I. The Man of Flesh and Blood
HOMO SUM; nihil humani a me alienum puto, said the Latin playwright. For my part I would rather say: Nullum hominem a me alienum puto: I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger. For in my eyes the adjective humanus is no less suspect than its abstract substantive humanitas, humanity. I would choose neither “the human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor the substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive: man, the man of flesh and blood, the man who is born, suffers, and dies—above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and loves; the man who is seen and heard; one’s brother, the real brother.
For there is something else called man, the subject of many lucubrations, more or less scientific, and he is the legendary featherless biped, the 
of Aristotle, the social contractor of Rousseau, the homo economicus of the Manchester school, the homo sapiens of Linnaeus, or, if you like, the vertical mammal. Such a man is a man from nowhere, from neither here nor there, neither of this age nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in short, a mere idea. That is to say, a no-man.
Our man is the other one, the man of flesh and blood: you and I, that man yonder, all of us who walk firmly on the earth.
And this specific man, this flesh-and-blood man is both the subject and 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 growing out of one another spontaneously, and their authors, the philosophers, appear as mere pretexts. The inner biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, is assigned a secondary place. And yet it is precisely that inner biography which can mean most to us.
It behooves us to say, before all else, that philosophy lies closer to poetry than to science. All philosophic systems constructed as a supreme concatenation of the end results of the individual sciences have, in every age, possessed much less consistency and life than those which expressed the integral spiritual yearning of their authors.
For the fact is that the sciences—though they concern us so greatly and are, indeed, indispensable for our life and thought—are in a certain sense more foreign to us than philosophy. Their end is more objective, that is, farther removed from us. Fundamentally they are 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, the airplane-—in that it serves some purpose. Thus, the telephone may serve us to communicate with our beloved some distance away. But as for her, what purpose does she serve? A man takes an electric tram to go to hear an opera, and might well ask: “Which is the more useful, the tram or the opera?”
Philosophy responds to our need to form a complete and unitary concept of life and the world and, following on our conceptualization, the impulse which engenders an inner attitude or even action. But the fact is that the impulse in question, instead of being a consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our philosophy, that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the world and life, springs from our impulse toward life itself. And life, like everything affective, has roots in our subconscious, perhaps in our unconscious.
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but our optimism or pessimism—of perhaps physiological or pathological origin, the one as well 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. And yet what differentiates him from other animals is perhaps feeling rather than reason. I have seen a cat reason more often than laugh or weep. Perhaps it laughs or weeps within itself—but then perhaps within itself a crab solves equations of the second degree.
And thus, in a philosopher, what need most concern us is the man.
Take Kant, the man Immanuel Kant, who was born and lived at Königsberg, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. In the philosophy of this man Kant, a man of heart and head, that is to say, a man, there is a significant “leap,” as Kierkegaard, another man—and such a man!—would have said: the leap from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of Practical Reason. In the latter he reconstructs what he destroyed in the former, whatever those who do not see the man himself may say. After having examined and pulverized with his analysis the traditional proofs of the existence of God, of the Aristotelian God, who is the God corresponding to the 
of the abstract God, the immovable prime mover, he reconstructs God anew. But now it is the God of conscience, the Author of the moral order: in short, the Lutheran God. This leap by Kant exists already in embryo in the Lutheran notion of faith.
The one God, the rational God, is the projection to external infinity of man as he is by definition: that is, of abstract man, of the man who is no-man; the other God, the God of feeling and volition, is the projection to internal infinity of man in life, of the specific man, the man of flesh and blood.
Kant reconstructed with his heart what he had overthrown with his head. And in truth we know, from the testimony of those who knew him, as well as from his own, from his letters and private declarations, that the man Kant, the more or less selfish old bachelor who taught philosophy at Königsberg at the end of the century of the Encyclopedia and of the goddess of Reason, was a man much preoccupied with the Problem: I mean the only real and vital problem, the problem which strikes closest at the root of our being, the problem of our personal and individual destiny, of the immortality of our soul. The man Kant was not resigned to die utterly. And because he was not resigned to die utterly he made that leap, that immortal leap, from the one Critique to the other.
Whoever reads the Critique of Practical Reason attentively and without blinkers will see that, strictly speaking, the existence of God is there inferred from the immortality of the soul, and not the immortality of the soul from the existence of God. The categorical imperative leads us to a moral postulate which necessitates, in turn, in the teleological or, rather, eschatological order, the immortality of the soul, and, for the purpose of sustaining this immortality, God is introduced. All the rest is the jugglery of the philosophy professional.
The man Kant felt that morality was the basis of eschatology, but the professor of philosophy inverted the terms.
Another professor, the professor and man William James, has already said somewhere that for the generality of men God is the provider of immortality. Yes: for the generality of men, including the man Kant, the man James, and the man who writes these lines, which you, reader, are reading.
