Part 7

Truths, Proven and Unproven

Whence did we get the habit of requiring proofs of each idea that is expressed? If we put aside the consideration, as having no real meaning in the present case, that men do often purposely deceive their neighbours for gain or other interests, then strictly speaking the necessity for proof is entirely removed. It is true that we can still deceive ourselves and fall into involuntary error. Sometimes we take a vision for a reality, and we wish to guard against that offensive mistake. But as soon as the possibility of bona fide error is removed, then we may relate simply without arguments, judgments, or references. If you please, believe; if you don't, don't. And there is one province, the very province which has always attracted to itself the most remarkable representatives of the human race, where proofs in the general acceptation are even quite impossible. We have been hitherto taught that that which cannot be proved, should not be spoken about. Still worse, we have so arranged our language that, strictly speaking, everything we say is expressed in the form of a judgment, that is, in a form which presupposes not merely the possibility but the necessity of proofs. Perhaps this is the reason why metaphysics has been the object of incessant attack. Metaphysics evidently was not only unable to find a form of expression for her truths which would free her from the obligation of proof; she did not even want to. She considered herself the science par excellence, and therefore supposed that she had more largely and more strictly to prove the judgments which she took under her wing. She thought that if she were to neglect the duty of demonstration she would lose all her rights. And that, I imagine, was her fatal mistake. The correspondence of rights and duties is perhaps a cardinal truth (or a cardinal fiction) of the doctrine of law, but it has been introduced into the sphere of philosophy by a misunderstanding. Here, rather, the contrary principle is enthroned: rights are in inverse proportion to duties. And only there where all duties have ceased is the greatest and most sovereign right acquired--the right of communion with ultimate truths. Here we must not for one moment forget that ultimate truths have nothing in common with middle truths, the logical construction of which we have so diligently studied for the last two thousand years. The fundamental difference is that the ultimate truths are absolutely unintelligible. Unintelligible, I repeat, but not inaccessible. It is true that middle truths also are, strictly speaking, unintelligible. Who will assert that he understands light, heat, pain, pride, joy, degradation?

Nevertheless, our mind, in alliance with omnipotent habit, has, with the assistance of some strained interpretation, given to the combination of phenomena in the segment of universal life that is accessible to us, a certain kind of harmony and unity, and this from time immemorial has gained repute under the name of an intelligible explanation of the created world. But the known, which is the familiar, world is sufficiently unintelligible to make good faith require of us that we should accept unintelligibility as the fundamental predicate of being. It is impossible to hold, as some do, that the only reason why we do not understand the world is that something is hidden from us or that our mind is weak, so that if the Supreme Being wished to unveil the secret of creation to us, or if the human brain should so much develop in the next ten million years that he will excel us as far as we excel our official ancestor, the ape, then the world will be intelligible. No, no, no! By their very essence the operations which we perform upon reality to understand it are useful and necessary only so long as they do not pass a certain limit. It is possible to understand the arrangement of a locomotive. It is also legitimate to seek an explanation of an eclipse of the sun, or of an earthquake. But a moment comes--only we cannot define it exactly--when explanations lose all meaning and are good for nothing any more. It is as though we were led by a rope--the law of sufficient reason--to a certain place and left there: 'Now go wherever you like.' And since we have grown so used to the rope in our lives, we begin to believe that it is part of the very essence of the world. One of the most remarkable thinkers, Spinoza, thought that God himself was bound by necessity.

