extensive extract in _The Times_,
+he described it, in a letter to Adam Louis von Doss (March 1, 1860), as
+"downright empiricism" _(platter Empirismus)_. In fact, for a
+voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously
+empirical and rational as that of Darwin left out of account the inward
+force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the
+hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate
+themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation?
+Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions.
+This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that
+there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a
+feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as
+ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are. And it may be said
+that this force is the divine in us, that it is God Himself who works in
+us because He suffers in us.
+
+And sympathy teaches us to discover this force, this aspiration towards
+consciousness, in all things. It moves and activates the most minute
+living creatures; it moves and activates, perhaps, the very cells of our
+own bodily organism, which is a confederation, more or less solidary, of
+living beings; it moves the very globules of our blood. Our life is
+composed of lives, our vital aspiration of aspirations existing perhaps
+in the limbo of subconsciousness. Not more absurd than so many other
+dreams which pass as valid theories is the belief that our cells, our
+globules, may possess something akin to a rudimentary cellular, globular
+consciousness or basis of consciousness. Or that they may arrive at
+possessing such consciousness. And since we have given a loose rein to
+the fancy, we may fancy that these cells may communicate with one
+another, and that some of them may express their belief that they form
+part of a superior organism endowed with a collective personal
+consciousness. And more than once in the history of human feeling this
+fancy has been expressed in the surmisal of some philosopher or poet
+that we men are a kind of globules in the blood of a Supreme Being, who
+possesses his own personal collective consciousness, the consciousness
+of the Universe.
+
+Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear nights we behold stretching
+across the heavens, this vast encircling ring in which our planetary
+system is itself but a molecule, is in its turn but a cell in the
+Universe, in the Body of God. All the cells of our body combine and
+co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their activity our
+consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness or the souls of all
+these cells entered completely into our consciousness, into the
+composite whole, if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my
+bodily organism, I should feel the universe happening within myself,
+and perhaps the painful sense of my limitedness would disappear. And if
+all the consciousness of all beings unite in their entirety in the
+universal consciousness, this consciousness--that is to say, God--is
+all.
+
+In every instant obscure consciousnesses, elementary souls, are born and
+die within us, and their birth and death constitute our life. And their
+sudden and violent death constitutes our pain. And in like manner, in
+the heart of God consciousnesses are born and die--but do they die?--and
+their births and deaths constitute His life.
+
+If there is a Universal and Supreme Consciousness, I am an idea in it;
+and is it possible for any idea in this Supreme Consciousness to be
+completely blotted out? After I have died, God will go on remembering
+me, and to be remembered by God, to have my consciousness sustained by
+the Supreme Consciousness, is not that, perhaps, to be?
+
+And if anyone should say that God has made the universe, it may be
+rejoined that so also our soul has made our body as much as, if not more
+than, it has been made by it--if, indeed, there be a soul.
+
+When pity, love, reveals to us the whole universe striving to gain, to
+preserve, and to enlarge its consciousness, striving more and more to
+saturate itself with consciousness, feeling the pain of the discords
+which are produced within it, pity reveals to us the likeness of the
+whole universe with ourselves; it reveals to us that it is human, and it
+leads us to discover our Father in it, of whose flesh we are flesh; love
+leads us to personalize the whole of which we form a part.
+
+To say that God is eternally producing things is fundamentally the same
+as saying that things are eternally producing God. And the belief in a
+personal and spiritual God is based on the belief in our own personality
+and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we
+feel God to be consciousness--that is to say, a person; and because we
+desire ardently that our consciousness shall live and be independently
+of the body, we believe that the divine person lives and exists
+independently of the universe, that his state of consciousness is _ad
+extra_.
+
+No doubt logicians will come forward and confront us with the evident
+rational difficulties which this involves; but we have already stated
+that, although presented under logical forms, the content of all this is
+not strictly rational. Every rational conception of God is in itself
+contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for God--we believe that God
+exists by force of wishing that He may exist, and it is born also,
+perhaps, of God's love for us. Reason does not prove to us that God
+exists, but neither does it prove that He cannot exist.
+
+But of this conception of faith in God as the personalization of the
+universe we shall have more to say presently.
+
+And recalling what has been said in another part of this work, we may
+say that material things, in so far as they are known to us, issue into
+knowledge through the agency of hunger, and out of hunger issues the
+sensible or material universe in which we conglomerate these things; and
+that ideal things issue out of love, and out of love issues God, in whom
+we conglomerate these ideal things as in the Consciousness of the
+Universe. It is social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct
+of perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see society
+in everything, and that shows us at last that all Nature is really an
+infinite Society. For my part, the feeling that Nature is a society has
+taken hold of me hundreds of times in walking through the woods
+possessed with a sense of solidarity with the oaks, a sense of their dim
+awareness of my presence.
+
+Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and
+anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes
+everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to
+supernaturalize Nature--that is to say, to make it divine by making it
+human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of
+reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.
+
+And just as a fruitful union is consummated between the individual--who
+is, in a certain sense, a society--and society, which is also an
+individual--the two being so inseparable from one another that it is
+impossible to say where the one begins and the other ends, for they are
+rather two aspects of a single essence--so also the spirit, the social
+element, which by relating us to others makes us conscious, unites with
+matter, the individual and individualizing element; similarly, reason or
+intelligence and imagination embrace in a mutually fruitful union, and
+the Universe merges into one with God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Is all this true? And what is truth? I in my turn will ask, as Pilate
+asked--not, however, only to turn away and wash my hands, without
+waiting for an answer.
+
+Is truth in reason, or above reason, or beneath reason, or outside of
+reason, in some way or another? Is only the rational true? May there not
+be a reality, by its very nature, unattainable by reason, and perhaps,
+by its very nature, opposed to reason? And how can we know this reality
+if reason alone holds the key to knowledge?
+
+Our desire of living, our need of life, asks that that may be true which
+urges us to self-preservation and self-perpetuation, which sustains man
+and society; it asks that the true water may be that which assuages our
+thirst, and because it assuages it, that the true bread may be that
+which satisfies our hunger, because it satisfies it.
+
+The senses are devoted to the service of the instinct of preservation,
+and everything that satisfies this need of preserving ourselves, even
+though it does not pass through the senses, is nevertheless a kind of
+intimate penetration of reality in us. Is the process of assimilating
+nutriment perhaps less real than the process of knowing the nutritive
+substance? It may be said that to eat a loaf of bread is not the same
+thing as seeing, touching, or tasting it; that in the one case it enters
+into our body, but not therefore into our consciousness. Is this true?
+Does not the loaf of bread that I have converted into my flesh and blood
+enter more into my consciousness than the other loaf which I see and
+touch, and of which I say: "This is mine"? And must I refuse objective
+reality to the bread that I have thus converted into my flesh and blood
+and made mine when I only touch it?
+
+There are some who live by air without knowing it. In the same way, it
+may be, we live by God and in God--in God the spirit and consciousness
+of society and of the whole Universe, in so far as the Universe is also
+a society.
+
+God is felt only in so far as He is lived; and man does not live by
+bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God
+(Matt. iv. 4; Deut. viii. 3).
+
+And this personalization of the all, of the Universe, to which we are
+led by love, by pity, is the personalization of a person who embraces
+and comprehends within himself the other persons of which he is
+composed.
+
+The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.
+For where there is no consciousness there is no finality, finality
+presupposing a purpose. And, as we shall see, faith in God is based
+simply upon the vital need of giving finality to existence, of making it
+answer to a purpose. We need God, not in order to understand the _why_,
+but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate _wherefore_, to give a
+meaning to the Universe.
+
+And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that this
+consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the
+consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the
+consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it
+remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it.
+Only thus is it possible to understand how in God we live, move, and
+have our being. That great visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, saw or caught
+a glimpse of this in his book on Heaven and Hell _(De Coelo et Inferno_,
+lii.), when he tells us: "An entire angelic society appears sometimes in
+the form of a single angel, which also it hath been granted me by the
+Lord to see. When the Lord Himself appears in the midst of the angels,
+He doth not appear as encompassed by a multitude, but as a single being
+in angelic form. Hence it is that the Lord in the Word is called an
+angel, and likewise that on entire society is so called. Michael,
+Gabriel, and Raphael are nothing but angelical societies, which are so
+named from their functions."
+
+May we not perhaps live and love--that is, suffer and pity--in this
+all-enveloping Supreme Person--we, all the persons who suffer and pity
+and all the beings that strive to achieve personality, to acquire
+consciousness of their suffering and their limitation? And are we not,
+perhaps, ideas of this total Grand Consciousness, which by thinking of
+us as existing confers existence upon us? Does not our existence consist
+in being perceived and felt by God? And, further on, this same visionary
+tells us, under the form of images, that each angel, each society of
+angels, and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed, appear in
+human form, and in virtue of this human form the Lord rules them as one
+man.
+
+"God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal,"
+wrote Kierkegaard (_Afslutende uvidens-kabelige Efterskrift_); but
+perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian
+city, that "God is great because His thought is action" (_Ai giovani
+d'ltalia_), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives
+existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of
+thinking it, and the impossible is the unthinkable by God. Is it not
+written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word--that is to
+say, with His thought--and that by this, by His Word, He made everything
+that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not
+be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme
+Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all
+existence eternalized?
+
+Our longing to save consciousness, to give personal and human finality
+to the Universe and to existence, is such that even in the midst of a
+supreme, an agonizing and lacerating sacrifice, we should still hear the
+voice that assured us that if our consciousness disappears, it is that
+the infinite and eternal Consciousness may be enriched thereby, that our
+souls may serve as nutriment to the Universal Soul. Yes, I enrich God,
+because before I existed He did not think of me as existing, because I
+am one more--one more even though among an infinity of others--who,
+having really lived, really suffered, and really loved, abide in His
+bosom. It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to
+make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God,
+to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To create Him,
+yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist.
+For to believe in God is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He
+first creates us.[37] It is He who in us is continually creating
+Himself.
+
+We have created God in order to save the Universe from nothingness, for
+all that is not consciousness and eternal consciousness, conscious of
+its eternity and eternally conscious, is nothing more than appearance.
+There is nothing truly real save that which feels, suffers, pities,
+loves, and desires, save consciousness; there is nothing substantial but
+consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in
+order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know
+the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it. Love is
+a contradiction if there is no God.
+
+Let us now consider this idea of God, of the logical God or the Supreme
+Reason, and of the vital God or the God of the heart--that is, Supreme
+Love.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[36] _Todo lo humaniza, y aun lo humana_.
+
+[37] In the translation it is impossible to retain the play upon the
+verbs _crear_, to create, and _creer_, to believe: _"Porque creer en
+Dios es en cierto modo crearle, aunque El nos cree antes."_--J.E.C.F.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+FROM GOD TO GOD
+
+
+To affirm that the religious sense is a sense of divinity and that it is
+impossible without some abuse of the ordinary usages of human language
+to speak of an atheistic religion, is not, I think, to do violence to
+the truth; although it is clear that everything will depend upon the
+concept that we form of God, a concept which in its turn depends upon
+the concept of divinity.
+
+Our proper procedure, in effect, will be to begin with this sense of
+divinity, before prefixing to the concept of this quality the definite
+article and the capital letter and so converting it into "the
+Divinity"--that is, into God. For man has not deduced the divine from
+God, but rather he has reached God through the divine.
+
+In the course of these somewhat wandering but at the same time urgent
+reflections upon the tragic sense of life, I have already alluded to the
+_timor fecit deos_ of Statius with the object of limiting and correcting
+it. It is not my intention to trace yet once again the historical
+processes by which peoples have arrived at the consciousness and concept
+of a personal God like the God of Christianity. And I say peoples and
+not isolated individuals, for if there is any feeling or concept that is
+truly collective and social it is the feeling and concept of God,
+although the individual subsequently individualizes it. Philosophy may,
+and in fact does, possess an individual origin; theology is necessarily
+collective.
+
+Schleiermacher's theory, which attributes the origin, or rather the
+essence, of the religious sense to the immediate and simple feeling of
+dependency, appears to be the most profound and exact explanation.
+Primitive man, living in society, feels himself to be dependent upon the
+mysterious forces invisibly environing him; he feels himself to be in
+social communion, not only with beings like himself, his fellow-men, but
+with the whole of Nature, animate and inanimate, which simply means, in
+other words, that he personalizes everything. Not only does he possess a
+consciousness of the world, but he imagines that the world, like
+himself, possesses consciousness also. Just as a child talks to his doll
+or his dog as if it understood what he was saying, so the savage
+believes that his fetich hears him when he speaks to it, and that the
+angry storm-cloud is aware of him and deliberately pursues him. For the
+newly born mind of the primitive natural man has not yet wholly severed
+itself from the cords which still bind it to the womb of Nature, neither
+has it clearly marked out the boundary that separates dreaming from
+waking, imagination from reality.
+
+The divine, therefore, was not originally something objective, but was
+rather the subjectivity of consciousness projected exteriorly, the
+personalization of the world. The concept of divinity arose out of the
+feeling of divinity, and the feeling of divinity is simply the dim and
+nascent feeling of personality vented upon the outside world. And
+strictly speaking it is not possible to speak of outside and inside,
+objective and subjective, when no such distinction was actually felt;
+indeed it is precisely from this lack of distinction that the feeling
+and concept of divinity proceed. The clearer our consciousness of the
+distinction between the objective and the subjective, the more obscure
+is the feeling of divinity in us.
+
+It has been said, and very justly so it would appear, that Hellenic
+paganism was not so much polytheistic as pantheistic. I do not know that
+the belief in a multitude of gods, taking the concept of God in the
+sense in which we understand it to-day, has ever really existed in any
+human mind. And if by pantheism is understood the doctrine, not that
+everything and each individual thing is God--a proposition which I find
+unthinkable--but that everything is divine, then it may be said without
+any great abuse of language that paganism was pantheistic. Its gods not
+only mixed among men but intermixed with them; they begat gods upon
+mortal women and upon goddesses mortal men begat demi-gods. And if
+demi-gods, that is, demi-men, were believed to exist, it was because the
+divine and the human were viewed as different aspects of the same
+reality. The divinization of everything was simply its humanization. To
+say that the sun was a god was equivalent to saying that it was a man, a
+human consciousness, more or less, aggrandized and sublimated. And this
+is true of all beliefs from fetichism to Hellenic paganism.
+
+The real distinction between gods and men consisted in the fact that the
+former were immortal. A god came to be identical with an immortal man
+and a man was deified, reputed as a god, when it was deemed that at his
+death he had not really died. Of certain heroes it was believed that
+they were alive in the kingdom of the dead. And this is a point of great
+importance in estimating the value of the concept of the divine.
+
+In those republics of gods there was always some predominating god, some
+real monarch. It was through the agency of this divine monarchy that
+primitive peoples were led from monocultism to monotheism. Hence
+monarchy and monotheism are twin brethren. Zeus, Jupiter, was in process
+of being converted into an only god, just as Jahwe originally one god
+among many others, came to be converted into an only god, first the god
+of the people of Israel, then the god of humanity, and finally the god
+of the whole universe.
+
+Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march
+and in time of war," says Robertson Smith in _The Prophets of
+Israel_,[38] "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central
+authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national
+organization, centring in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought
+of mainly as the host of Jehovah. The very name of Israel is martial,
+and means 'God (_El_) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is
+Iahwe Cebaeoth--the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the
+battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in
+primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in
+time of peace."
+
+God, the only God, issued, therefore, from man's sense of divinity as a
+warlike, monarchical and social God. He revealed himself to the people
+as a whole, not to the individual. He was the God of a people and he
+jealously exacted that worship should be rendered to him alone. The
+transition from this monocultism to monotheism was effected largely by
+the individual action, more philosophical perhaps than theological, of
+the prophets. It was, in fact, the individual activity of the prophets
+that individualized the divinity. And above all by making the divinity
+ethical.
+
+Subsequently reason--that is, philosophy--took possession of this God
+who had arisen in the human consciousness as a consequence of the sense
+of divinity in man, and tended to define him and convert him into an
+idea. For to define a thing is to idealize it, a process which
+necessitates the abstraction from it of its incommensurable or
+irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of feeling, the
+divinity felt as a unique person and consciousness external to us,
+although at the same time enveloping and sustaining us, was converted
+into the idea of God.
+
+The logical, rational God, the _ens summum_, the _primum movens_, the
+Supreme Being of theological philosophy, the God who is reached by the
+three famous ways of negation, eminence and causality, _viae negationis,
+eminentiae, causalitatis_, is nothing but an idea of God, a dead thing.
+The traditional and much debated proofs of his existence are, at bottom,
+merely a vain attempt to determine his essence; for as Vinet has very
+well observed, existence is deduced from essence; and to say that God
+exists, without saying what God is and how he is, is equivalent to
+saying nothing at all.
+
+And this God, arrived at by the methods of eminence and negation or
+abstraction of finite qualities, ends by becoming an unthinkable God, a
+pure idea, a God of whom, by the very fact of his ideal excellence, we
+can say that he is nothing, as indeed he has been defined by Scotus
+Erigena: _Deus propter excellentiam non inmerito nihil vocatur_. Or in
+the words of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in his fifth Epistle,
+"The divine darkness is the inaccessible light in which God is said to
+dwell." The anthropomorphic God, the God who is felt, in being purified
+of human, and as such finite, relative and temporal, attributes,
+evaporates into the God of deism or of pantheism.
+
+The traditional so-called proofs of the existence of God all refer to
+this God-Idea, to this logical God, the God by abstraction, and hence
+they really prove nothing, or rather, they prove nothing more than the
+existence of this idea of God.
+
+In my early youth, when first I began to be puzzled by these eternal
+problems, I read in a book, the author of which I have no wish to
+recall,[39] this sentence: "God is the great X placed over the ultimate
+barrier of human knowledge; in the measure in which science advances,
+the barrier recedes." And I wrote in the margin, "On this side of the
+barrier, everything is explained without Him; on the further side,
+nothing is explained, either with Him or without Him; God therefore is
+superfluous." And so far as concerns the God-Idea, the God of the
+proofs, I continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace is said to have
+stated that he had not found the hypothesis of God necessary in order to
+construct his scheme of the origin of the Universe, and it is very true.
+In no way whatever does the idea of God help us to understand better the
+existence, the essence and the finality of the Universe.
+
+That there is a Supreme Being, infinite, absolute and eternal, whose
+existence is unknown to us, and who has created the Universe, is not
+more conceivable than that the material basis of the Universe itself,
+its matter, is eternal and infinite and absolute. We do not understand
+the existence of the world one whit the better by telling ourselves that
+God created it. It is a begging of the question, or a merely verbal
+solution, intended to cover up our ignorance. In strict truth, we deduce
+the existence of the Creator from the fact that the thing created
+exists, a process which does not justify rationally His existence. You
+cannot deduce a necessity from a fact, or else everything were
+necessary.
+
+And if from the nature of the Universe we pass to what is called its
+order, which is supposed to necessitate an Ordainer, we may say that
+order is what there is, and we do not conceive of any other. This
+deduction of God's existence from the order of the Universe implies a
+transition from the ideal to the real order, an outward projection of
+our mind, a supposition that the rational explanation of a thing
+produces the thing itself. Human art, instructed by Nature, possesses a
+conscious creative faculty, by means of which it apprehends the process
+of creation, and we proceed to transfer this conscious and artistic
+creative faculty to the consciousness of an artist-creator, but from
+what nature he in his turn learnt his art we cannot tell.
+
+The traditional analogy of the watch and the watchmaker is inapplicable
+to a Being absolute, infinite and eternal. It is, moreover, only another
+way of explaining nothing. For to say that the world is as it is and not
+otherwise because God made it so, while at the same time we do not know
+for what reason He made it so, is to say nothing. And if we knew for
+what reason God made it so, then God is superfluous and the reason
+itself suffices. If everything were mathematics, if there were no
+irrational element, we should not have had recourse to this explanatory
+theory of a Supreme Ordainer, who is nothing but the reason of the
+irrational, and so merely another cloak for our ignorance. And let us
+not discuss here that absurd proposition that, if all the type in a
+printing-press were printed at random, the result could not possibly be
+the composition of _Don Quixote_. Something would be composed which
+would be as good as _Don Quixote_ for those who would have to be content
+with it and would grow in it and would form part of it.
+
+In effect, this traditional supposed proof of God's existence resolves
+itself fundamentally into hypostatizing or substantivating the
+explanation or reason of a phenomenon; it amounts to saying that
+Mechanics is the cause of movement, Biology of life, Philology of
+language, Chemistry of bodies, by simply adding the capital letter to
+the science and converting it into a force distinct from the phenomena
+from which we derive it and distinct from our mind which effects the
+derivation. But the God who is the result of this process, a God who is
+nothing but reason hypostatized and projected towards the infinite,
+cannot possibly be felt as something living and real, nor yet be
+conceived of save as a mere idea which will die with us.
+
+The question arises, on the other hand, whether a thing the idea of
+which has been conceived but which has no real existence, does not exist
+because God wills that it should not exist, or whether God does not will
+it to exist because, in fact, it does not exist; and, with regard to the
+impossible, whether a thing is impossible because God wills it so, or
+whether God wills it so because, in itself and by the very fact of its
+own inherent absurdity, it is impossible. God has to submit to the
+logical law of contradiction, and He cannot, according to the
+theologians, cause two and two to make either more or less than four.
+Either the law of necessity is above Him or He Himself is the law of
+necessity. And in the moral order the question arises whether falsehood,
+or homicide, or adultery, are wrong because He has so decreed it, or
+whether He has so decreed it because they are wrong. If the former, then
+God is a capricious and unreasonable God, who decrees one law when He
+might equally well have decreed another, or, if the latter, He obeys an
+intrinsic nature and essence which exists in things themselves
+independently of Him--that is to say, independently of His sovereign
+will; and if this is the case, if He obeys the innate reason of things,
+this reason, if we could but know it, would suffice us without any
+further need of God, and since we do not know it, God explains nothing.
+This reason would be above God. Neither is it of any avail to say that
+this reason is God Himself, the supreme reason of things. A reason of
+this kind, a necessary reason, is not a personal something. It is will
+that gives personality. And it is because of this problem of the
+relations between God's reason, necessarily necessary, and His will,
+necessarily free, that the logical and Aristotelian God will always be a
+contradictory God.
+
+The scholastic theologians never succeeded in disentangling themselves
+from the difficulties in which they found themselves involved when they
+attempted to reconcile human liberty with divine prescience and with the
+knowledge that God possesses of the free and contingent future; and that
+is strictly the reason why the rational God is wholly inapplicable to
+the contingent, for the notion of contingency is fundamentally the same
+as the notion of irrationality. The rational God is necessarily
+necessary in His being and in His working; in every single case He
+cannot do other than the best, and a number of different things cannot
+all equally be the best, for among infinite possibilities there is only
+one that is best accommodated to its end, just as among the infinite
+number of lines that can be drawn from one point to another, there is
+only one straight line. And the rational God, the God of reason, cannot
+but follow in each case the straight line, the line that leads most
+directly to the end proposed, a necessary end, just as the only straight
+line that leads to it is a necessary line. And thus for the divinity of
+God is substituted His necessity. And in the necessity of God, His free
+will--that is to say, His conscious personality--perishes. The God of
+our heart's desire, the God who shall save our soul from nothingness,
+must needs be an arbitrary God.
+
+Not because He thinks can God be God, but because He works, because He
+creates; He is not a contemplative but an active God. A God-Reason, a
+theoretical or contemplative God, such as is this God of theological
+rationalism, is a God that is diluted in His own contemplation. With
+this God corresponds, as we shall see, the beatific vision, understood
+as the supreme expression of human felicity. A quietist God, in short,
+as reason, by its very essence, is quietist.
+
+There remains the other famous proof of God's existence, that of the
+supposed unanimous consent in a belief in Him among all peoples. But
+this proof is not strictly rational, neither is it an argument in favour
+of the rational God who explains the Universe, but of the God of the
+heart, who makes us live. We should be justified in calling it a
+rational proof only on the supposition that we believed that reason was
+identical with a more or less unanimous agreement among all peoples,
+that it corresponded with the verdict of a universal suffrage, only on
+the supposition that we held that _vox populi_, which is said to be _vox
+Dei_, was actually the voice of reason.
+
+Such was, indeed, the belief of Lamennais, that tragic and ardent
+spirit, who affirmed that life and truth were essentially one and the
+same thing--would that they were!--and that reason was one, universal,
+everlasting and holy (_Essai sur l'indifference_, partie iv., chap,
+viii.). He invoked the _aut omnibus credendum est aut nemini_ of
+Lactantius--we must believe all or none--and the saying of Heraclitus
+that every individual opinion is fallible, and that of Aristotle that
+the strongest proof consists in the general agreement of mankind, and
+above all that of Pliny (_Paneg. Trajani_, lxii.), to the effect that
+one man cannot deceive all men or be deceived by all--_nemo omnes,
+neminem omnes fefellerunt_. Would that it were so! And so he concludes
+with the dictum of Cicero (_De natura deorum_, lib. iii., cap. ii., 5
+and 6), that we must believe the tradition of our ancestors even though
+they fail to render us a reason--_maioribus autem nostris, etiam nulla
+ratione reddita credere_.
+
+Let us suppose that this belief of the ancients in the divine
+interpenetration of the whole of Nature is universal and constant, and
+that it is, as Aristotle calls it, an ancestral dogma (_patrios doxa_)
+(_Metaphysica_, lib. vii., cap. vii.); this would prove only that there
+is a motive impelling peoples and individuals--that is to say, all or
+almost all or a majority of them--to believe in a God. But may it not be
+that there are illusions and fallacies rooted in human nature itself? Do
+not all peoples begin by believing that the sun turns round the earth?
+And do we not all naturally incline to believe that which satisfies our
+desires? Shall we say with Hermann[40] that, "if there is a God, He has
+not left us without some indication of Himself, and if is His will that
+we should find Him."
+
+A pious desire, no doubt, but we cannot strictly call it a reason,
+unless we apply to it the Augustinian sentence, but which again is not
+a reason, "Since thou seekest Me, it must be that thou hast found Me,"
+believing that God is the cause of our seeking Him.
+
+This famous argument from the supposed unanimity of mankind's belief in
+God, the argument which with a sure instinct was seized upon by the
+ancients, is in its essence identical with the so-called moral proof
+which Kant employed in his _Critique of Practical Reason_, transposing
+its application from mankind collectively to the individual, the proof
+which he derives from our conscience, or rather from our feeling of
+divinity. It is not a proof strictly or specifically rational, but
+vital; it cannot be applied to the logical God, the _ens summum_, the
+essentially simple and abstract Being, the immobile and impassible prime
+mover, the God-Reason, in a word, but to the biotic God, to the Being
+essentially complex and concrete, to the suffering God who suffers and
+desires in us and with us, to the Father of Christ who is only to be
+approached through Man, through His Son (John xiv. 6), and whose
+revelation is historical, or if you like, anecdotical, but not
+philosophical or categorical.
+
+The unanimous consent of mankind (let us suppose the unanimity) or, in
+other words, this universal longing of all human souls who have arrived
+at the consciousness of their humanity, which desires to be the end and
+meaning of the Universe, this longing, which is nothing but that very
+essence of the soul which consists in its effort to persist eternally
+and without a break in the continuity of consciousness, leads us to the
+human, anthropomorphic God, the projection of our consciousness to the
+Consciousness of the Universe; it leads us to the God who confers human
+meaning and finality upon the Universe and who is not the _ens summum_,
+the _primum movens_, nor the Creator of the Universe, nor merely the
+Idea-God. It leads us to the living, subjective God, for He is simply
+subjectivity objectified or personality universalized--He is more than a
+mere idea, and He is will rather than reason. God is Love--that is,
+Will. Reason, the Word, derives from Him, but He, the Father, is, above
+all, Will.
+
+"There can be no doubt whatever," Ritschl says (_Rechtfertigung und
+Versoehnung_, iii., chap. v.), "that a very imperfect view was taken of
+God's spiritual personality in the older theology, when the functions of
+knowing and willing alone were employed to illustrate it. Religious
+thought plainly ascribes to God affections of feeling as well. The older
+theology, however, laboured under the impression that feeling and
+emotion were characteristic only of limited and created personality; it
+transformed, _e.g._, the religious idea of the Divine blessedness into
+eternal self-knowledge, and that of the Divine wrath into a fixed
+purpose to punish sin." Yes, this logical God, arrived at by the _via
+negationis_, was a God who, strictly speaking, neither loved nor hated,
+because He neither enjoyed nor suffered, an inhuman God, and His justice
+was a rational or mathematical justice--that is, an injustice.
+
+The attributes of the living God, of the Father of Christ, must be
+deduced from His historical revelation in the Gospel and in the
+conscience of every Christian believer, and not from metaphysical
+reasonings which lead only to the Nothing-God of Scotus Erigena, to the
+rational or pantheistic God, to the atheist God--in short, to the
+de-personalized Divinity.
+
+Not by the way of reason, but only by the way of love and of suffering,
+do we come to the living God, the human God. Reason rather separates us
+from Him. We cannot first know Him in order that afterwards we may love
+Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering after Him,
+before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God,
+and this knowledge has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God
+is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within
+the limits of our mind--that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we
+attempt to define Him, there rises up before us--Nothingness.
+
+The idea of God, formulated by a theodicy that claims to be rational, is
+simply an hypothesis, like the hypotheses of ether, for example.
+
+Ether is, in effect, a merely hypothetical entity, valuable only in so
+far as it explains that which by means of it we endeavour to
+explain--light, electricity or universal gravitation--and only in so far
+as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. In like manner the
+idea of God is also an hypothesis, valuable only in so far as it enables
+us to explain that which by means of if we endeavour to explain--the
+essence and existence of the Universe--and only so long as these cannot
+be explained in any other way. And since in reality we explain the
+Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the
+idea of God, the supreme _petitio principii_, is valueless.
+
+But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air, on
+the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even though it did
+not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless
+always be directly aware of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in
+moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself,
+not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and
+even though the idea of Him does not enable us to explain either the
+existence or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct
+feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this
+feeling--mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic
+sense of life is founded upon this--this feeling is a feeling of hunger
+for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first
+instance, as we shall see, to wish that there may be a God, to be unable
+to live without Him.
+
+So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason in search of God,
+I could not find Him, for I was not deluded by the idea of God, neither
+could I take an idea for God, and it was then, as I wandered among the
+wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought to seek no other
+consolation than the truth, meaning thereby reason, and yet for all that
+I was not comforted. But as I sank deeper and deeper into rational
+scepticism on the one hand and into heart's despair on the other, the
+hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation of spirit made me
+feel the want of God, and with the want of Him, His reality. And I
+wished that there might be a God, that God might exist. And God does not
+exist, but rather super-exists, and He is sustaining our existence,
+existing us _(existiendonos)_.
+
+God, who is Love, the Father of Love, is the son of love in us. There
+are men of a facile and external habit of mind, slaves of reason, that
+reason which externalizes us, who think it a shrewd comment to say that
+so far from God having made man in His image and likeness, it is rather
+man who has made his gods or his God in his own image and likeness,[41]
+and so superficial are they that they do not pause to consider that if
+the second of these propositions be true, as in fact it is, it is owing
+to the fact that the first is not less true. God and man, in effect,
+mutually create one another; God creates or reveals Himself in man and
+man creates himself in God. God is His own maker, _Deus ipse se facit_,
+said Lactantius (_Divinarum Institutionum_, ii., 8), and we may say that
+He is making Himself continually both in man and by man. And if each of
+us, impelled by his love, by his hunger for divinity, creates for
+himself an image of God according to his own desire, and if according to
+His desire God creates Himself for each of us, then there is a
+collective, social, human God, the resultant of all the human
+imaginations that imagine Him. For God is and reveals Himself in
+collectivity. And God is the richest and most personal of human
+conceptions.
+
+The Master of divinity has bidden us be perfect as our Father who is in
+heaven is perfect (Matt. v. 48), and in the sphere of thought and
+feeling our perfection consists in the zeal with which we endeavour to
+equate our imagination with the total imagination of the humanity of
+which in God we form a part.
+
+The logical theory of the opposition between the extension and the
+comprehension of a concept, the one increasing in the ratio in which the
+other diminishes, is well known. The concept that is most extensive and
+at the same time least comprehensive is that of being or of thing, which
+embraces everything that exists and possesses no other distinguishing
+quality than that of being; while the concept that is most comprehensive
+and least extensive is that of the Universe, which is only applicable to
+itself and comprehends all existing qualities. And the logical or
+rational God, the God obtained by way of negation, the absolute entity,
+merges, like reality itself, into nothingness; for, as Hegel pointed
+out, pure being and pure nothingness are identical. And the God of the
+heart, the God who is felt, the God of living men, is the Universe
+itself conceived as personality, is the consciousness of the Universe. A
+God universal and personal, altogether different from the individual God
+of a rigid metaphysical monotheism.
+
+I must advert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists
+between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the
+one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the
+continent or thing which contains, personality the content or thing
+contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my
+comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself--which
+is in a certain way the whole Universe--and that my individuality is my
+extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite. A hundred jars of
+hard earthenware are strongly individualized, but it is possible for
+them to be all equally empty or all equally full of the same homogeneous
+liquid, whereas two bladders of so delicate a membrane as to admit of
+the action of osmosis and exosmosis may be strongly differentiated and
+contain liquids of a very mixed composition. And thus a man, in so far
+as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort
+of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating
+content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more
+personality a man has and the greater his interior richness and the more
+he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from
+his fellows. In the same way the rigid God of deism, of Aristotelian
+monotheism, the _ens summum_, is a being in whom individuality, or
+rather simplicity, stifles personality. Definition kills him, for to
+define is to impose boundaries, it is to limit, and it is impossible to
+define the absolutely indefinable. This God lacks interior richness; he
+is not a society in himself. And this the vital revelation obviated by
+the belief in the Trinity, which makes God a society and even a family
+in himself and no longer a pure individual. The God of faith is
+personal; He is a person because He includes three persons, for
+personality is not sensible of itself in isolation. An isolated person
+ceases to be a person, for whom should he love? And if he does not love,
+he is not a person. Nor can a simple being love himself without his love
+expanding him into a compound being.
+
+It was because God was felt as a Father that the belief in the Trinity
+arose. For a God-Father cannot be a single, that is, a solitary, God. A
+father is always the father of a family. And the fact that God was felt
+as a father acted as a continual incentive to conceive Him not merely
+anthropomorphically--that is to say, as a man, _anthropos_--but
+andromorphically, as a male, _aner_. In the popular Christian
+imagination, in effect, God the Father is conceived of as a male. And
+the reason is that man, _homo_, _anthropos_, as we know him, is
+necessarily either a male, _vir_, _aner_, or a female, _mulier_, _gyne_. And
+to these may be added the child, who is neuter. And hence in order to
+satisfy imaginatively this necessity of feeling God as a perfect
+man--that is, as a family--arose the cult of the God-Mother, the Virgin
+Mary, and the cult of the Child Jesus.
