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?