Let any one probe himself carefully, and he will find that he is not merely unable to think but almost unable to live without the hypothesis of Spinoza. The work of Hume, who so brilliantly disputed the axiom of causal necessity, was only half done. He clearly showed that it is impossible to prove the existence of necessary connection. But it is also impossible to prove the contrary. In the result, everything remained as before: Kant, and all mankind after him, has returned to Spinoza's position. Freedom has been driven into an intellectual world, an unknown land,

'from whose bourne No traveller returns,'

and everything is in its former place. Philosophy wants to be a science at all costs. It is absolutely impossible for her to succeed in this; but the price she has paid for the right to be called a science, is not returned to her. She has waived the right of seeking that which she needed wherever she would, and she is deprived of the right for ever. But did she really need it? If you glance at contemporary German philosophy you will say without hesitation that it was not needed at all. Neither by mistake, nor even in pursuit of a new title, did she renounce her great vocation: it has become an intolerable burden to her. However hard it may be to confess, it is nevertheless indubitable that the great secrets of the universe cannot be manifested with the clarity and distinctness with which the visible and tangible world is opened to us. Not only others--you will not even convince yourself of your truth with the obviousness with which you can convince all men without exception of scientific truths.

Revelations, if they do occur, are always revelations for an instant. Mahomet--Dostoevsky explains--could only stay in paradise a very short time, from half a second to five seconds, even if he succeeded in falling into it. And Dostoevsky himself entered paradise only for an instant. And here on earth, both of them lived for years, for tens of years, and there seemed to be no end to the hell of earthly existence. The hell was obvious, demonstrable; it could be fixed, exhibited, ad oculos. But how could paradise be proven? How could one fix, how express, those half-seconds of paradisic beatitude, which were from the outside manifested in ugly and horrible epileptic fits with convulsions, paroxysms, a foaming mouth, and sometimes an ill-omened sudden fall, with the spilling of blood? Again, believe, if you will: if you won't, don't. Surely a man who lives now in paradise, now in hell sees life utterly differently from others. And he wants to think that he is right, that his experience is of great value, that life is not at all as it is described by men of different experience and more limited emotions. How desperately did Dostoevsky desire to persuade all men of his rightness, how stubbornly he used to demonstrate, and how angry he was made by the consciousness that lived in the depths of his soul that he was impotent to prove anything. But a fact remains a fact. Perhaps epileptics and madmen know things of which normal men have not even the remotest presentiment, but it is not vouchsafed to them to communicate their knowledge to others, or to prove it. And there is a universal knowledge which is the very object of philosophical seeking, with which one may commune, but which by its very essence cannot be communicated to all, that is, cannot be turned into verified and demonstrable universal truths. To renounce this knowledge in order that philosophy should have the right to be called a science! At times men acted thus. There were sober epochs when the pursuit of positive knowledge absorbed every one capable of intellectual labour. Or perhaps there were epochs in which men who sought something other than positive science were condemned to universal contempt, and passed unregarded: in such an epoch Plato would have found no sympathy, but would have died in obscurity. One thing at least is clear. He whose chief interest and motive in life is in undemonstrable truths is doomed to complete or relative sterility in the sense in which the word is generally understood. If he is clever and gifted, men may perhaps be interested in his mind and talent, but they will pass his work with indifference, contempt, and even horror; and they will begin to warn the world against him.

'Look at him, my children, He is stern and pale and lean. He is poor and naked, And all men count him mean.'

Has not the work of the prophets who sought for ultimate truths been barren and useless? Did life hold them in any account? Life went its own way, and the voices of the prophets have been, are, and ever will be, voices in the wilderness. For that which they see and know, cannot be proved and is not capable of proof. Prophets have always been isolated, dissevered, separate, helpless men, locked up in their pride. Prophets are kings without an army. For all their love to their subjects, they can do nothing for them, for subjects respect only those kings who possess a formidable military power. And--long may it be so!

