Tragic Sense Of Life Part 8

And if the belief in the immortality of the soul has been unable to find vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with pantheism. To say that everything is G.o.d, and that when we die we return to G.o.d, or, more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in G.o.d before we were born, and if when we die we return to where we were before being born, then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And since we know very well that G.o.d, the personal and conscious G.o.d of Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said, to be merely atheism disguised; and, in my opinion, undisguised. And they were right in calling Spinoza an atheist, for his is the most logical, the most rational, system of pantheism.

Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable, which, when it has professed to wish to leave religious feelings scathless, has always been inspired by the most refined hypocrisy. The whole of the first part of Spencer's _First Principles_, and especially the fifth chapter ent.i.tled "Reconciliation"--that between reason and faith or science and religion being understood--is a model at the same time of philosophical superficiality and religious insincerity, of the most refined British cant. The unknowable, if it is something more than the merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up.

The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion considered as an individual and social psychic phenomenon irrespective of the transcendental objective validity of religious affirmations, is a science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul is something that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the rationality of this belief. However much the religious man may repeat with Schleiermacher, "Science can teach thee nothing; it is for science to learn from thee," inwardly he thinks otherwise.

From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of life.

A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely individual, is, strictly, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to ident.i.ties and genera, to each representation having no more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains the same for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of G.o.d is different each time that I conceive it. Ident.i.ty, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to a.n.a.lyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them. Worms also feed upon corpses. My own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the innermost recesses of my soul, once they are torn from their roots in the heart, poured out on to this paper and there fixed in unalterable shape, are already only the corpses of thoughts. How, then, shall reason open its portals to the revelation of life? It is a tragic combat--it is the very essence of tragedy--this combat of life with reason. And truth? Is truth something that is lived or that is comprehended?

It is only necessary to read the terrible _Parmenides_ of Plato to arrive at his tragic conclusion that "the one is and is not, and both itself and others, in relation to themselves and one another, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be." All that is vital is irrational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is essentially sceptical.

The rational, in effect, is simply the relational; reason is limited to relating irrational elements. Mathematics is the only perfect science, inasmuch as it adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers, but not real and substantial things, inasmuch as it is the most formal of the sciences. Who can extract the cube root of an ash-tree?

Nevertheless we need logic, this terrible power, in order to communicate thoughts and perceptions and even in order to think and perceive, for we think with words, we perceive with forms. To think is to converse with oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and logic. But may they not perhaps possess a content, an individual matter, incommunicable and untranslatable? And may not this be the source of their power?

The truth is that man, the prisoner of logic, without which he cannot think, has always sought to make logic subservient to his desires, and princ.i.p.ally to his fundamental desire. He has always sought to hold fast to logic, and especially in the Middle Ages, in the interests of theology and jurisprudence, both of which based themselves on what was established by authority. It was not until very much later that logic propounded the problem of knowledge, the problem of its own validity, the scrutiny of the metalogical foundations.

"The Western theology," Dean Stanley wrote, "is essentially logical in form and based on law. The Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate.

The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist."[28]

And all the laboured arguments in support of our hunger of immortality, which pretend to be grounded on reason or logic, are merely advocacy and sophistry.

The property and characteristic of advocacy is, in effect, to make use of logic in the interests of a thesis that is to be defended, while, on the other hand, the strictly scientific method proceeds from the facts, the data, presented to us by reality, in order that it may arrive, or not arrive, as the case may be, at a certain conclusion. What is important is to define the problem clearly, whence it follows that progress consists not seldom in undoing what has been done. Advocacy always supposes a _pet.i.tio principii_, and its arguments are _ad probandum_. And theology that pretends to be rational is nothing but advocacy.

Theology proceeds from dogma, and dogma, _dogma_, in its primitive and most direct sense, signifies a decree, something akin to the Latin _placitum_, that which has seemed to the legislative authority fitting to be law. This juridical concept is the starting-point of theology. For the theologian, as for the advocate, dogma, law, is something given--a starting-point which admits of discussion only in respect of its application and its most exact interpretation. Hence it follows that the theological or advocatory spirit is in its principle dogmatical, while the strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is sceptical, _skeptikos_--that is, investigative. It is so at least in its principle, for there is the other sense of the term scepticism, that which is most usual to-day, that of a system of doubt, suspicion, and uncertainty, and this has arisen from the theological or advocatory use of reason, from the abuse of dogmatism. The endeavour to apply the law of authority, the _placitum_, the dogma, to different and sometimes contraposed practical necessities, is what has engendered the scepticism of doubt. It is advocacy, or what amounts to the same thing, theology, that teaches the distrust of reason--not true science, not the science of investigation, sceptical in the primitive and direct meaning of the word, which hastens towards no predetermined solution nor proceeds save by the testing of hypotheses.

