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.