+
+The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which, by the gradual elevation of
+the divine element in the Virgin has led almost to her deification,
+answers merely to the demand of the feeling that God should be a perfect
+man, that God should include in His nature the feminine element. The
+progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety,
+having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, _theotokos_,
+_deipara_, has culminated in attributing to her the status of
+co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without
+the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a position between
+Humanity and Divinity and nearer Divinity than Humanity. And it has been
+surmised that in course of time she may perhaps even come to be regarded
+as yet another personal manifestation of the Godhead.
+
+And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion of the Trinity
+into a Quaternity. If _pneuma_, in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter
+had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already
+have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? That
+fervent piety which always knows how to mould theological speculation in
+accordance with its own desires would have found sufficient warranty for
+such a doctrine in the text of the Gospel, in Luke's narrative of the
+Annunciation where the angel Gabriel hails Mary with the words, "The
+Holy Spirit shall come upon thee," _pneuma agion epeleusetai epi se_ (Luke
+i. 35). And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel
+to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification
+with the Word.
+
+In any case the cult of the Virgin, of the eternal feminine, or rather
+of the divine feminine, of the divine maternity, helps to complete the
+personalization of God by constituting Him a family.
+
+In one of my books (_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_, part ii., chap.
+lxvii.) I have said that "God was and is, in our mind, masculine. In His
+mode of judging and condemning men, He acts as a male, not as a human
+person above the limitation of sex; He acts as a father. And to
+counterbalance this, the Mother element was required, the Mother who
+always forgives, the Mother whose arms are always open to the child when
+he flies from the frowning brow or uplifted hand of the angry father;
+the Mother in whose bosom we seek the dim, comforting memory of that
+warmth and peace of our pre-natal unconsciousness, of that milky
+sweetness that soothed our dreams of innocence; the Mother who knows no
+justice but that of forgiveness, no law but that of love. Our weak and
+imperfect conception of God as a God with a long beard and a voice of
+thunder, of a God who promulgates laws and pronounces dooms, of a God
+who is the Master of a household, a Roman Paterfamilias, required
+counterpoise and complement, and since fundamentally we are unable to
+conceive of the personal and living God as exalted above human and even
+masculine characteristics, and still less as a neutral or hermaphrodite
+God, we have recourse to providing Him with a feminine God, and by the
+side of the God-Father we have placed the Goddess-Mother, she who always
+forgives, because, since she sees with love-blind eyes, she sees always
+the hidden cause of the fault and in that hidden cause the only justice
+of forgiveness ..."
+
+And to this I must now add that not only are we unable to conceive of
+the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to
+conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I,
+an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living I is an
+I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of
+other, and by other I's; I am sprung, from a multitude of ancestors, I
+carry them within me in extract, and at the same time I carry within me,
+potentially, a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection of my I
+to the infinite--or rather I, the projection of God to the finite--must
+also be multitude. Hence, in order to save the personality of God--that
+is to say, in order to save the living God--faith's need--the need of
+the feeling and the imagination--of conceiving Him and; feeling Him as
+possessed of a certain internal multiplicity.
+
+This need the pagan feeling of a living divinity obviated by polytheism.
+It is the agglomeration of its gods, the republic of them, that really
+constitutes its Divinity. The real God of Hellenic paganism is not so
+much Father Zeus (_Jupiter_) as the whole society of gods and demi-gods.
+Hence the solemnity of the invocation of Demosthenes when he invoked all
+the gods and all the goddesses: _tois theohis euchomai pasi kahi pasais_.
+And when the rationalizers converted the term god, _theos_, which is
+properly an adjective, a quality predicated of each one of the gods,
+into a substantive, and added the definite article to it, they produced
+_the_ god, _o theos_, the dead and abstract god of philosophical
+rationalism, a substantivized quality and therefore void of personality.
+For the masculine concrete god (_el_ dios) is nothing but the neuter
+abstract divine quality (_lo_ divino). Now the transition from feeling
+the divinity in all things to substantivating it and converting the
+Divinity into God, cannot be achieved without feeling undergoing a
+certain risk. And the Aristotelian God, the God of the logical proofs,
+is nothing more than the Divinity, a concept and not a living person who
+can be felt and with whom through love man can communicate. This God is
+merely a substantivized adjective; He is a constitutional God who
+reigns but does not govern, and Knowledge is His constitutional charter.
+
+And even in Greco-Latin paganism itself the tendency towards a living
+monotheism is apparent in the fact that Zeus was conceived of and felt
+as a father, _Zeus pater_, as Homer calls him, the _Ju-piter_ or
+_Ju-pater_ of the Latins, and as a father of a whole widely extended
+family of gods and goddesses who together with him constituted the
+Divinity.
+
+The conjunction of pagan polytheism with Judaic monotheism, which had
+endeavoured by other means to save the personality of God, gave birth to
+the feeling of the Catholic God, a God who is a society, as the pagan
+God of whom I have spoken was a society, and who at the same time is
+one, as the God of Israel finally became one. Such is the Christian
+Trinity, whose deepest sense rationalistic deism has scarcely ever
+succeeded in understanding, that deism, which though more or less
+impregnated with Christianity, always remains Unitarian or Socinian.
+
+And the truth is that we feel God less as a superhuman consciousness
+than as the actual consciousness of the whole human race, past, present,
+and future, as the collective consciousness of the whole race, and still
+more, as the total and infinite consciousness which embraces and
+sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human, and perhaps,
+super-human. The divinity that there is in everything, from the
+lowest--that is to say, from the least conscious--of living forms, to
+the highest, including our own human consciousness, this divinity we
+feel to be personalized, conscious of itself, in God. And this gradation
+of consciousnesses, this sense of the gulf between the human and the
+fully divine, the universal, consciousness, finds its counterpart in the
+belief in angels with their different hierarchies, as intermediaries
+between our human consciousness and that of God. And these gradations a
+faith consistent with itself must believe to be infinite, for only by an
+infinite number of degrees is it possible to pass from the finite to the
+infinite.
+
+Deistic rationalism conceives God as the Reason of the Universe, but its
+logic compels it to conceive Him as an impersonal reason--that is to
+say, as an idea--while deistic vitalism feels and imagines God as
+Consciousness, and therefore as a person or rather as a society of
+persons. The consciousness of each one of us, in effect, is a society of
+persons; in me there are various I's and even the I's of those among
+whom I live, live in me.
+
+The God of deistic rationalism, in effect, the God of the logical proofs
+of His existence, the _ens realissimum_ and the immobile prime mover, is
+nothing more than a Supreme Reason, but in the same sense in which we
+can call the law of universal gravitation the reason of the falling of
+bodies, this law being merely the explanation of the phenomenon. But
+will anyone say that that which we call the law of universal
+gravitation, or any other law or mathematical principle, is a true and
+independent reality, that it is an angel, that it is something which
+possesses consciousness of itself and others, that it is a person? No,
+it is nothing but an idea without any reality outside of the mind of him
+who conceives it. And similarly this God-Reason either possesses
+consciousness of himself or he possesses no reality outside the mind
+that conceives him. And if he possesses consciousness of himself, he
+becomes a personal reason, and then all the value of the traditional
+proofs disappears, for these proofs only proved a reason, but not a
+supreme consciousness. Mathematics prove an order, a constancy, a reason
+in the series of mechanical phenomena, but they 'do not prove that this
+reason is conscious of itself. This reason is a logical necessity, but
+the logical necessity does not prove the teleological or finalist
+necessity. And where there is no finality there is no personality, there
+is no consciousness.
+
+The rational God, therefore--that is to say, the God who is simply the
+Reason of the Universe and nothing more--consummates his own
+destruction, is destroyed in our mind in so far as he is such a God, and
+is only born again in us when we feel him in our heart as a living
+person, as Consciousness, and no longer merely as the impersonal and
+objective Reason of the Universe. If we wish for a rational explanation
+of the construction of a machine, all that we require to know is the
+mechanical science of its constructor; but if we would have a reason for
+the existence of such a machine, then, since it is the work not of
+Nature but of man, we must suppose a conscious, constructive being. But
+the second part of this reasoning is not applicable to God, even though
+it be said that in Him the mechanical science and the mechanician, by
+means of which the machine was constructed, are one and the same thing.
+From the rational point of view this identification is merely a begging
+of the question. And thus it is that reason destroys this Supreme
+Reason, in so far as the latter is a person.
+
+The human reason, in effect, is a reason that is based upon the
+irrational, upon the total vital consciousness, upon will and feeling;
+our human reason is not a reason that can prove to us the existence of a
+Supreme Reason, which in its turn would have to be based upon the
+Supreme Irrational, upon the Universal Consciousness. And the revelation
+of this Supreme Consciousness in our feeling and imagination, by love,
+by faith, by the process of personalization, is that which leads us to
+believe in the living God.
+
+And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you,
+lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And He is
+in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is
+Himself creating the longing for Himself. And He is the God of the
+humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of
+the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to
+confound the things which are mighty (i Cor. i. 27). And God is in each
+one of us in the measure in which each one feels Him and loves Him. "If
+of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without
+sincerity of heart, and the other prays to an idol with all the passion
+of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to an idol,
+while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that
+the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires.
+And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in
+theology. The venerable Father of the long beard and white locks who
+appears among the clouds carrying the globe of the world in his hand is
+more living and more real than the _ens realissimum_ of theodicy.
+
+Reason is an analytical, that is, a dissolving force, whenever it
+transfers its activity from the form of intuitions, whether those of the
+individual instinct of preservation or those of the social instinct of
+perpetuation, and applies it to the essence and matter of them. Reason
+orders the sensible perceptions which give us the material world; but
+when its analysis is exercised upon the reality of the perceptions
+themselves, it dissolves them and plunges us into a world of
+appearances, a world of shadows without consistency, for outside the
+domain of the formal, reason is nihilist and annihilating. And it
+performs the same terrible office when we withdraw it from its proper
+domain and apply it to the scrutiny of the imaginative intuitions which
+give us the spiritual world. For reason annihilates and imagination
+completes, integrates or totalizes; reason by itself alone kills, and it
+is imagination that gives life. If it is true that imagination by itself
+alone, in giving us life without limit, leads us to lose our identity in
+the All and also kills us as individuals, it kills us by excess of life.
+Reason, the head, speaks to us the word Nothing! imagination, the heart,
+the word All! and between all and nothing, by the fusion of the all and
+the nothing within us, we live in God, who is All, and God lives in us
+who, without Him, are nothing. Reason reiterates, Vanity of vanities!
+all is vanity! And imagination answers, Plenitude of plenitudes! all is
+plenitude! And thus we live the vanity of plenitude or the plenitude of
+vanity.
+
+And so deeply rooted in the depths of man's being is this vital need of
+living a world[42] illogical, irrational, personal or divine, that those
+who do not believe in God, or believe that they do not believe in Him,
+believe nevertheless in some little pocket god or even devil of their
+own, or in an omen, or in a horseshoe picked up by chance on the
+roadside and carried about with them to bring them good luck and defend
+them from that very reason whose loyal and devoted henchmen they imagine
+themselves to be.
+
+The God whom we hunger after is the God to whom we pray, the God of the
+_Pater Noster_, of the Lord's Prayer; the God whom we beseech, before
+all and above all, and whether we are aware of it or not, to instil
+faith into us, to make us believe in Him, to make Himself in us, the God
+to whom we pray that His name may be hallowed and that His will may be
+done--His will, not His reason--on earth as it is in heaven; but feeling
+that His will cannot be other than the essence of our will, the desire
+to persist eternally.
+
+And such a God is the God of love--_how_ He is it profits us not to ask,
+but rather let each consult his own heart and give his imagination leave
+to picture Him in the remoteness of the Universe, gazing down upon him
+with those myriad eyes of His that shine in the night-darkened heavens.
+He in whom you believe, reader, He is your God, He who has lived with
+you and within you, who was born with you, who was a child when you were
+a child, who became a man according as you became a man, who will vanish
+when you yourself vanish, and who is your principle of continuity in
+the spiritual life, for He is the principle of solidarity among all men
+and in each man and between men and the Universe, and He is, as you are,
+a person. And if you believe in God, God believes in you, and believing
+in you He creates you continually. For in your essence you are nothing
+but the idea that God possesses of you--but a living idea, because the
+idea of a God who is living and conscious of Himself, of a
+God-Consciousness, and apart from what you are in the society of God you
+are nothing.
+
+How to define God? Yes, that is our longing. That was the longing of the
+man Jacob, when, after wrestling all the night until the breaking of the
+day with that divine visitant, he cried, "Tell me, I pray thee, thy
+name!" (Gen. xxxii. 29). Listen to the words of that great Christian
+preacher, Frederick William Robertson, in a sermon preached in Trinity
+Chapel, Brighton, on the 10th of June, 1849: "And this is our
+struggle--_the_ struggle. Let any true man go down into the deeps of his
+own being, and answer us--what is the cry that comes from the most real
+part of his nature? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for that
+in his _first_ communing with God--preservation, safety. Is it even
+this--to be forgiven our sins? Jacob had a sin to be forgiven, and in
+that most solemn moment of his existence he did not say a syllable about
+it. Or is it this--'Hallowed be Thy name'? No, my brethren. Out of our
+frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the earthlier
+hours of our religion may be this--'Save my soul'; but in the most
+unearthly moments it is this--'Tell me thy name.' We move through a
+world of mystery; and the deepest question is, What is the being that is
+ever near, sometimes felt, never seen; that which has haunted us from
+childhood with a dream of something surpassingly fair, which has never
+yet been realized; that which sweeps through the soul at times as a
+desolation, like the blast from the wings of the Angel of Death,
+leaving us stricken and silent in our loneliness; that which has
+touched us in our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with
+agony, and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain; that
+which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness and conceptions of
+superhuman excellence? Shall we say It or He? What is It? Who is He?
+Those anticipations of Immortality and God--what are they? Are they the
+mere throbbings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living
+something beside me? Are they the sound of my own wishes, echoing
+through the vast void of Nothingness? or shall I call them God, Father,
+Spirit, Love? A living Being within me or outside me? Tell me Thy name,
+thou awful mystery of Loveliness! This is the struggle of all earnest
+life."[43]
+
+Thus Robertson. To which I must add this comment, that Tell me thy name
+is essentially the same as Save my soul! We ask Him His name in order
+that He may save our soul, that He may save the human soul, that He may
+save the human finality of the Universe. And if they tell us that He is
+called He, that He is the _ens realissimum_ or the Supreme Being or any
+other metaphysical name, we are not contented, for we know that every
+metaphysical name is an X, and we go on asking Him His name. And there
+is only one name that satisfies our longing, and that is the name
+Saviour, Jesus. God is the love that saves. As Browning said in his
+_Christmas Eve and Easter Day_,
+
+    For the loving worm within its clod,
+    Were diviner than a loveless God
+    Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.
+
+The essence of the divine is Love, Will that personalizes and
+eternalizes, that feels the hunger for eternity and infinity.
+
+It is ourselves, it is our eternity that we seek in God, it is our
+divinization. It was Browning again who said, in _Saul_,
+
+    'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh that I seek
+    In the Godhead!
+
+But this God who saves us, this personal God, the Consciousness of the
+Universe who envelops and sustains our consciousnesses, this God who
+gives human finality to the whole creation--does He exist? Have we
+proofs of His existence?
+
+This question leads in the first place to an enquiry into the cleaning
+of this notion of existence. What is it to exist and in what sense do we
+speak of things as not existing?
+
+In its etymological signification to exist is to be outside of
+ourselves, outside of our mind: _ex-sistere_. But is there anything
+outside of our mind, outside of our consciousness which embraces the sum
+of the known? Undoubtedly there is. The matter of knowledge comes to us
+from without. And what is the mode of this matter? It is impossible for
+us to know, for to know is to clothe matter with form, and hence we
+cannot know the formless as formless. To do so would be tantamount to
+investing chaos with order.
+
+This problem of the existence of God, a problem that is rationally
+insoluble, is really identical with the problem of consciousness, of the
+_ex-sistentia_ and not of the _in-sistentia_ of consciousness, it is
+none other than the problem of the substantial existence of the soul,
+the problem of the perpetuity of the human soul, the problem of the
+human finality of the Universe itself. To believe in a living and
+personal God, in an eternal and universal consciousness that knows and
+loves us, is to believe that the Universe exists _for_ man. For man, or
+for a consciousness of the same order as the human consciousness, of the
+same nature, although sublimated, a consciousness that is capable of
+knowing us, in the depth of whose being our memory may live for ever.
+Perhaps, as I have said before, by a supreme and desperate effort of
+resignation we might succeed in making the sacrifice of our personality
+provided that we knew that at our death it would go to enrich a Supreme
+Personality; provided that we knew that the Universal Soul was nourished
+by our souls and had need of them. We might perhaps meet death with a
+desperate resignation or with a resigned despair, delivering up our soul
+to the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the work that bears
+the impress of our person, if it were certain that this humanity were
+destined to bequeath its soul in its turn to another soul, when at long
+last consciousness shall have become extinct upon this desire-tormented
+Earth. But is it certain?
+
+And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human collective
+consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe,
+and if this Consciousness is eternal, why must our own individual
+consciousness--yours, reader, mine--be not eternal?
+
+In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly--a
+consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined
+to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat,
+a merely transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity that
+inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by
+living organisms, by consciousnesses akin to our own, and a profound
+longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to
+star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of
+transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe
+that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less
+degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves,
+but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His
+finality as we feel it.
+
+What would a universe be without any consciousness capable of reflecting
+it and knowing it? What would objectified reason be without will and
+feeling? For us it would be equivalent to nothing--a thousand times more
+dreadful than nothing.
+
+If such a supposition is reality, our life is deprived of sense and
+value.
+
+It is not, therefore, rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels
+us to believe in God. And to believe in God--I must reiterate it yet
+again--is, before all and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger
+for divinity, to be sensible of His lack and absence, to wish that God
+may exist. And it is to wish to save the human finality of the Universe.
+For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if
+it be that our consciousness is based upon a Consciousness, if
+consciousness is the end of the Universe.
+
+"The wicked man hath said in his heart, There is no God." And this is
+truth. For in his head the righteous man may say to himself, God does
+not exist! But only the wicked can say it in his heart. Not to believe
+that there is a God or to believe that there is not a God, is one thing;
+to resign oneself to there not being a God is another thing, and it is a
+terrible and inhuman thing; but not to wish that there be a God exceeds
+every other moral monstrosity; although, as a matter of fact, those who
+deny God deny Him because of their despair at not finding Him.
+
+And now reason once again confronts us with the Sphinx-like
+question--the Sphinx, in effect, is reason--Does God exist? This eternal
+and eternalizing person who gives meaning--and I will add, a human
+meaning, for there is none other--to the Universe, is it a substantial
+something, existing independently of our consciousness, independently of
+our desire? Here we arrive at the insoluble, and it is best that it
+should be so. Let it suffice for reason that it cannot prove the
+impossibility of His existence.
+
+To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to
+act as if He existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the
+inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets
+hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this
+divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.
+
+Let us see how this may be.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] Lecture I., p. 36. London, 1895, Black.
+
+[39] _No quiero acordarme_, a phrase that is always associated in
+Spanish literature with the opening sentence of _Don Quijote: En an
+lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme_.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[40] W. Hermann, _Christlich systematische Dogmatik_, in the volume
+entitled _Systematische christliche Religion. Die Kultur der Gegenwart_
+series, published by P. Hinneberg.
+
+[41] _Dieu a fait l'homme a son image, mais l'homme le lui a bien
+rendu_, Voltaire.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[42] _Vivir un mundo_.
+
+[43] _Sermons_, by the Rev. Frederick W. Robertson. First series, sermon
+iii., "Jacob's Wrestling." Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebuer and Co., London,
+1898.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY
+
+Sanctius ac reverentius visum de actis deorum credere quam
+scire.--TACITUS: _Germania_, 34.
+
+
+The road that leads us to the living God, the God of the heart, and that
+leads us back to Him when we have left Him for the lifeless God of
+logic, is the road of faith, not of rational or mathematical conviction.
+
+And what is faith?
+
+This is the question propounded in the Catechism of Christian Doctrine
+that was taught us at school, and the answer runs: Faith is believing
+what we have not seen.
+
+This, in an essay written some twelve years ago, I amended as follows:
+"Believing what we have not seen, no! but creating what we do not see."
+And I have already told you that believing in God is, in the first
+instance at least, wishing that God may be, longing for the existence of
+God.
+
+The theological virtue of faith, according to the Apostle Paul, whose
+definition serves as the basis of the traditional Christian
+disquisitions upon it, is "the substance of things hoped for, the
+evidence of things not seen," _elpizomevon hupostasis, pragmaton
+elegchos ou blepomenon_ (Heb. xi. 1).
+
+The substance, or rather the support and basis, of hope, the guarantee
+of it. That which connects, or, rather than connects, subordinates,
+faith to hope. And in fact we do not hope because we believe, but rather
+we believe because we hope. It is hope in God, it is the ardent longing
+that there may be a God who guarantees the eternity of consciousness,
+that leads us to believe in Him.
+
+But faith, which after all is something compound, comprising a
+cognitive, logical, or rational element together with an affective,
+biotic, sentimental, and strictly irrational element, is presented to us
+under the form of knowledge. And hence the insuperable difficulty of
+separating it from some dogma or other. Pure faith, free from dogmas,
+about which I wrote a great deal years ago, is a phantasm. Neither is
+the difficulty overcome by inventing the theory of faith in faith
+itself. Faith needs a matter to work upon.
+
+Believing is a form of knowing, even if it be no more than a knowing and
+even a formulating of our vital longing. In ordinary language the term
+"believing," however, is used in a double and even a contradictory
+sense. It may express, on the one hand, the highest degree of the mind's
+conviction of the truth of a thing, and, on the other hand, it may imply
+merely a weak and hesitating persuasion of its truth. For if in one
+sense believing expresses the firmest kind of assent we are capable of
+giving, the expression "I believe that it is so, although I am not sure
+of it," is nevertheless common in ordinary speech.
+
+And this agrees with what we have said above with respect to uncertainty
+as the basis of faith. The most robust faith, in so far as it is
+distinguished from all other knowledge that is not _pistic_ or of
+faith--faithful, as we might say--is based on uncertainty. And this is
+because faith, the guarantee of things hoped for, is not so much
+rational adhesion to a theoretical principle as trust in a person who
+assures us of something. Faith supposes an objective, personal element.
+We do not so much believe something as believe someone who promises us
+or assures us of this or the other thing. We believe in a person and in
+God in so far as He is a person and a personalization of the Universe.
+
+This personal or religious element in faith is evident. Faith, it is
+said, is in itself neither theoretical knowledge nor rational adhesion
+to a truth, nor yet is its essence sufficiently explained by defining it
+as trust in God. Seeberg says of faith that it is "the inward submission
+to the spiritual authority of God, immediate obedience. And in so far as
+this obedience is the means of attaining a rational principle, faith is
+a personal conviction."[44]
+
+The faith which St. Paul defined, _pistis_ in Greek, is better
+translated as trust, confidence. The word _pistis_ is derived from the
+verb _peitho_, which in its active voice means to persuade and in its
+middle voice to trust in someone, to esteem him as worthy of trust, to
+place confidence in him, to obey. And _fidare se_, to trust, is derived
+from the root _fid_--whence _fides_, faith, and also confidence. The
+Greek root _pith_ and the Latin _fid_ are twin brothers. In the root of
+the word "faith" itself, therefore, there is implicit the idea of
+confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence
+is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we conceive as
+something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something
+impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the
+person who gives us hope, that we believe, not directly and immediately
+in truth itself or in hope itself.
+
+And this personal or rather personifying element in faith extends even
+to the lowest forms of it, for it is this that produces faith in
+pseudo-revelation, in inspiration, in miracle. There is a story of a
+Parisian doctor, who, when he found that a quack-healer was drawing away
+his clientele, removed to a quarter of the city as distant as possible
+from his former abode, where he was totally unknown, and here he gave
+himself out as a quack-healer and conducted himself as such. When he was
+denounced as an illegal practitioner he produced his doctor's
+certificate, and explained his action more or less as follows: "I am
+indeed a doctor, but if I had announced myself as such I should not
+have had as large a clientele as I have as a quack-healer. Now that all
+my clients know that I have studied medicine, however, and that I am a
+properly qualified medical man, they will desert me in favour of some
+quack who can assure them that he has never studied, but cures simply by
+inspiration." And true it is that a doctor is discredited when it is
+proved that he has never studied medicine and possesses no qualifying
+certificate, and that a quack is discredited when it is proved that he
+has studied and is a qualified practitioner. For some believe in science
+and in study, while others believe in the person, in inspiration, and
+even in ignorance.
+
+"There is one distinction in the world's geography which comes
+immediately to our minds when we thus state the different thoughts and
+desires of men concerning their religion. We remember how the whole
+world is in general divided into two hemispheres upon this matter. One
+half of the world--the great dim East--is mystic. It insists upon not
+seeing anything too clearly. Make any one of the great ideas of life
+distinct and clear, and immediately it seems to the Oriental to be
+untrue. He has an instinct which tells him that the vastest thoughts are
+too vast for the human mind, and that if they are made to present
+themselves in forms of statement which the human mind can comprehend,
+their nature is violated and their strength is lost.
+
+"On the other hand, the Occidental, the man of the West, demands
+clearness and is impatient with mystery. He loves a definite statement
+as much as his brother of the East dislikes it. He insists on knowing
+what the eternal and infinite forces mean to his personal life, how they
+will make him personally happier and better, almost how they will build
+the house over his head, and cook the dinner on his hearth. This is the
+difference between the East and the West, between man on the banks of
+the Ganges and man on the banks of the Mississippi. Plenty of
+exceptions, of course, there are--mystics in Boston and St. Louis,
+hard-headed men of facts in Bombay and Calcutta. The two great
+dispositions cannot be shut off from one another by an ocean or a range
+of mountains. In some nations and places--as, for instance, among the
+Jews and in our own New England--they notably commingle. But in general
+they thus divide the world between them. The East lives in the moonlight
+of mystery, the West in the sunlight of scientific fact. The East cries
+out to the Eternal for vague impulses. The West seizes the present with
+light hands, and will not let it go till it has furnished it with
+reasonable, intelligible motives. Each misunderstands, distrusts, and in
+large degree despises the other. But the two hemispheres together, and
+not either one by itself, make up the total world." Thus, in one of his
+sermons, spoke the great Unitarian preacher Phillips Brooks, late Bishop
+of Massachusetts (_The Mystery of Iniquity and Other Sermons_, sermon
+xvi.).
+
+We might rather say that throughout the whole world, in the East as well
+as in the West, rationalists seek definition and believe in the concept,
+while vitalists seek inspiration and believe in the person. The former
+scrutinize the Universe in order that they may wrest its secrets from
+it; the latter pray to the Consciousness of the Universe, strive to
+place themselves in immediate relationship with the Soul of the World,
+with God, in order that they may find the guarantee or substance of what
+they hope for, which is not to die, and the evidence of what they do not
+see.
+
+And since a person is a will, and will always has reference to the
+future, he who believes, believes in what is to come--that is, in what
+he hopes for. We do not believe, strictly speaking, in what is or in
+what was, except as the guarantee, as the substance, of what will be.
+For the Christian, to believe in the resurrection of Christ--that is to
+say, in tradition and in the Gospel, which assure him that Christ has
+risen, both of them personal forces--is to believe that he himself will
+one day rise again by the grace of Christ. And even scientific
+faith--for such there is--refers to the future and is an act of trust.
+The man of science believes that at a certain future date an eclipse of
+the sun will take place; he believes that the laws which have governed
+the world hitherto will continue to govern it.
+
+To believe, I repeat, is to place confidence in someone, and it has
+reference to a person. I say that I know that there is an animal called
+the horse, and that it has such and such characteristics, because I have
+seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or the
+ornithorhyncus, and that it possesses such and such qualities, because I
+believe those who assure me that they have seen it. And hence the
+element of uncertainty attached to faith, for it is possible that a
+person may be deceived or that he may deceive us.
+
+But, on the other hand, this personal element in belief gives it an
+effective and loving character, and above all, in religious faith, a
+reference to what is hoped for. Perhaps there is nobody who would
+sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of
+a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does
+not demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand, there are
+many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their
+religious faith. Indeed it is truer to say that martyrs make faith than
+that faith makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the
+intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a
+theoretical truth, a process in which the will merely sets in motion our
+faculty of comprehension; faith is an act of the will--it is a movement
+of the soul towards a practical truth, towards a person, towards
+something that makes us not merely comprehend life, but that makes us
+live.[45]
+
+Faith makes us live by showing us that life, although it is dependent
+upon reason, has its well-spring and source of power elsewhere, in
+something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man
+of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind, has said
+that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that
+gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of the
+reason lead to nothing but affliction of spirit (_Traite de
+l'enchainement des idees fondamentales dans les sciences et dans
+l'histoire_, Sec. 329). And in truth we wish to live.
+
+But, although we have said that faith is a thing of the will, it would
+perhaps be better to say that it is will itself--the will not to die,
+or, rather, that it is some other psychic force distinct from
+intelligence, will, and feeling. We should thus have feeling, knowing,
+willing, and believing or creating. For neither feeling, nor
+intelligence, nor will creates; they operate upon a material already
+given, upon the material given them by faith. Faith is the creative
+power in man. But since it has a more intimate relation with the will
+than with any other of his faculties, we conceive it under the form of
+volition. It should be borne in mind, however, that wishing to
+believe--that is to say, wishing to create--is not precisely the same as
+believing or creating, although it is its starting-point.
+
+Faith, therefore, if not a creative force, is the fruit of the will, and
+its function is to create. Faith, in a certain sense, creates its
+object. And faith in God consists in creating God; and since it is God
+who gives us faith in Himself, it is God who is continually creating
+Himself in us. Therefore St. Augustine said: "I will seek Thee, Lord, by
+calling upon Thee, and I will call upon Thee by believing in Thee. My
+faith calls upon Thee, Lord, the faith which Thou hast given me, with
+which Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy Son, through the
+ministry of Thy preacher" (_Confessions_, book i., chap. i.). The power
+of creating God in our own image and likeness, of personalizing the
+Universe, simply means that we carry God within us, as the substance of
+what we hope for, and that God is continually creating us in His own
+image and likeness.
+
+And we create God--that is to say, God creates Himself in us--by
+compassion, by love. To believe in God is to love Him, and in our love
+to fear Him; and we begin by loving Him even before knowing Him, and by
+loving Him we come at last to see and discover Him in all things.
+
+Those who say that they believe in God and yet neither love nor fear
+Him, do not in fact believe in Him but in those who have taught them
+that God exists, and these in their turn often enough do not believe in
+Him either. Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any
+passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty,
+without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation,
+believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself. And just as belief in
+God is born of love, so also it may be born of fear, and even of hate,
+and of such kind was the belief of Vanni Fucci, the thief, whom Dante
+depicts insulting God with obscene gestures in Hell (_Inf._, xxv., 1-3).
+For the devils also believe in God, and not a few atheists.
+
+Is it not perhaps a mode of believing in God, this fury with which those
+deny and even insult Him, who, because they cannot bring themselves to
+believe in Him, wish that He may not exist? Like those who believe,
+they, too, wish that God may exist; but being men of a weak and passive
+or of an evil disposition, in whom reason is stronger than will, they
+feel themselves caught in the grip of reason and haled along in their
+own despite, and they fall into despair, and because of their despair
+they deny, and in their denial they affirm and create the thing that
+they deny, and God reveals Himself in them, affirming Himself by their
+very denial of Him.
+
+But it will be objected to all this that to demonstrate that faith
+creates its own object is to demonstrate that this object is an object
+for faith alone, that outside faith it has no objective reality; just
+as, on the other hand, to maintain that faith is necessary because it
+affords consolation to the masses of the people, or imposes a wholesome
+restraint upon them, is to declare that the object of faith is illusory.
+What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before
+all and above all, wishing that God may exist.
+
+Wishing that God may exist, and acting and feeling as if He did exist.
+And desiring God's existence and acting conformably with this desire, is
+the means whereby we create God--that is, whereby God creates Himself in
+us, manifests Himself to us, opens and reveals Himself to us. For God
+goes out to meet him who seeks Him with love and by love, and hides
+Himself from him who searches for Him with the cold and loveless reason.
+God wills that the heart should have rest, but not the head, reversing
+the order of the physical life in which the head sleeps and rests at
+times while the heart wakes and works unceasingly. And thus knowledge
+without love leads us away from God; and love, even without knowledge,
+and perhaps better without it, leads us to God, and through God to
+wisdom. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!
+
+And if you should ask me how I believe in God--that is to say, how God
+creates Himself in me and reveals Himself to me--my answer may, perhaps,
+provoke your smiles or your laughter, or it may even scandalize you.
+
+I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
+of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
+leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a
+particular providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the
+course of my own destiny. And the concept of law--it is nothing but a
+concept after all!--tells me nothing and teaches me nothing.
+
+Once and again in my life I have seen myself suspended in a trance over
+the abyss; once and again I have found myself at the cross-roads,
+confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in choosing one I should
+be renouncing all the others--for there is no turning back upon these
+roads of life; and once and again in such unique moments as these I have
+felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious, sovereign, and loving.
+And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens out the way of the
+Lord.
+
+It is possible for a man to feel the Universe calling to him and guiding
+him as one person guides and calls to another, to hear within him its
+voice speaking without words and saying: "Go and preach to all peoples!"
+How do you know that the man you see before you possesses a
+consciousness like you, and that an animal also possesses such a
+consciousness, more or less dimly, but not a stone? Because the man acts
+towards you like a man, like a being made in your likeness, and because
+the stone does not act towards you at all, but suffers you to act upon
+it. And in the same way I believe that the Universe possesses a certain
+consciousness like myself, because its action towards me is a human
+action, and I feel that it is a personality that environs me.
+
+Here is a formless mass; it appears to be a kind of animal; it is
+impossible to distinguish its members; I only see two eyes, eyes which
+gaze at me with a human gaze, the gaze of a fellow-being, a gaze which
+asks for pity; and I hear it breathing. I conclude that in this formless
+mass there is a consciousness. In just such a way and none other, the
+starry-eyed heavens gaze down upon the believer, with a superhuman, a
+divine, gaze, a gaze that asks for supreme pity and supreme love, and in
+the serenity of the night he hears the breathing of God, and God touches
+him in his heart of hearts and reveals Himself to him. It is the
+Universe, living, suffering, loving, and asking for love.
+
+From loving little trifling material things, which lightly come and
+lightly go, having no deep root in our affections, we come to love the
+more lasting things, the things which our hands cannot grasp; from
+loving goods we come to love the Good; from loving beautiful things we
+come to love Beauty; from loving the true we come to love the Truth;
+from loving pleasures we come to love Happiness; and, last of all, we
+come to love Love. We emerge from ourselves in order to penetrate
+further into our supreme I; individual consciousness emerges from us in
+order to submerge itself in the total Consciousness of which we form a
+part, but without being dissolved in it. And God is simply the Love that
+springs from universal suffering and becomes consciousness.
