Chapter II (2)

And in Paul of Tarsus, in his epistle to the Romans and his first epistle to the Corinthians, he found those three classes of men: the carnal or _sarcinal_, σάρϰινοι, the natural or psychical, Ψυϰικοί, and the spiritual or pneumatical, πνευματικοί. He had often read that 14th verse of the 7th chapter of the epistle to the Romans: “For we know that the law is spiritual [_pneumatical_]; but I am carnal [_sarcinal_], sold under sin”; and that 44th verse of the 11th chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians which says that there is a natural or _psychical_ body and a spiritual or _pneumatical_ body; and he was aware that for the Apostle the _psyche_, Ψυϰή, was something inferior, something that was more or less equivalent to what was later to be called the vital force, the sensitive soul, common to men and animals; the _pneuma_, on the other hand, being the higher part of the soul, the spirit, the ήγεμονικόν of the Stoics, something that survives the body. But he preferred to give it another interpretation, and he always regarded the _psyche_ as the intellectual power that is bound to the necessities of our actual earthly life, the slave of a logic that is educated and trained by the struggle for life, ordinary, common, current knowledge, necessary in order to enable us to live, the knowledge from which science is evolved. He could not help thinking of psychical men as intellectuals, men of common sense and logic, men whose ideas are dominated by the associations which the external and visible world suggests to them, reasonable men who are trained to some profession and practice it, who, if they are doctors, learn how to cure diseases, if engineers to construct roads, if chemists to prepare drugs and analyse compounds, if architects to build houses. These psychical men are the average men, those who take the middle course, those of whom it is said that they have a sound and clear judgment and standard, those who do not believe in any fallacy that is not consecrated by tradition and habit, those who never swallow any new absurdity, because their minds are already so stuffed with timeworn absurdities.

Between these and the carnal or _sarcinal_ men he always established a difference. For him the carnal men were the brutish, the absolutely uncultured, those who scarcely think of anything but eating, drinking and sleeping, those who are wholly and completely immerged in animal life. The psychical man, no; the psychical man is interested in questions of science and culture; the psychical Spaniard preaches national regeneration, is enthusiastic about the telephone, the gramophone and the cinematograph, reads Flammarion, Haeckel, Ribot, buys popular works on philosophy, and if he is in the neighbourhood of a railway stands in ecstatic contemplation of the majestic progress of the locomotive. If the psychical man is an orthodox Catholic, he admires the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas, although he has never read him, he knows that modern geology squares with the Mosaic account of the Creation, and that it is legitimate to admit a part of Darwinism, and that the Church possesses a remedy for all the social ills that afflict our age. The psychical man is an intellectual, his intellect may be small or great, but fundamentally he is an intellectual.

And lastly come the spiritual men, the dreamers, those whom the intellectuals contemptuously call mystics, those who tolerate the tyranny neither of science nor of logic, those who believe that there is another world within our world and mysterious dormant forces in the depths of our spirit, those who speak the language of the heart and many who prefer not to speak at all. Most of the great poets have been spiritual men, not intellectuals. Of one of them, of the sweet singer Wordsworth, it has been said that he was a genius without talent, that is to say a great spirit without sufficient intelligence.

How many times had he not read and re-read the end of the second and the beginning of the third chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians! “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth [not with didactical arguments, which is the term employed in the text], but which the Holy Spirit teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man [_psychical_, or as our man translated it, intellectual] receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual [_pneumatical_] judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal [_sarcinal_], even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat; for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal....”