The Limits of Reality

After all, not even the most consistent and convinced realist represents life to himself as it really is. He overlooks a great deal; and on the other hand he often sees something which has no existence in reality. I do not think there is any need to show this by example. For all our desire to be objective we are, after all, extremely subjective, and those things which Kant calls synthetic judgments a priori, by which our mind forms nature and dictates laws to her, do play a great and serious part in our lives. We create something like the veil of Maia: we are awake in sleep, and sleep in wakefulness, exactly as though some magic power had charmed us. And just as in sleep we feel for instants that what is happening to us is like a half-dream, an intermediate half-life. Schopenhauer and the Buddhists were right in asserting that it is equally wrong to say of the veil of Maia, the world accessible to us, either that it exists or does not exist. It is true that logic does not admit such judgments and persecutes them most implacably, for they violate its most fundamental laws. But it cannot be helped: when one has to choose between philosophy which is alluring and promising, and empty logic, one will always sacrifice the latter for the former. And philosophy without contradictory judgments would be either doomed to eternal silence, or would be churned into a mud of commonplace and reduced to nothing. Philosophers know that. The same is true of our own case: we must confess that we are at the same time awake and dreaming dreams, and at times we must own that though we are alive, yet we have long since been dead. As living beings we still hold to the accepted synthetic judgments a priori, and as dead, we try to do without them, or to replace them by other judgments which have nothing in common with the former but are even opposite to them. Philosophy is occupied in this work with extreme diligence, and in this and this alone is the meaning of the idealistic movement which has never, since the time of Plato, disappeared from history. The problem is not for us to find another, primordial, better, and eternal world to replace the visible world accessible to all, as idealistic philosophy is usually interpreted by her official and, unfortunately, her most influential representatives. Interpretation of that kind too obviously bears the mark of its empiric utilitarian origin: they bring us as near to super-empiric reality as do the notions wherewith we define what is valuable in life. We might as well consider the super-empiric world as one of gold, diamond, or pearls simply because gold, diamonds, and pearls are very costly. But so it usually happens. God himself is usually represented as glimmering with gold and precious stones, as omniscient and omnipotent. He is called the King of Kings since on earth the lot of a crowned head is considered most enviable. The meaning and value of idealistic philosophy thus appears to be that she for ever ratifies all that we have found valuable on earth during our brief existence. Herein, I believe, is a fatal error. Idealistic philosophy, it is true, gave an excuse for falsely interpreting her, since she loved to be arrayed in sumptuous apparel. The religion of almost all nations has always sought for forms outwardly beautiful without stopping even before such an obvious paradox--not to put it more strongly--as a golden cross studded with diamonds. And for the sake of sumptuous words and golden crosses men overlooked great truths, and perhaps great possibilities. The philosophy of the schools also loved to array herself, so that she should not be behind the masters in this respect, and for the sake of dress she often forgot her necessary work. Plato taught that our life was only a shadow of another reality. If this is true, and he discovered the truth, then surely our first task is to begin to live a different life, to turn our back to the wall above which the shadows are walking and to turn our face to the source of light which created the shadows or to those things of which the visible outlines give only a remote resemblance. We must be awakened, if only in part; to this end what is usually done to a person sound asleep must be done to us. He is pulled, pinched, beaten, tickled, and if all these things fail, still stronger and more heroic measures must be applied. At all events, it is out of the question to advise contemplation, which may well make one still sleepier, or quietude, which leads to the same result. Philosophy should live by sarcasm, irony, alarm, struggles, despairs, and allow herself contemplation and quietude only from time to time, as a relaxation. Then perhaps she will succeed in creating, by the side of realistic dreams, dreams of a quite different order, and visibly demonstrate that the universally accepted dreams are not the only ones. 'What is the use?' I do not think this question need be answered. He who asks it, shows by the fact that he needs neither an answer nor philosophy, while he who needs them will not ask but will patiently await events: a temperature of 120°, an epileptic fit, or something of this kind, which facilitates the difficult task of seeking....