Take the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas, the cla.s.sical monument of the theology--that is, of the advocacy--of Catholicism, and open it where you please. First comes the thesis--_utrum_ ... whether such a thing be thus or otherwise; then the objections--_ad primum sic proceditur_; next the answers to these objections--_sed contra est_ ... or _respondeo dicendum_.... Pure advocacy! And underlying many, perhaps most, of its arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be expressed _more scholastico_ by this syllogism: I do not understand this fact save by giving it this explanation; it is thus that I must understand it, therefore this must be its explanation. The alternative being that I am left without any understanding of it at all. True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant; advocacy neither doubts nor believes that it does not know. It requires a solution.

To the mentality that a.s.sumes, more or less consciously, that we must of necessity find a solution to every problem, belongs the argument based on the disastrous consequences of a thing. Take any book of apologetics--that is to say, of theological advocacy--and you will see how many times you will meet with this phrase--"the disastrous consequences of this doctrine." Now the disastrous consequences of a doctrine prove at most that the doctrine is disastrous, but not that it is false, for there is no proof that the true is necessarily that which suits us best. The identification of the true and the good is but a pious wish. In his _etudes sur Blaise Pascal_, A. Vinet says: "Of the two needs that unceasingly belabour human nature, that of happiness is not only the more universally felt and the more constantly experienced, but it is also the more imperious. And this need is not only of the senses; it is intellectual. It is not only for the _soul_; it is for the _mind_ that happiness is a necessity. Happiness forms a part of truth."

This last proposition--_le bonheur fait partie de la verite_--is a proposition of pure advocacy, but not of science or of pure reason. It would be better to say that truth forms a part of happiness in a Tertullianesque sense, in the sense of _credo quia absurdum_, which means actually _credo quia consolans_--I believe because it is a thing consoling to me.

No, for reason, truth is that of which it can be proved that it is, that it exists, whether it console us or not. And reason is certainly not a consoling faculty. That terrible Latin poet Lucretius, whose apparent serenity and Epicurean _ataraxia_ conceal so much despair, said that piety consists in the power to contemplate all things with a serene soul--_pacata posse mente omnia tueri_. And it was the same Lucretius who wrote that religion can persuade us into so great evils--_tantum religio potuit suadere malorum_. And it is true that religion--above all the Christian religion--has been, as the Apostle says, to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the intellectuals foolishness.[29] The Christian religion, the religion of the immortality of the soul, was called by Tacitus a pernicious superst.i.tion (_exitialis superst.i.tio_), and he a.s.serted that it involved a hatred of mankind (_odium generis humani_).

Speaking of the age in which these men lived, the most genuinely rationalistic age in the world's history, Flaubert, writing to Madame Roger des Genettes, uttered these pregnant words: "You are right; we must speak with respect of Lucretius; I see no one who can compare with him except Byron, and Byron has not his gravity nor the sincerity of his sadness. The melancholy of the ancients seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, who all more or less presuppose an immortality on the yonder side of the _black hole_. But for the ancients this black hole was the infinite itself; the procession of their dreams is imaged against a background of immutable ebony. The G.o.ds being no more and Christ being not yet, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius a unique moment in which man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find this grandeur; but what renders Lucretius intolerable is his physics, which he gives as if positive. If he is weak, it is because he did not doubt enough; he wished to explain, to arrive at a conclusion!"[30]

Yes, Lucretius wished to arrive at a conclusion, a solution, and, what is worse, he wished to find consolation in reason. For there is also an anti-theological advocacy, and an _odium anti-theologic.u.m_.

Many, very many, men of science, the majority of those who call themselves rationalists, are afflicted by it.

The rationalist acts rationally--that is to say, he does not speak out of his part--so long as he confines himself to denying that reason satisfies our vital hunger for immortality; but, furious at not being able to believe, he soon becomes a prey to the vindictiveness of the _odium anti-theologic.u.m_, and exclaims with the Pharisees: "This people who knoweth not the law are cursed." There is much truth in these words of Soloviev: "I have a foreboding of the near approach of a time when Christians will gather together again in the Catacombs, because of the persecution of the faith--a persecution less brutal, perhaps, than that of Nero's day, but not less refined in its severity, consummated by mendacity, derision, and all the hypocrisies."