+
+But this, it will be said, is merely to revolve in an iron ring, for
+such a God is not objective. And at this point it may not be out of
+place to give reason its due and to examine exactly what is meant by a
+thing existing, being objective.
+
+What is it, in effect, to exist? and when do we say that a thing exists?
+A thing exists when it is placed outside us, and in such a way that it
+shall have preceded our perception of it and be capable of continuing to
+subsist outside us after we have disappeared. But have I any certainty
+that anything has preceded me or that anything must survive me? Can my
+consciousness know that there is anything outside it? Everything that I
+know or can know is within my consciousness. We will not entangle
+ourselves, therefore, in the insoluble problem of an objectivity outside
+our perceptions. Things exist in so far as they act. To exist is to act.
+
+But now it will be said that it is not God, but the idea of God, that
+acts in us. To which we shall reply that it is sometimes God acting by
+His idea, but still very often it is rather God acting in us by Himself.
+And the retort will be a demand for proofs of the objective truth of the
+existence of God, since we ask for signs. And we shall have to answer
+with Pilate: What is truth?
+
+And having asked this question, Pilate turned away without waiting for
+an answer and proceeded to wash his hands in order that he might
+exculpate himself for having allowed Christ to be condemned to death.
+And there are many who ask this question, What is truth? but without any
+intention of waiting for the answer, and solely in order that they may
+turn away and wash their hands of the crime of having helped to kill and
+eject God from their own consciousness or from the consciousness of
+others.
+
+What is truth? There are two kinds of truth--the logical or objective,
+the opposite of which is error, and the moral or subjective, the
+opposite of which is falsehood. And in a previous essay I have
+endeavoured to show that error is the fruit of falsehood.[46]
+
+Moral truth, the road that leads to intellectual truth, which also is
+moral, inculcates the study of science, which is over and above all a
+school of sincerity and humility. Science teaches us, in effect, to
+submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they
+are--that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would
+have them be. In a religiously scientific investigation, it is the data
+of reality themselves, it is the perceptions which we receive from the
+outside world, that formulate themselves in our mind as laws--it is not
+we ourselves who thus formulate them. It is the numbers themselves which
+in our mind create mathematics. Science is the most intimate school of
+resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly
+most insignificant of facts. And it is the gateway of religion; but
+within the temple itself its function ceases.
+
+And just as there is logical truth, opposed to error, and moral truth,
+opposed to falsehood, so there is also esthetic truth or verisimilitude,
+which is opposed to extravagance, and religious truth or hope, which is
+opposed to the inquietude of absolute despair. For esthetic
+verisimilitude, the expression of which is sensible, differs from
+logical truth, the demonstration of which is rational; and religious
+truth, the truth of faith, the substance of things hoped for, is not
+equivalent to moral truth, but superimposes itself upon it. He who
+affirms a faith built upon a basis of uncertainty does not and cannot
+lie.
+
+And not only do we not believe with reason, nor yet above reason nor
+below reason, but we believe against reason. Religious faith, it must be
+repeated yet again, is not only irrational, it is contra-rational.
+Kierkegaard says: "Poetry is illusion before knowledge; religion
+illusion after knowledge. Between poetry and religion the worldly wisdom
+of living plays its comedy. Every individual who does not live either
+poetically or religiously is a fool" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig
+Efterskrift_, chap. iv., sect. 2a, Sec. 2). The same writer tells us that
+Christianity is a desperate sortie (_salida_). Even so, but it is only
+by the very desperateness of this sortie that we can win through to
+hope, to that hope whose vitalizing illusion is of more force than all
+rational knowledge, and which assures us that there is always something
+that cannot be reduced to reason. And of reason the same may be said as
+was said of Christ: that he who is not with it is against it. That which
+is not rational is contra-rational; and such is hope.
+
+By this circuitous route we always arrive at hope in the end.
+
+To the mystery of love, which is the mystery of suffering, belongs a
+mysterious form, and this form is time. We join yesterday to to-morrow
+with links of longing, and the now is, strictly, nothing but the
+endeavour of the before to make itself the after; the present is simply
+the determination of the past to become the future. The now is a point
+which, if not sharply articulated, vanishes; and, nevertheless, in this
+point is all eternity, the substance of time.
+
+Everything that has been can be only as it was, and everything that is
+can be only as it is; the possible is always relegated to the future,
+the sole domain of liberty, wherein imagination, the creative and
+liberating energy, the incarnation of faith, has space to roam at large.
+
+Love ever looks and tends to the future, for its work is the work of our
+perpetuation; the property of love is to hope, and only upon hopes does
+it nourish itself. And thus when love sees the fruition of its desire it
+becomes sad, for it then discovers that what it desired was not its true
+end, and that God gave it this desire merely as a lure to spur it to
+action; it discovers that its end is further on, and it sets out again
+upon its toilsome pilgrimage through life, revolving through a constant
+cycle of illusions and disillusions. And continually it transforms its
+frustrated hopes into memories, and from these memories it draws fresh
+hopes. From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jewelled
+visions of our future; imagination shapes our remembrances into hopes.
+And humanity is like a young girl full of longings, hungering for life
+and thirsting for love, who weaves her days with dreams, and hopes,
+hopes ever, hopes without ceasing, for the eternal and predestined
+lover, for him who, because he was destined for her from the beginning,
+from before the dawn of her remotest memory, from before her
+cradle-days, shall live with her and for her into the illimitable
+future, beyond the stretch of her furthest hopes, beyond the grave
+itself. And for this poor lovelorn humanity, as for the girl ever
+awaiting her lover, there is no kinder wish than that when the winter of
+life shall come it may find the sweet dreams of its spring changed into
+memories sweeter still, and memories that shall burgeon into new hopes.
+In the days when our summer is over, what a flow of calm felicity, of
+resignation to destiny, must come from remembering hopes which have
+never been realized and which, because they have never been realized,
+preserve their pristine purity.
+
+Love hopes, hopes ever and never wearies of hoping; and love of God, our
+faith in God, is, above all, hope in Him. For God dies not, and he who
+hopes in God shall live for ever. And our fundamental hope, the root and
+stem of all our hopes, is the hope of eternal life.
+
+And if faith is the substance of hope, hope in its turn is the form of
+faith. Until it gives us hope, our faith is a formless faith, vague,
+chaotic, potential; it is but the possibility of believing, the longing
+to believe. But we must needs believe in something, and we believe in
+what we hope for, we believe in hope. We remember the past, we know the
+present, we only believe in the future. To believe what we have not seen
+is to believe what we shall see. Faith, then, I repeat once again, is
+faith in hope; we believe what we hope for.
+
+Love makes us believe in God, in whom we hope and from whom we hope to
+receive life to come; love makes us believe in that which the dream of
+hope creates for us.
+
+Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and hope is God's
+longing, the longing of the eternal, of the divine in us, which advances
+to meet our faith and uplifts us. Man aspires to God by faith and cries
+to Him: "I believe--give me, Lord, wherein to believe!" And God, the
+divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order that he may
+believe in it. Hope is the reward of faith. Only he who believes truly
+hopes; and only he who truly hopes believes. We only believe what we
+hope, and we only hope what we believe.
+
+It was hope that called God by the name of Father; and this name, so
+comforting yet so mysterious, is still bestowed upon Him by hope. The
+father gave us life and gives bread wherewith to sustain it, and we ask
+the father to preserve our life for us. And if Christ was he who, with
+the fullest heart and purest mouth, named with the name of Father his
+Father and ours, if the noblest feeling of Christianity is the feeling
+of the Fatherhood of God, it is because in Christ the human race
+sublimated its hunger for eternity.
+
+It may perhaps be said that this longing of faith, that this hope, is
+more than anything else an esthetic feeling. Possibly the esthetic
+feeling enters into it, but without completely satisfying it.
+
+We seek in art an image of eternalization. If for a brief moment our
+spirit finds peace and rest and assuagement in the contemplation of the
+beautiful, even though it finds therein no real cure for its distress,
+it is because the beautiful is the revelation of the eternal, of the
+divine in things, and beauty but the perpetuation of momentaneity. Just
+as truth is the goal of rational knowledge, so beauty is the goal of
+hope, which is perhaps in its essence irrational.
+
+Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another
+everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time,
+returns to eternity. The temporal world has its roots in eternity, and
+in eternity yesterday is united with to-day and to-morrow. The scenes of
+life pass before us as in a cinematograph show, but on the further side
+of time the film is one and indivisible.
+
+Physicists affirm that not a single particle of matter nor a single
+tremor of energy is lost, but that each is transformed and transmitted
+and persists. And can it be that any form, however fugitive it may be,
+is lost? We must needs believe--believe and hope!--that it is not, but
+that somewhere it remains archived and perpetuated, and that there is
+some mirror of eternity in which, without losing themselves in one
+another, all the images that pass through time are received. Every
+impression that reaches me remains stored up in my brain even though it
+may be so deep or so weak that it is buried in the depths of my
+subconsciousness; but from these depths it animates my life; and if the
+whole of my spirit, the total content of my soul, were to awake to full
+consciousness, all these dimly perceived and forgotten fugitive
+impressions would come to life again, including even those which I had
+never been aware of. I carry within me everything that has passed before
+me, and I perpetuate it with myself, and it may be that it all goes into
+my germs, and that all my ancestors live undiminished in me and will
+continue so to live, united with me, in my descendants. And perhaps I,
+the whole I, with all this universe of mine, enter into each one of my
+actions, or, at all events, that which is essential in me enters into
+them--that which makes me myself, my individual essence.
+
+And how is this individual essence in each several thing--that which
+makes it itself and not another--revealed to us save as beauty? What is
+the beauty of anything but its eternal essence, that which unites its
+past with its future, that element of it that rests and abides in the
+womb of eternity? or, rather, what is it but the revelation of its
+divinity?
+
+And this beauty, which is the root of eternity, is revealed to us by
+love; it is the supreme revelation of the love of God and the token of
+our ultimate victory over time. It is love that reveals to us the
+eternal in us and in our neighbours.
+
+Is it the beautiful, the eternal, in things, that awakens and kindles
+our love for them, or is it our love for things that reveals to us the
+beautiful, the eternal, in them? Is not beauty perhaps a creation of
+love, in the same way and in the same sense that the sensible world is a
+creation of the instinct of preservation and the supersensible world of
+that of perpetuation? Is not beauty, and together with beauty eternity,
+a creation of love? "Though our outward man perish," says the Apostle,
+"yet the inward man is renewed day by day" (2 Cor. iv. 16). The man of
+passing appearances perishes and passes away with them; the man of
+reality remains and grows. "For our light affliction, which is but for a
+moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory"
+(ver. 17). Our suffering causes us anguish, and this anguish, bursting
+because of its own fullness, seems to us consolation. "While we look not
+at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for
+the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not
+seen are eternal" (ver. 18).
+
+This suffering gives hope, which is the beautiful in life, the supreme
+beauty, or the supreme consolation. And since love is full of suffering,
+since love is compassion and pity, beauty springs from compassion and is
+simply the temporal consolation that compassion seeks. A tragic
+consolation! And the supreme beauty is that of tragedy. The
+consciousness that everything passes away, that we ourselves pass away,
+and that everything that is ours and everything that environs us passes
+away, fills us with anguish, and this anguish itself reveals to us the
+consolation of that which does not pass away, of the eternal, of the
+beautiful.
+
+And this beauty thus revealed, this perpetuation of momentaneity, only
+realizes itself practically, only lives through the work of charity.
+Hope in action is charity, and beauty in action is goodness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Charity, which eternalizes everything it loves, and in giving us the
+goodness of it brings to light its hidden beauty, has its root in the
+love of God, or, if you like, in charity towards God, in pity for God.
+Love, pity, personalizes everything, we have said; in discovering the
+suffering in everything and in personalizing everything, it personalizes
+the Universe itself as well--for the Universe also suffers--and it
+discovers God to us. For God is revealed to us because He suffers and
+because we suffer; because He suffers He demands our love, and because
+we suffer He gives us His love, and He covers our anguish with the
+eternal and infinite anguish.
+
+This was the scandal of Christianity among Jews and Greeks, among
+Pharisees and Stoics, and this, which was its scandal of old, the
+scandal of the Cross, is still its scandal to-day, and will continue to
+be so, even among Christians themselves--the scandal of a God who
+becomes man in order that He may suffer and die and rise again, because
+He has suffered and died, the scandal of a God subject to suffering and
+death. And this truth that God suffers--a truth that appals the mind of
+man--is the revelation of the very heart of the Universe and of its
+mystery, the revelation that God revealed to us when He sent His Son in
+order that he might redeem us by suffering and dying. It was the
+revelation of the divine in suffering, for only that which suffers is
+divine.
+
+And men made a god of this Christ who suffered, and through him they
+discovered the eternal essence of a living, human God--that is, of a God
+who suffers--it is only the dead, the inhuman, that does not suffer--a
+God who loves and thirsts for love, for pity, a God who is a person.
+Whosoever knows not the Son will never know the Father, and the Father
+is only known through the Son; whosoever knows not the Son of Man--he
+who suffers bloody anguish and the pangs of a breaking heart, whose soul
+is heavy within him even unto death, who suffers the pain that kills and
+brings to life again--will never know the Father, and can know nothing
+of the suffering God.
+
+He who does not suffer, and who does not suffer because he does not
+live, is that logical and frozen _ens realissimum_, the _primum movens_,
+that impassive entity, which because of its impassivity is nothing but a
+pure idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or
+exist as a person. And how is the world to derive its origin and life
+from an impassive idea? Such a world would be but the idea of the world.
+But the world suffers, and suffering is the sense of the flesh of
+reality; it is the spirit's sense of its mass and substance; it is the
+self's sense of its own tangibility; it is immediate reality.
+
+Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it
+is only suffering that makes us persons. And suffering is universal,
+suffering is that which unites all us living beings together; it is the
+universal or divine blood that flows through us all. That which we call
+will, what is it but suffering?
+
+And suffering has its degrees, according to the depth of its
+penetration, from the suffering that floats upon the sea of appearances
+to the eternal anguish, the source of the tragic sense of life, which
+seeks a habitation in the depths of the eternal and there awakens
+consolation; from the physical suffering that contorts our bodies to the
+religious anguish that flings us upon the bosom of God, there to be
+watered by the divine tears.
+
+Anguish is something far deeper, more intimate, and more spiritual than
+suffering. We are wont to feel the touch of anguish even in the midst of
+that which we call happiness, and even because of this happiness itself,
+to which we cannot resign ourselves and before which we tremble. The
+happy who resign themselves to their apparent happiness, to a transitory
+happiness, seem to be as men without substance, or, at any rate, men who
+have not discovered this substance in themselves, who have not touched
+it. Such men are usually incapable of loving or of being loved, and they
+go through life without really knowing either pain or bliss.
+
+There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to
+choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. And love leads us
+to no other happiness than that of love itself and its tragic
+consolation of uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and
+satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love. The
+satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near
+neighbour to annihilation. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to
+be. Man is the more man--that is, the more divine--the greater his
+capacity for suffering, or, rather, for anguish.
+
+At our coming into the world it is given to us to choose between love
+and happiness, and we wish--poor fools!--for both: the happiness of
+loving and the love of happiness. But we ought to ask for the gift of
+love and not of happiness, and to be preserved from dozing away into
+habit, lest we should fall into a fast sleep, a sleep without waking,
+and so lose our consciousness beyond power of recovery. We ought to ask
+God to make us conscious of ourselves in ourselves, in our suffering.
+
+What is Fate, what is Fatality, but the brotherhood of love and
+suffering? What is it but that terrible mystery in virtue of which love
+dies as soon as it touches the happiness towards which it reaches out,
+and true happiness dies with it? Love and suffering mutually engender
+one another, and love is charity and compassion, and the love that is
+not charitable and compassionate is not love. Love, in a word, is
+resigned despair.
+
+That which the mathematicians call the problem of maxima and minima,
+which is also called the law of economy, is the formula for all
+existential--that is, passional--activity. In material mechanics and in
+social mechanics, in industry and in political economy, every problem
+resolves itself into an attempt to obtain the greatest possible
+resulting utility with the least possible effort, the greatest income
+with the least expenditure, the most pleasure with the least pain. And
+the terrible and tragic formula of the inner, spiritual life is either
+to obtain the most happiness with the least love, or the most love with
+the least happiness. And it is necessary to choose between the one and
+the other, and to know that he who approaches the infinite of love, the
+love that is infinite, approaches the zero of happiness, the supreme
+anguish. And in reaching this zero he is beyond the reach of the misery
+that kills. "Be not, and thou shalt be mightier than aught that is,"
+said Brother Juan de los Angeles in one of his _Dialogos de la conquista
+del reino de Dios_ (Dial. iii. 8).
+
+And there is something still more anguishing than suffering. A man about
+to receive a much-dreaded blow expects to have to suffer so severely
+that he may even succumb to the suffering, and when the blow falls he
+feels scarcely any pain; but afterwards, when he has come to himself and
+is conscious of his insensibility, he is seized with terror, a tragic
+terror, the most terrible of all, and choking with anguish he cries out:
+"Can it be that I no longer exist?" Which would you find most
+appalling--to feel such a pain as would deprive you of your senses on
+being pierced through with a white-hot iron, or to see yourself thus
+pierced through without feeling any pain? Have you never felt the
+horrible terror of feeling yourself incapable of suffering and of tears?
+Suffering tells us that we exist; suffering tells us that those whom we
+love exist; suffering tells us that the world in which we live exists;
+and suffering tells us that God exists and suffers; but it is the
+suffering of anguish, the anguish of surviving and being eternal.
+Anguish discovers God to us and makes us love Him.
+
+To believe in God is to love Him, and to love Him is to feel Him
+suffering, to pity Him.
+
+It may perhaps appear blasphemous to say that God suffers, for suffering
+implies limitation. Nevertheless, God, the Consciousness of the
+Universe, is limited by the brute matter in which He lives, by the
+unconscious, from which He seeks to liberate Himself and to liberate us.
+And we, in our turn, must seek to liberate Him. God suffers in each and
+all of us, in each and all of the consciousnesses imprisoned in
+transitory matter, and we all suffer in Him. Religious anguish is but
+the divine suffering, the feeling that God suffers in me and that I
+suffer in Him.
+
+The universal suffering is the anguish of all in seeking to be all else
+but without power to achieve it, the anguish of each in being he that he
+is, being at the same time all that he is not, and being so for ever.
+The essence of a being is not only its endeavour to persist for ever, as
+Spinoza taught us, but also its endeavour to universalize itself; it is
+the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity. Every created being
+tends not only to preserve itself in itself, but to perpetuate itself,
+and, moreover, to invade all other beings, to be others without ceasing
+to be itself, to extend its limits to the infinite, but without breaking
+them. It does not wish to throw down its walls and leave everything laid
+flat, common and undefended, confounding and losing its own
+individuality, but it wishes to carry its walls to the extreme limits of
+creation and to embrace everything within them. It seeks the maximum of
+individuality with the maximum also of personality; it aspires to the
+identification of the Universe with itself; it aspires to God.
+
+And this vast I, within which each individual I seeks to put the
+Universe--what is it but God? And because I aspire to God, I love Him;
+and this aspiration of mine towards God is my love for Him, and just as
+I suffer in being He, He also suffers in being I, and in being each one
+of us.
+
+I am well aware that in spite of my warning that I am attempting here to
+give a logical form to a system of a-logical feelings, I shall be
+scandalizing not a few of my readers in speaking of a God who suffers,
+and in applying to God Himself, as God, the passion of Christ. The God
+of so-called rational theology excludes in effect all suffering. And the
+reader will no doubt think that this idea of suffering can have only a
+metaphorical value when applied to God, similar to that which is
+supposed to attach to those passages in the Old Testament which
+describe the human passions of the God of Israel. For anger, wrath, and
+vengeance are impossible without suffering. And as for saying that God
+suffers through being bound by matter, I shall be told that, in the
+words of Plotinus (_Second Ennead_, ix., 7), the Universal Soul cannot
+be bound by the very thing--namely, bodies or matter--which is bound by
+It.
+
+Herein is involved the whole problem of the origin of evil, the evil of
+sin no less than the evil of pain, for if God does not suffer, He causes
+suffering; and if His life, since God lives, is not a process of
+realizing in Himself a total consciousness which is continually becoming
+fuller--that is to say, which is continually becoming more and more
+God--it is a process of drawing all things towards Himself, of imparting
+Himself to all, of constraining the consciousness of each part to enter
+into the consciousness of the All, which is He Himself, until at last He
+comes to be all in all--_panta en paot_, according to the expression of
+St. Paul, the first Christian mystic. We will discuss this more fully,
+however, in the next chapter on the apocatastasis or beatific union.
+
+For the present let it suffice to say that there is a vast current of
+suffering urging living beings towards one another, constraining them to
+love one another and to seek one another, and to endeavour to complete
+one another, and to be each himself and others at the same time. In God
+everything lives, and in His suffering everything suffers, and in loving
+God we love His creatures in Him, just as in loving and pitying His
+creatures we love and pity God in them. No single soul can be free so
+long as there is anything enslaved in God's world, neither can God
+Himself, who lives in the soul of each one of us, be free so long as our
+soul is not free.
+
+My most immediate sensation is the sense and love of my own misery, my
+anguish, the compassion I feel for myself, the love I bear for myself.
+And when this compassion is vital and superabundant, it overflows from
+me upon others, and from the excess of my own compassion I come to have
+compassion for my neighbours. My own misery is so great that the
+compassion for myself which it awakens within me soon overflows and
+reveals to me the universal misery.
+
+And what is charity but the overflow of pity? What is it but reflected
+pity that overflows and pours itself out in a flood of pity for the woes
+of others and in the exercise of charity?
+
+When the overplus of our pity leads us to the consciousness of God
+within us, it fills us with so great anguish for the misery shed abroad
+in all things, that we have to pour our pity abroad, and this we do in
+the form of charity. And in this pouring abroad of our pity we
+experience relief and the painful sweetness of goodness. This is what
+Teresa de Jesus, the mystical doctor, called "sweet-tasting suffering"
+(_dolor sabroso_), and she knew also the lore of suffering loves. It is
+as when one looks upon some thing of beauty and feels the necessity of
+making others sharers in it. For the creative impulse, in which charity
+consists, is the work of suffering love.
+
+We feel, in effect, a satisfaction in doing good when good superabounds
+within us, when we are swollen with pity; and we are swollen with pity
+when God, filling our soul, gives us the suffering sensation of
+universal life, of the universal longing for eternal divinization. For
+we are not merely placed side by side with others in the world, having
+no common root with them, neither is their lot indifferent to us, but
+their pain hurts us, their anguish fills us with anguish, and we feel
+our community of origin and of suffering even without knowing it.
+Suffering, and pity which is born of suffering, are what reveal to us
+the brotherhood of every existing thing that possesses life and more or
+less of consciousness. "Brother Wolf" St. Francis of Assisi called the
+poor wolf that feels a painful hunger for the sheep, and feels, too,
+perhaps, the pain of having to devour them; and this brotherhood reveals
+to us the Fatherhood of God, reveals to us that God is a Father and that
+He exists. And as a Father He shelters our common misery.
+
+Charity, then, is the impulse to liberate myself and all my fellows from
+suffering, and to liberate God, who embraces us all.
+
+Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of
+consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order
+that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never
+known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely
+possess consciousness of himself. The child first cries at birth when
+the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seems to say to him:
+You have to breathe me in order that you may live!
+
+We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us,
+that the material or sensible world which the senses create for us
+exists solely in order to embody and sustain that other spiritual or
+imaginable world which the imagination creates for us. Consciousness
+tends to be ever more and more consciousness, to intensify its
+consciousness, to acquire full consciousness of its complete self, of
+the whole of its content. We must needs believe with faith, whatever
+counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in
+animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the
+Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire
+consciousness of itself, to be itself--for to be oneself is to know
+oneself--to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means
+of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at
+the same time that it remains the prisoner of it. The face can only see
+itself when portrayed in the mirror, but in order to see itself it must
+remain the prisoner of the mirror in which it sees itself, and the image
+which it sees therein is as the mirror distorts it; and if the mirror
+breaks, the image is broken; and if the mirror is blurred, the image is
+blurred.
+
+Spirit finds itself limited by the matter in which it has to live and
+acquire consciousness of itself, just as thought is limited by the word
+in which as a social medium it is incarnated. Without matter there is no
+spirit, but matter makes spirit suffer by limiting it. And suffering is
+simply the obstacle which matter opposes to spirit; it is the clash of
+the conscious with the unconscious.
+
+Suffering is, in effect, the barrier which unconsciousness, matter, sets
+up against consciousness, spirit; it is the resistance to will, the
+limit which the visible universe imposes upon God; it is the wall that
+consciousness runs up against when it seeks to extend itself at the
+expense of unconsciousness; it is the resistance which unconsciousness
+opposes to its penetration by consciousness.
+
+Although in deference to authority we may believe, we do not in fact
+know, that we possess heart, stomach, or lungs so long as they do not
+cause us discomfort, suffering, or anguish. Physical suffering, or even
+discomfort, is what reveals to us our own internal core. And the same is
+true of spiritual suffering and anguish, for we do not take account of
+the fact that we possess a soul until it hurts us.
+
+Anguish is that which makes consciousness return upon itself. He who
+knows no anguish knows what he does and what he thinks, but he does not
+truly know that he does it and that he thinks it. He thinks, but he does
+not think that he thinks, and his thoughts are as if they were not his.
+Neither does he properly belong to himself. For it is only anguish, it
+is only the passionate longing never to die, that makes a human spirit
+master of itself.
+
+Pain, which is a kind of dissolution, makes us discover our internal
+core; and in the supreme dissolution, which is death, we shall, at last,
+through the pain of annihilation, arrive at the core of our temporal
+core--at God, whom in our spiritual anguish we breathe and learn to
+love.
+
+Even so must we believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give
+us.
+
+The origin of evil, as many discovered of old, is nothing other than
+what is called by another name the inertia of matter, and, as applied to
+the things of the spirit, sloth. And not without truth has it been said
+that sloth is the mother of all vices, not forgetting that the supreme
+sloth is that of not longing madly for immortality.
+
+Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of
+eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God--these are never
+satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and to be all other
+consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself: it seeks to be God. And
+matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing,
+its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and
+matter answers: I wish not to be!
+
+And in the order of human life, the individual would tend, under the
+sole instigation of the instinct of preservation, the creator of the
+material world, to destruction, to annihilation, if it were not for
+society, which, in implanting in him the instinct of perpetuation, the
+creator of the spiritual world, lifts and impels him towards the All,
+towards immortalization. And everything that man does as a mere
+individual, opposed to society, for the sake of his own preservation,
+and at the expense of society, if need be, is bad; and everything that
+he does as a social person, for the sake of the society in which he
+himself is included, for the sake of its perpetuation and of the
+perpetuation of himself in it, is good. And many of those who seem to be
+the greatest egoists, trampling everything under their feet in their
+zeal to bring their work to a successful issue, are in reality men
+whose souls are aflame and overflowing with charity, for they subject
+and subordinate their petty personal I to the social I that has a
+mission to accomplish.
+
+He who would tie the working of love, of spiritualization, of
+liberation, to transitory and individual forms, crucifies God in matter;
+he crucifies God who makes the ideal subservient to his own temporal
+interests or worldly glory. And such a one is a deicide.
+
+The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavour to liberate God
+from brute matter, to endeavour to give consciousness to everything, to
+spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very
+rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this
+dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious,
+that the Word may become life.
+
+We have but to look at the eucharistic symbol to see an instance of it.
+The Word has been imprisoned in a piece of material bread, and it has
+been imprisoned therein to the end that we may eat it, and in eating it
+make it our own, part and parcel of our body in which the spirit dwells,
+and that it may beat in our heart and think in our brain and be
+consciousness. It has been imprisoned in this bread in order that, after
+being buried in our body, it may come to life again in our spirit.
+
+And we must spiritualize everything. And this we shall accomplish by
+giving our spirit, which grows the more the more it is distributed, to
+all men and to all things. And we give our spirit when we invade other
+spirits and make ourselves the master of them.
+
+All this is to be believed with faith, whatever counsels reason may give
+us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now we are about to see what practical consequences all these more
+or less fantastical doctrines may have in regard to logic, to esthetics,
+and, above all, to ethics--their religious concretion, in a word. And
+perhaps then they will gain more justification in the eyes of the
+reader who, in spite of my warnings, has hitherto been looking for the
+scientific or even philosophic development of an irrational system.
+
+I think it may not be superfluous to recall to the reader once again
+what I said at the conclusion of the sixth chapter, that entitled "In
+the Depths of the Abyss"; but we now approach the practical or
+pragmatical part of this treatise. First, however, we must see how the
+religious sense may become concrete in the hopeful vision of another
+life.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[44] Reinold Seeberg, _Christliche-protestantische Ethik_ in
+_Systematische christliche Religion_, in _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_
+series.
+
+[45] _Cf._ St. Thomas Aquinas, _Summa_, secunda secundae, quaestio iv.,
+art. 2.
+
+[46] "_Que es Verdad?_" ("What is truth?"), published in _La Espana
+Moderna_, March, 1906, vol. 207 (reprinted in the edition of collected
+_Ensayos_, vol. vi., Madrid, 1918).
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND AND THE APOCATASTASIS
+
+_Kai gar isos kai malista prepei mellonta echeise apodemein diaskopein te
+kai muthologein peri tes apodemias tes echei, poian tina auten oiometha
+einai._--PLATO: _Phaedo_.
+
+
+Religion is founded upon faith, hope, and charity, which in their turn
+are founded upon the feeling of divinity and of God. Of faith in God is
+born our faith in men, of hope in God hope in men, and of charity or
+piety towards God--for as Cicero said,[47] _est enim pietas iustitia
+adversum deos_--charity towards men. In God is resumed not only
+Humanity, but the whole Universe, and the Universe spiritualized and
+penetrated with consciousness, for as the Christian Faith teaches, God
+shall at last be all in all. St. Teresa said, and Miguel de Molinos
+repeated with a harsher and more despairing inflection, that the soul
+must realize that nothing exists but itself and God.
+
+And this relation with God, this more or less intimate union with Him,
+is what we call religion.
+
+What is religion? In what does it differ from the religious sense and
+how are the two related? Every man's definition of religion is based
+upon his own inward experience of it rather than upon his observation of
+it in others, nor indeed is it possible to define it without in some way
+or another experiencing it. Tacitus said (_Hist._ v. 4), speaking of the
+Jews, that they regarded as profane everything that the Romans held to
+be sacred, and that what was sacred to them was to the Romans impure:
+_profana illic omnia quae apud nos sacra, rursum conversa apud illos quae
+nobis incesta_. Therefore he, the Roman, describes the Jews as a people
+dominated by superstition and hostile to religion, _gens superstitioni
+obnoxia, religionibus adversa_, while as regards Christianity, with
+which he was very imperfectly acquainted, scarcely distinguishing it
+from Judaism, he deemed it to be a pernicious superstition, _existialis
+superstitio_, inspired by a hatred of mankind, _odium generis humani_
+(_Ab excessu Aug._, xv., 44). And there have been many others who have
+shared his opinion. But where does religion end and superstition begin,
+or perhaps rather we should say at what point does superstition merge
+into religion? What is the criterion by means of which we discriminate
+between them?
+
+It would be of little profit to recapitulate here, even summarily, the
+principal definitions, each bearing the impress of the personal feeling
+of its definer, which have been given of religion. Religion is better
+described than defined and better felt than described. But if there is
+any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of
+Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple
+feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a
+desire to establish relations with this mysterious power. Nor is there
+much amiss with the statement of W. Hermann[48] that the religious
+longing of man is a desire for truth concerning his human existence. And
+to cut short these extraneous citations, I will end with one from the
+judicious and perspicacious Cournot: "Religious manifestations are the
+necessary consequence of man's predisposition to believe in the
+existence of an invisible, supernatural and miraculous world, a
+predisposition which it has been possible to consider sometimes as a
+reminiscence of an anterior state, sometimes as an intimation of a
+future destiny" (_Traite de l'enchainement des idees fondamentales dans
+les sciences et dans l'histoire_, Sec. 396). And it is this problem of
+human destiny, of eternal life, or of the human finality of the Universe
+or of God, that we have now reached. All the highways of religion lead
+up to this, for it is the very essence of all religion.
+
+Beginning with the savage's personalization of the whole Universe in his
+fetich, religion has its roots in the vital necessity of giving human
+finality to the Universe, to God, and this necessity obliges it,
+therefore, to attribute to the Universe, to God, consciousness of self
+and of purpose. And it may be said that religion is simply union with
+God, each one interpreting God according to his own sense of Him. God
+gives transcendent meaning and finality to life; but He gives it
+relatively to each one of us who believe in Him. And thus God is for man
+as much as man is for God, for God in becoming man, in becoming human,
+has given Himself to man because of His love of him.
+
+And this religious longing for union with God is a longing for a union
+that cannot be consummated in science or in art, but only in life. "He
+who possesses science and art, has religion; he who possesses neither
+science nor art, let him get religion," said Goethe in one of his
+frequent accesses of paganism. And yet in spite of what he said, he
+himself, Goethe...?
+
+And to wish that we may be united with God is not to wish that we may be
+lost and submerged in Him, for this loss and submersion of self ends at
+last in the complete dissolution of self in the dreamless sleep of
+Nirvana; it is to wish to possess Him rather than to be possessed by
+Him. When his disciples, amazed at his saying that it was impossible for
+a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, asked Jesus who then
+could be saved, the Master replied that with men it was impossible but
+not with God; and then said Peter, "Behold, we have forsaken all and
+followed thee; what shall we have therefore?" And the reply of Jesus
+was, not that they should be absorbed in the Father, but that they
+should sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel
+(Matt. xix. 23-26).
+
+It was a Spaniard, and very emphatically a Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos,
+who said in his _Guia Espiritual_[49] that "he who would attain to the
+mystical science must abandon and be detached from five things: first,
+from creatures; second, from temporal things; third, from the very gifts
+of the Holy Spirit; fourth, from himself; and fifth, he must be detached
+even from God." And he adds that "this last is the completest of all,
+because that soul only that knows how to be so detached is that which
+attains to being lost in God, and only the soul that attains to being so
+lost succeeds in finding itself." Emphatically a true Spaniard, Molinos,
+and truly Spanish is this paradoxical expression of quietism or rather
+of nihilism--for he himself elsewhere speaks of annihilation--and not
+less Spanish, nay, perhaps even more Spanish, were the Jesuits who
+attacked him, upholding the prerogatives of the All against the claims
+of Nothingness. For religion is not the longing for self-annihilation,
+but for self-completion, it is the longing not for death but for life.
+"The eternal religion of the inward essence of man ... the individual
+dream of the heart, is the worship of his own being, the adoration of
+life," as the tortured soul of Flaubert was intimately aware (_Par les
+champs et par les greves_, vii.).