The Given and the Possible

The law of causation as a principle of inquiry is an excellent thing: the existing sciences afford us convincing evidence of that. But as an idea in the Platonic sense it is of little value, at times at least. The strict harmony and order of the world have fascinated many people: such giants of thought as Spinoza and Goethe paused with reverent wonder in contemplation of the great and unchangeable order of nature. Therefore they exalted necessity even to the rank of a primordial, eternal, original principle. And we must confess that Goethe's and Spinoza's conception of the world lives so much in each one of us that in most cases we can love and respect the world only when our souls feel in it a symmetrical harmony. Harmony seems to us at once-the highest value and the ultimate truth. It gives to the soul great peace, a stable firmness, a trust in the Creator--the highest boons accessible to mortal men, as the philosophers teach. Nevertheless, there are other yearnings. Man's heart is suddenly possessed by a longing for the fantastic, the unforeseen, for that which cannot be foreseen. The beautiful world loves its beauty, peace of soul seems disgraceful, stability is felt as an intolerable burden. Just as a youth grown to manhood suddenly feels irritated by the bountiful tutelage of his parents, from which he has received so much, though he does not know what to do with his freedom, so is a man of insight ashamed of the happiness which is given to him, which some one has created. The law of causation, like the whole harmony of the world, seems to him a pleasant gift, facilitating life, but yet a degrading one. He has sold his birthright for peace, for undisturbed happiness--his great birthright of free creation. He does not understand how a giant like Goethe could have been seduced by the temptation of a pleasant life, he suspects the sincerity of Spinoza. There is something rotten in the state of Denmark. The apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, has become to him the sole purpose of life, even though the path to it should lie through extreme suffering.

And, strangely, nature herself seems to be preoccupied in urging man to that fatal path. There comes a time in our life when some imperative and secret voice forbids us to rejoice at the beauty and grandeur of the world. The world allures us as before, but it no longer gives pure happiness. Remember Tchekhov. How he loved nature! What immeasurable yearning is audible in his wonderful descriptions of nature! Just as though each time that he glanced at the blue sky, the troubled sea or the green woods, a voice of authority whispered to him: 'All this is yours no longer. You may look at it, but you have no right to rejoice. Prepare yourself for another life, where nothing will be given, complete, prepared, where nothing will be created, where there will be illimitable creation alone. And everything which is in this world shall be given to destruction, to destruction and destruction, even this nature which you so passionately love, and which it is so hard and painful for you to renounce.' Everything drives us to the mysterious realm of the eternally fantastic, eternally chaotic, and--who knows?--it may be, the eternally beautiful....

Experiment and Proof

When cogito ergo sum came into Descartes' head, he marked the day--November 10, 1619--as a remarkable day: 'The light of a wonderful discovery,' he wrote in his diary, 'flashed into my mind.' Schelling relates the same thing of himself: in the year 1801 he 'saw the light.' And to Nietzsche when he roamed the mountains and the valleys of the Engadine there came a mighty change: he grasped the doctrine of eternal recurrence. One might name many philosophers, poets, artists, preachers, who like these three suddenly saw the light, and considered their vision the beginning of a new life. It is even probable that all men who have been destined to display to the world something perfectly new and original have without exception experienced that miracle of sudden metamorphosis. Nevertheless, though much is spoken of these miracles and often, in nearly all biographies of great men, we cannot strictly make any use of them. Descartes, Schelling, Nietzsche tell the story of their conversion; and with us, Tolstoi and Dostoevsky tell of theirs; in the less remote past, there are Mahomet and Paul the Apostle; in far antiquity the legend of Moses. But if I had chosen tenfold the number, if thousands even had been collected, it would still be impossible for the mind to make any deduction from them. In other words, all these cases have no value as scientific material, whereas one fossil skeleton or a unique case of an unknown rare disease is a precious windfall to the scientist. What is still more interesting, Descartes was so struck with his cogito ergo sum, Nietzsche with his eternal recurrence, Mahomet with his paradise, Paul the Apostle with his vision, while we remain more or less indifferent to anything they may relate of their experiences. Only the most sensitive among us have an ear for stories of that kind, and even they are obliged to hide their impressions within them, for what can be done with them?