He turned again to the epistles of Paul of Tarsus and re-read the verses that he had so often read before. “The things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” And he said to himself: Useless to seek to know the things of God by the method of didactical argument, of theology, of logic; a theology is a contradiction in terms, for the _theos_ is at war with the _logia_; arguments do not help us to reach God. And he remembered Kant and his shattering of the supposed logical proofs of the existence of God, and how in his own spirit all that scaffolding of a metalogical belief, spiritual and not intellectual, psychical and not pneumatical, had collapsed. The ontological proof, the cosmological proof, the metaphysical proof, the ethical proof, all had come tumbling down in his mind at the same time, and with them the so-called God of reason. All that theological rationalism had come to earth in his spirit with a crash, though the noise of it was heard only by himself, destroying not a few delicate flowers in its fall and covering the ground with rubbish. Upheavals of the heart, earthquakes of the spirit, had cleared the ground of the debris, and in a new way, a way the intellectuals do not know, there sprung up within him a faith which came from the Spirit of God. For the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.

“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.”--Mystic! This word, spat out with contempt, like an insult or a reproach, seemed to be spoken into his ear, and so near, so clear, so distinct it was, that he involuntarily turned his head. And there at his side, not in the body, visible and tangible, but present in the spirit, was the prototype of the intellectual, with all his most exclusively intellectual attributes--there was the psychical man, the natural man _par excellence_. There he was repeating his physiological creed parrot-wise, while in his heart he rebelled against his poetic and creative impotence, against his unconfessed unspirituality.--He shrugged his shoulders, smiled and turned again to look at the slowly darkening sky. The sunset clouds now appeared like mountains of ashes, the remains of the solar conflagration. He turned on the electric switch and the wire thread glowed in the bulb--there was light, light of man’s making, light of applied science.

“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness into him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” Foolishness ... madness ... he repeated to himself, while his eyes wandered over those familiar objects which the electric light had called forth out of the dark shadows. Madness ... and what is madness? There are alienists, phreno-pathologists, psychiatrists, and who knows by how many other names they are called?... But what is sanity? For perhaps one ought to begin with that.

Health is that condition in which a man is free from every kind of disease; but what is disease? Health, others say, is “that condition in which the organism exercises all its faculties normally.”[5] Normally ... normally ... and what is the normal? He stretched out his hand for a book which he was just then reading, a book stored with a mass of data relating to the mysterious life of the spirit, the work of that noble mind that had been the soul of the Society for Psychical Research, and he read:

“The word _normal_ in common speech is used almost indifferently to imply either of two things, which may be very different from each other--conformity to a standard and position as an average between extremes. Often, indeed, the average constitutes the standard--as when a gas is of average density; or is practically equivalent to the standard--as when a sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come to living organisms a new factor is introduced. Life is change; each living organism changes; each generation differs from its predecessor. To assign a fixed norm to a changing species is to shoot point-blank at a flying bird. The actual average at any given moment is no ideal standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary stage now reached is tending, given stability in the environment, to become the average of the future.”[6]

He shut the book and said to himself again: Normal ... madness ... sanity ... disease ... health.... The madness of to-day will be the sanity of to-morrow, just as the sanity of to-day will appear madness to-morrow. Intellectuals call that madness which they are unable to understand, for it can only be discerned spiritually. And an intellectual, what is he, in the last instance, but a normal man, a man of the _via media_, equally far removed from the carnal and from the spiritual man? The intellectual is the man of the _via media_, at an equal distance from the enormous mass of carnality and from the very limited quantity of conscious spirituality--for the other kind of spirituality, the unconscious and potential, is dormant in all men and is perhaps more alive in the carnal men themselves than in the intellectuals. For it is easier for the flesh than for the intellect to receive the spirit; between intellect and spirit the logic of the schools interposes. The intellectual is the man of average sense, which he calls common sense, and which is as far from the universal, cosmic or instinctive sense in which carnal men live, as it is from that private sense which fortifies the spirit of spiritual men.

“But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.” By what right do those whose own spirit is buried beneath their intellect judge the things of the spirit?

“For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.” At this word Christ our man’s thinking was arrested. He had arrived at what is called the religious problem and it presented itself to him in the form under which he had been contemplating it now for some time. In this problem--_the_ problem, the religious problem--he saw the principal touchstone that distinguishes the intellectuals from the spiritual men.