+
+When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance,
+the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took concrete form in
+the knightly ideal with its codes of love and honour. But it was a
+paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman--_la donna_--was the divinity
+enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the
+memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full
+force and purity; the Universe is woman. And so it was in Germany, in
+France, in Provence, in Spain, in Italy, at the beginning of the modern
+age. History was cast in this mould; Trojans and Romans were conceived
+as knights-errant, and so too were Arabs, Saracens, Turks, the Sultan
+and Saladin.... In this universal fraternity mingle angels, saints,
+miracles and paradise, strangely blended with the fantasy and
+voluptuousness of the Oriental world, and all baptized in the name of
+Chivalry." Thus, in his _Storia della Letteratura italiana_, ii., writes
+Francesco de Sanctis, and in an earlier passage he informs us that for
+that breed of men "in paradise itself the lover's delight was to look
+upon his lady--_Madonna_--and that he had no desire to go thither if he
+might not go in his lady's company." What, in fact, was Chivalry--which
+Cervantes, intending to kill it, afterwards purified and Christianized
+in _Don Quixote_--but a real though distorted religion, a hybrid between
+paganism and Christianity, whose gospel perhaps was the legend of
+Tristan and Iseult? And did not even the Christianity of the
+mystics--those knights-errant of the spirit--possibly reach its
+culminating-point in the worship of the divine woman, the Virgin Mary?
+What else was the Mariolatry of a St. Bonaventura, the troubadour of
+Mary? And this sentiment found its inspiration in love of the fountain
+of life, of that which saves us from death.
+
+But as the Renaissance advanced men turned from the religion of woman to
+the religion of science; desire, the foundation of which was curiosity,
+ended in curiosity, in eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of
+good and evil. Europe flocked to the University of Bologna in search of
+learning. Chivalry was succeeded by Platonism. Men sought to discover
+the mystery of the world and of life. But it was really in order to save
+life, which they had also sought to save in the worship of woman. Human
+consciousness sought to penetrate the Universal Consciousness, but its
+real object, whether it was aware of it or not, was to save itself.
+
+For the truth is that we feel and imagine the Universal
+Consciousness--and in this feeling and imagination religious experience
+consists--simply in order that thereby we may save our own individual
+consciousnesses. And how?
+
+Once again I must repeat that the longing for the immortality of the
+soul, for the permanence, in some form or another, of our personal and
+individual consciousness, is as much of the essence of religion as is
+the longing that there may be a God. The one does not exist apart from
+the other, the reason being that fundamentally they are one and the same
+thing. But as soon as we attempt to give a concrete and rational form to
+this longing for immortality and permanence, to define it to ourselves,
+we encounter even more difficulties than we encountered in our attempt
+to rationalize God.
+
+The universal consent of mankind has again been invoked as a means of
+justifying this immortal longing for immortality to our own feeble
+reason. _Permanere animos arbitratur consensu nationum omnium_, said
+Cicero, echoing the opinion of the ancients (_Tuscul. Quaest._, xvi.,
+36). But this same recorder of his own feelings confessed that, although
+when he read the arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul in
+the _Phaedo_ of Plato he was compelled to assent to them, as soon as he
+put the book aside and began to revolve the problem in his own mind, all
+his previous assent melted away, _assentio omnis illa illabitur_ (cap.
+xi., 25). And what happened to Cicero happens to us all, and it happened
+likewise to Swedenborg, the most daring visionary of the other world.
+Swedenborg admitted that he who discourses of life after death, putting
+aside all erudite notions concerning the soul and its mode of union with
+the body, believes that after death he shall live in a glorious joy and
+vision, as a man among angels; but when he begins to reflect upon the
+doctrine of the union of the soul with the body, or upon the
+hypothetical opinion concerning the soul, doubts arise in him as to
+whether the soul is thus or otherwise, and when these doubts arise, his
+former idea is dissipated (_De caelo et inferno_, Sec. 183). Nevertheless,
+as Cournot says, "it is the destiny that awaits me, _me_ or my _person_,
+that moves, perturbs and consoles me, that makes me capable of
+abnegation and sacrifice, whatever be the origin, the nature or the
+essence of this inexplicable bond of union, in the absence of which the
+philosophers are pleased to determine that my person must disappear"
+(_Traite_, etc., Sec. 297).
+
+Must we then embrace the pure and naked faith in an eternal life without
+trying to represent it to ourselves? This is impossible; it is beyond
+our power to bring ourselves or accustom ourselves to do so. And
+nevertheless there are some who call themselves Christians and yet leave
+almost altogether on one side this question of representation. Take any
+work of theology informed by the most enlightened--that is, the most
+rationalistic and liberal--Protestantism; take, for instance, the
+_Dogmatik_ of Dr. Julius Kaftan, and of the 668 pages of which the sixth
+edition, that of 1909, consists, you will find only one, the last, that
+is devoted to this problem. And in this page, after affirming that
+Christ is not only the beginning and middle but also the end and
+consummation of History, and that those who are in Christ will attain to
+fullness of life, the eternal life of those who are in Christ, not a
+single word as to what that life may be. Half a dozen words at most
+about eternal death, that is, hell, "for its existence is demanded by
+the moral character of faith and of Christian hope." Its moral
+character, eh? not its religious character, for I am not aware that the
+latter knows any such exigency. And all this inspired by a prudent
+agnostic parsimony.
+
+Yes, the prudent, the rational, and, some will say, the pious,
+attitude, is not to seek to penetrate into mysteries that are hidden
+from our knowledge, not to insist upon shaping a plastic representation
+of eternal glory, such as that of the _Divina Commedia_. True faith,
+true Christian piety, we shall be told, consists in resting upon the
+confidence that God, by the grace of Christ, will, in some way or
+another, make us live in Him, in His Son; that, as our destiny is in His
+almighty hands, we should surrender ourselves to Him, in the full
+assurance that He will do with us what is best for the ultimate end of
+life, of spirit and of the universe. Such is the teaching that has
+traversed many centuries, and was notably prominent in the period
+between Luther and Kant.
+
+And nevertheless men have not ceased endeavouring to imagine to
+themselves what this eternal life may be, nor will they cease their
+endeavours so long as they are men and not merely thinking machines.
+There are books of theology--or of what passes for theology--full of
+disquisitions upon the conditions under which the blessed dead live in
+paradise, upon their mode of enjoyment, upon the properties of the
+glorious body, for without some form of body the soul cannot be
+conceived.
+
+And to this same necessity, the real necessity of forming to ourselves a
+concrete representation of what this other life may be, must in great
+part be referred the indestructible vitality of doctrines such as those
+of spiritualism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from star
+to star, and the like; doctrines which as often as they are pronounced
+to be defeated and dead, are found to have come to life again, clothed
+in some more or less new form. And it is merely supine to be content to
+ignore them and not to seek to discover their permanent and living
+essence. Man will never willingly abandon his attempt to form a concrete
+representation of the other life.
+
+But is an eternal and endless life after death indeed thinkable? How
+can we conceive the life of a disembodied spirit? How can we conceive
+such a spirit? How can we conceive a pure consciousness, without a
+corporal organism? Descartes divided the world into thought and
+extension, a dualism which was imposed upon him by the Christian dogma
+of the immortality of the soul. But is extension, is matter, that which
+thinks and is spiritualized, or is thought that which is extended and
+materialized? The weightiest questions of metaphysics arise practically
+out of our desire to arrive at an understanding of the possibility of
+our immortality--from this fact they derive their value and cease to be
+merely the idle discussions of fruitless curiosity. For the truth is
+that metaphysics has no value save in so far as it attempts to explain
+in what way our vital longing can or cannot be realized. And thus it is
+that there is and always will be a rational metaphysic and a vital
+metaphysic, in perennial conflict with one another, the one setting out
+from the notion of cause, the other from the notion of substance.
+
+And even if we were to succeed in imagining personal immortality, might
+we not possibly feel it to be something no less terrible than its
+negation? "Calypso was inconsolable at the departure of Ulysses; in her
+sorrow she was dismayed at being immortal," said the gentle, the
+mystical Fenelon at the beginning of his _Telemaque_. Was it not a kind
+of doom that the ancient gods, no less than the demons, were subject
+to--the deprivation of the power to commit suicide?
+
+When Jesus took Peter and James and John up into a high mountain and was
+transfigured before them, his raiment shining as white as snow, and
+Moses and Elias appeared and talked with him, Peter said to the Master:
+"Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three
+tabernacles; one for thee and one for Moses and one for Elias," for he
+wished to eternalize that moment. And as they came down from the
+mountain, Jesus charged them that they should tell no man what they had
+seen until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead. And they,
+keeping this saying to themselves, questioned one with another what this
+rising from the dead should mean, as men not understanding the purport
+of it. And it was after this that Jesus met the father whose son was
+possessed with a dumb spirit and who cried out to him, "Lord, I believe;
+help thou mine unbelief" (Mark ix.).
+
+Those three apostles did not understand what this rising from the dead
+meant. Neither did those Sadducees who asked the Master whose wife she
+should be in the resurrection who in this life had had seven husbands
+(Matt. xxii.); and it was then that Jesus said that God is not the God
+of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is not, in fact,
+thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and
+transitory life. Nor is the mystery at all clarified by that metaphor of
+the grain and the wheat that it bears, with which Paul answers the
+question, "How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?"
+(1 Cor. xv. 35).
+
+How can a human soul live and enjoy God eternally without losing its
+individual personality--that is to say, without losing itself? What is
+it to enjoy God? What is eternity as opposed to time? Does the soul
+change or does it not change in the other life? If it does not change,
+how does it live? And if it changes, how does it preserve its
+individuality through so vast a period of time? For though the other
+life may exclude space, it cannot exclude time, as Cournot observes in
+the work quoted above.
+
+If there is life in heaven there is change. Swedenborg remarked that the
+angels change, because the delight of the celestial life would gradually
+lose its value if they always enjoyed it in its fullness, and because
+angels, like men, love themselves, and he who loves himself experiences
+changes of state; and he adds further that at times the angels are sad,
+and that he, Swedenborg, discoursed with some when they were sad (_De
+Caelo et Inferno_, Sec.Sec. 158, 160). In any case, it is impossible for us to
+conceive life without change, change of growth or of diminution, of
+sadness or of joy, of love or of hate.
+
+In effect, an eternal life is unthinkable and an eternal life of
+absolute felicity, of beatific vision, is more unthinkable still.
+
+And what precisely is this beatific vision? We observe in the first
+place that it is called vision and not action, something passive being
+therefore presupposed. And does not this beatific vision suppose loss of
+personal consciousness? A saint in heaven, says Bossuet, is a being who
+is scarcely sensible of himself, so completely is he possessed by God
+and immerged in His glory.... Our attention cannot stay on the saint,
+because one finds him outside of himself, and subject by an unchangeable
+love to the source of his being and his happiness (_Du culte qui est du
+a Dieu_). And these are the words of Bossuet, the antiquietist. This
+loving vision of God supposes an absorption in Him. He who in a state of
+blessedness enjoys God in His fullness must perforce neither think of
+himself, nor remember himself, nor have any consciousness of himself,
+but be in perpetual ecstasy (_ekstasis_) outside of himself, in a
+condition of alienation. And the ecstasy that the mystics describe is a
+prelude of this vision.
+
+He who sees God shall die, say the Scriptures (Judg. xiii. 22); and may
+it not be that the eternal vision of God is an eternal death, a swooning
+away of the personality? But St. Teresa, in her description of the last
+state of prayer, the rapture, transport, flight, or ecstasy of the soul,
+tells us that the soul is borne as upon a cloud or a mighty eagle, "but
+you see yourself carried away and know not whither," and it is "with
+delight," and "if you do not resist, the senses are not lost, at least I
+was so much myself as to be able to perceive that I was being lifted up
+"--that is to say, without losing consciousness. And God "appears to be
+not content with thus attracting the soul to Himself in so real a way,
+but wishes to have the body also, though it be mortal and of earth so
+foul." "Ofttimes the soul is absorbed--or, to speak more correctly, the
+Lord absorbs it in Himself; and when He has held it thus for a moment,
+the will alone remains in union with Him"--not the intelligence alone.
+We see, therefore, that it is not so much vision as a union of the will,
+and meanwhile, "the understanding and memory are distraught ... like one
+who has slept long and dreamed and is hardly yet awake." It is "a soft
+flight, a delicious flight, a noiseless flight." And in this delicious
+flight the consciousness of self is preserved, the awareness of
+distinction from God with whom one is united. And one is raised to this
+rapture, according to the Spanish mystic, by the contemplation of the
+Humanity of Christ--that is to say, of something concrete and human; it
+is the vision of the living God, not of the idea of God. And in the 28th
+chapter she tells us that "though there were nothing else to delight the
+sight in heaven but the great beauty of the glorified bodies, that would
+be an excessive bliss, particularly the vision of the Humanity of Jesus
+Christ our Lord...." "This vision," she continues, "though imaginary, I
+did never see with my bodily eyes, nor, indeed, any other, but only with
+the eyes of the soul." And thus it is that in heaven the soul does not
+see God only, but everything in God, or rather it sees that everything
+is God, for God embraces all things. And this idea is further emphasized
+by Jacob Boehme. The saint tells us in the _Moradas Setimas_ (vii. 2)
+that "this secret union takes place in the innermost centre of the soul,
+where God Himself must dwell." And she goes on to say that "the soul, I
+mean the spirit of the soul, is made one with God ..."; and this union
+may be likened to "two wax candles, the tips of which touch each other
+so closely that there is but one light; or again, the wick, the wax,
+and the light become one, but the one candle can again be separated from
+the other, and the two candles remain distinct; or the wick may be
+withdrawn from the wax." But there is another more intimate union, and
+this is "like rain falling from heaven into a river or stream, becoming
+one and the same liquid, so that the river and the rain-water cannot be
+divided; or it resembles a streamlet flowing into the sea, which cannot
+afterwards be disunited from it; or it may be likened to a room into
+which a bright light enters through two windows--though divided when it
+enters, the light becomes one and the same." And what difference is
+there between this and the internal and mystical silence of Miguel de
+Molinos, the third and most perfect degree of which is the silence of
+thought? (_Guia Espiritual_, book i., chap. xvii., Sec. 128). Do we not
+here very closely approach the view that "nothingness is the way to
+attain to that high state of a mind reformed"? (book iii., chap. xx., Sec.
+196). And what marvel is it that Amiel in his _Journal Intime_ should
+twice have made use of the Spanish word _nada_, nothing, doubtless
+because he found none more expressive in any other language? And
+nevertheless, if we read our mystical doctor, St. Teresa, with care, we
+shall see that the sensitive element is never excluded, the element of
+delight--that is to say, the element of personal consciousness. The soul
+allows itself to be absorbed in God in order that it may absorb Him, in
+order that it may acquire consciousness of its own divinity.
+
+A beatific vision, a loving contemplation in which the soul is absorbed
+in God and, as it were, lost in Him, appears either as an annihilation
+of self or as a prolonged tedium to our natural way of feeling. And
+hence a certain feeling which we not infrequently observe and which has
+more than once expressed itself in satires, not altogether free from
+irreverence or perhaps impiety, with reference to the heaven of eternal
+glory as a place of eternal boredom. And it is useless to despise
+feelings such as these, so wholly natural and spontaneous.
+
+It is clear that those who feel thus have failed to take note of the
+fact that man's highest pleasure consists in acquiring and intensifying
+consciousness. Not the pleasure of knowing, exactly, but rather that of
+learning. In knowing a thing we tend to forget it, to convert it, if the
+expression may be allowed, into unconscious knowledge. Man's pleasure,
+his purest delight, is allied with the act of learning, of getting at
+the truth of things, of acquiring knowledge with differentiation. And
+hence the famous saying of Lessing which I have already quoted. There is
+a story told of an ancient Spaniard who accompanied Vasco Nunez de
+Balboa when he climbed that peak in Darien from which both the Atlantic
+and the Pacific are visible. On beholding the two oceans the old man
+fell on his knees and exclaimed, "I thank Thee, God, that Thou didst not
+let me die without having seen so great a wonder." But if this man had
+stayed there, very soon the wonder would have ceased to be wonderful,
+and with the wonder the pleasure, too, would have vanished. His joy was
+the joy of discovery. And perhaps the joy of the beatific vision may be
+not exactly that of the contemplation of the supreme Truth, whole and
+entire (for this the soul could not endure), but rather that of a
+continual discovery of the Truth, of a ceaseless act of learning
+involving an effort which keeps the sense of personal consciousness
+continually active.
+
+It is difficult for us to conceive a beatific vision of mental quiet, of
+full knowledge and not of gradual apprehension, as in any way different
+from a kind of Nirvana, a spiritual diffusion, a dissipation of energy
+in the essence of God, a return to unconsciousness induced by the
+absence of shock, of difference--in a word, of activity.
+
+May it not be that the very condition which makes our eternal union with
+God thinkable destroys our longing? What difference is there between
+being absorbed by God and absorbing Him in ourself? Is it the stream
+that is lost in the sea or the sea that is lost in the stream? It is all
+the same.
+
+Our fundamental feeling is our longing not to lose the sense of the
+continuity of our consciousness, not to break the concatenation of our
+memories, the feeling of our own personal concrete identity, even though
+we may be gradually being absorbed in God, enriching Him. Who at eighty
+years of age remembers the child that he was at eight, conscious though
+he may be of the unbroken chain connecting the two? And it may be said
+that the problem for feeling resolves itself into the question as to
+whether there is a God, whether there is a human finality to the
+Universe. But what is finality? For just as it is always possible to ask
+the why of every why, so it is also always possible to ask the wherefore
+of every wherefore. Supposing that there is a God, then wherefore God?
+For Himself, it will be said. And someone is sure to reply: What is the
+difference between this consciousness and no-consciousness? But it will
+always be true, as Plotinus has said (_Enn_., ii., ix., 8), that to ask
+why God made the world is the same as to ask why there is a soul. Or
+rather, not why, but wherefore (_dia ti_).
+
+For him who places himself outside himself, in an objective hypothetical
+position--which is as much as to say in an inhuman position--the
+ultimate wherefore is as inaccessible--and strictly, as absurd--as the
+ultimate why. What difference in effect does it make if there is not any
+finality? What logical contradiction is involved in the Universe not
+being destined to any finality, either human or superhuman? What
+objection is there in reason to there being no other purpose in the sum
+of things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and happen? For
+him who places himself outside himself, none; but for him who lives and
+suffers and desires within himself--for him it is a question of life or
+death. Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself, does not one
+find one's own nothingness? "Having become a sinner in seeking himself,
+man has become wretched in finding himself," said Bossuet (_Traite de la
+Concupiscence_, chap. xi.). "Seek thyself" begins with "Know thyself."
+To which Carlyle answers (_Past and Present_, book iii., chap. xi.):
+"The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know
+thyself': long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou
+wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this
+of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou
+canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules. That will be thy better
+plan."
+
+Yes, but what I work at, will not that too be lost in the end? And if it
+be lost, wherefore should I work at it? Yes, yes, it may be that to
+accomplish my work--and what is my work?--without thinking about myself,
+is to love God. And what is it to love God?
+
+And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am I not loving myself
+more than God, am I not loving myself in God?
+
+What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this
+same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium, and without
+death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his _Consolatio
+ad Marciam_ (xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again: _ista
+moliri_. And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to see God in the flesh,
+not in the spirit. And what but that is the meaning of that comic
+conception of _eternal recurrence_ which issued from the tragic soul of
+poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?
+
+And this beatific vision which is the primary Catholic solution of the
+problem, how can it be realized, I ask again, without obliteration of
+the consciousness of self? Will it not be like a sleep in which we
+dream without knowing what we dream? Who would wish for an eternal life
+like that? To think without knowing that we think is not to be sensible
+of ourselves, it is not to be ourselves. And is not eternal life perhaps
+eternal consciousness, not only seeing God, but seeing that we see Him,
+seeing ourselves at the same time and ourselves as distinct from Him? He
+who sleeps lives, but he has no consciousness of himself; and would
+anyone wish for an eternal sleep? When Circe advised Ulysses to descend
+to the abode of the dead in order to consult the soothsayer Teiresias,
+she told him that Teiresias alone among the shades of the dead was
+possessed of understanding, for all the others flitted about like
+shadows (_Odyssey_, x., 487-495). And can it be said that the others,
+apart from Teiresias, had really overcome death? Is it to overcome death
+to flit about like shadows without understanding?
+
+And on the other hand, may we not imagine that possibly this earthly
+life of ours is to the other life what sleep is to waking? May not all
+our life be a dream and death an awakening? But an awakening to what?
+And supposing that everything is but the dream of God and that God one
+day will awaken? Will He remember His dream?
+
+Aristotle, the rationalist, tells in his _Ethics_ of the superior
+happiness of the contemplative life, _bios theoretikos_; and all
+rationalists are wont to place happiness in knowledge. And the
+conception of eternal happiness, of the enjoyment of God, as a beatific
+vision, as knowledge and comprehension of God, is a thing of rationalist
+origin, it is the kind of happiness that corresponds with the God-Idea
+of Aristotelianism. But the truth is that, in addition to vision,
+happiness demands delight, and this is a thing which has very little to
+do, with rationalism and is only attainable when we feel ourselves
+distinct from God.
+
+Our Aristotelian Catholic theologian, the author of the endeavour to
+rationalize Catholic feeling, St. Thomas Aquinas, tells us in his
+_Summa_ (_prima secundae partis, quaestio_ iv., _art_. i) that "delight is
+requisite for happiness. For delight is caused by the fact of desire
+resting in attained good. Hence, since happiness is nothing but the
+attainment of the Sovereign Good, there cannot be happiness without
+concomitant delight." But where is the delight of him who rests? To
+rest, _requiescere_--is not that to sleep and not to possess even the
+consciousness that one is resting? "Delight is caused by the vision of
+God itself," the theologian continues. But does the soul feel itself
+distinct from God? "The delight that accompanies the activity of the
+understanding does not impede, but rather strengthens that activity," he
+says later on. Obviously! for what happiness were it else? And in order
+to save delectation, delight, pleasure, which, like pain, has always
+something material in it, and which we conceive of only as existing in a
+soul incarnate in a body, it was necessary to suppose that the soul in a
+state of blessedness is united with its body. Apart from some kind of
+body, how is delight possible? The immortality of the pure soul, without
+some sort of body or spirit-covering, is not true immortality. And at
+bottom, what we long for is a prolongation of this life, this life and
+no other, this life of flesh and suffering, this life which we imprecate
+at times simply because it comes to an end. The majority of suicides
+would not take their lives if they had the assurance that they would
+never die on this earth. The self-slayer kills himself because he will
+not wait for death.
+
+When in the thirty-third canto of the _Paradiso_, Dante relates how he
+attained to the vision of God, he tells us that just as a man who
+beholds somewhat in his sleep retains on awakening nothing but the
+impression of the feeling in his mind, so it was with him, for when the
+vision had all but passed away the sweetness that sprang from it still
+distilled itself in his heart.
+
+    _Cotal son to, che quasi tutta cessa
+    mia visione ed ancor mi distilla
+    nel cuor lo dulce che nacque da essa_
+
+like snow that melts in the sun--
+
+    _cosi la neve al sol si disigilla_.
+
+That is to say, that the vision, the intellectual content, passes, and
+that which remains is the delight, the _passione impressa_, the
+emotional, the irrational--in a word, the corporeal.
+
+What we desire is not merely spiritual felicity, not merely vision, but
+delight, bodily happiness. The other happiness, the rationalist
+_beatitude_, the happiness of being submerged in understanding, can
+only--I will not say satisfy or deceive, for I do not believe that it
+ever satisfied or deceived even a Spinoza. At the conclusion of his
+_Ethic_, in propositions xxxv. and xxxvi. of the fifth part, Spinoza,
+affirms that God loves Himself with an infinite intellectual love; that
+the intellectual love of the mind towards God is the selfsame love with
+which God loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far
+as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind,
+considered under the form of eternity--that is to say, that the
+intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love
+with which God loves Himself. And after these tragic, these desolating
+propositions, we are told in the last proposition of the whole book,
+that which closes and crowns this tremendous tragedy of the _Ethic_,
+that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, and that
+our repression of our desires is not the cause of our enjoyment of
+virtue, but rather because we find enjoyment in virtue we are able to
+repress our desires. Intellectual love! intellectual love! what is this
+intellectual love? Something of the nature of a red flavour, or a bitter
+sound, or an aromatic colour, or rather something of the same sort as a
+love-stricken triangle or an enraged ellipse--a pure metaphor, but a
+tragic metaphor. And a metaphor corresponding tragically with that
+saying that the heart also has its reasons. Reasons of the heart! loves
+of the head! intellectual delight! delicious intellection!--tragedy,
+tragedy, tragedy!
+
+And nevertheless there is something which may be called intellectual
+love, and that is the love of understanding, that which Aristotle meant
+by the contemplative life, for there is something of action and of love
+in the act of understanding, and the beatific vision is the vision of
+the total truth. Is there not perhaps at the root of every passion
+something of curiosity? Did not our first parents, according to the
+Biblical story, fall because of their eagerness to taste of the fruit of
+the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and to be as gods, knowers
+of this knowledge? The vision of God--that is to say, the vision of the
+Universe itself, in its soul, in its inmost essence--would not that
+appease all our longing? And this vision can fail to satisfy only men of
+a gross mind who do not perceive that the greatest joy of man is to be
+more man--that is, more God--and that man is more God the more
+consciousness he has.
+
+And this intellectual love, which is nothing but the so-called platonic
+love, is a means to dominion and possession. There is, in fact, no more
+perfect dominion than knowledge; he who knows something, possesses it.
+Knowledge unites the knower with the known. "I contemplate thee and in
+contemplating thee I make thee mine"--such is the formula. And to know
+God, what can that be but to possess Him? He who knows God is thereby
+himself God.
+
+In _La Degradation de l'energie_ (iv^e partie, chap. xviii., 2) B.
+Brunhes relates a story concerning the great Catholic mathematician
+Cauchy, communicated to him by M. Sarrau, who had it from Pere Gratry.
+While Cauchy and Pere Gratry were walking in the gardens of the
+Luxumbourg, their conversation turned upon the happiness which those in
+heaven would have in knowing at last, without any obscurity or
+limitation, the truths which they had so long and so laboriously sought
+to investigate on earth. In allusion to the study which Cauchy had made
+of the mechanistic theory of the reflection of light, Pere Gratry threw
+out the suggestion that one on the greatest intellectual joys of the
+great geometrician in the future life would be to penetrate into the
+secret of light. To which Cauchy replied that it did not appear to him
+to be possible to know more about this than he himself already knew,
+neither could he conceive how the most perfect intelligence could arrive
+at a clearer comprehension of the mystery of reflection than that
+manifested in his own explanation of it, seeing that he had furnished a
+mechanistic theory of the phenomenon. "His piety," Brunhes adds, "did
+not extend to a belief that God Himself could have created anything
+different or anything better."
+
+From this narrative two points of interest emerge. The first is the idea
+expressed in it as to what contemplation, intellectual love, or beatific
+vision, may mean for men of a superior order of intelligence, men whose
+ruling passion is knowledge; and the second is the implicit faith shown
+in the mechanistic explanation of the world.
+
+This mechanistic tendency of the intellect coheres with the well-known
+formula, "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is
+transformed"--a formula by means of which it has been sought to
+interpret the ambiguous principle of the conservation of energy,
+forgetting that practically, for us, for men, energy is utilizable
+energy, and that this is continually being lost, dissipated by the
+diffusion of heat, and degraded, its tendency being to arrive at a
+dead-level and homogeneity. That which has value, and more than value,
+reality, for us, is the differential, which is the qualitative; pure,
+undifferentiated quantity is for us as if it did not exist, for it does
+not act. And the material Universe, the body of the Universe, would
+appear to be gradually proceeding--unaffected by the retarding action of
+living organisms or even by the conscious action of man--towards a state
+of perfect stability, of homogeneity (_vide_ Brunhes, _op. cit._) For,
+while spirit tends towards concentration, material energy tends towards
+diffusion.
+
+And may not this have an intimate relation with our problem? May there
+not be a connection between this conclusion of scientific philosophy
+with respect to a final state of stability and homogeneity and the
+mystical dream of the apocatastasis? May not this death of the body of
+the Universe be the final triumph of its spirit, of God?
+
+It is manifest that there is an intimate relation between the religious
+need of an eternal life after death and the conclusions--always
+provisional--at which scientific philosophy arrives with respect to the
+probable future of the material or sensible Universe. And the fact is
+that just as there are theologians of God and the immortality of the
+soul, so there are also those whom Brunhes calls (_op. cit._, chap.
+xxvi., Sec. 2) theologians of monism, and whom it would perhaps be better
+to call atheologians, people who pertinaciously adhere to the spirit of
+_a priori_ affirmation; and this becomes intolerable, Brunhes adds, when
+they harbour the pretension of despising theology. A notable type of
+these gentlemen may be found in Haeckel, who has succeeded in solving
+the riddles of Nature!
+
+These atheologians have seized upon the principle of the conservation of
+energy, the "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is
+transformed" formula, the theological origin of which is seen in
+Descartes, and have made use of it as a means whereby we are able to
+dispense with God. "The world built to last," Brunhes comments,
+"resisting all wear and tear, or rather automatically repairing the
+rents that appear in it--what a splendid theme for oratorical
+amplification! But these same amplifications which served in the
+seventeenth century to prove the wisdom of the Creator have been used in
+our days as arguments for those who presume to do without Him." It is
+the old story: so-called scientific philosophy, the origin and
+inspiration of which is fundamentally theological or religious, ending
+in an atheology or irreligion, which is itself nothing else but theology
+and religion. Let us call to mind the comments of Ritschl upon this
+head, already quoted in this work.
+
+To-day the last word of science, or rather of scientific philosophy,
+appears to be that, by virtue of the degradation of energy, of the
+predominance of irreversible phenomena, the material, sensible world is
+travelling towards a condition of ultimate levelness, a kind of final
+homogeneity. And this brings to our mind the hypothesis, not only so
+much used but abused by Spencer, of a primordial homogeneity, and his
+fantastic theory of the instability of the homogeneous. An instability
+that required the atheological agnosticism of Spencer in order to
+explain the inexplicable transition from the homogeneous to the
+heterogeneous. For how, without any action from without, can any
+heterogeneity emerge from perfect and absolute homogeneity? But as it
+was necessary to get rid of every kind of creation, "the unemployed
+engineer turned metaphysician," as Papini called him, invented the
+theory of the instability of the homogeneous, which is more ... what
+shall I say? more mystical, and even more mythological if you like, than
+the creative action of God.
+
+The Italian positivist, Roberto Ardigo, was nearer the mark when,
+objecting to Spencer's theory, he said that the most natural supposition
+was that things always were as they are now, that always there have been
+worlds in process of formation, in the nebulous stage, worlds
+completely formed and worlds in process of dissolution; that
+heterogeneity, in short, is eternal. Another way, it will be seen, of
+not solving the riddle.
+
+Is this perhaps the solution? But in that case the Universe would be
+infinite, and in reality we are unable to conceive a Universe that is
+both eternal and limited such as that which served as the basis of
+Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence. If the Universe must be
+eternal, if within it and as regards each of its component worlds,
+periods in which the movement is towards homogeneity, towards the
+degradation of energy, must alternate with other periods in which the
+movement is towards heterogeneity, then it is necessary that the
+Universe should be infinite, that there should be scope, always and in
+each world, for some action coming from without. And, in fact, the body
+of God cannot be other than eternal and infinite.
+
+But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual
+levelling-down--or, we might say, its death--appears to be proved. And
+how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with
+the degradation of the energy of our world and return to
+unconsciousness, or will it rather grow according as the utilizable
+energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to
+retard this degradation and to dominate Nature?--for this it is that
+constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its
+extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at
+the expense of the other?
+
+The fact is that the best of our scientific work, the best of our
+industry (that part of it I mean--and it is a large part--that does not
+tend to destruction), is directed towards retarding this fatal process
+of the degradation of energy. And organic life, the support of our
+consciousness, is itself an effort to avoid, so far as it is possible,
+this fatal period, to postpone it.
+
+It is useless to seek to deceive ourselves with pagan paeans in praise
+of Nature, for as Leopardi, that Christian atheist, said with profound
+truth in his stupendous poem _La Ginestra_, Nature "gives us life like a
+mother, but loves us like a step-mother." The origin of human
+companionship was opposition to Nature; it was horror of impious Nature
+that first linked men together in the bonds of society. It is human
+society, in effect, the source of reflective consciousness and of the
+craving for immortality, that inaugurates the state of grace upon the
+state of Nature; and it is man who, by humanizing and spiritualizing
+Nature by his industry, supernaturalizes her.
+
+In two amazing sonnets which he called _Redemption_, the tragic
+Portuguese poet, Antero de Quental, embodied his dream of a spirit
+imprisoned, not in atoms or ions or crystals, but--as is natural in a
+poet--in the sea, in trees, in the forest, in the mountains, in the
+wind, in all material individualities and forms; and he imagines that a
+day may come when all these captive souls, as yet in the limbo of
+existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought
+from the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these forms, the
+creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve like a baseless vision. It
+is a magnificent dream of the penetration of everything by
+consciousness.
+
+May it not be that the Universe, our Universe--who knows if there are
+others?--began with a zero of spirit--and zero is not the same as
+nothing--and an infinite of matter, and that its goal is to end with an
+infinite of spirit and a zero of matter? Dreams!
+
+May it be that everything has a soul and that this soul begs to be
+freed?
+
+    _Oh tierras de Alvargonzalez,
+    en el corazon de Espana,
+    tierras pobres, tierras tristes,
+    tan tristes que tienen alma!_
+
+sings our poet Antonio Machado in his _Campos de Castilla_.[50] Is the
+sadness of the field in the fields themselves or in us who look upon
+them? Do they not suffer? But what can an individual soul in a world of
+matter actually be? Is it the rock or the mountain that is the
+individual? Is it the tree?
+
+And nevertheless the fact always remains that spirit and matter are at
+strife. This is the thought that Espronceda expressed when he wrote:
+
+    _Aqui, para vivir en santa calma,
+    o sobra la materia, o sobra el alma._[51]
+
+And is there not in the history of thought, or of human imagination if
+you prefer it, something that corresponds to this process of the
+reduction of matter, in the sense of a reduction of everything to
+consciousness?
+
+Yes, there is, and its author is the first Christian mystic, St. Paul of
+Tarsus, the Apostle of the Gentiles, he who because he had never with
+his bodily eyes looked upon the face of the fleshly and mortal Christ,
+the ethical Christ, created within himself an immortal and religious
+Christ--he who was caught up into the third heaven and there beheld
+secret and unspeakable things (2 Cor. xii.). And this first Christian
+mystic dreamed also of a final triumph of spirit, of consciousness, and
+this is what in theology is technically called the apocatastasis or
+restitution.
+
+In 1 Cor. xv. 26-28 he tells us that "the last enemy that shall be
+destroyed is death, for he hath put all things under his feet. But when
+he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is
+excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall
+be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto
+him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all": _hina he
+ho theos panta en pasin_--that is to say, that the end is that God,
+Consciousness, will end by being all in all.