It is even impossible to fix them as indubitable facts, for facts also require a verification and must be proved. There are no proofs. Philosophic and religious teachings offered by men who have had extraordinary inward experiences, not only do not generally confirm, but rather refute their own stories of revelation. For philosophic and religious teaching have always hitherto assigned themselves the task of attracting all and sundry to themselves, and in order to attain this end they had to have recourse to such methods as have effect with the ordinary man, who knows of nothing extraordinary--to proof, to the authority of visible and tangible phenomena, which can be measured, weighed and counted. In their pursuit of proofs, of persuasiveness and popularity, they had to sacrifice the important and essential, and expose for show that which is agreeable to reason--things already more or less known, and therefore of little interest and importance. In course of time, as experimental science, so-called, gained more and more power, the habit of hiding in oneself all that cannot be demonstrated ad oculos, has become more and more firmly rooted, until it is almost man's second nature. Nowadays we 'naturally' share but a small part of an experience with our friends, so that if Mahomet and Paul lived in our time, it would not enter their heads to tell their extraordinary stories. And for all his bravery, Nietzsche nevertheless passes quickly over eternal recurrence, and is much more occupied with preaching the morality of the Superman, which, though it at first astounded people, was after all accepted with more or less modification, because it was demonstrable. Evidently we are confronted with a great dilemma. If we continue to cultivate modern methodology, we run the risk of becoming so accustomed to it that we will lose not only the faculty of sharing all undemonstrable and exceptional experiences with others, but even of retaining them firmly in the memory. They will begin to be forgotten as dreams, they will even seem to be waking dreams. Thus we will cut ourselves off for ever from a vast realm of reality, whose meaning and value have by no means been divined or appreciated. In olden times men could add dreams and madmen's visions to reality; but we shall curtail the real indubitable reality, transferring it to the realm of hallucinations and dreams. I suppose even a modern man will feel some hesitation in coming over to the side of this methodology, even though he is incapable of thinking, with the ancients, that dreams are by no means worthless things. And if this is so, then the rights of experiences must not be defined by the degree of their demonstrability. However capricious our experiences may be, however little they agree with the rooted and predominant conceptions of the necessary character of events in the inward and outward life--once they have taken place in the soul of man, they acquire, ipso facto, the lawful right of figuring side by side with facts which are most demonstrable and susceptible of control and verification, and even with a deliberate experiment.

It may be said that we would not then be protected against deliberate frauds. People who have never been in paradise will give themselves out for Mahomets. That is true; they will talk and they will he. There will be no method of objective verification. But they will surely tell the truth also. For the sake of that truth we may make up our minds to swim through a whole ocean of lies. Yes, it is not in the least impossible to distinguish truth from lie in this realm, though, certainly, not by the signs which have been evolved by logic; and not even by signs, but by no signs at all. The signs of the beautiful have not yet been even approximately, defined, and, please God--be it said without offence to the Germans--they never will be defined, but yet we distinguish between Apollo and Venus. So it is with truth: she too may be recognised. But what if a man cannot distinguish without signs, and, moreover, does not want to?... What is to be done with him? Really, I do not know; besides, I do not imagine that all men down to the last should act in unison. When did all men act in agreement? Men have mostly acted separately, meeting in certain places, and parting in others. Long may it be so! Some will recognise and seek after truth by signs, others without signs, as they please, and yet others, in both ways.

The Seventh Day of Creation

Socrates said that he often used to hear from poets thoughts remarkable for their profundity and seriousness, but when he began to inquire of them more particularly, he became convinced that they themselves did not understand what they were saying. What did he really mean? Did Socrates wish to compare the poets to parrots or trained blackbirds who can learn by heart, with the assistance of a man to teach them, any ideas whatever, perfectly foreign to them. That can hardly be. Socrates hardly thought that what the poets say had been overheard by them from some one, and mechanically fixed in their mind, though it remained quite foreign to their soul. Most probably he used the word 'understand' in the sense that they could not demonstrate or explain the soundness and stability of their ideas,--they could not deduce them and relate them to a definite conception of the world. As every one knows, Socrates thought that not merely poets, but all men, from eminent statesmen down to ignorant artisans, had ideas, even a great many ideas, but they never could explain where they had got them, or make them agree among themselves.