In so far as the religious question is concerned, the intellectuals presented themselves to him, in effect, as divided into two large groups, usually called believers and unbelievers. Taking these terms in the concrete and in relation to his own country, they resolved themselves into intellectual Catholics and intellectual non-Catholics, who in practice were always anti-Catholics. These two factions contended one against another; but as a contest is only possible on a common basis, they contended on the same ground. No contest is possible between a fish which never emerges from the depths of the sea and a bird which never descends from the altitudes of the air. These two factions contended facing one another--that is to say, one looking in one direction and the other in another--but both standing on the same ground, both on the same plane of intellectuality. And woe to him who should address them either from above or from below, from another plane than theirs, from the plane of spirituality or from the plane of carnality. They will both unite in calling him either a madman or a brute.

These two factions contend together. For the one, religion is needful as the necessary basis of morality, social order being impossible without the fear of hell, of death and of the devil; religion is assured by external proofs, prophecies, miracles--or, rather, accounts of miracles--and before all and above all, by a tradition of centuries resting upon an authority. For the other, proofs of the truth of religion are wanting; social order can be established without hell or the fear of death and of the devil, and the tradition has neither been constant nor does it possess any convincing logical value. Both approach the question from the same side: the one sees in religion a social institution devoted to the interests of order, the other a social institution devoted to the interests of despotism; the one seeks for external logical proofs and the other rejects these proofs. Advocates, and merely advocates, both of them! For both of them it is a question of a social institution, something based upon external authorities and evidences or inevidences, upon something logical or illogical. It is what they call the conflict between reason and faith, although this faith is not faith but only belief. It was not possible for him, for our man, to feel it in that way, and the arguments of the one side interested him as little as those of the other. Disputes of intellectuals!...

He was now called to supper and he went away to attend to the wants of the body, giving it first food and then sleep.

THE MATERIALISM OF THE MASSES

In the course of my frequent peregrinations, when I go up and down the country preaching my lay sermons in the towns and cities of Spain, I have a way of taking my audiences as raw material for experiment. I carry out tests upon them, observing how they respond and react to my words. And I have observed that whenever they hear me say something which they think, however erroneously, implies a kind of negation of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of another life transcending this world, they break out into applause. And this applause saddens me and sometimes prompts me to attack.

If these outbursts of applause meant simply: “Hear, hear! Bravo! This man’s honest. He puts love of truth, however painful the truth may be, before love of consolation”--if the applause meant that, I would accept it, though with a certain sadness. But no, this applause means something different. It means: “Hear, hear! Excellent! We don’t want another life! This life is enough for us!” And this wounds me, for it is an explosion of the most debasing materialism.

Not believing that God exists or that the soul is immortal, or believing that God does not exist and that the soul is not immortal--and believing that the soul is not immortal is not the same as not believing that it is immortal--this is a belief that I can respect; but not wishing that God should exist or that the soul should be immortal is a thing profoundly repellent to me.

And it is precisely because I have this thorn in my heart of hearts, because I cannot resign myself to one day returning to unconsciousness, because I have a thirst for eternity, that this applause bruises my heart. That a man should not believe in another life, that I understand, for I myself find no proof of it; but that he should resign himself to this, and above all that he should not desire anything more than this life, that is a thing I do indeed not understand.

And then these gross calumniations of Christ and of Christianity, these stupidities that go contrary to nature and that have stunted the human spirit, and all this alluvion of vulgarity that so many unfortunate people swallow whole....