+
+This doctrine is completed by Paul's teaching, in his Epistle to the
+Ephesians, with regard to the end of the whole history of the world. In
+this Epistle, as you know, he represents Christ--by whom "were all
+things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and
+invisible" (Col. i. 16)--as the head over all things (Eph. i. 22), and
+in him, in this head, we all shall be raised up that we may live in the
+communion of saints and that we "may be able to comprehend with all
+saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to
+know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge" (Eph. iii. 18, 19).
+And this gathering of us together in Christ, who is the head and, as it
+were, the compendium, of Humanity, is what the Apostle calls the
+gathering or collecting together or recapitulating of all things in
+Christ, _anakephalaiosthai ta panta en Christo_. And this
+recapitulation--_anakephalaiosis_, anacefaleosis--the end of the world's
+history and of the human race, is merely another aspect of the
+apocatastasis. The apocatastasis, God's coming to be all in all, thus
+resolves itself into the anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all
+things in Christ, in Humanity--Humanity therefore being the end of
+creation. And does not this apocatastasis, this humanization or
+divinization of all things, do away with matter? But if matter, which is
+the principle of individuation, the scholastic _principium
+individuationis_, is once done away with, does not everything return to
+pure consciousness, which, in its pure purity, neither knows itself nor
+is it anything that can be conceived or felt? And if matter be
+abolished, what support is there left for spirit?
+
+Thus a different train of thought leads us to the same difficulties, the
+same unthinkabilities.
+
+It may be said, on the other hand, that the apocatastasis, God's coming
+to be all in all, presupposes that there was a time when He was not all
+in all. The supposition that all beings shall attain to the enjoyment of
+God implies the supposition that God shall attain to the enjoyment of
+all beings, for the beatific vision is mutual, and God is perfected in
+being better known, and His being is nourished and enriched with souls.
+
+Following up the track of these wild dreams, we might imagine an
+unconscious God, slumbering in matter, and gradually wakening into
+consciousness of everything, consciousness of His own divinity; we might
+imagine the whole Universe becoming conscious of itself as a whole and
+becoming conscious of each of its constituent consciousnesses, becoming
+God. But in that case, how did this unconscious God begin? Is He not
+matter itself? God would thus be not the beginning but the end of the
+Universe; but can that be the end which was not the beginning? Or can it
+be that outside time, in eternity, there is a difference between
+beginning and end? "The soul of all things cannot be bound by that very
+thing--that is, matter--which it itself has bound," says Plotinus
+(_Enn._ ii., ix. 7). Or is it not rather the Consciousness of the Whole
+that strives to become the consciousness of each part and to make each
+partial consciousness conscious of itself--that is, of the total
+consciousness? Is not this universal soul a monotheist or solitary God
+who is in process of becoming a pantheist God? And if it is not so, if
+matter and pain are alien to God, wherefore, it will be asked, did God
+create the world? For what purpose did He make matter and introduce
+pain? Would it not have been better if He had not made anything? What
+added glory does He gain by the creation of angels or of men whose fall
+He must punish with eternal torment? Did He perhaps create evil for the
+sake of remedying it? Or was redemption His design, redemption complete
+and absolute, redemption of all things and of all men? For this
+hypothesis is neither more rational nor more pious than the other.
+
+In so far as we attempt to represent eternal happiness to ourselves, we
+are confronted by a series of questions to which there is no
+satisfactory--that is, rational--answer, and it matters not whether the
+supposition from which we start be monotheist, or pantheist, or even
+panentheist.
+
+Let us return to the Pauline apocatastasis.
+
+Is it not possible that in becoming all in all God completes Himself,
+becomes at last fully God, an infinite consciousness embracing all
+consciousnesses? And what is an infinite consciousness? Since
+consciousness supposes limitation, or rather since consciousness is
+consciousness of limitation, of distinction, does it not thereby exclude
+infinitude? What value has the notion of infinitude applied to
+consciousness? What is a consciousness that is all consciousness,
+without anything outside it that is not consciousness? In such a case,
+of what is consciousness the consciousness? Of its content? Or may it
+not rather be that, starting from chaos, from absolute unconsciousness,
+in the eternity of the past, we continually approach the apocatastasis
+or final apotheosis without ever reaching it?
+
+May not this apocatastasis, this return of all things to God, be rather
+an ideal term to which we unceasingly approach--some of us with fleeter
+step than others--but which we are destined never to reach? May not the
+absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would
+die if it were to be realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope?
+And there is no place for hope when once possession has been realized,
+for hope, desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say, that
+all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others,
+but all having to pass some time through the same degree of growth,
+whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the
+infinite, at God, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal
+happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order
+that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness?
+
+Follow more questions to which there is no answer. "He shall be all in
+all," says the Apostle. But will His mode of being in each one be
+different or will it be the same for all alike? Will not God be wholly
+in one of the damned? Is He not in his soul? Is He not in what is called
+hell? And in what sense is He in hell?
+
+Whence arise new problems, those relating to the opposition between
+heaven and hell, between eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness.
+
+May it not be that in the end all shall be saved, including Cain and
+Judas and Satan himself, as Origen's development of the Pauline
+apocatastasis led him to hope?
+
+When our Catholic theologians seek to justify rationally--or in other
+words, ethically--the dogma of the eternity of the pains of hell, they
+put forward reasons so specious, ridiculous, and childish, that it would
+appear impossible that they should ever have obtained currency. For to
+assert that since God is infinite, an offence committed against Him is
+infinite also and therefore demands an eternal punishment, is, apart
+from the inconceivability of an infinite offence, to be unaware that, in
+human ethics, if not in the human police system, the gravity of the
+offence is measured not by the dignity of the injured person but by the
+intention of the injurer, and that to speak of an infinite culpable
+intention is sheer nonsense, and nothing else. In this connection those
+words which Christ addressed to His Father are capable of application:
+"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and no man who
+commits an offence against God or his neighbour knows what he does. In
+human ethics, or if you like in human police regulations--that which is
+called penal law and is anything but law[52] eternal punishment is a
+meaningless phrase.
+
+"God is just and punishes us; that is all we need to know; as far as we
+are concerned the rest is merely curiosity." Such was the conclusion of
+Lamennais (_Essai_, etc., iv^e partie, chap, vii.), an opinion shared by
+many others. Calvin also held the same view. But is there anyone who is
+content with this? Pure curiosity!--to call this load that wellnigh
+crushes our heart pure curiosity!
+
+May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he
+wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to
+eternalize himself because he was evil? May we not say that it is not
+believing in the other life that makes a man good, but rather that being
+good makes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil?
+These states pertain to the sphere of ethics, not of religion: or,
+rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and
+the being good though doing evil to religion?
+
+Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner
+suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to
+sin?--for the damned sin without ceasing. This, however, is no solution
+of the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that
+punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as
+correction, has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples.
+And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police
+institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the
+worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to
+be shut up.
+
+But, on the other hand, as a religious conception and veiled in mystery,
+why not--although the idea revolts our feelings--an eternity of
+suffering? why not a God who is nourished by our suffering? Is our
+happiness the end of the Universe? or may we possibly sustain with our
+suffering some alien happiness? Let us read again in the _Eumenides_ of
+that terrible tragedian, AEschylus, those choruses of the Furies in
+which they curse the new gods for overturning the ancient laws and
+snatching Orestes from their hands--impassioned invectives against the
+Apollinian redemption. Does not redemption tear man, their captive and
+plaything, from the hands of the gods, who delight and amuse themselves
+in his sufferings, like children, as the tragic poet says, torturing
+beetles? And let us remember the cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou
+forsaken me?"
+
+Yes, why not an eternity of suffering? Hell is an eternalization of the
+soul, even though it be an eternity of pain. Is not pain essential to
+life?
+
+Men go on inventing theories to explain what they call the origin of
+evil. And why not the origin of good? Why suppose that it is good that
+is positive and original, and evil that is negative and derivatory?
+"Everything that is, in so far as it is, is good," St. Augustine
+affirmed. But why? What does "being good" mean? Good is good for
+something, conducive to an end, and to say that everything is good is
+equivalent to saying that everything is making for its end. But what is
+its end? Our desire is to eternalize ourselves, to persist, and we call
+good everything that conspires to this end and bad everything that tends
+to lessen or destroy our consciousness. We suppose that human
+consciousness is an end and not a means to something else which may not
+be consciousness, whether human or superhuman.
+
+All metaphysical optimism, such as that of Leibnitz, and all
+metaphysical pessimism, such as that of Schopenhauer, have no other
+foundation than this. For Leibnitz this world is the best because it
+conspires to perpetuate consciousness, and, together with consciousness,
+will, because intelligence increases will and perfects it, because the
+end of man is the contemplation of God; while for Schopenhauer this
+world is the worst of all possible worlds, because it conspires to
+destroy will, because intelligence, representation, nullifies the will
+that begot it.
+
+And similarly Franklin, who believed in another life, asserted that he
+was willing to live this life over again, the life that he had actually
+lived, "from its beginning to the end"; while Leopardi, who did not
+believe in another life, asserted that nobody would consent to live his
+life over again. These two views of life are not merely ethical, but
+religious; and the feeling of moral good, in so far as it is a
+teleological value, is of religious origin also.
+
+And to return to our interrogations: Shall not all be saved, shall not
+all be made eternal, and eternal not in suffering but in happiness,
+those whom we call good and those whom we call bad alike?
+
+And as regards this question of good and evil, does not the malice of
+him who judges enter in? Is the badness in the intention of him who does
+the deed or is it not rather in that of him who judges it to be bad? But
+the terrible thing is that man judges himself, creates himself his own
+judge.
+
+Who then shall be saved? And now the imagination puts forth another
+possibility--neither more nor less rational than all those which have
+just been put forward interrogatively--and that is that only those are
+saved who have longed to be saved, that only those are eternalized who
+have lived in an agony of hunger for eternity and for eternalization. He
+who desires never to die and believes that he shall never die in the
+spirit, desires it because he deserves it, or rather, only he desires
+personal immortality who carries his immortality within him. The man who
+does not long passionately, and with a passion that triumphs over all
+the dictates of reason, for his own immortality, is the man who does not
+deserve it, and because he does not deserve it he does not long for it.
+And it is no injustice not to give a man that which he does not know how
+to desire, for "ask, and it shall be given you." It may be that to each
+will be given that which he desired. And perhaps the sin against the
+Holy Ghost--for which, according to the Evangelist, there is no
+remission--is none other than that of not desiring God, not longing to
+be made eternal.
+
+    As is your sort of mind
+    So is your sort of search; you'll find
+    What you desire, and that's to be
+    A Christian,
+
+said Robert Browning in _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_.
+
+In his _Inferno_ Dante condemned the Epicureans, those who did not
+believe in another life, to something more terrible than the not having
+it, and that is the consciousness of not having it, and this he
+expressed in plastic form by picturing them shut up in their tombs for
+all eternity, without light, without air, without fire, without
+movement, without life (_Inferno_, x., 10-15).
+
+What cruelty is there in denying to a man that which he did not or could
+not desire? In the sixth book of his _AEneid_ (426-429) the gentle Virgil
+makes us hear the plaintive voices and sobbing of the babes who weep
+upon the threshold of Hades,
+
+    _Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens,
+    Infantumque animae flentes in limine primo,_
+
+unhappy in that they had but entered upon life and never known the
+sweetness of it, and whom, torn from their mothers' breasts, a dark day
+had cut off and drowned in bitter death--
+
+    _Quos dulcis vitae exsortes et at ubere raptos
+    Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo._
+
+But what life did they lose, if they neither knew life nor longed for
+it? And yet is it true that they never longed for it?
+
+It may be said that others craved life on their behalf, that their
+parents longed for them to be eternal to the end that they might be
+gladdened by them in paradise. And so a fresh field is opened up for the
+imagination--namely, the consideration of the solidarity and
+representivity of eternal salvation.
+
+There are many, indeed, who imagine the human race as one being, a
+collective and solidary individual, in whom each member may represent or
+may come to represent the total collectivity; and they imagine salvation
+as something collective. As something collective also, merit, and as
+something collective sin, and redemption. According to this mode of
+feeling and imagining, either all are saved or none is saved; redemption
+is total and it is mutual; each man is his neighbour's Christ.
+
+And is there not perhaps a hint of this in the popular Catholic belief
+with regard to souls in purgatory, the belief that the living may devote
+suffrages and apply merits to the souls of their dead? This sense of the
+transmission of merits, both to the living and the dead, is general in
+popular Catholic piety.
+
+Nor should it be forgotten that in the history of man's religious
+thought there has often presented itself the idea of an immortality
+restricted to a certain number of the elect, spirits representative of
+the rest and in a certain sense including them; an idea of pagan
+derivation--for such were the heroes and demi-gods--which sometimes
+shelters itself behind the pronouncement that there are many that are
+called and few that are chosen.
+
+Recently, while I was engaged upon this essay, there came into my hands
+the third edition of the _Dialogue sur la vie et sur la mort_, by
+Charles Bonnefon, a book in which imaginative conceptions similar to
+those that I have been setting forth find succinct and suggestive
+expression. The soul cannot live without the body, Bonnefon says, nor
+the body without the soul, and thus neither birth nor death has any real
+existence--strictly speaking, there is no body, no soul, no birth, no
+death, all of which are abstractions and appearances, but only a
+thinking life, of which we form part and which can neither be born nor
+die. Hence he is led to deny human individuality and to assert that no
+one can say "I am" but only "we are," or, more correctly, "there is in
+us." It is humanity, the species, that thinks and loves in us. And souls
+are transmitted in the same way that bodies are transmitted. "The living
+thought or the thinking life which we are will find itself again
+immediately in a form analogous to that which was our origin and
+corresponding with our being in the womb of a pregnant woman." Each of
+us, therefore, has lived before and will live again, although he does
+not know it. "If humanity is gradually raised above itself, when the
+last man dies, the man who will contain all the rest of mankind in
+himself, who shall say that he may not have arrived at that higher order
+of humanity such as exists elsewhere, in heaven?... As we are all bound
+together in solidarity, we shall all, little by little, gather the
+fruits of our travail." According to this mode of imagining and
+thinking, since nobody is born, nobody dies, no single soul has finished
+its struggle but many times has been plunged into the midst of the human
+struggle "ever since the type of embryo corresponding with the same
+consciousness was represented in the succession of human phenomena." It
+is obvious that since Bonnefon begins by denying personal individuality,
+he leaves out of account our real longing, which is to save our
+individuality; but on the other hand, since he, Bonnefon, is a personal
+individual and feels this longing, he has recourse to the distinction
+between the called and the chosen, and to the idea of representative
+spirits, and he concedes to a certain number of men this representative
+individual immortality. Of these elect he says that "they will be
+somewhat more necessary to God than we ourselves." And he closes this
+splendid dream by supposing that "it is not impossible that we shall
+arrive by a series of ascensions at the supreme happiness, and that our
+life shall be merged in the perfect Life as a drop of water in the sea.
+Then we shall understand," he continues, "that everything was
+necessary, that every philosophy and every religion had its hour of
+truth, and that in all our wanderings and errors and in the darkest
+moments of our history we discerned the light of the distant beacon, and
+that we were all predestined to participate in the Eternal Light. And if
+the God whom we shall find again possesses a body--and we cannot
+conceive a living God without a body--we, together with each of the
+myriads of races that the myriads of suns have brought forth, shall be
+the conscious cells of his body. If this dream should be fulfilled, an
+ocean of love would beat upon our shores and the end of every life would
+be to add a drop of water to this ocean's infinity." And what is this
+cosmic dream of Bonnefon's but the plastic representation of the Pauline
+apocatastasis?
+
+Yes, this dream, which has its origin far back in the dawn of
+Christianity, is fundamentally the same as the Pauline anacefaleosis,
+the fusion of all men in Man, in the whole of Humanity embodied in a
+Person, who is Christ, and the fusion not only of all men but of all
+things, and the subsequent subjection of all things to God, in order
+that God, Consciousness, may be all in all. And this supposes a
+collective redemption and a society beyond the grave.
+
+In the middle of the eighteenth century, two pietists of Protestant
+origin, Johann Jakob Moser and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, gave a new
+force and value to the Pauline anacefaleosis. Moser "declared that his
+religion consisted not in holding certain doctrines to be true and in
+living a virtuous life conformably therewith, but in being reunited to
+God through Christ. But this demands the thorough knowledge--a knowledge
+that goes on increasing until the end of life--of one's own sins and
+also of the mercy and patience of God, the transformation of all natural
+feelings, the appropriation of the atonement wrought by the death of
+Christ, the enjoyment of peace with God in the permanent witness of the
+Holy Spirit to the remission of sins, the ordering of life according to
+the pattern of Christ, which is the fruit of faith alone, the drawing
+near to God and the intercourse of the soul with Him, the disposition to
+die in grace and the joyful expectation of the Judgement which will
+bestow blessedness in the more intimate enjoyment of God and in the
+_commerce with all the saints_" (Ritschl, _Geschichte des Pietismus_,
+vol. iii., Sec. 43). The commerce with all the saints--that is to say, the
+eternal human society. And for his part, Oetinger considers eternal
+happiness not as the contemplation of God in His infinitude, but, taking
+the Epistle to the Ephesians as his authority, as the contemplation of
+God in the harmony of the creature with Christ. The commerce with all
+the saints was, according to him, essential to the content of eternal
+happiness. It was the realization of the kingdom of God, which thus
+comes to be the kingdom of Man. And in his exposition of these doctrines
+of the two pietists, Ritschl confesses _(op. cit._, iii., Sec. 46) that
+both witnesses have with these doctrines contributed something to
+Protestantism that is of like value with the theological method of
+Spener, another pietist.
+
+We see, therefore, that the Christian, mystical, inward longing ever
+since St. Paul, has been to give human finality, or divine finality, to
+the Universe, to save human consciousness, and to save it by converting
+all humanity into a person. This longing is expressed in the
+anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things, all things in earth
+and in heaven, the visible and the invisible, in Christ, and also in the
+apocatastasis, the return of all things to God, to consciousness, in
+order that God may be all in all. And does not God's being all in all
+mean that all things shall acquire consciousness and that in this
+consciousness everything that has happened will come to life again, and
+that everything that has existed in time will be eternalized? And within
+the all, all individual consciousnesses, those which have been, those
+that are, and those that will be, and as they have been, as they are,
+and as they will be, will exist in a condition of society and
+solidarity.
+
+But does not this awakening to consciousness of everything that has
+been, necessarily involve a fusion of the identical, an amalgamation of
+like things? In this conversion of the human race into a true society in
+Christ, a communion of saints, a kingdom of heaven, will not individual
+differences, tainted as they are with deceit and even with sin, be
+obliterated, and in the perfect society will that alone remain of each
+man which was the essential part of him? Would it not perhaps result,
+according to Bonnefon's supposition, that this consciousness that lived
+in the twentieth century in this corner of this earth would feel itself
+to be the same with other such consciousnesses as have lived in other
+centuries and perhaps in other worlds?
+
+And how can we conceive of an effective and real union, a substantial
+and intimate union, soul with soul, of all those who have been?
+
+    If any two creatures grew into one
+    They would do more than the world has done,
+
+said Browning in _The Flight of the Duchess_; and Christ has told us
+that where two or three are gathered together in His name, there is He
+in the midst of them.
+
+Heaven, then, so it is believed by many, is society, a more perfect
+society than that of this world; it is human society fused into a
+person. And there are not wanting some who believe that the tendency of
+all human progress is the conversion of our species into one collective
+being with real consciousness--is not perhaps an individual human
+organism a kind of confederation of cells?--and that when it shall have
+acquired full consciousness, all those who have existed will come to
+life again in it.
+
+Heaven, so many think, is society. Just as no one can live in isolation,
+so no one can survive in isolation. No one can enjoy God in heaven who
+sees his brother suffering in hell, for the sin and the merit were
+common to both. We think with the thoughts of others and we feel with
+the feelings of others. To see God when God shall be all in all is to
+see all things in God and to live in God with all things.
+
+This splendid dream of the final solidarity of mankind is the Pauline
+anacefaleosis and apocatastasis. We Christians, said the Apostle (I Cor.
+xii. 27) are the body of Christ, members of Him, flesh of His flesh and
+bone of His bone (Eph. v. 30), branches of the vine.
+
+But in this final solidarization, in this true and supreme
+_Christination_ of all creatures, what becomes of each individual
+consciousness? what becomes of Me, of this poor fragile I, this I that
+is the slave of time and space, this I which reason tells me is a mere
+passing accident, but for the saving of which I live and suffer and hope
+and believe? Granting that the human finality of the Universe is saved,
+that consciousness is saved, would I resign myself to make the sacrifice
+of this poor I, by which and by which alone I know this finality and
+this consciousness?
+
+And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we reach the summit
+of the tragedy, the very heart of it--the sacrifice of our own
+individual consciousness upon the altar of the perfected Human
+Consciousness, of the Divine Consciousness.
+
+But is there really a tragedy? If we could attain to a clear vision of
+this anacefaleosis, if we could succeed in understanding and feeling
+that we were going to enrich Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in
+surrendering ourselves utterly to Him? Would the stream that flows into
+the sea, and feels in the freshness of its waters the bitterness of the
+salt of the ocean, wish to flow back to its source? would it wish to
+return to the cloud which drew its life from the sea? is not its joy to
+feel itself absorbed?
+
+And yet....
+
+Yes, in spite of everything, this is the climax of the tragedy.
+
+And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not
+absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to
+approach and never to arrive, it longs for a never-ending longing, for
+an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled.
+And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something
+and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows
+without ceasing in consciousness and in longing. Do not write upon the
+gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of
+hell, _Lasciate ogni speranza!_ Do not destroy time! Our life is a hope
+which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its
+turn begets hope. Give us leave to live! The eternity that is like an
+eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death. Thus do
+ideas exist, but not thus do men live. Thus do ideas exist in the
+God-Idea, but not thus can men live in the living God, in the God-Man.
+
+An eternal purgatory, then, rather than a heaven of glory; an eternal
+ascent. If there is an end of all suffering, however pure and
+spiritualized we may suppose it to be, if there is an end of all desire,
+what is it that makes the blessed in paradise go on living? If in
+paradise they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love Him?
+And if even there, in the heaven of glory, while they behold God little
+by little and closer and closer, yet without ever wholly attaining to
+Him, there does not always remain something more for them to know and
+desire, if there does not always remain a substratum of doubt, how shall
+they not fall asleep?
+
+Or, to sum up, if in heaven there does not remain something of this
+innermost tragedy of the soul, what sort of a life is that? Is there
+perhaps any greater joy than that of remembering misery--and to remember
+it is to feel it--in time of felicity? Does not the prison haunt the
+freed prisoner? Does he not miss his former dreams of liberty?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mythological dreams! it will be said. And I have not pretended that they
+are anything else. But has not the mythological dream its content of
+truth? Are not dream and myth perhaps revelations of an inexpressible
+truth, of an irrational truth, of a truth that cannot be proven?
+
+Mythology! Perhaps; but, as in the days of Plato, we must needs
+mythologize when we come to deal with the other life. But we have just
+seen that whenever we seek to give a form that is concrete, conceivable,
+or in other words, rational, to our primary, primordial, and fundamental
+longing for an eternal life conscious of itself and of its personal
+individuality, esthetic, logical, and ethical absurdities are multiplied
+and there is no way of conceiving the beatific vision and the
+apocatastasis that is free from contradictions and inconsistencies.
+
+And nevertheless!...
+
+Nevertheless, yes, we must needs long for it, however absurd it may
+appear to us; nay, more, we must needs believe in it, in some way or
+another, in order that we may live. In order that we may live, eh? not
+in order that we may understand the Universe. We must needs believe in
+it, and to believe in it is to be religious. Christianity, the only
+religion which we Europeans of the twentieth century are really capable
+of feeling, is, as Kierkegaard said, a desperate sortie (_Afsluttende
+uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, ii., i., cap. i.), a sortie which can be
+successful only by means of the martyrdom of faith, which is, according
+to this same tragic thinker, the crucifixion of reason.
+
+Not without reason did he who had the right to do so speak of the
+foolishness of the cross. Foolishness, without doubt, foolishness. And
+the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was not altogether wide of
+the mark in making one of the characters in his ingenious conversations
+say that he thought better of those who were confined in a lunatic
+asylum on account of religious mania than of those who, while professing
+the same religious principles, kept their wits and appeared to enjoy
+life very well outside of the asylums.[53] But those who are at large,
+are they not really, thanks to God, mad too? Are there not mild
+madnesses, which not only permit us to mix with our neighbours without
+danger to society, but which rather enable us to do so, for by means of
+them we are able to attribute a meaning and finality to life and society
+themselves?
+
+And after all, what is madness and how can we distinguish it from
+reason, unless we place ourselves outside both the one and the other,
+which for us is impossible?
+
+Madness perhaps it is, and great madness, to seek to penetrate into the
+mystery of the Beyond; madness to seek to superimpose the
+self-contradictory dreams of our imagination upon the dictates of a sane
+reason. And a sane reason tells us that nothing can be built up without
+foundations, and that it is not merely an idle but a subversive task to
+fill the void of the unknown with fantasies. And nevertheless....
+
+We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the
+grave, and in an individual and personal life, in a life in which each
+one of us may feel his consciousness and fed that it is united, without
+being confounded, with all other consciousnesses in the Supreme
+Consciousness, in God; we must needs believe in that other life in order
+that we may live this life, and endure it, and give it meaning and
+finality. And we must needs believe in that other life, perhaps, in
+order that we may deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may
+be that he neither deserves it nor will obtain it who does not
+passionately desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason.
+
+And above all, we must feel and act as if an endless continuation of
+our earthly life awaited us after death; and if it be that nothingness
+is the fate that awaits us we must not, in the words of _Obermann_, so
+act that it shall be a just fate.
+
+And this leads us directly to the examination of the practical or
+ethical aspect of our sole problem.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[47] _De natura deorum_, lib. i., cap. 41.
+
+[48] _Op. cit._
+
+[49] _Guia Espiritual que desembaraza al alma y la conduce por el
+interior camino para alcanzar la perfecta contemplacion y el rico tesoro
+de la paz interior_, book iii., chap. xviii., Sec. 185.
+
+[50]
+
+    O land of Alvargonzalez,
+    In the heart of Spain,
+    Sad land, poor land,
+    So sad that it has a soul!
+
+[51]
+
+    To living a life of blessed quiet here on earth,
+    Either matter or soul is a hindrance.
+
+[52] Eso que llaman derecho penal, y que es todo menos derecho.
+
+[53] _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table._
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM
+
+     L'homme est perissable. II se peut; mais perissons en resistant,
+     et, si le neant nous est reserve, ne faisons pas que ce soit une
+     justice.--SENANCOUR: _Obermann_, lettre xc.
+
+
+Several times in the devious course of these essays I have defined, in
+spite of my horror of definitions, my own position with regard to the
+problem that I have been examining; but I know there will always be some
+dissatisfied reader, educated in some dogmatism or other, who will say:
+"This man comes to no conclusion, he vacillates--now he seems to affirm
+one thing and then its contrary--he is full of contradictions--I can't
+label him. What is he?" Just this--one who affirms contraries, a man of
+contradiction and strife, as Jeremiah said of himself; one who says one
+thing with his heart and the contrary with his head, and for whom this
+conflict is the very stuff of life. And that is as clear as the water
+that flows from the melted snow upon the mountain tops.
+
+I shall be told that this is an untenable position, that a foundation
+must be laid upon which to build our action and our works, that it is
+impossible to live by contradictions, that unity and clarity are
+essential conditions of life and thought, and that it is necessary to
+unify thought. And this leaves us as we were before. For it is precisely
+this inner contradiction that unifies my life and gives it its practical
+purpose.
+
+Or rather it is the conflict itself, it is this self-same passionate
+uncertainty, that unifies my action and makes me live and work.
+
+We think in order that we may live, I have said; but perhaps it were
+more correct to say that we think because we live, and the form of our
+thought corresponds with that of our life. Once more I must repeat that
+our ethical and philosophical doctrines in general are usually merely
+the justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, of our actions. Our
+doctrines are usually the means we seek in order to explain and justify
+to others and to ourselves our own mode of action. And this, be it
+observed, not merely for others, but for ourselves. The man who does not
+really know why he acts as he does and not otherwise, feels the
+necessity of explaining to himself the motive of his action and so he
+forges a motive. What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are
+usually but the pretexts for it. The very same reason which one man may
+regard as a motive for taking care to prolong his life may be regarded
+by another man as a motive for shooting himself.
+
+Nevertheless it cannot be denied that reasons, ideas, have an influence
+upon human actions, and sometimes even determine them, by a process
+analogous to that of suggestion upon a hypnotized person, and this is so
+because of the tendency in every idea to resolve itself into action--an
+idea being simply an inchoate or abortive act. It was this notion that
+suggested to Fouillee his theory of idea-forces. But ordinarily ideas
+are forces which we accommodate to other forces, deeper and much less
+conscious.
+
+But putting all this aside for the present, what I wish to establish is
+that uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our
+final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable
+dogmatic foundation, may be the basis of an ethic.
+
+He who bases or thinks that he bases his conduct--his inward or his
+outward conduct, his feeling or his action--upon a dogma or theoretical
+principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a
+fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or
+shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If, the earth that he
+thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for
+we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains
+undaunted among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily the
+stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him. For if a man
+should tell you that he does not defraud or cuckold his best friend only
+because he is afraid of hell, you may depend upon it that neither would
+he do so even if he were to cease to believe in hell, but that he would
+invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the honour of the
+human race.
+
+But he who believes that he is sailing, perhaps without a set course, on
+an unstable and sinkable raft, must not be dismayed if the raft gives
+way beneath his feet and threatens to sink. Such a one thinks that he
+acts, not because he deems his principle of action to be true, but in
+order to make it true, in order to prove its truth, in order to create
+his own spiritual world.
+
+My conduct must be the best proof, the moral proof, of my supreme
+desire; and if I do not end by convincing myself, within the bounds of
+the ultimate and irremediable uncertainty, of the truth of what I hope
+for, it is because my conduct is not sufficiently pure. Virtue,
+therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not
+faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith. There is no
+security or repose--so far as security and repose are obtainable in this
+life, so essentially insecure and unreposeful--save in conduct that is
+passionately good.
+
+Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory. "If any man will do
+His will--the will of Him that sent me," said Jesus, "he shall know of
+the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself" (John
+vii. 17); and there is a well-known saying of Pascal: "Begin by taking
+holy water and you will end by becoming a believer." And pursuing a
+similar train of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the
+opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to regard the
+Christian religion as void of truth so long as he had not put it to the
+proof by keeping its precepts and commandments (Ritschl, _Geschichte des
+Pietismus_, book vii., 43).
+
+What is our heart's truth, anti-rational though it be? The immortality
+of the human soul, the truth of the persistence of our consciousness
+without any termination whatsoever, the truth of the human finality of
+the Universe. And what is its moral proof? We may formulate it thus: Act
+so that in your own judgement and in the judgement of others you may
+merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that
+you may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you were to die
+to-morrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. The end of
+morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to
+discover the finality that belongs to it--if indeed it has any
+finality--and to discover it by acting.
+
+More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that series that
+constitutes the immense monody of his _Obermann_, Senancour wrote the
+words which I have put at the head of this chapter--and of all the
+spiritual descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, Senancour was the
+most profound and the most intense; of all the men of heart and feeling
+that France has produced, not excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic.
+"Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it
+is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a
+just fate." Change this sentence from its negative to the positive
+form--"And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it
+shall be an unjust fate"--and you get the firmest basis of action for
+the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.
+
+That which is irreligious and demoniacal, that which incapacitates us
+for action and leaves us without any ideal defence against our evil
+tendencies, is the pessimism that Goethe puts into the mouth of
+Mephistopheles when he makes him say, "All that has achieved existence
+deserves to be destroyed" (_denn alles was ensteht ist wert doss es
+zugrunde geht_). This is the pessimism which we men call evil, and not
+that other pessimism that consists in lamenting what it fears to be true
+and struggling against this fear--namely, that everything is doomed to
+annihilation in the end. Mephistopheles asserts that everything that
+exists deserves to be destroyed, annihilated, but not that everything
+will be destroyed or annihilated; and we assert that everything that
+exists deserves to be exalted and eternalized, even though no such fate
+is in store for it. The moral attitude is the reverse of this.
+
+Yes, everything deserves to be eternalized, absolutely everything, even
+evil itself, for that which we call evil would lose its evilness in
+being eternalized, because it would lose its temporal nature. For the
+essence of evil consists in its temporal nature, in its not applying
+itself to any ultimate and permanent end.
+
+And it might not be superfluous here to say something about that
+distinction, more overlaid with confusion than any other, between what
+we are accustomed to call optimism and pessimism, a confusion not less
+than that which exists with regard to the distinction between
+individualism and socialism. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to form a
+clear idea as to what pessimism really is.
+
+I have just this very day read in the _Nation_ (July 6, 1912) an
+article, entitled "A Dramatic Inferno," that deals with an English
+translation of the works of Strindberg, and it opens with the following
+judicious observations: "If there were in the world a sincere and total
+pessimism, it would of necessity be silent. The despair which finds a
+voice is a social mood, it is the cry of misery which brother utters to
+brother when both are stumbling through a valley of shadows which is
+peopled with--comrades. In its anguish it bears witness to something
+that is good in life, for it presupposes sympathy ... The real gloom,
+the sincere despair, is dumb and blind; it writes no books, and feels no
+impulse to burden an intolerable universe with a monument more lasting
+than brass." Doubtless there is something of sophistry in this
+criticism, for the man who is really in pain weeps and even cries aloud,
+even if he is alone and there is nobody to hear him, simply as a means
+of alleviating his pain, although this perhaps may be a result of social
+habits. But does not the lion, alone in the desert, roar if he has an
+aching tooth? But apart from this, it cannot be denied that there is a
+substance of truth underlying these remarks. The pessimism that protests
+and defends itself cannot be truly said to be pessimism. And, in truth,
+still less is it pessimism to hold that nothing ought to perish although
+all things may be doomed to annihilation, while on the other hand it is
+pessimism to affirm that all things ought to be annihilated even though
+nothing may perish.
+
+Pessimism, moreover, may possess different values. There is a
+eudemonistic or economic pessimism, that which denies happiness; there
+is an ethical pessimism, that which denies the triumph of moral good;
+and there is a religious pessimism, that which despairs of the human
+finality of the Universe, of the eternal salvation of the individual
+soul.
+
+All men deserve to be saved, but, as I have said in the previous
+chapter, he above all deserves immortality who desires it passionately
+and even in the face of reason. An English writer, H.G. Wells, who has
+taken upon himself the role of the prophet (a thing not uncommon in his
+country), tells us in _Anticipations_ that "active and capable men of
+all forms of religious profession tend in practice to disregard the
+question of immortality altogether." And this is because the religious
+professions of these active and capable men to whom Wells refers are
+usually simply a lie, and their lives are a lie, too, if they seek to
+base them upon religion. But it may be that at bottom there is not so
+much truth in what Wells asserts as he and others imagine. These active
+and capable men live in the midst of a society imbued with Christian
+principles, surrounded by institutions and social feelings that are the
+product of Christianity, and faith in the immortality of the soul exists
+deep down in their own souls like a subterranean river, neither seen nor
+heard, but watering the roots of their deeds and their motives.