In this respect poets were the same as the rest of people. From some mysterious source they had acquired truths, often great and profound, but they were unable to explain them. This seemed to Socrates a great misery, a real misfortune. I do not know how it happened--not a single historian of philosophy has explained it, and indeed very little interest has been taken in it--but Socrates for some reason decided that an unproven and unexplained truth had less value than a proven and explained one. In our times, when a whole theory, even a conception of the world, has been made of Socrates's idea, this notion seems so natural and self-evident that no one doubts it. But in antiquity the case was different. Strictly, Socrates thought that the poets had acquired their truths, which they were unable to prove, from a very respectable source, which deserved all possible confidence: he himself compared the poets with oracles, and consequently admitted that they had communion with the gods. There was, therefore, a most excellent guarantee that the poets were possessed of real, undiluted truth--the pledge of its purity being the divine authority. Socrates said that he himself had frequently been guided in his actions, not by considerations of reason, but by the voice of his mysterious 'demon.' That is, at times, he abstained from certain actions--his demon gave him never positive, but only negative advice--without being able to produce reasons, simply because the secret voice, more authoritative than any human mind, demanded abstinence from them.

Is it not strange that under such circumstances, at an epoch when the gods vouchsafed truths to men, there should have suddenly appeared in a man the unexplained desire to acquire truths without the help of the gods, and in independence of them, by the dialectic method so beloved of the Greeks? It is doubtful which is more important for us, to acquire the truth or to acquire for one's self with one's own effort, it may be a false, but one's own judgment. The example of Socrates, who has been a pattern for all subsequent generations of thinking men, leaves not the slightest doubt. Men do not need a truth ready made; they turn away from the gods to devote themselves to independent creations. Practically the same story is told in the Bible. What indeed was lacking to Adam? He lived in paradise, in direct proximity to God, from whom he could learn anything he wanted. And yet it did not suit him. It was enough that the Serpent should make his perfidious proposal for the man to forget the wrath of God, and all the dangers which threatened him, and to pluck the apple from the forbidden tree. Then the truth, which until the creation of the world and man had been one, split and broke with a great, perhaps an infinitely great, number of most diverse truths, eternally being born, and eternally dying. This was the seventh day of creation, unrecorded in history. Man became God's collaborator. He himself became a creator. Socrates renounced the divine truth and even spoke contemptuously of it, merely because it was not proven, that is, because it does not bear the marks of man's handiwork. Socrates really did not prove anything, but he was proving, creating, and in this he saw the meaning of his own life and of all human lives. Thus, surely, the pronouncement of the Delphic oracle seems true even now: Socrates was the wisest of men. And he who would be wise must, imitating Socrates, not be like him in anything. Thus did all great men, and all great philosophers.

What does the History of Philosophy teach us?