In one of those series of popular publications which flatter and seduce the coarsest instincts of the unlettered multitudes, there is a book--translated from the Italian, I believe--entitled “Jesus Christ Has Never Existed.” It is one of the most deplorable, shallow, and worthless books imaginable, inspired not by a love of truth but by the most blatant sectarianism. I was talking about it one day to a man who had read it and who had been delighted with it, and I said: “It is not the thesis that shocks me. The thesis that Jesus had no historical existence, that He is a myth, has many times been put forward, and with apparently very plausible arguments, at any rate with erudition--recently by Karthoff--but it is a thesis that has been demolished by the most judicious investigators, no matter what their personal creed may have been.” He replied: “Then I’m sorry, for He ought not to have existed.” And naturally I did not know what to say to that.

This lack of ideality, this aridity and poverty of inward life, which is implied by not longing for another and transcendental life, all this practical materialism, is dismaying to the mind of whosoever meditates a little upon the worth of human life. For my own part, I have very little hope of peoples who fall into this materialistic attitude.

Understand me clearly: I am not assuring you, nor can I assure you, that there is another life; I myself am not convinced that there is; but I cannot conceive that a man, a true man, should not merely resign himself to the enjoyment of this life only, but that he should renounce and even spurn another life. And as for this idea that we shall continue to live in our works, in our children, in the memory of other generations, and that everything renews and transforms itself, and that we shall help to build up a more perfect society--all this appears to me to be the most miserable subterfuge for escaping the depths of despair.

This is the reason why the radicalism of certain sections of the masses dismays me and why I cannot hope that anything fruitful will come of it. The radicalism of the masses in Spain, and perhaps in other so-called Latin, or, more strictly speaking, Catholic, countries, is lacking in the spirit and substance of religion. The weak point in our socialism is its confused notion of the supreme end of the individual life.

Let us better the economic condition of man--good! Let us put an end to the division between rich and poor--exactly! Let us realize a state in which a moderate amount of work will be sufficient to satisfy all our wants--very good! And then? We have now created a society such as Bebel or Kropotkin dreamed of, and what is to happen to each one of us in this society? What is to be the end of this society? What shall we live for?

“Get rich!” said Guizon, the Calvinist, to the Catholic bourgeoisie of France; “get rich!” Very good. And then, when we have got rich?...

A country in which the people think only of getting rich is a country ... well, I would rather not inquire what kind of a country it is. Suffice it to say that I at any rate should die in it of cold, of shame, of disgust.

And if a country which is solely preoccupied with getting rich is abhorrent to me, still more abhorrent is the country in which the dominant preoccupation is that of enjoyment, of diversion. In other words, of self-stupefaction.

A collective patriotic enthusiasm, an imperialistic instinct, a passionate desire to influence other peoples and to impress your own stamp upon them--this, after all, is something. But this enthusiasm, this instinct, this desire, lives and burns in those peoples which preserve the inward spring of religion, an underlying inextinguishable thirst for eternity.

The people that is satisfied with this life lives, strictly speaking, on the defensive, and the people that lives on the defensive ends by being absorbed and dominated by those in whom the aggressive and dominating instinct is uppermost. The so-called struggle for life is efficacious only when the struggle is for predominance, not for preservation. The essence of being, as Spinoza showed, consists not so much in the effort to persist in mere being as in the effort to become more, to become everything. It is the appetite for infinity and eternity.

I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples that have been materialized by a long indoctrination of implicit Catholic faith, whose beliefs are a matter of routine, in whom the inner spring appears to be exhausted--that inward disquietude which distinguishes the essentially Protestant spirit. I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples in whom centuries of a religion more social than individual, characterized rather by ritual and ceremony and externality and authority than by inward struggle, have resulted in generating a kind of free-thinking that issues in indifference and in resignation to the life of this world.

From the superstition of a ridiculous and childish heaven and hell they have fallen into the superstition of a gross and unspiritual earth.

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 thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.

For there is something else that is also called man, and he is the subject of many more or less scientific speculations. He is the legendary featherless biped, the ξῷον πολιτικόυ 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.

Our man is the other man, the man of flesh and bone--I and you, my reader, and the other man over there, all of us who weigh upon 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 they grew out of one another and their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inward biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a secondary place. And it is this, nevertheless, this inward biography, that explains most things to us.