The anti-theological hate, the scientificist--I do not say scientific--fury, is manifest. Consider, not the more detached scientific investigators, those who know how to doubt, but the fanatics of rationalism, and observe with what gross brutality they speak of faith. Vogt considered it probable that the cranial structure of the Apostles was of a p.r.o.nounced simian character; of the indecencies of Haeckel, that supreme incomprehender, there is no need to speak, nor yet of those of Buchner; even Virchow is not free from them. And others work with more subtilty. There are people who seem not to be content with not believing that there is another life, or rather, with believing that there is none, but who are vexed and hurt that others should believe in it or even should wish that it might exist. And this att.i.tude is as contemptible as that is worthy of respect which characterizes those who, though urged by the need they have of it to believe in another life, are unable to believe. But of this most n.o.ble att.i.tude of the spirit, the most profound, the most human, and the most fruitful, the att.i.tude of despair, we will speak later on.

And the rationalists who do not succ.u.mb to the anti-theological fury are bent on convincing men that there are motives for living and consolations for having been born, even though there shall come a time, at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for living and working, this thing which some call humanism, are the amazing products of the affective and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of its stupendous hypocrisy--a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing sincerity to veracity, and sworn not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and disconsolatory power.

Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this business of manufacturing culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, and all this without our taking thought for the ultimate end of each one of us?

Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of science, of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these beautiful conceptions, if at the last, in four days or in four millions of centuries--it matters not which--no human consciousness shall exist to appropriate this civilization, this science, art, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest?

Many and very various have been the rationalist devices--more or less rational--by means of which from the days of the Epicureans and the Stoics it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and to convince men, although those who sought so to do remained themselves unconvinced, that there are motives for working and lures for living, even though the human consciousness be destined some day to disappear.

The Epicurean att.i.tude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," or the Horatian _carpe diem_, which may be rendered by "Live for the day," does not differ in its essence from the Stoic att.i.tude with its "Accomplish what the moral conscience dictates to thee, and afterward let it be as it may be." Both att.i.tudes have a common base; and pleasure for pleasure's sake comes to the same as duty for duty's sake.

Spinoza, the most logical and consistent of atheists--I mean of those who deny the persistence of individual consciousness through indefinite future time--and at the same time the most pious, Spinoza devoted the fifth and last part of his _Ethic_ to elucidating the path that leads to liberty and to determining the concept of happiness. The concept!

Concept, not feeling! For Spinoza, who was a terrible intellectualist, happiness (_beat.i.tudo_) is a concept, and the love of G.o.d an intellectual love. After establishing in proposition xxi. of the fifth part that "the mind can imagine nothing, neither can it remember anything that is past, save during the continuance of the body"--which is equivalent to denying the immortality of the soul, since a soul which, disjoined from the body in which it lived, does not remember its past, is neither immortal nor is it a soul--he goes on to affirm in proposition xxiii. that "the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is _eternal_,"

and this eternity of the mind is a certain mode of thinking. But do not let yourselves be deceived; there is no such eternity of the individual mind. Everything is _sub aeternitatis specie_--that is to say, pure illusion. Nothing could be more dreary, nothing more desolating, nothing more anti-vital than this happiness, this _beat.i.tudo_, of Spinoza, that consists in the intellectual love of the mind towards G.o.d, which is nothing else but the very love with which G.o.d loves Himself (prop, x.x.xvi.). Our happiness--that is to say, our liberty--consists in the constant and eternal love of G.o.d towards men. So affirms the corollary to this thirty-sixth proposition. And all this in order to arrive at the conclusion, which is the final and crowning proposition of the whole _Ethic_, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.

The everlasting refrain! Or, to put it plainly, we proceed from G.o.d and to G.o.d we return, which, translated into concrete language, the language of life and feeling, means that my personal consciousness sprang from nothingness, from my unconsciousness, and to nothingness it will return.

And this most dreary and desolating voice of Spinoza is the very voice of reason. And the liberty of which he tells us is a terrible liberty.

And against Spinoza and his doctrine of happiness there is only one irresistible argument, the argument _ad hominem_. Was he happy, Benedict Spinoza, while, to allay his inner unhappiness, he was discoursing of happiness? Was he free?