+
+It must be admitted that there exists in truth no more solid foundation
+for morality than the foundation of the Catholic ethic. The end of man
+is eternal happiness, which consists in the vision and enjoyment of God
+_in saecula saeculorum_. Where it errs, however, is in the choice of the
+means conducive to this end; for to make the attainment of eternal
+happiness dependent upon believing or not believing in the Procession of
+the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son and not from the Father
+alone, or in the Divinity of Jesus, or in the theory of the Hypostatic
+Union, or even in the existence of God, is, as a moment's reflection
+will show, nothing less than monstrous. A human God--and that is the
+only kind of God we are able to conceive--would never reject him who was
+unable to believe in Him with his head, and it is not in his head but in
+his heart that the wicked man says that there is no God, which is
+equivalent to saying that he wishes that there may not be a God. If any
+belief could be bound up with the attainment of eternal happiness it
+would be the belief in this happiness itself and in the possibility of
+it.
+
+And what shall we say of that other proposition of the king of pedants,
+to the effect that we have not come into the world to be happy but to
+fulfil our duty (_Wir sind nicht auf der Welt, um gluecklich zu sein,
+sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu tun_)? If we are in the world _for_
+something (_um etwas_), whence can this _for_ be derived but from the
+very essence of our own will, which asks for happiness and not duty as
+the ultimate end? And if it is sought to attribute some other value to
+this _for_, an objective value, as some Sadducean pedant would say, then
+it must be recognized that the objective reality, that which would
+remain even though humanity should disappear, is as indifferent to our
+duty as to our happiness, is as little concerned with our morality as
+with our felicity. I am not aware that Jupiter, Uranus, or Sirius would
+allow their course to be affected by the fact that we are or are not
+fulfilling our duty any more than by the fact that we are or are not
+happy.
+
+Such considerations must appear to these pedants to be characterized by
+a ridiculous vulgarity and a dilettante superficiality. (The
+intellectual world is divided into two classes--dilettanti on the one
+hand, and pedants on the other.) What choice, then, have we? The modern
+man is he who resigns himself to the truth and is content to be ignorant
+of the synthesis of culture--witness what Windelband says on this head
+in his study of the fate of Hoelderlin (_Praeludien_, i.). Yes, these men
+of culture are resigned, but there remain a few poor savages like
+ourselves for whom resignation is impossible. We do not resign ourselves
+to the idea of having one day to disappear, and the criticism of the
+great Pedant does not console us.
+
+The quintessence of common sense was expressed by Galileo Galilei when
+he said: "Some perhaps will say that the bitterest pain is the loss of
+life, but I say that there are others more bitter; for whosoever is
+deprived of life is deprived at the same time of the power to lament,
+not only this, but any other loss whatsoever." Whether Galileo was
+conscious or not of the humour of this sentence I do not know, but it is
+a tragic humour.
+
+But, to turn back, I repeat that if the attainment of eternal happiness
+could be bound up with any particular belief, it would be with the
+belief in the possibility of its realization. And yet, strictly
+speaking, not even with this. The reasonable man says in his head,
+"There is no other life after this," but only the wicked says it in his
+heart. But since the wicked man is possibly only a man who has been
+driven to despair, will a human God condemn him because of his despair?
+His despair alone is misfortune enough.
+
+But in any event let us adopt the Calderonian formula in _La Vida es
+Sueno_:
+
+    _Que estoy sonando y que quiero
+    obrar hacer bien, pues no se pierde
+    el hacer bien aun en suenos_[54]
+
+But are good deeds really not lost? Did Calderon know? And he added:
+
+    _Acudamos a lo eterno
+    que es la fama vividora
+    donde ni duermen las dichas
+    no las grandezas reposan_[55]
+
+Is it really so? Did Calderon know?
+
+Calderon had faith, robust Catholic faith; but for him who lacks faith,
+for him who cannot believe in what Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca
+believed, there always remains the attitude of _Obermann_.
+
+If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let
+us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory; let us
+fight against it quixotically.
+
+And not only do we fight against destiny in longing for what is
+irrational, but in acting in such a way that we make ourselves
+irreplaceable, in impressing our seal and mark upon others, in acting
+upon our neighbours in order to dominate them, in giving ourselves to
+them in order that we may eternalize ourselves so far as we can.
+
+Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make
+the theoretical fact--if this expression does not involve a
+contradiction in terms--the fact that each one of us is unique and
+irreplaceable, that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when
+we die, a practical truth.
+
+For in fact each man is unique and irreplaceable; there cannot be any
+other I; each one of us--our soul, that is, not our life--is worth the
+whole Universe. I say the spirit and not the life, for the ridiculously
+exaggerated value which those attach to human life who, not really
+believing in the spirit--that is to say, in their personal
+immortality--tirade against war and the death penalty, for example, is a
+value which they attach to it precisely because they do not really
+believe in the spirit of which life is the servant. For life is of use
+only in so far as it serves its lord and master, spirit, and if the
+master perishes with the servant, neither the one nor the other is of
+any great value.
+
+And to act in such a way as to make our annihilation an injustice, in
+such a way as to make our brothers, our sons, and our brothers' sons,
+and their sons' sons, feel that we ought not to have died, is something
+that is within the reach of all.
+
+The essence of the doctrine of the Christian redemption is in the fact
+that he who suffered agony and death was the unique man--that is, Man,
+the Son of Man, or the Son of God; that he, because he was sinless, did
+not deserve to have died; and that this propitiatory divine victim died
+in order that he might rise again and that he might raise us up from the
+dead, in order that he might deliver us from death by applying his
+merits to us and showing us the way of life. And the Christ who gave
+himself for his brothers in humanity with an absolute self-abnegation is
+the pattern for our action to shape itself on.
+
+All of us, each one of us, can and ought to determine to give as much
+of himself as he possibly can--nay, to give more than he can, to exceed
+himself, to go beyond himself, to make himself irreplaceable, to give
+himself to others in order that he may receive himself back again from
+them. And each one in his own civil calling or office. The word office,
+_officium_, means obligation, debt, but in the concrete, and that is
+what it always ought to mean in practice. We ought not so much to try to
+seek that particular calling which we think most fitting and suitable
+for ourselves, as to make a calling of that employment in which chance,
+Providence, or our own will has placed us.
+
+Perhaps Luther rendered no greater service to Christian civilization
+than that of establishing the religious value of the civil occupation,
+of shattering the monastic and medieval idea of the religious calling,
+an idea involved in the mist of human passions and imaginations and the
+cause of terrible life tragedies. If we could but enter into the
+cloister and examine the religious vocation of those whom the
+self-interest of their parents had forced as children into a novice's
+cell and who had suddenly awakened to the life of the world--if indeed
+they ever do awake!--or of those whom their own self-delusions had led
+into it! Luther saw this life of the cloister at close quarters and
+suffered it himself, and therefore he was able to understand and feel
+the religious value of the civil calling, to which no man is bound by
+perpetual vows.
+
+All that the Apostle said in the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the
+Ephesians with regard to the respective functions of Christians in the
+Church must be transferred and applied to the civil or
+non-ecclesiastical life, for to-day among ourselves the
+Christian--whether he know it or not, and whether he like it or not--is
+the citizen, and just as the Apostle exclaimed, "I am a Roman citizen!"
+each one of us, even the atheist, might exclaim "I am a Christian!" And
+this demands the _civilizing_, in the sense of dis-ecclesiasticizing, of
+Christianity, which was Luther's task, although he himself eventually
+became the founder of a Church.
+
+There is a common English phrase, "the right man in the right place." To
+which we might rejoin, "Cobbler, to thy last!" Who knows what is the
+post that suits him best and for which he is most fitted? Does a man
+himself know it better than others or do they know it better than he?
+Who can measure capacities and aptitudes? The religious attitude,
+undoubtedly, is to endeavour to make the occupation in which we find
+ourselves our vocation, and only in the last resort to change it for
+another.
+
+This question of the proper vocation is possibly the gravest and most
+deep-seated of social problems, that which is at the root of all the
+others. That which is known _par excellence_ as the social question is
+perhaps not so much a problem of the distribution of wealth, of the
+products of labour, as a problem of the distribution of avocations, of
+the modes of production. It is not aptitude--a thing impossible to
+ascertain without first putting it to the test and not always clearly
+indicated in a man, for with regard to the majority of callings a man is
+not born but made--it is not special aptitude, but rather social,
+political, and customary reasons that determine a man's occupation. At
+certain times and in certain countries it is caste and heredity; at
+other times and in other places, the guild or corporation; in later
+times machinery--in almost all cases necessity; liberty scarcely ever.
+And the tragedy of it culminates in those occupations, pandering to
+evil, in which the soul is sacrificed for the sake of the livelihood, in
+which the workman works with the consciousness, not of the uselessness
+merely, but of the social perversity, of his work, manufacturing the
+poison that will kill him, the weapon, perchance, with which his
+children will be murdered. This, and not the question of wages, is the
+gravest problem.
+
+I shall never forget a scene of which I was a witness that took place
+on the banks of the river that flows through Bilbao, my native town. A
+workman was hammering at something in a shipwright's yard, working
+without putting his heart into his work, as if he lacked energy or
+worked merely for the sake of getting a wage, when suddenly a woman's
+voice was heard crying, "Help! help!" A child had fallen into the river.
+Instantly the man was transformed. With an admirable energy,
+promptitude, and sang-froid he threw off his clothes and plunged into
+the water to rescue the drowning infant.
+
+Possibly the reason why there is less bitterness in the agrarian
+socialist movement than in that of the towns is that the field labourer,
+although his wages and his standard of living are no better than those
+of the miner or artisan, has a clearer consciousness of the social value
+of his work. Sowing corn is a different thing from extracting diamonds
+from the earth.
+
+And it may be that the greatest social progress consists in a certain
+indifferentiation of labour, in the facility for exchanging one kind of
+work for another, and that other not perhaps a more lucrative, but a
+nobler one--for there are degrees of nobility in labour. But unhappily
+it is only too seldom that a man who keeps to one occupation without
+changing is concerned with making a religious vocation of it, or that
+the man who changes his occupation for another does so from any
+religious motive.
+
+And do you not know cases in which a man, justifying his action on the
+ground that the professional organism to which he belongs and in which
+he works is badly organized and does not function as it ought, will
+evade the strict performance of his duty on the pretext that he is
+thereby fulfilling a higher duty? Is not this insistence upon the
+literal carrying out of orders called disciplinarianism, and do not
+people speak disparagingly of bureaucracy and the Pharisaism of public
+officials? And cases occur not unlike that of an intelligent and
+studious military officer who should discover the deficiencies of his
+country's military organization and denounce them to his superiors and
+perhaps to the public--thereby fulfilling his duty--and who, when on
+active service, should refuse to carry out an operation which he was
+ordered to undertake, believing that there was but scant probability of
+success or rather certainty of failure, so long as these deficiencies
+remained unremedied. He would deserve to be shot. And as for this
+question of Pharisaism ...
+
+And there is always a way of obeying an order while yet retaining the
+command, a way of carrying out what one believes to be an absurd
+operation while correcting its absurdity, even though it involve one's
+own death. When in my bureaucratic capacity I have come across some
+legislative ordinance that has fallen into desuetude because of its
+manifest absurdity, I have always endeavoured to apply it. There is
+nothing worse than a loaded pistol which nobody uses left lying in some
+corner of the house; a child finds it, begins to play with it, and kills
+its own father. Laws that have fallen into desuetude are the most
+terrible of all laws, when the cause of the desuetude is the badness of
+the law.
+
+And these are not groundless suppositions, and least of all in our
+country. For there are many who, while they go about looking out for I
+know not what ideal--that is to say, fictitious duties and
+responsibilities--neglect the duty of putting their whole soul into the
+immediate and concrete business which furnishes them with a living; and
+the rest, the immense majority, perform their task perfunctorily, merely
+for the sake of nominally complying with their duty--_para cumplir_, a
+terribly immoral phrase--in order to get themselves out of a difficulty,
+to get the job done, to qualify for their wages without earning them,
+whether these wages be pecuniary or otherwise.
+
+Here you have a shoemaker who lives by making shoes, and makes them with
+just enough care and attention to keep his clientele together without
+losing custom. Another shoemaker lives on a somewhat higher spiritual
+plane, for he has a proper love for his work, and out of pride or a
+sense of honour strives for the reputation of being the best shoemaker
+in the town or in the kingdom, even though this reputation brings him no
+increase of custom or profit, but only renown and prestige. But there is
+a still higher degree of moral perfection in this business of
+shoemaking, and that is for the shoemaker to aspire to become for his
+fellow-townsmen the one and only shoemaker, indispensable and
+irreplaceable, the shoemaker who looks after their footgear so well that
+they will feel a definite loss when he dies--when he is "dead to them,"
+not merely "dead"[56]--and they will feel that he ought not to have
+died. And this will result from the fact that in working for them he was
+anxious to spare them any discomfort and to make sure that it should not
+be any preoccupation with their feet that should prevent them from being
+at leisure to contemplate the higher truths; he shod them for the love
+of them and for the love of God in them--he shod them religiously.
+
+I have chosen this example deliberately, although it may perhaps appear
+to you somewhat pedestrian. For the fact is that in this business of
+shoemaking, the religious, as opposed to the ethical, sense is at a very
+low ebb.
+
+Working men group themselves in associations, they form co-operative
+societies and unions for defence, they fight very justly and nobly for
+the betterment of their class; but it is not clear that these
+associations have any great influence on their moral attitude towards
+their work. They have succeeded in compelling employers to employ only
+such workmen, and no others, as the respective unions shall designate in
+each particular case; but in the selection of those designated they pay
+little heed to their technical fitness. Often the employer finds it
+almost impossible to dismiss an inefficient workman on account of his
+inefficiency, for his fellow-workers take his part. Their work,
+moreover, is often perfunctory, performed merely as a pretext for
+receiving a wage, and instances even occur when they deliberately
+mishandle it in order to injure their employer.
+
+In attempting to justify this state of things, it may be said that the
+employers are a hundred times more blameworthy than the workmen, for
+they are not concerned to give a better wage to the man who does better
+work, or to foster the general education and technical proficiency of
+the workman, or to ensure the intrinsic goodness of the article
+produced. The improvement of the product--which, apart from reasons of
+industrial and mercantile competition, ought to be in itself and for the
+good of the consumers, for charity's sake, the chief end of the
+business--is not so regarded either by employers or employed, and this
+is because neither the one nor the other have any religious sense of
+their social function. Neither of them seek to make themselves
+irreplaceable. The evil is aggravated when the business takes the
+unhappy form of the impersonal limited company, for where there is no
+longer any personal signature there is no longer any of that pride which
+seeks to give the signature prestige, a pride which in its way is a
+substitute for the craving for eternalization. With the disappearance of
+the concrete individuality, the basis of all religion, the religious
+sense of the business calling disappears also.
+
+And what has been said of employers and workmen applies still more to
+members of the liberal professions and public functionaries. There is
+scarcely a single servant of the State who feels the religious bearing
+of his official and public duties. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory,
+nothing more confused, than the feeling among our people with regard to
+their duties towards the State, and this sense of duty is still further
+obliterated by the attitude of the Catholic Church, whose action so far
+as the State is concerned is in strict truth anarchical. It is no
+uncommon thing to find among its ministers upholders of the moral
+lawfulness of smuggling and contraband as if in disobeying the legally
+constituted authority the smuggler and contrabandist did not sin against
+the Fourth Commandment of the law of God, which in commanding us to
+honour our father and mother commands us to obey all lawful authority in
+so far as the ordinances of such authority are not contrary (and the
+levying of these contributions is certainly not contrary) to the law of
+God.
+
+There are many who, since it is written "In the sweat of thy face shalt
+thou eat bread," regard work as a punishment, and therefore they
+attribute merely an economico-political, or at best an esthetic, value
+to the work of everyday life. For those who take this view--and it is
+the view principally held by the Jesuits--the business of life is
+twofold: there is the inferior and transitory business of winning a
+livelihood, of winning bread for ourselves and our children in an
+honourable, manner--and the elasticity of this honour is well known; and
+there is the grand business of our salvation, of winning eternal glory.
+This inferior or worldly business is to be undertaken not only so as to
+permit us, without deceiving or seriously injuring our neighbours, to
+live decently in accordance with our social position, but also so as to
+afford us the greatest possible amount of time for attending to the
+other main business of our life. And there are others who, rising
+somewhat above this conception of the work of our civil occupation, a
+conception which is economical rather than ethical, attain to an
+esthetic conception and sense of it, and this involves endeavouring to
+acquire distinction and renown in our occupation, the converting of it
+into an art for art's sake, for beauty's sake. But it is necessary to
+rise still higher than this, to attain to an ethical sense of our civil
+calling, to a sense which derives from our religious sense, from our
+hunger of eternalization. To work at our ordinary civil occupation, with
+eyes fixed on God, for the love of God, which is equivalent to saying
+for the love of our eternalization, is to make of this work a work of
+religion.
+
+That saying, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," does not
+mean that God condemned man to work, but to the painfulness of it. It
+would have been no condemnation to have condemned man to work itself,
+for work is the only practical consolation for having been born. And,
+for a Christian, the proof that God did not condemn man to work itself
+consists in the saying of the Scripture that, before the Fall, while he
+was still in a state of innocence, God took man and put him in the
+garden "to dress it and to keep it" (Gen. ii. 15). And how, in fact,
+would man have passed his time in Paradise if he had had no work to do
+in keeping it in order? And may it not be that the beatific vision
+itself is a kind of work?
+
+And even if work were our punishment, we ought to strive to make it, the
+punishment itself, our consolation and our redemption; and if we must
+needs embrace some cross or other, there is for each one of us no better
+cross than the cross of our own civil calling. For Christ did not say,
+"Take up my cross and follow me," but "Take up thy cross and follow me":
+every man his own cross, for the Saviour's cross the Saviour alone can
+bear. And the imitation of Christ, therefore, does not consist in that
+monastic ideal so shiningly set forth in the book that commonly bears
+the name of a Kempis, an ideal only applicable to a very limited number
+of persons and therefore anti-Christian; but to imitate Christ is to
+take up each one his own cross, the cross of his own civil
+occupation--civil and not merely religions--as Christ took up his cross,
+the cross of his calling, and to embrace it and carry it, looking
+towards God and striving to make each act of this calling a true prayer.
+In making shoes and because he makes them a man can gain heaven,
+provided that the shoemaker strives to be perfect, as a shoemaker, as
+our Father in heaven is perfect.
+
+Fourier, the socialist dreamer, dreamed of making work attractive in his
+phalansteries by the free choice of vocations and in other ways. There
+is no other way than that of liberty. Wherein consists the charm of the
+game of chance, which is a kind of work, if not in the voluntary
+submission of the player to the liberty of Nature--that is, to chance?
+But do not let us lose ourselves in a comparison between work and play.
+
+And the sense of making ourselves irreplaceable, of not meriting death,
+of making our annihilation, if it is annihilation that awaits us, an
+injustice, ought to impel us not only to perform our own occupation
+religiously, from love of God and love of our eternity and
+eternalization, but to perform it passionately, tragically if you like.
+It ought to impel us to endeavour to stamp others with our seal, to
+perpetuate ourselves in them and in their children by dominating them,
+to leave on all things the imperishable impress of our signature. The
+most fruitful ethic is the ethic of mutual imposition.
+
+Above all, we must recast in a positive form the negative commandments
+which we have inherited from the Ancient Law. Thus where it is written,
+"Thou shalt not lie!" let us understand, "Thou shalt always speak the
+truth, in season and out of season!" although it is we ourselves, and
+not others, who are judges in each case of this seasonableness. And for
+"Thou shalt not kill!" let us understand, "Thou shalt give life and
+increase it!" And for "Thou shalt not steal!" let us say, "Thou shalt
+increase the general wealth!" And for "Thou shalt not commit adultery!"
+"Thou shalt give children, healthy, strong, and good, to thy country and
+to heaven!" And thus with all the other commandments.
+
+He who does not lose his life shall not find it. Give yourself then to
+others, but in order to give yourself to them, first dominate them. For
+it is not possible to dominate except by being dominated. Everyone
+nourishes himself upon the flesh of that which he devours. In order that
+you may dominate your neighbour you must know and love him. It is by
+attempting to impose my ideas upon him that I become the recipient of
+his ideas. To love my neighbour is to wish that he may be like me, that
+he may be another I--that is to say, it is to wish that I may be he; it
+is to wish to obliterate the division between him and me, to suppress
+the evil. My endeavour to impose myself upon another, to be and live in
+him and by him, to make him mine--which is the same as making myself
+his--is that which gives religious meaning to human collectivity, to
+human solidarity.
+
+The feeling of solidarity originates in myself; since I am a society, I
+feel the need of making myself master of human society; since I am a
+social product, I must socialize myself, and from myself I proceed to
+God--who is I projected to the All--and from God to each of my
+neighbours.
+
+My immediate first impulse is to protest against the inquisitor and to
+prefer the merchant who comes to offer me his wares. But when my
+impressions are clarified by reflection, I begin to see that the
+inquisitor, when he acts from a right motive, treats me as a man, as an
+end in myself, and if he molests me it is from a charitable wish to save
+my soul; while the merchant, on the other hand, regards me merely as a
+customer, as a means to an end, and his indulgence and tolerance is at
+bottom nothing but a supreme indifference to my destiny. There is much
+more humanity in the inquisitor.
+
+Similarly there is much more humanity in war than in peace.
+Non-resistance to evil implies resistance to good, and to take the
+offensive, leaving the defensive out of the question, is perhaps the
+divinest thing in humanity. War is the school of fraternity and the bond
+of love; it is war that has brought peoples into touch with one
+another, by mutual aggression and collision, and has been the cause of
+their knowing and loving one another. Human love knows no purer embrace,
+or one more fruitful in its consequences, than that between victor and
+vanquished on the battlefield. And even the purified hate that springs
+from war is fruitful. War is, in its strictest sense, the sanctification
+of homicide; Cain is redeemed as a leader of armies. And if Cain had not
+killed his brother Abel, perhaps he would have died by the hand of Abel.
+God revealed Himself above all in war; He began by being the God of
+battles; and one of the greatest services of the Cross is that, in the
+form of the sword-hilt, it protects the hand that wields the sword.
+
+The enemies of the State say that Cain, the fratricide, was the founder
+of the State. And we must accept the fact and turn it to the glory of
+the State, the child of war. Civilization began on the day on which one
+man, by subjecting another to his will and compelling him to do the work
+of two, was enabled to devote himself to the contemplation of the world
+and to set his captive upon works of luxury. It was slavery that enabled
+Plato to speculate upon the ideal republic, and it was war that brought
+slavery about. Not without reason was Athena the goddess of war and of
+wisdom. But is there any need to repeat once again these obvious truths,
+which, though they have continually been forgotten, are continually
+rediscovered?
+
+And the supreme commandment that arises out of love towards God, and the
+foundation of all morality, is this: Yield yourself up entirely, give
+your spirit to the end that you may save it, that you may eternalize it.
+Such is the sacrifice of life.
+
+The individual _qua_ individual, the wretched captive of the instinct of
+preservation and of the senses, cares only about preserving himself, and
+all his concern is that others should not force their way into his
+sphere, should not disturb him, should not interrupt his idleness; and
+in return for their abstention or for the sake of example he refrains
+from forcing himself upon them, from interrupting their idleness, from
+disturbing them, from taking possession of them. "Do not do unto others
+what you would not have them do unto you," he translates thus: I do not
+interfere with others--let them not interfere with me. And he shrinks
+and pines and perishes in this spiritual avarice and this repellent
+ethic of anarchic individualism: each one for himself. And as each one
+is not himself, he can hardly live for himself.
+
+But as soon as the individual feels himself in society, he feels himself
+in God, and kindled by the instinct of perpetuation he glows with love
+towards God, and with a dominating charity he seeks to perpetuate
+himself in others, to perennialize his spirit, to eternalize it, to
+unnail God, and his sole desire is to seal his spirit upon other spirits
+and to receive their impress in return. He has shaken off the yoke of
+his spiritual sloth and avarice.
+
+Sloth, it is said, is the mother of all the vices; and in fact sloth
+does engender two vices--avarice and envy--which in their turn are the
+source of all the rest. Sloth is the weight of matter, in itself inert,
+within us, and this sloth, while it professes to preserve us by
+economizing our forces, in reality attenuates us and reduces us to
+nothing.
+
+In man there is either too much matter or too much spirit, or to put it
+better, either he feels a hunger for spirit--that is, for eternity--or
+he feels a hunger for matter--that is, submission to annihilation. When
+spirit is in excess and he feels a hunger for yet more of it, he pours
+it forth and scatters it abroad, and in scattering it abroad he
+amplifies it with that of others; and on the contrary, when a man is
+avaricious of himself and thinks that he will preserve himself better by
+withdrawing within himself, he ends by losing all--he is like the man
+who received the single talent: he buried it in order that he might not
+lose it, and in the end he was bereft of it. For to him that hath shall
+be given, but from him that hath but a little shall be taken away even
+the little that he hath.
+
+Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect, we are bidden,
+and this terrible precept--terrible because for us the infinite
+perfection of the Father is unattainable--must be our supreme rule of
+conduct. Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he
+achieves will be scarcely worth the trouble of achieving. It behoves us
+to aspire to the impossible, to the absolute and infinite perfection,
+and to say to the Father, "Father, I cannot--help Thou my impotence."
+And He acting in us will achieve it for us.
+
+And to be perfect is to be all, it is to be myself and to be all else,
+it is to be humanity, it is to be the Universe. And there is no other
+way of being all but to give oneself to all, and when all shall be in
+all, all will be in each one of us. The apocatastasis is more than a
+mystical dream: it is a rule of action, it is a beacon beckoning us to
+high exploits.
+
+And from it springs the ethic of invasion, of domination, of aggression,
+of inquisition if you like. For true charity is a kind of invasion--it
+consists in putting my spirit into other spirits, in giving them my
+suffering as the food and consolation for their sufferings, in awakening
+their unrest with my unrest, in sharpening their hunger for God with my
+hunger for God. It is not charity to rock and lull our brothers to sleep
+in the inertia and drowsiness of matter, but rather to awaken them to
+the uneasiness and torment of spirit.
+
+To the fourteen works of mercy which we learnt in the Catechism of
+Christian Doctrine there should sometimes be added yet another, that of
+awakening the sleeper. Sometimes, at any rate, and surely when the
+sleeper sleeps on the brink of a precipice, it is much more merciful to
+awaken him than to bury him after he is dead--let us leave the dead to
+bury their dead. It has been well said, "Whosoever loves thee dearly
+will make thee weep," and charity often causes weeping. "The love that
+does not mortify does not deserve so divine a name," said that ardent
+Portuguese apostle, Fr. Thome de Jesus,[57] who was also the author of
+this ejaculation--"O infinite fire, O eternal love, who weepest when
+thou hast naught to embrace and feed upon and many hearts to burn!" He
+who loves his neighbour burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood,
+in burning groans and distils itself in tears.
+
+And to do this is generosity, one of the two mother virtues which are
+born when inertia, sloth, is overcome. Most of our miseries come from
+spiritual avarice.
+
+The cure for suffering--which, as we have said, is the collision of
+consciousness with unconsciousness--is not to be submerged in
+unconsciousness, but to be raised to consciousness and to suffer more.
+The evil of suffering is cured by more suffering, by higher suffering.
+Do not take opium, but put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for
+when you sleep and no longer feel the suffering, you are not. And to be,
+that is imperative. Do not then close your eyes to the agonizing Sphinx,
+but look her in the face and let her seize you in her mouth and crunch
+you with her hundred thousand poisonous teeth and swallow you. And when
+she has swallowed you, you will know the sweetness of the taste of
+suffering.
+
+The way thereto in practice is by the ethic of mutual imposition. Men
+should strive to impose themselves upon one another, to give their
+spirits to one another, to seal one another's souls.
+
+There is matter for thought in the fact that the Christian ethic has
+been called an ethic of slaves. By whom? By anarchists! It is anarchism
+that is an ethic of slaves, for it is only the slave that chants the
+praises of anarchical liberty. Anarchism, no! but _panarchism_; not the
+creed of "Nor God nor master!" but that of "All gods and all masters!"
+all striving to become gods, to become immortal, and achieving this by
+dominating others.
+
+And there are so many ways of dominating. There is even a passive way,
+or one at least that is apparently passive, of fulfilling at times this
+law of life. Adaptation to environment, imitation, putting oneself in
+another's place, sympathy, in a word, besides being a manifestation of
+the unity of the species, is a mode of self-expansion, of being another.
+To be conquered, or at least to seem to be conquered, is often to
+conquer; to take what is another's is a way of living in him.
+
+And in speaking of domination, I do not mean the domination of the
+tiger. The fox also dominates by cunning, and the hare by flight, and
+the viper by poison, and the mosquito by its smallness, and the squid by
+the inky fluid with which it darkens the water and under cover of which
+it escapes. And no one is scandalized at this, for the same universal
+Father who gave its fierceness, its talons, and its jaws to the tiger,
+gave cunning to the fox, swift feet to the hare, poison to the viper,
+diminutiveness to the mosquito, and its inky fluid to the squid. And
+nobleness or ignobleness does not consist in the weapons we use, for
+every species and even every individual possesses its own, but rather in
+the way in which we use them, and above all in the cause in which we
+wield them.
+
+And among the weapons of conquest must be included the weapon of
+patience and of resignation, but a passionate patience and a passionate
+resignation, containing within itself an active principle and antecedent
+longings. You remember that famous sonnet of Milton--Milton, the great
+fighter, the great Puritan disturber of the spiritual peace, the singer
+of Satan--who, when he considered how his light was spent and that one
+talent which it is death to hide lodged with him useless, heard the
+voice of Patience saying to him,
+
+                        God doth not need
+    Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best
+    Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best: his state
+    Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
+    And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
+    They also serve who only stand and wait.
+
+They also serve who only stand and wait--yes, but it is when they wait
+for Him passionately, hungeringly, full of longing for immortality in
+Him.
+
+And we must impose ourselves, even though it be by our patience. "My cup
+is small, but I drink out of my cup," said the egoistical poet of an
+avaricious people.[58] No, out of my cup all drink, for I wish all to
+drink out of it; I offer it to them, and my cup grows according to the
+number of those who drink out of it, and all, in putting it to their
+lips, leave in it something of their spirit. And while they drink out of
+my cup, I also drink out of theirs. For the more I belong to myself, and
+the more I am myself, the more I belong to others; out of the fullness
+of myself I overflow upon my brothers, and as I overflow upon them they
+enter into me.
+
+"Be ye perfect, as your Father is perfect," we are bidden, and our
+Father is perfect because He is Himself and because He is in each one of
+His children who live and move and have their being in Him. And the end
+of perfection is that we all may be one (John xvii. 21), all one body in
+Christ (Rom. xii. 5), and that, at the last, when all things are subdued
+unto the Son, the Son himself may be subject to Him that put all things
+under him, that God may be all in all. And this is to make the Universe
+consciousness, to make Nature a society, and a human society. And then
+shall we be able confidently to call God Father.
+
+I am aware that those who say that ethics is a science will say that
+all this commentary of mine is nothing but rhetoric; but each man has
+his own language and his own passion--that is to say, each man who knows
+what passion is--and as for the man who knows it not, nothing will it
+avail him to know science.
+
+And the passion that finds its expression in this rhetoric, the devotees
+of ethical science call egotism. But this egotism is the only true
+remedy for egoism, spiritual avarice, the vice of preserving and
+reserving oneself and of not striving to perennialize oneself by giving
+oneself.
+
+"Be not, and ye shall be mightier than all that is," said Fr. Juan de
+los Angeles in one of his _Dialogos de la Conquista del Reina de Dios_
+(_Dial._, iii., 8); but what does this "Be not" mean? May it not mean
+paradoxically--and such a mode of expression is common with the
+mystics--the contrary of that which, at a first and literal reading, it
+would appear to mean? Is not the whole ethic of submission and quietism
+an immense paradox, or rather a great tragic contradiction? Is not the
+monastic, the strictly monastic, ethic an absurdity? And by the monastic
+ethic I mean that of the solitary Carthusian, that of the hermit, who
+flees from the world--perhaps carrying it with him nevertheless--in
+order that he may live quite alone with a God who is lonely as himself;
+not that of the Dominican inquisitor who scoured Provence in search of
+Albigensian hearts to burn.
+
+"Let God do it all," someone will say; but if man folds his arms, God
+will go to sleep.
+
+This Carthusian ethic and that scientific ethic which is derived from
+ethical science--oh, this science of ethics! rational and rationalistic
+ethics! pedantry of pedantry, all is pedantry!--yes, this perhaps is
+egoism and coldness of heart.
+
+There are some who say that they isolate themselves with God in order
+that they may the better work out their salvation, their redemption; but
+since sin is collective, redemption must be collective also. "The
+religious is the determination of the whole, and everything outside this
+is an illusion of the senses, and that is why the greatest criminal is
+at bottom innocent, a good-natured man and a saint" (Kierkegaard,
+_Afsluttende_, etc., ii., ii., cap. iv., sect. 2, _a_).
+
+Are we to understand, on the other hand, that men seek to gain the
+other, the eternal life, by renouncing this the temporal life? If the
+other life is anything, it must be a continuation of this, and only as
+such a continuation, more or less purified, is it mirrored in our
+desire; and if this is so, such as is this life of time, so will be the
+life of eternity.
+
+"This world and the other are like the two wives of one husband--if he
+pleases one he makes the other envious," said an Arab thinker, quoted by
+Windelband (_Das Heilige_, in vol. ii. of _Praeludien_); but such a
+thought could only have arisen in the mind of one who had failed to
+resolve the tragic conflict between his spirit and the world in a
+fruitful warfare, a practical contradiction. "Thy kingdom come" to us;
+so Christ taught us to pray to the Father, not "May we come to Thy
+kingdom"; and according to the primitive Christian belief the eternal
+life was to be realized on this earth itself and as a continuation of
+the earthly life. We were made men and not angels in order that we might
+seek our happiness through the medium of this life, and the Christ of
+the Christian Faith became, not an angelic, but a human, being,
+redeeming us by taking upon himself a real and effective body and not an
+appearance of one merely. And according to this same Faith, even the
+highest of the angelical hierarchy adore the Virgin, the supreme symbol
+of terrestrial Humanity. The angelical ideal, therefore, is not the
+Christian ideal, and still less is it the human ideal, nor can it be. An
+angel, moreover, is a neutral being, without sex and without country.
+
+It is impossible for us to feel the other life, the eternal life, I have
+already repeated more than once, as a life of angelical contemplation;
+it must be a life of action. Goethe said that "man must believe in
+immortality, since in his nature he has a right to it." And he added:
+"The conviction of our persistence arises in me from the concept of
+activity. If I work without ceasing to the end, Nature is obliged (_so
+ist die Natur verpflichtet_) to provide me with another form of
+existence, since my actual spirit can bear no more." Change Nature to
+God, and you have a thought that remains Christian in character, for the
+first Fathers of the Church did not believe that the immortality of the
+soul was a natural gift--that is to say, something rational--but a
+divine gift of grace. And that which is of grace is usually, in its
+essence, of justice, since justice is divine and gratuitous, not
+natural. And Goethe added: "I could begin nothing with an eternal
+happiness before me, unless new tasks and new difficulties were given me
+to overcome." And true it is that there is no happiness in a vacuity of
+contemplation.