It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry than to science. All philosophic systems that have been constructed as a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have in every age possessed much less consistency and less life than those which have expressed the integral desire of the spirit of their authors.

For the fact is that the sciences, important to us as they are and indeed indispensable for our life and thought, are in a certain sense more extraneous to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end, that is to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are, at bottom, 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 that is useful for something. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in enabling us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But she, what is she useful to us for? A man takes an electric tram to go to hear an opera and asks himself: Which is in this case 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 an activity. But in fact this feeling, instead of being a consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or of not understanding the world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And this, like everything affective, has subconscious, perhaps unconscious, roots.

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, they say, is 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 the crab also resolves equations of the second degree inwardly.

And thus in a philosopher what must most concern us is the man.

* * * * *

Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to man, to each man, to each “I.” What is this idol--call it Humanity or call it what you will--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 who 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. And what is this right to live? They tell me that I have come into the world 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, an accumulation of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, with museums, with libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will endure--for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?

“Why!”--the reader will exclaim--“we are getting back to what the Catechism says: ‘Q. For whom did God create the world? A. For man’?” Precisely--so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it took account of these matters and were a person, conscious of itself, 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 has said--I know not who, but it was excellently well said. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life. Not this life. And it is a fact 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. Hence arises the effeminate sentimental feeling against war. True, a man ought not to wish to die, but it is the other, the eternal death, that he ought not to wish. “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it,” says the Gospel; but it does not say “whosoever will save his soul,” the immortal soul--the soul that we believe and wish to be immortal.

And all those definers of objectism do not realize, or rather do not wish to realize, that a man, in affirming his “I,” his personal consciousness, 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 the same thing fundamentally.

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 joy 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[7] 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.

It is possible that someone will discover that everything that I am saying rests upon a contradiction, since sometimes I express a longing for immortality and at other times I say that this life does not possess the value that is attributed 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! For we only live upon contradictions and by them; life is tragedy, and the tragedy is perpetual struggle, without victory or the hope of victory; life is contradiction.

It is a question, as you see, of an affective value, and against affective values reasons do not avail. For reasons are nothing more than reasons, that is to say, they are not even truths. There are definition-mongers--pedants by nature and by grace--who produce an effect upon me like that of a man who consoles a father for the loss of a son, dead in the prime of his life, by saying: “Patience, friend, we all must die.” Would you think it strange if this father were irritated by such an ineptitude? For it is an ineptitude. How often may it not be said--

_para penser cual tú, sólo es preciso_
_no tener nada más que inteligencia?_[8]

There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain or with whatever other organ may be the specific organ for thinking; while others think with the whole body and with the whole 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 become definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought. And you know what a professional is....

If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything rather than a philosopher; he is, above all, a pedant, that is to say, a caricature of a man. The cultivation of any science--of chemistry, of physics, of geometry, of philology--may be, though within very narrow limits and restrictions, a work of differentiated specialization; but philosophy, like poetry, is either a work of integration and harmony or else it is mere philosophism, pseudo-philosophical erudition.

All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowing for the sake of knowing is, say what you will, nothing but a solemn begging of the question. We learn a thing either for an immediate practical end, or in order to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the ideas that appear to us most theoretical--that is to say, of least immediate application to the non-intellectual necessities of life--answer to an intellectual necessity, which is also a real necessity, to a principle of unity and continuity of consciousness. But just as scientific knowledge has its finality in the rest of our knowledge, the philosophy which we may be forced to choose has another extrinsic finality--it refers to our whole destiny, to our attitude towards life and the universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy is that of reconciling intellectual necessities of the heart and the will. For it is just here that every philosophy that claims to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction that is the very basis of our existence breaks down. But do all men confront this contradiction?

Little can be hoped for from a ruler, for example, who has not been preoccupied at some time or other, even if only in some dim way, with the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and, above all, of men, with their first “why” and their ultimate “wherefore.”