In the corollary to proposition xli. of this same final and most tragic part of that tremendous tragedy of his _Ethic_, the poor desperate Jew of Amsterdam discourses of the common persuasion of the vulgar of the truth of eternal life. Let us hear what he says: "It would appear that they esteem piety and religion--and, indeed, all that is referred to fort.i.tude or strength of mind--as burdens which they expect to lay down after death, when they hope to receive a reward for their servitude, not for their piety and religion in this life. Nor is it even this hope alone that leads them; the fear of frightful punishments with which they are menaced after death also influences them to live--in so far as their impotence and poverty of spirit permits--in conformity with the prescription of the Divine law. And were not this hope and this fear infused into the minds of men--but, on the contrary, did they believe that the soul perished with the body, and that, beyond the grave, there was no other life prepared for the wretched who had borne the burden _of piety_ in this--they would return to their natural inclinations, preferring to accommodate everything to their own liking, and would follow fortune rather than reason. But all this appears no less absurd than it would be to suppose that a man, because he did not believe that he could nourish his body eternally with wholesome food, would saturate himself with deadly poisons; or than if because believing that his soul was not eternal and immortal, he should therefore prefer to be without a soul (_amens_) and to live without reason; all of which is so absurd as to be scarcely worth refuting (_quae adeo absurda sunt, ut vix recenseri mereantur_)."

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid--in which case all comment is superfluous--or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem. And this it is in this case. Yes! poor Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland, yes! that he who is convinced without a vestige of doubt, without the faintest hope of any saving uncertainty, that his soul is not immortal, should prefer to be without a soul (_amens_), or irrational, or idiot, that he should prefer not to have been born, is a supposition that has nothing, absolutely nothing, absurd in it. Was he happy, the poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and of happiness? For that and no other is the problem. "What does it profit thee to know the definition of compunction if thou dost not feel it?"

says a Kempis. And what profits it to discuss or to define happiness if you cannot thereby achieve happiness? Not inapposite in this connection is that terrible story that Diderot tells of a eunuch who desired to take lessons in esthetics from a native of Ma.r.s.eilles in order that he might be better qualified to select the slaves destined for the harem of the Sultan, his master. At the end of the first lesson, a physiological lesson, brutally and carnally physiological, the eunuch exclaimed bitterly, "It is evident that I shall never know esthetics!" Even so, and just as eunuchs will never know esthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned about or defined.

And you have another rationalist, one not sad or submissive, like Spinoza, but rebellious, and though concealing a despair not less bitter, making a hypocritical pretence of light-heartedness, you have Nietzsche, who discovered _mathematically_ (!!!) that counterfeit of the immortality of the soul which is called "eternal recurrence," and which is in fact the most stupendous tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy. The number of atoms or irreducible primary elements being finite and the universe eternal, a combination identical with that which at present exists must at some future time be reproduced, and therefore that which now is must be repeated an infinite number of times. This is evident, and just as I shall live again the life that I am now living, so I have already lived it before an infinite number of times, for there is an eternity that stretches into the past--_a parte ante_--just as there will be one stretching into the future--_a parte post_. But, unfortunately, it happens that I remember none of my previous existences, and perhaps it is impossible that I should remember them, for two things absolutely and completely identical are but one. Instead of supposing that we live in a finite universe, composed of a finite number of irreducible primary elements, suppose that we live in an infinite universe, without limits in s.p.a.ce--which concrete infinity is not less inconceivable than the concrete eternity in time--then it will follow that this system of ours, that of the Milky Way, is repeated an infinite number of times in the infinite of s.p.a.ce, and that therefore I am now living an infinite number of lives, all exactly identical. A jest, as you see, but one not less comic--that is to say, not less tragic--than that of Nietzsche, that of the laughing lion. And why does the lion laugh? I think he laughs with rage, because he can never succeed in finding consolation in the thought that he has been the same lion before and is destined to be the same lion again.

But if Spinoza and Nietzsche were indeed both rationalists, each after his own manner, they were not spiritual eunuchs; they had heart, feeling, and, above all, hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for immortality. The physical eunuch does not feel the need of reproducing himself carnally, in the body, and neither does the spiritual eunuch feel the hunger for self-perpetuation.

Certain it is that there are some who a.s.sert that reason suffices them, and they counsel us to desist from seeking to penetrate into the impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith in an eternal personal life to furnish them with incentives to living and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from birth may also a.s.sure us that he feels no great longing to enjoy the world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it, and we must needs believe him, for what is wholly unknown cannot be the object of desire--_nihil volitum quin praecognitum_, there can be no volition save of things already known. But I cannot be persuaded that he who has once in his life, either in his youth or for some other brief s.p.a.ce of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will ever find peace without it. And of this sort of blindness from birth there are but few instances among us, and then only by a kind of strange aberration. For the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration and nothing but an aberration.