+
+But may there not be some justification for the morality of the hermit,
+of the Carthusian, the ethic of the Thebaid? Might we not say, perhaps,
+that it is necessary to preserve these exceptional types in order that
+they may stand as everlasting patterns for mankind? Do not men breed
+racehorses, which are useless for any practical kind of work, but which
+preserve the purity of the breed and become the sires of excellent
+hackneys and hunters? Is there not a luxury of ethics, not less
+justifiable than any other sort of luxury? But, on the other hand, is
+not all this substantially esthetics, and not ethics, still less
+religion? May not the contemplative, medieval, monastic ideal be
+esthetical, and not religious nor even ethical? And after all, those of
+the seekers after solitude who have related to us their conversation
+when they were alone with God have performed an eternalizing work, they
+have concerned themselves with the souls of others. And by this alone,
+that it has given us an Eckhart, a Seuse, a Tauler, a Ruysbroek, a Juan
+de la Cruz, a Catherine of Siena, an Angela of Foligno, a Teresa de
+Jesus, is the cloister justified.
+
+But the chief of our Spanish Orders are the Predicadores, founded by
+Domingo de Guzman for the aggressive work of extirpating heresy; the
+Company of Jesus, a militia with the world as its field of operations
+(which explains its history); the order of the Escuelas Pias, also
+devoted to a work of an aggressive or invasive nature, that of
+instruction. I shall certainly be reminded that the reform of the
+contemplative Order of the Carmelites which Teresa de Jesus undertook
+was a Spanish work. Yes, Spanish it was, and in it men sought liberty.
+
+It was, in fact, the yearning for liberty, for inward liberty, which, in
+the troubled days of the Inquisition, led many choice spirits to the
+cloister. They imprisoned themselves in order that they might be more
+free. "Is it not a fine thing that a poor nun of San Jose can attain to
+sovereignty over the whole earth and the elements?" said St. Teresa in
+her _Life_. It was the Pauline yearning for liberty, the longing to
+shake off the bondage of the external law, which was then very severe,
+and, as Maestro Fray Luis de Leon said, very stubborn.
+
+But did they actually find liberty in the cloister? It is very doubtful
+if they did, and to-day it is impossible. For true liberty is not to rid
+oneself of the external law; liberty is consciousness of the law. Not he
+who has shaken off the yoke of the law is free, but he who has made
+himself master of the law. Liberty must be sought in the midst of the
+world, which is the domain of the law, and of sin, the offspring of the
+law. That which we must be freed from is sin, which is collective.
+
+Instead of renouncing the world in order that we may dominate it--and
+who does not know the collective instinct of domination of those
+religious Orders whose members renounce the world?--what we ought to do
+is to dominate the world in order that we may be able to renounce it.
+Not to seek poverty and submission, but to seek wealth in order that we
+may use it to increase human consciousness, and to seek power for the
+same end.
+
+It is curious that monks and anarchists should be at enmity with each
+other, when fundamentally they both profess the same ethic and are
+related by close ties of kinship. Anarchism tends to become a kind of
+atheistic monachism and a religious, rather than an ethical or
+economico-social, doctrine. The one party starts from the assumption
+that man is naturally evil, born in original sin, and that it is through
+grace that he becomes good, if indeed he ever does become good; and the
+other from the assumption that man is naturally good and is subsequently
+perverted by society. And these two theories really amount to the same
+thing, for in both the individual is opposed to society, as if the
+individual had preceded society and therefore were destined to survive
+it. And both ethics are ethics of the cloister.
+
+And the fact that guilt is collective must not actuate me to throw mine
+upon the shoulders of others, but rather to take upon myself the burden
+of the guilt of others, the guilt of all men; not to merge and sink my
+guilt in the total mass of guilt, but to make this total guilt my own;
+not to dismiss and banish my own guilt, but to open the doors of my
+heart to the guilt of all men, to centre it within myself and
+appropriate it to myself. And each one of us ought to help to remedy the
+guilt, and just because others do not do so. The fact that society is
+guilty aggravates the guilt of each member of it. "Someone ought to do
+it, but why should I? is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed
+amiability. Someone ought to do it, so why not I? is the cry of some
+earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous
+duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral
+evolution." Thus spoke Mrs. Annie Besant in her autobiography. Thus
+spoke theosophy.
+
+The fact that society is guilty aggravates the guilt of each one, and he
+is most guilty who most is sensible of the guilt. Christ, the innocent,
+since he best knew the intensity of the guilt, was in a certain sense
+the most guilty. In him the culpability, together with the divinity, of
+humanity arrived at the consciousness of itself. Many are wont to be
+amused when they read how, because of the most trifling faults, faults
+at which a man of the world would merely smile, the greatest saints
+counted themselves the greatest sinners. But the intensity of the fault
+is not measured by the external act, but by the consciousness of it, and
+an act for which the conscience of one man suffers acutely makes
+scarcely any impression on the conscience of another. And in a saint,
+conscience may be developed so fully and to such a degree of
+sensitiveness that the slightest sin may cause him more remorse than his
+crime causes the greatest criminal. And sin rests upon our consciousness
+of it, it is in him who judges and in so far as he judges. When a man
+commits a vicious act believing in good faith that he is doing a
+virtuous action, we cannot hold him morally guilty, while on the other
+hand that man is guilty who commits an act which he believes to be
+wrong, even though in itself the act is indifferent or perhaps
+beneficent. The act passes away, the intention remains, and the evil of
+the evil act is that it corrupts the intention, that in knowingly doing
+wrong a man is predisposed to go on doing it, that it blurs the
+conscience. And doing evil is not the same as being evil. Evil blurs the
+conscience, and not only the moral conscience but the general, psychical
+consciousness. And everything that exalts and expands consciousness is
+good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.
+
+And here we might raise the question which, according to Plato, was
+propounded by Socrates, as to whether virtue is knowledge, which is
+equivalent to asking whether virtue is rational.
+
+The ethicists--those who maintain that ethics is a science, those whom
+the reading of these divagations will provoke to exclaim, "Rhetoric,
+rhetoric, rhetoric!"--would appear to think that virtue is the fruit of
+knowledge, of rational study, and that even mathematics help us to be
+better men. I do not know, but for my part I feel that virtue, like
+religion, like the longing never to die--and all these are fundamentally
+the same thing--is the fruit of passion.
+
+But, I shall be asked, What then is passion? I do not know, or rather, I
+know full well, because I feel it, and since I feel it there is no need
+for me to define it to myself. Nay, more; I fear that if I were to
+arrive at a definition of it, I should cease to feel it and to possess
+it. Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object.
+It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something
+combustible to find the fire.
+
+That this may appear empty and sophistical well I know. And I shall also
+be told that there is the science of passion and the passion of science,
+and that it is in the moral sphere that reason and life unite together.
+
+I do not know, I do not know, I do not know.... And perhaps I may be
+saying fundamentally the same thing, although more confusedly, that my
+imaginary adversaries say, only more clearly, more definitely, and more
+rationally, those adversaries whom I imagine in order that I may have
+someone to fight. I do not know, I do not know.... But what they say
+freezes me and sounds to me as though it proceeded from emptiness of
+feeling.
+
+And, returning to our former question, Is virtue knowledge?--Is
+knowledge virtue? For they are two distinct questions. Virtue may be a
+science, the science of acting rightly, without every other science
+being therefore virtue. The virtue of Machiavelli is a science, and it
+cannot be said that his _virtu_ is always moral virtue It is well known,
+moreover, that the cleverest and the most learned men are not the best.
+
+No, no, no! Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to
+discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics
+how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be
+hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be the pedantry of logic, or of
+esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy.
+
+Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make
+either heroes or saints. Perhaps the saint is he who does good not for
+good's sake, but for God's sake, for the sake of eternalization.
+
+Perhaps, on the other hand, culture, or as I should say Culture--oh,
+this culture!--which is primarily the work of philosophers and men of
+science, is a thing which neither heroes nor saints have had any share
+in the making of. For saints have concerned themselves very little with
+the progress of human culture; they have concerned themselves rather
+with the salvation of the individual souls of those amongst whom they
+lived. Of what account in the history of human culture is our San Juan
+de la Cruz, for example--that fiery little monk, as culture, in perhaps
+somewhat uncultured phrase, has called him--compared with Descartes?
+
+All those saints, burning with religious charity towards their
+neighbours, hungering for their own and others' eternalization, who went
+about burning hearts, inquisitors, it may be--what have all those saints
+done for the progress of the science of ethics? Did any of them discover
+the categorical imperative, like the old bachelor of Koenigsberg, who, if
+he was not a saint, deserved to be one?
+
+The son of a famous professor of ethics, one who scarcely ever opened
+his lips without mentioning the categorical imperative, was lamenting to
+me one day the fact that he lived in a desolating dryness of spirit, in
+a state of inward emptiness. And I was constrained to answer him thus:
+"My friend, your father had a subterranean river flowing through his
+spirit, a fresh current fed by the beliefs of his early childhood, by
+hopes in the beyond; and while he thought that he was nourishing his
+soul with this categorical imperative or something of that sort, he was
+in reality nourishing it with those waters which had their spring in his
+childish days. And it may be that to you he has given the flower of his
+spirit, his rational doctrines of ethics, but not the root, not the
+subterranean source, not the irrational substratum."
+
+How was it that Krausism took root here in Spain, while Kantism and
+Hegelianism did not, although the two latter systems are much more
+profound, morally and philosophically, than the first? Because in
+transplanting the first, its roots were transplanted with it. The
+philosophical thought of a people or a period is, as it were, the
+flower, the thing that is external and above ground; but this flower, or
+fruit if you prefer it, draws its sap from the root of the plant, and
+this root, which is in and under the ground, is the religious sense. The
+philosophical thought of Kant, the supreme flower of the mental
+evolution of the Germanic people, has its roots in the religious feeling
+of Luther, and it is not possible for Kantism, especially the practical
+part of it, to take root and bring forth flower and fruit in peoples who
+have not undergone the experience of the Reformation and who perhaps
+were incapable of experiencing it. Kantism is Protestant, and we
+Spaniards are fundamentally Catholic. And if Krause struck some roots
+here--more numerous and more permanent than is commonly supposed--it is
+because Krause had roots in pietism, and pietism, as Ritschl has
+demonstrated in his _Geschichte des Pietismus_, has specifically
+Catholic roots and may be described as the irruption, or rather the
+persistence, of Catholic mysticism in the heart of Protestant
+rationalism. And this explains why not a few Catholic thinkers in Spain
+became followers of Krause.
+
+And since we Spaniards are Catholic--whether we know it or not, and
+whether we like it or not--and although some of us may claim to be
+rationalists or atheists, perhaps the greatest service we can render to
+the cause of culture, and of what is of more value than culture,
+religiousness--if indeed they are not the same thing--is in endeavouring
+to formulate clearly to ourselves this subconscious, social, or popular
+Catholicism of ours. And that is what I have attempted to do in this
+work.
+
+What I call the tragic sense of life in men and peoples is at any rate
+our tragic sense of life, that of Spaniards and the Spanish people, as
+it is reflected in my consciousness, which is a Spanish consciousness,
+made in Spain. And this tragic sense of life is essentially the Catholic
+sense of it, for Catholicism, and above all popular Catholicism, is
+tragic. The people abhors comedy. When Pilate--the type of the refined
+gentleman, the superior person, the esthete, the rationalist if you
+like--proposes to give the people comedy and mockingly presents Christ
+to them, saying, "Behold the man!" the people mutinies and shouts
+"Crucify him! Crucify him!" The people does not want comedy but tragedy.
+And that which Dante, the great Catholic, called the Divine Comedy, is
+the most tragical tragedy that has ever been written.
+
+And as I have endeavoured in these essays to exhibit the soul of a
+Spaniard, and therewithal the Spanish soul, I have curtailed the number
+of quotations from Spanish writers, while scattering with perhaps too
+lavish a hand those from the writers of other countries. For all human
+souls are brother-souls.
+
+And there is one figure, a comically tragic figure, a figure in which
+is revealed all that is profoundly tragic in the human comedy, the
+figure of Our Lord Don Quixote, the Spanish Christ, who resumes and
+includes in himself the immortal soul of my people. Perhaps the passion
+and death of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is the passion and
+death of the Spanish people, its death and resurrection. And there is a
+Quixotesque philosophy and even a Quixotesque metaphysic, there is a
+Quixotesque logic, and also a Quixotesque ethic and a Quixotesque
+religious sense--the religious sense of Spanish Catholicism. This is the
+philosophy, this is the logic, this is the ethic, this is the religious
+sense, that I have endeavoured to outline, to suggest rather than to
+develop, in this work. To develop it rationally, no; the Quixotesque
+madness does not submit to scientific logic.
+
+And now, before concluding and bidding my readers farewell, it remains
+for me to speak of the role that is reserved for Don Quixote in the
+modern European tragi-comedy.
+
+Let us see, in the next and last essay, what this may be.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[54] Act II., Scene 4: "I am dreaming and I wish to act rightly, for
+good deeds are not lost, though they be wrought in dreams."
+
+[55] Act III., Scene 10: "Let us aim at the eternal, the glory that does
+not wane, where bliss slumbers not and where greatness does not repose."
+
+[56] "Se _les_ muera," y no solo "se muera."
+
+[57] _Trabalhos de Jesus_, part i.
+
+[58] De Musset.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN TRAGI-COMEDY
+
+"A voice crying in the wilderness!"--ISA. xl. 3.
+
+
+Need is that I bring to a conclusion, for the present at any rate, these
+essays that threaten to become like a tale that has no ending. They have
+gone straight from my hands to the press in the form of a kind of
+improvization upon notes collected during a number of years, and in
+writing each essay I have not had before me any of those that preceded
+it. And thus they will go forth full of inward contradictions--apparent
+contradictions, at any rate--like life and like me myself.
+
+My sin, if any, has been that I have embellished them to excess with
+foreign quotations, many of which will appear to have been dragged in
+with a certain degree of violence. But I will explain this another time.
+
+A few years after Our Lord Don Quixote had journeyed through Spain,
+Jacob Boehme declared in his _Aurora_ (chap xi., Sec. 142) that he did not
+write a story or history related to him by others, but that he himself
+had had to stand in the battle, which he found to be full of heavy
+strivings, and wherein he was often struck down to the ground like all
+other men; and a little further on (Sec. 152) he adds: "Although I must
+become a spectacle of scorn to the world and the devil, yet my hope is
+in God concerning the life to come; in Him will I venture to hazard it
+and not resist or strive against the Spirit. Amen." And like this
+Quixote of the German intellectual world, neither will I resist the
+Spirit.
+
+And therefore I cry with the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and
+I send forth my cry from this University of Salamanca, a University that
+arrogantly styled itself _omnium scientiarum princeps_, and which
+Carlyle called a stronghold of ignorance and which a French man of
+letters recently called a phantom University; I send it forth from this
+Spain--"the land of dreams that become realities, the rampart of Europe,
+the home of the knightly ideal," to quote from a letter which the
+American poet Archer M. Huntington sent me the other day--from this
+Spain which was the head and front of the Counter-Reformation in the
+sixteenth century. And well they repay her for it!
+
+In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence of Catholicism. And
+the chief factors in _de-essentializing_ it--that is, in
+de-Catholicizing Europe--have been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and
+the Revolution, which for the ideal of an eternal, ultra-terrestrial
+life, have substituted the ideal of progress, of reason, of science, or,
+rather, of Science with the capital letter. And last of all, the
+dominant ideal of to-day, comes Culture.
+
+And in the second half of the nineteenth century, an age essentially
+unphilosophical and technical, dominated by a myopic specialism and by
+historical materialism, this ideal took a practical form, not so much in
+the popularization as in the vulgarization of science--or, rather, of
+pseudo-science--venting itself in a flood of cheap, popular, and
+propagandist literature. Science sought to popularize itself as if it
+were its function to come down to the people and subserve their
+passions, and not the duty of the people to rise to science and through
+science to rise to higher heights, to new and profounder aspirations.
+
+All this led Brunetiere to proclaim the bankruptcy of science, and this
+science--if you like to call it science--did in effect become bankrupt.
+And as it failed to satisfy, men continued their quest for happiness,
+but without finding it, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or in power,
+or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good conscience, or in
+culture. And the result was pessimism.
+
+Neither did the gospel of progress satisfy. What end did progress serve?
+Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the _Kulturkampf_ did
+not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I
+call the final finality is the real _hontos hon_. And the famous _maladie
+du siecle_, which announced itself in Rousseau and was exhibited more
+plainly in Senancour's _Obermann_ than in any other character, neither
+was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the
+soul, in the human finality of the Universe.
+
+The truest symbol of it is to be found in a creation of fiction, Dr.
+Faustus.
+
+This immortal Dr. Faustus, the product of the Renaissance and the
+Reformation, first comes into our ken at the beginning of the
+seventeenth century, when in 1604 he is introduced to us by Christopher
+Marlowe. This is the same character that Goethe was to rediscover two
+centuries later, although in certain respects the earlier Faust was the
+fresher and more spontaneous. And side by side with him Mephistopheles
+appears, of whom Faust asks: "What good will my soul do thy lord?"
+"Enlarge his kingdom," Mephistopheles replies. "Is that the reason why
+he tempts us thus?" the Doctor asks again, and the evil spirit answers:
+"_Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris_," which, mistranslated into
+Romance, is the equivalent of our proverb--"The misfortune of many is
+the consolation of fools." "Where we are is hell, and where hell is
+there must we ever be," Mephistopheles continues, to which Faust answers
+that he thinks hell's a fable and asks him who made the world. And
+finally this tragic Doctor, tortured with our torture, meets Helen, who,
+although no doubt Marlowe never suspected it, is none other than
+renascent Culture. And in Marlowe's _Faust_ there is a scene that is
+worth the whole of the second part of the _Faust_ of Goethe. Faust says
+to Helen: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss"--and he kisses
+her--
+
+    Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!
+    Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
+    Here will I dwell, for Helen is in these lips,
+    And all is dross that is not Helena.
+
+Give me my soul again!--the cry of Faust, the Doctor, when, after having
+kissed Helen, he is about to be lost eternally. For the primitive Faust
+has no ingenuous Margaret to save him. This idea of his salvation was
+the invention of Goethe. And is there not a Faust whom we all know, our
+own Faust? This Faust has studied Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine,
+and even Theology, only to find that we can know nothing, and he has
+sought escape in the open country (_hinaus ins weite Land_) and has
+encountered Mephistopheles, the embodiment of that force which, ever
+willing evil, ever achieves good in its own despite. This Faust has been
+led by Mephistopheles to the arms of Margaret, child of the
+simple-hearted people, she whom Faust, the overwise, had lost. And
+thanks to her--for she gave herself to him--this Faust is saved,
+redeemed by the people that believes with a simple faith. But there was
+a second part, for that Faust was the anecdotical Faust and not the
+categorical Faust of Goethe, and he gave himself again to Culture, to
+Helen, and begot Euphorion upon her, and everything ends among mystical
+choruses with the discovery of the eternal feminine. Poor Euphorion!
+
+And this Helen is the spouse of the fair Menelaus, the Helen whom Paris
+bore away, who was the cause of the war of Troy, and of whom the ancient
+Trojans said that no one should be incensed because men fought for a
+woman who bore so terrible a likeness to the immortal gods. But I
+rather think that Faust's Helen was that other Helen who accompanied
+Simon Magus, and whom he declared to be the divine wisdom. And Faust can
+say to her: Give me my soul again!
+
+For Helen with her kisses takes away our soul. And what we long for and
+have need of is soul--soul of bulk and substance.
+
+But the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution came, bringing
+Helen to us, or, rather, urged on by Helen, and now they talk to us
+about Culture and Europe.
+
+Europe! This idea of Europe, primarily and immediately of geographical
+significance, has been converted for us by some magical process into a
+kind of metaphysical category. Who can say to-day--in Spain, at any
+rate--what Europe is? I only know that it is a shibboleth (_vide_ my
+_Tres Ensayos_). And when I proceed to examine what it is that our
+Europeanizers call Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its
+periphery remains outside of it--Spain, of course, and also England,
+Italy, Scandinavia, Russia--and hence it is reduced to the central
+portion, Franco-Germany, with its annexes and dependencies.
+
+All this is the consequence, I repeat, of the Renaissance and the
+Reformation, which, although apparently they lived in a state of
+internecine war, were twin-brothers. The Italians of the Renaissance
+were all of them Socinians; the humanists, with Erasmus at their head,
+regarded Luther, the German monk, as a barbarian, who derived his
+driving force from the cloister, as did Bruno and Campanella. But this
+barbarian was their twin-brother, and though their antagonist he was
+also the antagonist of the common enemy. All this, I say, is due to the
+Renaissance and the Reformation, and to what was the offspring of these
+two, the Revolution, and to them we owe also a new Inquisition, that of
+science or culture, which turns against those who refuse to submit to
+its orthodoxy the weapons of ridicule and contempt.
+
+When Galileo sent his treatise on the earth's motion to the Grand Duke
+of Tuscany, he told him that it was meet that that which the higher
+authorities had determined should be believed and obeyed, and that he
+considered his treatise "as poetry or as a dream, and as such I desire
+your highness to receive it." And at other times he calls it a "chimera"
+or a "mathematical caprice." And in the same way in these essays, for
+fear also--why not confess it?--of the Inquisition, of the modern, the
+scientific, Inquisition, I offer as a poetry, dream, chimera, mystical
+caprice, that which springs from what is deepest in me. And I say with
+Galileo, _Eppur si muove!_ But is it only because of this fear? Ah, no!
+for there is another, more tragic Inquisition, and that is the
+Inquisition which the modern man, the man of culture, the European--and
+such am I, whether I will or not--carries within him. There is a more
+terrible ridicule, and that is the ridicule with which a man
+contemplates his own self. It is my reason that laughs at my faith and
+despises it.
+
+And it is here that I must betake me to my Lord Don Quixote in order
+that I may learn of him how to confront ridicule and overcome it, and a
+ridicule which perhaps--who knows?--he never knew.
+
+Yes, yes--how shall my reason not smile at these dilettantesque,
+would-be mystical, pseudo-philosophical interpretations, in which there
+is anything rather than patient study and--shall I say
+scientific?--objectivity and method? And nevertheless ... _eppur si
+muove!_
+
+_Eppur si muove!_ And I take refuge in dilettantism, in what a pedant
+would call _demi-mondaine_ philosophy, as a shelter against the pedantry
+of specialists, against the philosophy of the professional philosophers.
+And who knows?... Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there
+is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and
+the theology of the theologians.
+
+Let them talk to us of Europe! The civilization of Thibet is parallel
+with ours, and men who disappear like ourselves have lived and are
+living by it. And over all civilizations there hovers the shadow of
+Ecclesiastes, with his admonition, "How dieth the wise man?--as the
+fool" (ii. 16).
+
+Among the people of my country there is an admirable reply to the
+customary interrogation, "How are you?"[59] and it is "Living." And that
+is the truth--we are living, and living as much as all the rest. What
+can a man ask for more? And who does not recollect the verse?--
+
+    _Coda vez que considero
+    que me tengo de morir,
+    tiendo la capa en el suelo
+    y no me harto de dormir._[60]
+
+But no, not sleeping, but dreaming--dreaming life, since life is a
+dream.
+
+Among us Spaniards another phrase has very rapidly passed into current
+usage, the expression "It's a question of passing the time," or "killing
+the time." And, in fact, we make time in order to kill it. But there is
+something that has always preoccupied us as much as or more than passing
+the time--a formula which denotes an esthetical attitude--and that is,
+gaining eternity, which is the formula of the religious attitude. The
+truth is, we leap from the esthetic and the economic to the religious,
+passing over the logical and the ethical; we jump from art to religion.
+
+One of our younger novelists, Ramon Perez de Ayala, in his recent novel,
+_La Pata de la Raposa_, has told us that the idea of death is the trap,
+and spirit the fox or the wary virtue with which to circumvent the
+ambushes set by fatality, and he continues: "Caught in the trap, weak
+men and weak peoples lie prone on the ground ...; to robust spirits and
+strong peoples the rude shock of danger gives clear-sightedness; they
+quickly penetrate into the heart of the immeasurable beauty of life, and
+renouncing for ever their original hastiness and folly, emerge from the
+trap with muscles taut for action and with the soul's vigour, power, and
+efficiency increased a hundredfold." But let us see; weak men ... weak
+peoples ... robust spirits ... strong peoples ... what does all this
+mean? I do not know. What I think I know is that some individuals and
+peoples have not yet really thought about death and immortality, have
+not felt them, and that others have ceased to think about them, or
+rather ceased to feel them. And the fact that they have never passed
+through the religious period is not, I think, a matter for either men or
+peoples to boast about.
+
+The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to write about, and
+there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to it and accept it as it
+is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the
+"trap." But it has been said by Calderon that "to seek to persuade a man
+that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not
+console him for them, but is another misfortune in addition."[61] And,
+furthermore, "only the heart can speak to the heart," as Fray Diego de
+Estella said (_Vanidad del Mundo_, cap. xxi.).
+
+A short time ago a reply that I made to those who reproached us
+Spaniards for our scientific incapacity appeared to scandalize some
+people. After having remarked that the electric light and the steam
+engine function here in Spain just as well as in the countries where
+they were invented, and that we make use of logarithms as much as they
+do in the country where the idea of them was first conceived, I
+exclaimed, "Let others invent!"--a paradoxical expression which I do not
+retract. We Spaniards ought to appropriate to ourselves some of those
+sage counsels which Count Joseph de Maistre gave to the Russians, a
+people not unlike ourselves. In his admirable letters to Count
+Rasoumowski on public education in Russia, he said that a nation should
+not think the worse of itself because it was not made for science; that
+the Romans had no understanding of the arts, neither did they possess a
+mathematician, which, however, did not prevent them from playing their
+part in the world; and in particular we should take to heart everything
+that he said about that crowd of arrogant sciolists who idolize the
+tastes, the fashions, and the languages of foreign countries, and are
+ever ready to pull down whatever they despise--and they despise
+everything.
+
+We have not the scientific spirit? And what of that, if we have some
+other spirit? And who can tell if the spirit that we have is or is not
+compatible with the scientific spirit?
+
+But in saying "Let others invent!" I did not mean to imply that we must
+be content with playing a passive role. No. For them their science, by
+which we shall profit; for us, our own work. It is not enough to be on
+the defensive, we must attack.
+
+But we must attack wisely and cautiously. Reason must be our weapon. It
+is the weapon even of the fool. Our sublime fool and our exemplar, Don
+Quixote, after he had destroyed with two strokes of his sword that
+pasteboard visor "which he had fitted to his head-piece, made it anew,
+placing certain iron bars within it, in such a manner that he rested
+satisfied with its solidity, and without wishing to make a second trial
+of it, he deputed and held it in estimation of a most excellent
+visor."[62] And with the pasteboard visor on his head he made himself
+immortal--that is to say, he made himself ridiculous. For it was by
+making himself ridiculous that Don Quixote achieved his immortality.
+
+And there are so many ways of making ourselves ridiculous I ... Cournot
+said _(Traite de l'enchainement des idees fondamentales_, etc., Sec. 510):
+"It is best not to speak to either princes or peoples of the
+probabilities of death; princes will punish this temerity with disgrace;
+the public will revenge itself with ridicule." True, and therefore it is
+said that we must live as the age lives. _Corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum
+vocatur_ (Tacitus: _Germania_ 19).
+
+It is necessary to know how to make ourselves ridiculous, and not only
+to others but to ourselves. And more than ever to-day, when there is so
+much chatter about our backwardness compared with other civilized
+peoples, to-day when a parcel of shallow-brained critics say that we
+have had no science, no art, no philosophy, no Renaissance, (of this we
+had perhaps too much), no anything, these same critics being ignorant of
+our real history, a history that remains yet to be written, the first
+task being to undo the web of calumniation and protest that has been
+woven around it.
+
+Carducci, the author of the phrase about the _contorcimenti
+dell'affannosa grandiosita spagnola_, has written (in _Mosche Cochiere_)
+that "even Spain, which never attained the hegemony of the world of
+thought, had her Cervantes." But was Cervantes a solitary and isolated
+phenomenon, without roots, without ancestry, without a foundation? That
+an Italian rationalist, remembering that it was Spain that reacted
+against the Renaissance in his country, should say that Spain _non ebbe
+egemonia mai di pensiero_ is, however, readily comprehended. Was there
+no importance, was there nothing akin to cultural hegemony, in the
+Counter-Reformation, of which Spain was the champion, and which in point
+of fact began with the sack of Rome by the Spaniards, a providential
+chastisement of the city of the pagan popes of the pagan Renaissance?
+Apart from the question as to whether the Counter-Reformation was good
+or bad, was there nothing akin to hegemony in Loyola or the Council of
+Trent? Previous to this Council, Italy witnessed a nefarious and
+unnatural union between Christianity and Paganism, or rather, between
+immortalism and mortalism, a union to which even some of the Popes
+themselves consented in their souls; theological error was philosophical
+truth, and all difficulties were solved by the accommodating formula
+_salva fide_. But it was otherwise after the Council; after the Council
+came the open and avowed struggle between reason and faith, science and
+religion. And does not the fact that this change was brought about,
+thanks principally to Spanish obstinacy, point to something akin to
+hegemony?
+
+Without the Counter-Reformation, would the Reformation have followed the
+course that it did actually follow? Without the Counter-Reformation
+might not the Reformation, deprived of the support of pietism, have
+perished in the gross rationalism of the _Aufklaerung_, of the age of
+Enlightenment? Would nothing have been changed had there been no Charles
+I., no Philip II., our great Philip?
+
+A negative achievement, it will be said. But what is that? What is
+negative? what is positive? At what point in time--a line always
+continuing in the same direction, from the past to the future--does the
+zero occur which denotes the boundary between the positive and the
+negative? Spain, which is said to be the land of knights and rogues--and
+all of them rogues--has been the country most slandered by history
+precisely because it championed the Counter-Reformation. And because
+its arrogance has prevented it from stepping down into the public
+forum, into the world's vanity fair, and publishing its own
+justification.
+
+Let us leave on one side Spain's eight centuries of warfare against the
+Moors, during which she defended Europe from Mohammedanism, her work of
+internal unification, her discovery of America and the Indies--for this
+was the achievement of Spain and Portugal, and not of Columbus and Vasco
+da Gama--let us leave all this, and more than this, on one side, and it
+is not a little thing. Is it not a cultural achievement to have created
+a score of nations, reserving nothing for herself, and to have begotten,
+as the Conquistadores did, free men on poor Indian slaves? Apart from
+all this, does our mysticism count for nothing in the world of thought?
+Perhaps the peoples whose souls Helen will ravish away with her kisses
+may some day have to return to this mysticism to find their souls again.
+
+But, as everybody knows, Culture is composed of ideas and only of ideas,
+and man is only Culture's instrument. Man for the idea, and not the idea
+for man; the substance for the shadow. The end of man is to create
+science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to God
+in order, as I wrote years ago in my novel, _Amor y Pedagogia_. Man,
+apparently, is not even an idea. And at the end of all, the human race
+will fall exhausted at the foot of a pile of libraries--whole woods
+rased to the ground to provide the paper that is stored away in
+them--museums, machines, factories, laboratories ... in order to
+bequeath them--to whom? For God will surely not accept them.
+
+That horrible regenerationist literature, almost all of it an imposture,
+which the loss of our last American colonies provoked, led us into the
+pedantry of extolling persevering and silent effort--and this with great
+vociferation, vociferating silence--of extolling prudence, exactitude,
+moderation, spiritual fortitude, synteresis, equanimity, the social
+virtues, and the chiefest advocates of them were those of us who lacked
+them most. Almost all of us Spaniards fell into this ridiculous mode of
+literature, some more and some less. And so it befell that that
+arch-Spaniard Joaquin Costa, one of the least European spirits we ever
+had, invented his famous saying that we must Europeanize Spain, and,
+while proclaiming that we must lock up the sepulchre of the Cid with a
+sevenfold lock, Cid-like urged us to--conquer Africa! And I myself
+uttered the cry, "Down with Don Quixote!" and from this blasphemy, which
+meant the very opposite of what it said--such was the fashion of the
+hour--sprang my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_ and my cult of Quixotism
+as the national religion.
+
+I wrote that book in order to rethink _Don Quixote_ in opposition to the
+Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what
+was and still is for the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to
+me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he
+actually did put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover
+in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and
+under and over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to hunt down
+our philosophy in it.
+
+For the conviction continually grows upon me that our philosophy, the
+Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our
+life, in our action, in our mysticism, above all, and not in
+philosophical systems. It is concrete. And is there not perhaps as much
+philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel? The poetry of
+Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, _Don Quijote_, _La Vida es Sueno_, the
+_Subida al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept
+of life (_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_). And it was difficult for
+this philosophy of ours to formulate itself in the second half of the
+nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist,
+technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period
+essentially materialist and pessimist.
+
+Our language itself, like every cultured language, contains within
+itself an implicit philosophy.
+
+A language, in effect, is a potential philosophy. Platonism is the Greek
+language which discourses in Plato, unfolding its secular metaphors;
+scholasticism is the philosophy of the dead Latin of the Middle Ages
+wrestling with the popular tongues; the French language discourses in
+Descartes, the German in Kant and in Hegel, and the English in Hume and
+in Stuart Mill. For the truth is that the logical starting-point of all
+philosophical speculation is not the I, neither is it representation
+(_Vorstellung_), nor the world as it presents itself immediately to the
+senses; but it is mediate or historical representation, humanly
+elaborated and such as it is given to us principally in the language by
+means of which we know the world; it is not psychical but spiritual
+representation. When we think, we are obliged to set out, whether we
+know it not and whether we will or not, from what has been thought by
+others who came before us and who environ us. Thought is an inheritance.
+Kant thought in German, and into German he translated Hume and Rousseau,
+who thought in English and French respectively. And did not Spinoza
+think in Judeo-Portuguese, obstructed by and contending with Dutch?
+
+Thought rests upon prejudgements, and prejudgements pass into language.
+To language Bacon rightly ascribed not a few of the errors of the _idola
+fori_. But is it possible to philosophize in pure algebra or even in
+Esperanto? In order to see the result of such an attempt one has only to
+read the work of Avenarius on the criticism of pure experience (_reine
+Erfahrung_), of this prehuman or inhuman experience. And even Avenarius,
+who was obliged to invent a language, invented one that was based upon
+the Latin tradition, with roots which carry in their metaphorical
+implications a content of impure experience, of human social experience.
+
+All philosophy is, therefore, at bottom philology. And philology, with
+its great and fruitful law of analogical formations, opens wide the door
+to chance, to the irrational, to the absolutely incommensurable. History
+is not mathematics, neither is philosophy. And how many philosophical
+ideas are not strictly owing to something akin to rhyme, to the
+necessity of rightly placing a consonant! In Kant himself there is a
+great deal of this, of esthetic symmetry, rhyme.