And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must be affective. It is not enough to think about our destiny, it must be felt. And the would-be leader of men who says and proclaims that he pays no heed to the things of the spirit, does not deserve to lead them. Which does not mean, of course, that any determinate solution is to be required of him. Solution? Is there, indeed, any?

For my part, I will never willingly yield myself, nor entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who has not a real conviction that the leader of a people is a leader of men--men of flesh and bone; men who are born, suffer, and, although they may not wish to die, die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who have to be themselves and not others; men, in short, who seek that which we call happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of men to the generation following when there is no regard for the destiny of those sacrificed--not merely for their memory, for their names, but for themselves.

All this idea that a man lives in his children, or in his works, or in the universe, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity and who may, for the rest, be persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess a great talent or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as far as the feelings are concerned, and even morally imbecile. There have been instances.

Those who are mentally talented and affectively stupid usually say that it is useless to seek to delve into the unknowable or to kick against the pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has been amputated that it is useless to think about it. And we all lack something; only some of us feel it and others do not. Or they pretend not to feel it, and then they are hypocrites.

There is something which, for want 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 flow from ideas but rather determines them, although afterwards, of course, these ideas react upon the sense and confirm it. Sometimes this sense may proceed from a casual illness--from dyspepsia, for example--but at other times it is constitutional. And it is useless to speak of men who are healthy and men who are unhealthy. Apart from there being 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, when compared with the ass or the crab, already a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.

Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess the 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 laden with wisdom rather than with knowledge.

And there are, I believe, also peoples who possess this tragic sense of life.

THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY

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, who took Hume as the starting-point for his criticism, attempted to establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the belief that it imports, and that 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 remains unshaken. There is no way of rationally proving the immortality of the soul. There are, on the other hand, ways of rationally proving its mortality.

It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to explain here at length how far the individual human consciousness depends upon the organization of the body, how it comes gradually to birth according as the brain receives impressions from without, how it is temporally interrupted during sleep, swoons, and other accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture that death carries with it 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 no longer be. This is the rational position.

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 state it clearly--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, since we know what spirit is, and since matter is for us no more than 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 everything energy, or what 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 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 understanding and explaining our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the soul is unnecessary.

All the attempts to substantivate consciousness, making it independent of extension--it will be remembered that Descartes opposed thought to extension--are but sophistical subtleties 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 of which the reality exists only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal reality, it is a continuation of this life.

From whatever side we look at it, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And in strict truth, reason is the enemy of life. All that is vital is anti-rational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is essentially sceptical.

Rationalists persist in endeavouring to convince men that there are motives for living and that there is a consolation for having been born, even though there must 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, illustrate the amazing affectional and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of its stupendous hypocrisy--a hypocrisy that is resolved to sacrifice sincerity to veracity and not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and disconsolatory power.

Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this idea of creating 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, divorced from all preoccupation with the ultimate end of each one of us? Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these beautiful conceptions, if at the last end of everything, in four days or in four million centuries--it matters not which--no human consciousness shall exist to appropriate this culture, this science, art, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest?

Many and various have been the rationalist devices--more or less rational--from the days of the Epicureans and the Stoics, by means of which it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and to convince men--though the convincers were themselves unconvinced--that there are motives for working and lures for living, even though the human consciousness be destined ultimately 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,” is not radically different from the Stoic attitude with its “Do what your conscience tells you, 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 thing as duty for duty’s sake.

It is true that there are people who assert that reason suffices them, and they counsel us not to seek to penetrate into the impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith in eternal personal life in order to find 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 desire to enjoy the world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it, and we must needs believe him, for _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, nothing can be willed that is not previously known. But I cannot be persuaded that he who has once in his life, either in his youth or at some other point of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will ever find peace without it. And this kind of blindness from birth is scarcely possible among men, except by a strange aberration. And the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration and nothing but an aberration.