More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say: "We must not talk about it, for in talking about it we only waste our time and weaken our will; let us do our duty here and hereafter let come what may." But this sincerity hides a yet deeper insincerity. May it perhaps be that by saying "We must not talk about it," they succeed in not thinking about it? Our will is weakened? And what then? We lose the capacity for human action? And what then? It is very convenient to tell a man whom a fatal disease condemns to an early death, and who knows it, not to think about it.

_Meglio oprando obliar, senza indagarlo, Questo enorme mister del universo!_

"Better to work and to forget and not to probe into this vast mystery of the universe!" Carducci wrote in his _Idilio Maremmano_, the same Carducci who at the close of his ode _Sul Monte Mario_ tells us how the earth, the mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory and sorrow round the sun "until, worn out beneath the equator, mocked by the last flames of dying heat, the exhausted human race is reduced to a single man and woman, who, standing in the midst of dead woods, surrounded by sheer mountains, livid, with gla.s.sy eyes watch thee, O sun, set across the immense frozen waste."

But is it possible for us to give ourselves to any serious and lasting work, forgetting the vast mystery of the universe and abandoning all attempt to understand it? Is it possible to contemplate the vast All with a serene soul, in the spirit of the Lucretian piety, if we are conscious of the thought that a time must come when this All will no longer be reflected in any human consciousness?

Cain, in Byron's poem, asks of Lucifer, the prince of the intellectuals, "Are ye happy?" and Lucifer replies, "We are mighty." Cain questions again, "Are ye happy?" and then the great Intellectual says to him: "No; art thou?" And further on, this same Lucifer says to Adah, the sister and wife of Cain: "Choose betwixt love and knowledge--since there is no other choice." And in the same stupendous poem, when Cain says that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a lying tree, for "we know nothing; at least it promised knowledge at the price of death," Lucifer answers him: "It may be death leads to the highest knowledge"--that is to say, to nothingness.

To this word _knowledge_ which Lord Byron uses in the above quotations, the Spanish _ciencia_, the French _science_, the German _Wissenschaft_, is often opposed the word _wisdom, sabiduria, sagesse, Weisheit_.

Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast, Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest,

says another lord, Tennyson, in his _Locksley Hall_. And what is this wisdom which we have to seek chiefly in the poets, leaving knowledge on one side? It is well enough to say with Matthew Arnold in his Introduction to Wordsworth's poems, that poetry is reality and philosophy illusion; but reason is always reason and reality is always reality, that which can be proved to exist externally to us, whether we find in it consolation or despair.

I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be scandalized, when Brunetiere proclaimed again the bankruptcy of science.

For science as a subst.i.tute for religion and reason as a subst.i.tute for faith have always fallen to pieces. Science will be able to satisfy, and in fact does satisfy in an increasing measure, our increasing logical or intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, and far from satisfying our hunger for immortality it contradicts it. Rational truth and life stand in opposition to one another. And is it possible that there is any other truth than rational truth?

It must remain established, therefore, that reason--human reason--within its limits, not only does not prove rationally that the soul is immortal or that the human consciousness shall preserve its indestructibility through the tracts of time to come, but that it proves rather--within its limits, I repeat--that the individual consciousness cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves this, are the limits of rationality, of what is known by demonstration.

Beyond these limits is the irrational, which, whether it be called the super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational, is all the same thing. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the impossible of the _certum est, quia impossibile est_. And this absurd can only base itself upon the most absolute uncertainty.

The rational dissolution ends in dissolving reason itself; it ends in the most absolute scepticism, in the phenomenalism of Hume or in the doctrine of absolute contingencies of Stuart Mill, the most consistent and logical of the positivists. The supreme triumph of reason, the a.n.a.lytical--that is, the destructive and dissolvent--faculty, is to cast doubt upon its own validity. The stomach that contains an ulcer ends by digesting itself; and reason ends by destroying the immediate and absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept of necessity. Both concepts are relative; there is no absolute truth, no absolute necessity. We call a concept true which agrees with the general system of all our concepts; and we call a perception true which does not contradict the system of our perceptions. Truth is coherence. But as regards the whole system, the aggregate, as there is nothing outside of it of which we have knowledge, we cannot say whether it is true or not.

It is conceivable that the universe, as it exists in itself, outside of our consciousness, may be quite other than it appears to us, although this is a supposition that has no meaning for reason. And as regards necessity, is there an absolute necessity? By necessary we mean merely that which is, and in so far as it is, for in another more transcendental sense, what absolute necessity, logical and independent of the fact that the universe exists, is there that there should be a universe or anything else at all?

Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than scepticism, in the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the reasoning reason.