Neo-Kantianism is the prevalent school of modern philosophy. The literature about Kant has grown to unheard-of proportions. But if you attempt to analyse the colossal mass that has been written upon Kant, and put the question to yourself, what has really been left to us of Kant's teaching, then to your great amazement you will have to reply: Nothing at all. There is an extraordinary, incredibly famous name--Kant, and there is positively not a single Kantian thesis which in an uninterpreted form would have survived till our day. I say in an uninterpreted form, for interpretations resolve at bottom into arbitrary recastings, which often have not even an outward resemblance to the original. These interpretations began while Kant was still alive. Fichte gave the first example. It is well known that Kant reacted, demanding that his teaching should be understood not in the spirit but in the letter. And Kant was, naturally, quite right. Of two things one: either you take his teaching as it is, or you invent your own. But the fate of all thinkers who have been destined to give their names to an epoch is similar: they have been interpreted, recast, till they are unrecognisable. For after a short time had elapsed, it became clear that their ideas were so overburdened with contradictions, that in the form in which they emerged from the hands of their creators, they are absolutely unacceptable. Indeed, all the critics who had not made up their minds beforehand to be orthodox Kantians, came to the conclusion that Kant had not proved a single one of his fundamental propositions. Something stronger may be said. By virtue of the fact that Kant, owing to the central position which he occupied, attracted much attention to himself and was forced to submit to very careful criticism, there gradually emerged a truth which might have been known beforehand: that Kant's teaching is a mass of contradictions. The sum-total of more than a century's study of Kant may be resumed in a few words. Although he was not afraid of the most crying contradictions, he did not have the smallest degree of success in proving the correctness of his teaching. With an extraordinary power and depth of mind, with all the originality, boldness, and talent of his constructions, he really provided nothing that might be indisputably called a positive acquisition of philosophy. I repeat that I am not expressing my own opinion. I am only reckoning the sum-total of the opinions of the German critics of Kant, of those same critics who built him a monument aere perennius.

The same may be said of all the great representatives of philosophic thought beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and ending with Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Their works astonish by their power, depth, boldness, beauty and originality of thought. While you read them it seems that truth herself speaks with their lips. And what strong measures of precaution did they take to prevent themselves from being mistaken! They believed in nothing that men had grown accustomed to believe. They methodically doubted everything, reexamined everything, tens, hundreds of times. They gave their life to the truth not in words, but in deed. And still the sum-total is the same in their case as in Kant's: not one of them succeeded in inventing a system free from internal contradictions.

Aristotle was already criticising Plato, and the sceptics criticised both of them, and so on until in our day each new thinker struggles with his predecessors, refutes their contradictions and errors, although he knows that he is doomed to the same fate. The historians of philosophy are at infinite pains to conceal the most glaring and noticeable trait of philosophic creation, which is, at bottom, no secret to any one. The uninitiated, and people generally who do not like thinking, and therefore wish to be contemptuous of philosophy, point to the lack of unity among philosophers as evidence that it is not worth while to study philosophy. But they are both wrong. The history of philosophy not only does not inspire us with the thought of the continual evolution of an idea, but palpably convinces us of the contrary, that among philosophers there is not, has not been, and will never be, any aspiration towards unity. Neither will they find in future a truth free from contradiction, for they do not seek the truth in the sense in which the word is understood by the people and by science; and, after all, contradictions do not frighten them, but rather attract. Schopenhauer begins his criticism of Kant's philosophy with the words of Voltaire: 'It is the privilege of genius to make great mistakes with impunity.' I believe that the secret of the philosophic genius lies here. He makes great, the greatest, mistakes, and with impunity. Moreover his mistakes are put to his credit, for the important matter is not his truths, or his judgments, but himself. When you hear from Plato that the life we see is only a shadow, when Spinoza, intoxicated by God, exalts the idea of necessity, when Kant declares that reason dictates laws to Nature,--listening to them you do not examine whether their assertions are true or not, you agree with each of them, whatever he says, and only this question arises in your soul: 'Who is he that speaketh as one having authority?'

Later on, you will reject all their truths, with horror, perhaps with indignation and disgust, even with utter indifference. You will not consent to accept that our life is only a shadow of actual reality, you will revolt against Spinoza's God, who cannot love, yet demands love for himself, Kant's categorical imperative will seem to you a cold monster,--but you will never forget Plato, or Spinoza, or Kant, and will for ever keep your gratitude to them, who made you believe that authority is given to mortals. Then you will understand that there are no errors and no truths in philosophy; that errors and truths are only for him above whom is set a superior authority, a law, a standard. But philosophers themselves create laws and standards. This is what we are taught by the history of philosophy; this is what is most difficult for man to master and understand. I have already said that the historians of philosophy draw quite a different moral from the study of the great human creations.

Science and Metaphysics