+
+Representation is, therefore, like language, like reason itself--which
+is simply internal language--a social and racial product, and race, the
+blood of the spirit, is language, as Oliver Wendell Holmes has said, and
+as I have often repeated.
+
+It was in Athens and with Socrates that our Western philosophy first
+became mature, conscious of itself, and it arrived at this consciousness
+by means of the dialogue, of social conversation. And it is profoundly
+significant that the doctrine of innate ideas, of the objective and
+normative value of ideas, of what Scholasticism afterwards knew as
+Realism, should have formulated itself in dialogues. And these ideas,
+which constitute reality, are names, as Nominalism showed. Not that they
+may not be more than names (_flatus vocis_), but that they are nothing
+less than names. Language is that which gives us reality, and not as a
+mere vehicle of reality, but as its true flesh, of which all the rest,
+dumb or inarticulate representation, is merely the skeleton. And thus
+logic operates upon esthetics, the concept upon the expression, upon the
+word, and not upon the brute perception.
+
+And this is true even in the matter of love. Love does not discover that
+it is love until it speaks, until it says, I love thee! In Stendhal's
+novel, _La Chartreuse de Parme_, it is with a very profound intuition
+that Count Mosca, furious with jealousy because of the love which he
+believes unites the Duchess of Sanseverina with his nephew Fabrice, is
+made to say, "I must be calm; if my manner is violent the duchess,
+simply because her vanity is piqued, is capable of following Belgirate,
+and then, during the journey, chance may lead to a word which will give
+a name to the feelings they bear towards each other, and thereupon in a
+moment all the consequences will follow."
+
+Even so--all things were made by the word, and the word was in the
+beginning.
+
+Thought, reason--that is, living language--is an inheritance, and the
+solitary thinker of Aben Tofail, the Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as
+absurd as the ego of Descartes. The real and concrete truth, not the
+methodical and ideal, is: _homo sum, ergo cogito_. To feel oneself a man
+is more immediate than to think. But, on the other hand, History, the
+process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only
+in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man,
+each individual. _Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de
+Unamuno_. The individual is the end of the Universe.
+
+And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end
+of the Universe. The introspective individuality of the Spaniard was
+pointed out by Martin A.S. Hume in a passage in _The Spanish
+People_,[63] upon which I commented in an essay published in _La Espana
+Moderna_.[64]
+
+And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has not
+permitted the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical--or,
+rather, metaphysical--systems. And this in spite of Suarez, whose formal
+subtilties do not merit the name of philosophy.
+
+Our metaphysics, if we can be said to possess such a thing, has been
+metanthropics, and our metaphysicians have been philologists--or,
+rather, humanists--in the most comprehensive sense of the term.
+
+Menendez de Pelayo, as Benedetto Croce very truly said (_Estetica_,
+bibliographical appendix), was inclined towards metaphysical idealism,
+but he appeared to wish to take something from other systems, even from
+empirical theories. For this reason Croce considers that his work
+(referring to his _Historia de las ideas esteticas de Espana_) suffers
+from a certain uncertainty, from the theoretical point of view of its
+author, Menendez de Pelayo, which was that of a perfervid Spanish
+humanist, who, not wishing to disown the Renaissance, invented what he
+called Vivism, the philosophy of Luis Vives, and perhaps for no other
+reason than because he himself, like Vives, was an eclectic Spaniard of
+the Renaissance. And it is true that Menendez de Pelayo, whose
+philosophy is certainly all uncertainty, educated in Barcelona in the
+timidities of the Scottish philosophy as it had been imported into the
+Catalan spirit--that creeping philosophy of common sense, which was
+anxious not to compromise itself and yet was all compromise, and which
+is so well exemplified in Balmes--always shunned all strenuous inward
+combat and formed his consciousness upon compromises.
+
+Angel Ganivet, a man all divination and instinct, was more happily
+inspired, in my opinion, when he proclaimed that the Spanish philosophy
+was that of Seneca, the pagan Stoic of Cordoba, whom not a few
+Christians regarded as one of themselves, a philosophy lacking in
+originality of thought but speaking with great dignity of tone and
+accent. His accent was a Spanish, Latino-African accent, not Hellenic,
+and there are echoes of him in Tertullian--Spanish, too, at heart--who
+believed in the corporal and substantial nature of God and the soul, and
+who was a kind of Don Quixote in the world of Christian thought in the
+second century.
+
+But perhaps we must look for the hero of Spanish thought, not in any
+actual flesh-and-bone philosopher, but in a creation of fiction, a man
+of action, who is more real than all the philosophers--Don Quixote.
+There is undoubtedly a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also a
+Quixotic philosophy. May it not perhaps be that the philosophy of the
+Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and above all, in
+the order of abstract but deeply felt thought, that of our mystics, was,
+in its essence, none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John
+of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the divine warfare?
+
+And the philosophy of Don Quixote cannot strictly be called idealism; he
+did not fight for ideas. It was of the spiritual order; he fought for
+the spirit.
+
+Imagine Don Quixote turning his heart to religious speculation--as he
+himself once dreamed of doing when he met those images in bas-relief
+which certain peasants were carrying to set up in the retablo of their
+village church[65]--imagine Don Quixote given up to meditation upon
+eternal truths, and see him ascending Mount Carmel in the middle of the
+dark night of the soul, to watch from its summit the rising of that sun
+which never sets, and, like the eagle that was St. John's companion in
+the isle of Patmos, to gaze upon it face to face and scrutinize its
+spots. He leaves to Athena's owl--the goddess with the glaucous, or
+owl-like, eyes, who sees in the dark but who is dazzled by the light of
+noon--he leaves to the owl that accompanied Athena in Olympus the task
+of searching with keen eyes in the shadows for the prey wherewith to
+feed its young.
+
+And the speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like the practical
+Quixotism, madness, a daughter-madness to the madness of the Cross. And
+therefore it is despised by the reason. At bottom, philosophy abhors
+Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it.
+
+The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross.
+Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, by making a mockery of it,
+sought to convert it into a comedy; he conceived the farcical idea of
+the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, and cried "Behold
+the man!" But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts
+for tragedy, shouted, "Crucify him! crucify him!" And the human, the
+intra-human, tragedy is the tragedy of Don Quixote, whose face was
+daubed with soap in order that he might make sport for the servants of
+the dukes and for the dukes themselves, as servile as their servants.
+"Behold the madman!" they would have said. And the comic, the
+irrational, tragedy is the tragedy of suffering caused by ridicule and
+contempt.
+
+The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people,
+can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to
+make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.
+
+I have already spoken of the forceful sonnets of that tragic Portuguese,
+Antero de Quental, who died by his own hand. Feeling acutely for the
+plight of his country on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890,
+he wrote as follows:[66] "An English statesman of the last century, who
+was also undoubtedly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace
+Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy
+for those who think. Very well, then, if we are destined to end
+tragically, we Portuguese, we who _feel_, we would far rather prefer
+this terrible, but noble, destiny, to that which is reserved, and
+perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that
+_thinks_ and _calculates_, whose destiny it is to finish miserably and
+comically." We may leave on one side the assertion that the English are
+a thinking and calculating people, implying thereby their lack of
+feeling, the injustice of which is explained by the occasion which
+provoked it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying
+that they do not think or calculate--for we twin-brothers of the
+Atlantic seaboard have always been distinguished by a certain pedantry
+of feeling; but there remains a basis of truth underlying this terrible
+idea--namely, that some peoples, those who put thought above feeling, I
+should say reason above faith, die comically, while those die tragically
+who put faith above reason. For the mockers are those who die comically,
+and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of
+tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery.
+
+The mockery that underlies the career of Don Quixote is what we must
+endeavour to discover.
+
+And shall we be told yet again that there has never been any Spanish
+philosophy in the technical sense of the word? I will answer by asking,
+What is this sense? What does philosophy mean? Windelband, the historian
+of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (_Was ist
+Philosophie_? in the first volume of his _Praeludien_) tells us that "the
+history of the word 'philosophy' is the history of the cultural
+significance of science." He continues: "When scientific thought attains
+an independent existence as a desire for knowledge for the sake of
+knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently knowledge
+as a whole divides into its various branches, philosophy is the general
+knowledge of the world that embraces all other knowledge. As soon as
+scientific thought stoops again to becoming a means to ethics or
+religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of life
+or into a formulation of religious beliefs. And when afterwards the
+scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its
+character as an independent knowledge of the world, and in so far as it
+abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory
+of knowledge itself." Here you have a brief recapitulation of the
+history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval
+scholasticism upon which it endeavoured to establish religious beliefs.
+But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be
+to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been
+studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith,
+between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this
+conflict?
+
+Later on Windelband says: "By philosophy in the systematic, not in the
+historical, sense, I understand the critical knowledge of values of
+universal validity (_allgemeingiltigen Werten_)." But what values are
+there of more universal validity than that of the human will seeking
+before all else the personal, individual, and concrete immortality of
+the soul--or, in other words, the human finality of the Universe--and
+that of the human reason denying the rationality and even the
+possibility of this desire? What values are there of more universal
+validity than the rational or mathematical value and the volitional or
+teleological value of the Universe in conflict with one another?
+
+For Windelband, as for Kantians and neo-Kantians in general, there are
+only three normative categories, three universal norms--those of the
+true or the false, the beautiful or the ugly, and the morally good or
+evil. Philosophy is reduced to logics, esthetics, and ethics,
+accordingly as it studies science, art, or morality. Another category
+remains excluded--namely, that of the pleasing and the unpleasing, or
+the agreeable and the disagreeable: in other words, the hedonic. The
+hedonic cannot, according to them, pretend to universal validity, it
+cannot be normative. "Whosoever throws upon philosophy," wrote
+Windelband, "the burden of deciding the question of optimism and
+pessimism, whosoever demands that philosophy should pronounce judgement
+on the question as to whether the world is more adapted to produce pain
+than pleasure, or _vice versa_--such a one, if his attitude is not
+merely that of a dilettante, sets himself the fantastic task of finding
+an absolute determination in a region in which no reasonable man has
+ever looked for one." It remains to be seen, nevertheless, whether this
+is as clear as it seems, in the case of a man like myself, who am at the
+same time reasonable and yet nothing but a dilettante, which of course
+would be the abomination of desolation.
+
+It was with a very profound insight that Benedetto Croce, in his
+philosophy of the spirit in relation to esthetics as the science of
+expression and to logic as the science of pure concept, divided
+practical philosophy into two branches--economics and ethics. He
+recognizes, in effect, the existence of a practical grade of spirit,
+purely economical, directed towards the singular and unconcerned with
+the universal. Its types of perfection, of economic genius, are Iago and
+Napoleon, and this grade remains outside morality. And every man passes
+through this grade, because before all else he must wish to be himself,
+as an individual, and without this grade morality would be inexplicable,
+just as without esthetics logic would lack meaning. And the discovery of
+the normative value of the economic grade, which seeks the hedonic, was
+not unnaturally the work of an Italian, a disciple of Machiavelli, who
+speculated so fearlessly with regard to _virtu_, practical efficiency,
+which is not exactly the same as moral virtue.
+
+But at bottom this economic grade is but the rudimentary state of the
+religious grade. The religious is the transcendental economic or
+hedonic. Religion is a transcendental economy and hedonistic. That which
+man seeks in religion, in religious faith, is to save his own
+individuality, to eternalize it, which he achieves neither by science,
+nor by art, nor by ethics. God is a necessity neither for science, nor
+art, nor ethics; what necessitates God is religion. And with an insight
+that amounts to genius our Jesuits speak of the grand business of our
+salvation. Business--yes, business; something belonging to the economic,
+hedonistic order, although transcendental. We do not need God in order
+that He may teach us the truth of things, or the beauty of them, or in
+order that He may safeguard morality by means of a system of penalties
+and punishments, but in order that He may save us, in order that He may
+not let us die utterly. And because this unique longing is the longing
+of each and every normal man--those who are abnormal by reason of their
+barbarism or their hyperculture may be left out of the reckoning--it is
+universal and normative.
+
+Religion, therefore, is a transcendental economy, or, if you like,
+metaphysic. Together with its logical, esthetic, and ethical values, the
+Universe has for man an economic value also, which, when thus made
+universal and normative, is the religious value. We are not concerned
+only with truth, beauty, and goodness: we are concerned also and above
+all with the salvation of the individual, with perpetuation, which those
+norms do not secure for us. That science of economy which is called
+political teaches us the most adequate, the most economical way of
+satisfying our needs, whether these needs are rational or irrational,
+beautiful or ugly, moral or immoral--a business economically good may be
+a swindle, something that in the long run kills the soul--and the
+supreme human _need_ is the need of not dying, the need of enjoying for
+ever the plenitude of our own individual limitation. And if the Catholic
+eucharistic doctrine teaches that the substance of the body of Jesus
+Christ is present whole and entire in the consecrated Host, and in each
+part of it, this means that God is wholly and entirely in the whole
+Universe and also in each one of the individuals that compose it. And
+this is, fundamentally, not a logical, nor an esthetic, nor an ethical
+principle, but a transcendental economic or religious principle. And
+with this norm, philosophy is able to judge of optimism and pessimism.
+_If the human soul is immortal, the world is economically or
+hedonistically good; if not, it is bad_. And the meaning which pessimism
+and optimism give to the categories of good and evil is not an ethical
+sense, but an economic or hedonistic sense. Good is that which satisfies
+our vital longing and evil is that which does not satisfy it.
+
+Philosophy, therefore, is also the science of the tragedy of life, a
+reflection upon the tragic sense of it. An essay in this philosophy,
+with its inevitable internal contradictions and antinomies, is what I
+have attempted in these essays. And the reader must not overlook the
+fact that I have been operating upon myself; that this work partakes of
+the nature of a piece of self-surgery, and without any other anesthetic
+than that of the work itself. The enjoyment of operating upon myself has
+ennobled the pain of being operated upon.
+
+And as for my other claim--the claim that this is a Spanish philosophy,
+perhaps _the_ Spanish philosophy, that if it was an Italian who
+discovered the normative and universal value of the economic grade, it
+is a Spaniard who announces that this grade is merely the beginning of
+the religious grade, and that the essence of our religion, of our
+Spanish Catholicism, consists precisely in its being neither a science,
+nor an art, nor an ethic, but an economy of things eternal--that is to
+say, of things divine: as for this claim that all this is Spanish, I
+must leave the task of substantiating it to another and an historical
+work. But leaving aside the external and written tradition, that which
+can be demonstrated by reference to historical documents, is there not
+some present justification of this claim in the fact that I am a
+Spaniard--and a Spaniard who has scarcely ever been outside Spain; a
+product, therefore, of the Spanish tradition of the living tradition, of
+the tradition which is transmitted in feelings and ideas that dream, and
+not in texts that sleep?
+
+The philosophy in the soul of my people appears to me as the expression
+of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don
+Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between what the world is as
+scientific reason shows it to be, and what we wish that it might be, as
+our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be
+found the explanation of what is usually said about us--namely, that we
+are fundamentally irreducible to _Kultur_--or, in other words, that we
+refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either
+to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to
+morality or ethics.
+
+"And the upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by
+more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing
+will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been
+accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so! And what
+then?
+
+Yes, I know, I know very well, that it is madness to seek to turn the
+waters of the river back to their source, and that it is only the
+ignorant who seek to find in the past a remedy for their present ills;
+but I know too that everyone who fights for any ideal whatever, although
+his ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world on to the
+future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at
+home in the present. Every supposed restoration of the past is a
+creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is
+a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better. The march, as
+ever, is towards the future, and he who marches is getting there, even
+though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the
+better way!...
+
+I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the
+soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the
+Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution--learning from them,
+yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the
+spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark
+Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle
+between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance which was the offspring of
+the Middle Ages.
+
+And if some accuse me of subserving the cause of Catholic reaction,
+others perhaps, the official Catholics.... But these, in Spain, trouble
+themselves little about anything, and are interested only in their own
+quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor folk, they have neither eyes
+nor ears!
+
+But the truth is that my work--I was going to say my mission--is to
+shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in
+affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and
+this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all
+those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to
+agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and
+passionate desire.
+
+Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the
+immediate apparential efficacy of his work? It is very doubtful, and at
+any rate he did not by any chance put his visor to the test by slashing
+it a second time. And many passages in his history show that he did not
+look with much confidence to the immediate success of his design to
+restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter to him so long as thus
+he lived and immortalized himself? And he must have surmised, and did in
+fact surmise, that his work would have another and higher efficacy, and
+that was that it would ferment in the minds of all those who in a pious
+spirit read of his exploits.
+
+Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic
+ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self
+to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's
+battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul
+to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure
+of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho, at his
+side, inward and heroical too--and tell me if you find anything comic in
+the tragedy.
+
+And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left
+himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and
+all philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books;
+we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any _Critique
+of Pure Reason_.
+
+But Don Quixote was converted. Yes--and died, poor soul. But the other,
+the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives amongst us,
+animating us with his spirit--this Don Quixote was not converted, this
+Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this
+Don Quixote must never die. And the conversion of the other Don
+Quixote--he who was converted only to die--was possible because he was
+mad, and it was his madness, and not his death nor his conversion that
+immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for the crime of having been
+born.[67] _Felix culpa!_ And neither was his madness cured, but only
+transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he
+stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.
+
+This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered
+lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he had freed the galley
+slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that
+Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live
+hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at
+him, he went to heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this
+divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.
+
+And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with
+desperation. And does he not fight out of despair? How is it that among
+the words that English has borrowed from our language, such as _siesta,
+camarilla, guerrilla_, there is to be found this word _desperdo_? Is not
+this inward Don Quixote that I spoke of, conscious of his own tragic
+comicness, a man of despair (_desesperado_). A _desperado_--yes, like
+Pizarro and like Loyola. But "despair is the master of impossibilities,"
+as we learn from Salazar y Torres (_Elegir al enemigo_, Act I.), and it
+is despair and despair alone that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad
+hope. _Spero quia absurdum_, it ought to have been said, rather than
+_credo_.
+
+And Don Quixote, who lived in solitude, sought more solitude still; he
+sought the solitudes of the Pena Pobre, in order that there, alone,
+without witnesses, he might give himself up to greater follies with
+which to assuage his soul. But he was not quite alone, for Sancho
+accompanied him--Sancho the good, Sancho the believing, Sancho the
+simple. If, as some say, in Spain Don Quixote is dead and Sancho lives,
+then we are saved, for Sancho, his master dead, will become a
+knight-errant himself. And at any rate he is waiting for some other mad
+knight to follow again.
+
+And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other Sancho, the Sancho who
+journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote--it is not certain that he died,
+although some think that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his lance
+and believing in the truth of all those things which his dying and
+converted master had denounced and abominated as lies. But neither is it
+certain that the bachelor Sanson Carrasco, or the curate, or the barber,
+or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with these that the
+heroical Sancho has to contend.
+
+Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude.
+And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers, creating for
+ourselves a Quixotesque Spain which only exists in our imagination?
+
+And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote bequeathed to
+_Kultur_? I answer: Quixotism, and that is no little thing! It is a
+whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole esthetic, a whole logic, a
+whole ethic--above all, a whole religion--that is to say, a whole
+economy of things eternal and things divine, a whole hope in what is
+rationally absurd.
+
+For what did Don Quixote fight? For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for
+survival. Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice,
+who is theology; not for Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen, who
+is culture. He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives.
+
+And the greatest thing about him was his having been mocked and
+vanquished, for it was in being overcome that he overcame; he overcame
+the world by giving the world cause to laugh at him.
+
+And to-day? To-day he feels his own comicness and the vanity of his
+endeavours so far as their temporal results are concerned; he sees
+himself from without--culture has taught him to objectify himself, to
+alienate himself from himself instead of entering into himself--and in
+seeing himself from without he laughs at himself, but with a bitter
+laughter. Perhaps the most tragic character would be that of a Margutte
+of the inner man, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die of
+laughter, but of laughter at himself. _E ridera in eterno_, he will
+laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte. Do you not
+hear the laughter of God?
+
+The mortal Don Quixote, in dying, realized his own comicness and bewept
+his sins; but the immortal Quixote, realizing his own comicness,
+superimposes himself upon it and triumphs over it without renouncing it.
+
+And Don Quixote does not surrender, because he is not a pessimist, and
+he fights on. He is not a pessimist, because pessimism is begotten by
+vanity, it is a matter of fashion, pure intellectual snobbism, and Don
+Quixote is neither vain nor modern with any sort of modernity (still
+less is he a modernist), and he does not understand the meaning of the
+word "snob" unless it be explained to him in old Christian Spanish. Don
+Quixote is not a pessimist, for since he does not understand what is
+meant by the _joie de vivre_ he does not understand its opposite.
+Neither does he understand futurist fooleries. In spite of
+Clavileno,[68] he has not got as far as the aeroplane, which seems to
+tend to put not a few fools at a still greater distance from heaven. Don
+Quixote has not arrived at the age of the tedium of life, a condition
+that not infrequently takes the form of that topophobia so
+characteristic of many modern spirits, who pass their lives running at
+top speed from one place to another, not from any love of the place to
+which they are going, but from hatred of the place they are leaving
+behind, and so flying from all places: which is one of the forms of
+despair.
+
+But Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine laughter,
+and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in life eternal, he
+has to fight, attacking the modern, scientific, inquisitorial orthodoxy
+in order to bring in a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic,
+contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola, an Italian Quixote of
+the end of the fifteenth century, he fights against this Modern Age that
+began with Machiavelli and that will end comically. He fights against
+the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of mind,
+reconciliation between reason and faith--this, thanks to the providence
+of God, is no longer possible. The world must be as Don Quixote wishes
+it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight with it and will,
+to all appearances, be vanquished, but he will triumph by making himself
+ridiculous. And he will triumph by laughing at himself and making
+himself the object of his own laughter.
+
+"Reason speaks and feeling bites" said Petrarch; but reason also bites
+and bites in the inmost heart. And more light does not make more warmth.
+"Light, light, more light!" they tell us that the dying Goethe cried.
+No, warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we die of cold and not of darkness.
+It is not the night kills, but the frost. We must liberate the enchanted
+princess and destroy the stage of Master Peter.[69]
+
+But God! may there not be pedantry too in thinking ourselves the objects
+of mockery and in making Don Quixotes of ourselves? Kierkegaard said
+that the regenerate (_Opvakte_) desire that the wicked world should mock
+at them for the better assurance of their own regeneracy, for the
+enjoyment of being able to bemoan the wickedness of the world
+(_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, ii., Afsnit ii., cap. 4,
+sect. 2, b).
+
+The question is, how to avoid the one or the other pedantry, or the one
+or the other affectation, if the natural man is only a myth and we are
+all artificial.
+
+Romanticism! Yes, perhaps that is partly the word. And there is an
+advantage in its very lack of precision. Against romanticism the forces
+of rationalist and classicist pedantry, especially in France, have
+latterly been unchained. Romanticism itself is merely another form of
+pedantry, the pedantry of sentiment? Perhaps. In this world a man of
+culture is either a dilettante or a pedant: you have to take your
+choice. Yes, Rene and Adolphe and Obermann and Lara, perhaps they were
+all pedants.... The question is to seek consolation in disconsolation.
+
+The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration,
+essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a
+_demi-mondaine_ philosophy. Leave out the _demi_; call it _mondaine_,
+mundane. Mundane--yes, a philosophy for the world and not for
+philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The
+world desires illusion (_mundus vult decipi_)--either the illusion
+antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to
+reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever
+wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed
+are they who are easily befooled! A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, said
+that it was the privilege of his countrymen _n'etre pas dupe_--not to be
+taken in. A sorry privilege!
+
+Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. "Then let him
+not make the demand," it will be said, "let him resign himself, let him
+accept life and truth as they are." But he does not accept them as they
+are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho, who stands by his
+side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those
+understand who talk thus to him, those who succeed in resigning
+themselves and accepting rational life and rational truth. No, it is
+that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows!...
+
+And in this critical century, Don Quixote, who has also contaminated
+himself with criticism, has to attack his own self, the victim of
+intellectualism and of sentimentalism, and when he wishes to be most
+spontaneous he appears to be most affected. And he wishes, unhappy man,
+to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he
+sinks into the despair of the critical century whose two greatest
+victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through this despair he reaches
+the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke--that intellectual Don
+Quixote who escaped from the cloister--and becomes an awakener of
+sleeping souls (_dormitantium animorum excubitor_), as the ex-Dominican
+said of himself--he who wrote: "Heroic love is the property of those
+superior natures who are called insane (_insano_) not because they do
+not know (_no sanno_), but because they over-know (_soprasanno_)."
+
+But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines; at any rate the
+inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, opposite
+the Vatican, states that it has been dedicated to him by the age which
+he had foretold (_il secolo da lui divinato_). But our Don Quixote, the
+inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does
+not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they
+are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the
+world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the
+mountain, fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as
+Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the
+loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the title
+of king for the inscription written over the Cross.
+
+What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote, to-day, in this world? To
+cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But though men hear not, the
+wilderness hears, and one day it will be transformed into a resounding
+forest, and this solitary voice that goes scattering over the wilderness
+like seed, will fructify into a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred
+thousand tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of
+death.
+
+And now to you, the younger generation, bachelor Carrascos of a
+Europeanizing regenerationism, you who are working after the best
+European fashion, with scientific method and criticism, to you I say:
+Create wealth, create nationality, create art, create science, create
+ethics, above all create--or rather, translate--_Kultur_, and thus kill
+in yourselves both life and death. Little will it all last you!...
+
+And with this I conclude--high time that I did!--for the present at any
+rate, these essays on the tragic sense of life in men and in peoples, or
+at least in myself--who am a man--and in the soul of my people as it is
+reflected in mine.
+
+I hope, reader, that some time while our tragedy is still playing, in
+some interval between the acts, we shall meet again. And we shall
+recognize one another. And forgive me if I have troubled you more than
+was needful and inevitable, more than I intended to do when I took up my
+pen proposing to distract you for a while from your distractions. And
+may God deny you peace, but give you glory!
+
+SALAMANCA, _In the year of grace_ 1912.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[59] "Que tal?" o "como va?" y es aquella que responde: "se vive!"
+
+[60] Whenever I consider that I needs must die, I stretch my cloak upon
+the ground and am not surfeited with sleeping.
+
+[61] No es consuelo de desdichas--es otra desdicha aparte--querer a
+quien las padece--persuadir que no son tales (_Gustos y diogustos no son
+nies que imagination_, Act I., Scene 4).
+
+[62] _Don Quijote_, part i., chap, i.
+
+[63] Preface.
+
+[64] _El individualismo espanol_, in vol. clxxi., March 1, 1903.
+
+[65] See _El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha_, part ii.,
+chap. lviii., and the corresponding chapter in my _Vida de Don Quijote y
+Sancho_.
+
+[66] In an article which was to have been published on the occasion of
+the ultimatum, and of which the original is in the possession of the
+Conde do Ameal. This fragment appeared in the Portuguese review, _A
+Aguia_ (No. 3), March, 1912.
+
+[67] An allusion to the phrase in Calderon's _La Vida es Sueno_, "Que
+delito cometi contra vosotros naciendo?"--J.E.C.F.
+
+[68] The wooden horse upon which Don Quixote imagined that he and Sancho
+had been carried in the air. See _Don Quijote_, part ii., chaps. 40 and
+41.--J.E.C.F.
+
+[69] _Don Quijote_, part ii., chap. 26.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+AEschylus, 246
+Alexander of Aphrodisias, 88
+Amiel, 18, 68, 228
+Anaxagoras, 143
+Angelo of Foligno, 289
+Antero de Quintal, 240, 315
+Ardigo, Roberto, 238
+Aristotle, 1, 21, 80, 144, 165, 171, 232, 235
+Arnold, Matthew, 103
+Athanasius, 63-65
+Avenarius, Richard, 144, 310
+de Ayala, Ramon Perez, 303
+
+Bacon, 310
+Balfour, A.J., 27
+Balmes, 84, 85
+Bergson, 144, 328
+Berkeley, Bishop, 87, 146
+Besant, Mrs. A., 291
+Boccaccio, 52
+Boehme, Jacob, 227, 297
+Bonnefon, 250, 254
+Bossuet, 226, 231
+Brooks, Phillips, 76, 190
+Browning, Robert, 112, 181, 249, 254
+Brunetiere, 103, 298
+Brunhes, B., 235, 237, 238
+Bruno, 301, 329
+Buechner, 95
+Butler, Joseph, 5, 6, 87
+Byron, Lord, 94, 102, 103, 132
+
+Calderon, 39, 268, 323
+Calvin, 121, 246
+Campanella, 301
+Carducci, 102, 306
+Carlyle, 231, 298
+Catherine of Sienna, 289
+Cauchy, 236
+Cervantes, 220, 306
+Channing, W.E., 78
+Cicero, 165, 216, 221
+Clement of Alexandria, 32
+Cortes, Donoso, 74
+Costa, Joaquin, 309
+Cournot, 192, 217, 222, 306
+Cowper, 43
+Croce, Benedetto, 313, 318
+
+Dante, 42, 51, 140, 223, 233, 256, 295
+Darwin, 72, 147
+Descartes, 34, 86, 107, 224, 237, 293, 310, 312
+Diderot, 99
+Diego de Estella, 304
+Dionysius the Areopagite, 160
+Domingo de Guzman, 289
+Duns Scotus, 76
+
+Eckhart, 289
+Empedocles, 61
+Erasmus, 112, 301
+Erigena, 160, 167
+
+Fenelon, 224
+Fichte, 8, 29
+Flaubert, 94, 219
+Fouillee, 261
+Fourier, 278
+Francesco de Sanctis, 220
+Francke, August, 120
+Franklin, 248
+
+Galileo, 72, 267, 302
+Ganivet, Angel, 313
+de Gaultier, Jules, 328
+Goethe, 218, 264, 288, 299, 309
+Gounod, 56
+Gratry, Pere, 236
+
+Haeckel, 95
+Harnack, 59, 64, 65, 69, 75
+Hartmann, 146
+Hegel, 5, 111, 170, 294, 309, 310
+Heraclitus, 165
+Hermann, 69, 70, 77, 165, 217
+Herodotus, 140
+Hippocrates, 143
+Hodgson, S.H., 30
+Holberg, 109
+Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 257, 311
+Hume, David, 79, 86, 104, 310
+Hume, Martin A.S., 312
+Huntingdon, A.M., 298
+
+James, William, 5, 81, 86
+Jansen, 121
+Juan de los Angeles, 1, 207, 286
+Juan de la Cruz, 67, 289, 293
+Justin Martyr, 63
+
+Kaftan, 68, 222
+Kant, Immanuel, 3, 4, 11, 13, 67, 68, 73, 79, 114, 143, 166, 294, 310,
+    311, 317
+a Kempis, 51, 99, 277
+Kierkegaard, 3, 109, 115, 123, 153, 178, 198, 257, 287, 327
+Krause, 294
+
+Lactantius, 59, 74, 165, 169
+Lamarck, 147
+Lamennais, 74, 117, 165, 246
+Laplace, 161
+Leibnitz, 247
+Leo XIII., 75
+Leopardi, 44, 47, 123, 132, 240, 248
+Le Roy, 73
+Lessing, 229
+Linnaeus, 1
+Loisy, 72
+Loyola, 122, 307, 314, 324
+Loyson, Hyacinthe, 116
+Lucretius, 94, 102
+Luis de Leon, 289
+Luther, 3, 121, 270, 294, 301
+
+Mach, Dr. E., 114
+Machado, Antonio, 241
+Machiavelli, 296, 326, 328
+de Maistre, Count Joseph, 74, 305
+Malebranche, 63
+Malon de Chaide, 66
+Manrique, Jorge, 309
+Marcus Aurelius, 315
+Marlowe, Christopher, 299
+Martins, Oliveira, 68
+Mazzini, 153
+Melanchthon, 69
+Menendez de Pelayo, 313
+Michelet, 45
+Miguel de Molinos, 216, 219, 228
+Mill, Stuart, 104, 310
+Milton, 284
+Moser, Johann Jacob, 252, 263
+Myers, W.H., 88
+
+Nietzsche, 50, 61, 100, 231, 239, 328
+Nimesius, 59
+
+Obermann, 11, 47, 259, 263, 268
+Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph, 252, 253
+Ordonez de Lara, 56
+Origen, 245
+
+Papini, 238
+Pascal, 40, 45, 74, 262, 263
+Petrarch, 327
+Pfleiderer, 61
+Pius IX., 72
+Pizarro, 324
+Plato, 38, 45, 48, 61, 90, 125, 143, 216, 217, 221, 292, 310
+Pliny, 165
+Plotinus, 209, 230, 243
+Pohle, Joseph, 77
+Pomponazzi, Pietro, 88
+
+Renan, 51, 68
+Ritschl, Albrecht, 68, 114, 121, 167, 238, 253, 263, 294
+Robertson, F.W., 180
+Robespierre, 41
+Rohde, Erwin, 60, 61
+Rousseau, 53, 263, 299, 310
+Ruysbroek, 289
+
+Saint Augustine, 74, 192, 247
+Saint Bonaventura, 220
+Saint Francis of Assissi, 52, 210
+Saint Paul, 48, 49, 62, 94, 112, 188, 209, 225, 241, 253, 255, 270
+Saint Teresa, 67, 75, 210, 226, 228, 289, 323
+Saint Thomas Aquinas, 83, 92, 233
+Salazar y Torres, 324
+Schleiermacher, 89, 156, 217
+Schopenhauer, 146, 147, 247
+Seeberg, Reinold, 188
+Senancour, 43, 47, 260, 263, 299
+Seneca, 231, 313
+Seuse, Heinrich, 75, 289
+Shakespeare, 39
+Socrates, 29, 143, 145
+Solon, 17
+Soloviev, 95
+Spencer, Herbert, 89, 124, 238, 253
+Spener, 253
+Spinoza, Benedict, 6, 7, 22, 24, 31, 38, 40, 89, 97-99, 101, 208, 234,
+    310
+Stanley, Dean, 91
+Stendhal, 311
+Stirmer, Max, 29
+Suarez, 312
+Swedenborg, 153, 221, 225
+
+Tacitus, 56, 94, 142, 216, 306
+Tauler, 289
+Tennyson, Lord, 33, 103
+Tertullian, 74, 94, 104
+Thales of Miletus, 143, 317
+Thome de Jesus, 283
+Tolstoi, 328
+Troeltsch, Ernst, 70, 112
+
+Velasquez, 70
+Vico, Giovanni Baptista, 142, 143
+Vinet, A., 93, 113, 160
+Virchow, 95
+Virgil, 249
+Vives, Luis, 313
+Vogt, 95
+
+Walpole, Horace, 315
+Weizsaecker, 62, 77
+Wells, H.G., 265
+Whitman, Walt, 125
+Windelband, 267, 316, 317
+
+Xenophon, 29, 143
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Tragic Sense Of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno
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