I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be scandalized, when Brunetière proclaimed once again the bankruptcy of science. For science, in so far as it is a substitute for religion, and reason, in so far as it is a substitute for faith, have always foundered. Science will be able to satisfy in an increasing measure, and in fact does satisfy, our increasing logical and intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, our hunger for immortality--far from satisfying it, it contradicts it. Rational life and truth stand in opposition to one another. And can it be 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 and that the human consciousness is through all the ages indestructible, 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 we know by demonstration. Beyond these limits is the irrational, which is all the same whether it be called the super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the impossible of the _certum est, quia impossible est_. And this absurd can only base itself upon the most absolute incertitude.

* * * * *

The vital longing for human immortality, therefore, finds no rational confirmation, nor does reason give us any incentive or consolation for living or give to life itself any real finality. But here, in the depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and the will and the scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace fraternally. And it will be from this embrace, a tragic, that is to say a profoundly loving, embrace, that the fountain of life will flow, a life earnest and terrible. Scepticism, uncertainty--the ultimate position at which reason arrives by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own validity--is the foundation upon which the despair of the vital sense must build its hope.

Disillusioned, we have had to abandon the position of those who seek to convert rational and logical truth into consolation, pretending to prove the rationality, or at any rate the non-irrationality, of consolation; and we have had to abandon likewise the position of those who seek to convert consolation and motives for living into rational truth. Neither of these positions satisfies us. The one is at variance with our reason, the other with our feeling. Peace between these two powers is impossible and we must live by their war. We must make of this war, of war itself, the condition of our spiritual life.

Faith in immortality is irrational. And nevertheless, faith, life and reason have mutual need of one another. This vital longing is not properly a problem, cannot be formulated in propositions capable of rational discussion; but it announces itself in us as hunger announces itself. Neither can the wolf that throws itself upon its prey to devour it or upon the she-wolf to fecundate her, 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 alone can operate on the irrational. They are compelled to seek mutual support and association. But association in conflict, for conflict is a mode of association.

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There is no possible permanent position of agreement and harmony between reason and life, between philosophy and religion. And the tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle between reason and life--reason bent on rationalizing life and making it resign itself to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its 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, the will will always stand up against reason. Hence the rhythm of the history of philosophy and the alternation of periods in which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual forms, with periods in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to materialistic forms, although both of these classes of forms of belief may disguise themselves under other names. Neither reason nor life ever acknowledges itself vanquished.

No doubt it will be said that life ought to submit to reason and to this we shall reply that nothing ought to be done that cannot be done, and life cannot submit to reason. “Ought, therefore can,” some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: “Cannot, therefore ought not.” And life cannot submit to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.

There is always someone who will tell us of the religious duty of resigning ourselves to mortality. This is indeed the very summit of aberration and insincerity. And over against sincerity will be set the opposing ideal of veracity. Be it so, and yet it is quite possible to reconcile the two. Veracity, respect for what I believe to be rational, for what we call truth in the logical sense, moves me to affirm that the immortality of the individual soul is a logical contradiction, is something not only irrational but contra-rational; but sincerity leads me to affirm also that I do not resign myself to this former affirmation and that I protest against its validity. What I feel is a truth, as much a truth at any rate as what I see, touch, hear, and what is demonstrated to me--I believe that it is even more of a truth--and sincerity obliges me not to hide my feelings.

And in self-defence life searches for the weak point in reason and finds it in scepticism, which it seizes hold of, endeavouring to save itself by maintaining its hold. It needs the weakness of its adversary.

In an outburst of passion, Lamennais exclaims: “But what! All hope lost, shall we plunge blindly into the mute 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, which the will itself cannot master. Whether he like 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.”[10]

It is not strictly true that reason leads 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. Vital scepticism comes from the clash between reason and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and scepticism is born holy, sweet, saving incertitude, our supreme consolation.