Talking to a peasant one day, I suggested to him the hypothesis that there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a Consciousness or Conscience of the Universe, but that even so it would not be sufficient reason to assume that the soul of every man was immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. And he replied: “Then, what good is God?” And that was the response, in the secret tribunal of their consciousness, of the man Kant and the man James. But in their role as professors they had to justify rationally an attitude in itself so little rational—which does not mean, of course, that such an attitude is absurd.
Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of definitions, attempted to reconstruct the Universe with definitions, like that artillery sergeant who said that a cannon was made by taking a hole and enclosing it in steel.
Another man, the man Joseph Butler, the Anglican bishop who lived at the beginning of the eighteenth century and whom Cardinal Newman declared to be the greatest name in the Anglican Church, wrote—at the end of the first chapter of his great work, The Analogy of Religion, a chapter which deals with a future life—these pregnant words:
This credibility of a future life, which has been here insisted upon, how little soever it may satisfy our curiosity, seems to answer all the purposes of religion, in like manner as a demonstrative proof would. Indeed a proof, even a demonstrative one, of a future life, would not be a proof of religion. For, that we are to live hereafter, is just as reconcilable with the scheme of atheism, and as well to be accounted for by it, as that we are now alive is: and therefore nothing can be more absurd than to argue from that scheme that there can be no future state.
The man Butler, whose works were perhaps known to the man Kant, wished to save the belief in the immortality of the soul, and with this object in mind he made it independent of belief in God. The first chapter of his Analogy deals, as I say, with the future life; and the second, with God’s government by means of rewards and punishments. And the fact is that, in all truth, the good Anglican bishop infers the existence of God from the immortality of the soul. And, inasmuch as the good Anglican bishop made this inference his point of departure, he did not need to make the leap which the good Lutheran philosopher had to make at the end of the same century. Bishop Butler was one man, and Professor Kant was another.
And to be a man is to be something concrete, unitary and substantive: it is to be a thing, res. Now, we know what another man, the man Benedict Spinoza, the Portuguese Jew who was born and lived in Holland in the middle of the seventeenth century, wrote about the nature of things. The sixth proposition of Part III of his Ethics states: unaquaeque res, quatenus in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur: that is, everything, in so far as it is in itself, strives to persevere in its own being. Everything in so far as it is in itself: that is, in so far as it is substance, for according to him substance is id quod in se est et per se concipitur, that which is in itself and is conceived by itself. And in the next proposition, the seventh, in the same part, he adds: conatus, quo unaquaeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est praeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam, that is, the effort with which everything strives to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself. This means that your essence, reader, and mine, and that of the man Spinoza, and that of the man Butler, and of the man Kant, and of every man who is a man, is nothing but the endeavor, the effort, which he makes to continue to be a man, not to die. And the proposition that follows these two, the eighth, states: conatus, quo unaquaeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nullum tempus finitum, sed indefinitum involvit, that is: the effort with which everything strives to persevere in its own being does not involve finite time, but indefinite time. That is to say: you, I, and Spinoza wish never to die, and this longing of ours never to die is our present essence. Nevertheless, this poor Portuguese Jew, exiled in the mists of Holland, could never succeed in believing in his own personal immortality, and all his philosophy was but a consolation invented to make up for lack of faith. Just as other men have a pain in their hand or foot, a heartache or a headache, so had Spinoza a God-ache. Unhappy man! Unhappy men, the rest of us!
And as for man, this thing—is he a thing? However absurd the question may seem, it is one that some men have asked. Not long ago a certain doctrine called Positivism was in vogue, a doctrine which wrought much good and much ill. And among the ills it wrought was the introduction of a method of analysis by which facts were pulverized, reduced to a dust of facts. Most of what Positivism labeled facts were really only fragments of facts. In the field of psychology its effect was deleterious. There were even scholastics who played at literature—I will not say philosophers who played at poetry, for a poet and a philosopher are twins, or perhaps even one and the same thing—and who carried the Positivist psychological analysis into the novel and the drama, where the principal task is to put concrete men, men of flesh and blood, into motion. And the Positivists, by dint of focusing on states of consciousness, made consciousness disappear. The same thing happened to them that is said often to happen in the examination and testing of certain complicated, organic, living chemical compounds when the reagents destroy the very body under examination and the only results obtained are the products of the object’s decomposition.
Taking as their point of departure the obvious fact that mutually contradictory states pass through our consciousness, they ended by no longer seeing consciousness itself, the I. To ask a man about his I is like asking him about his body. And note that in speaking of the I, I speak of the concrete and personal I, not of the I of Fichte, but of Fichte himself, the man Fichte.
And that which determines a man, that which makes him a certain man, one man and not another, the man he is and not the man he is not, is a principle of unity and a principle of continuity. A principle of unity, first, in space, by virtue of his body, and next in action and intention. When we walk, one foot does not go forward and the other backward, nor when we look about us does one eye gaze to the North and the other to the South—as long as we are normal, that is. We are animated by some purpose at every moment in our life, and it is to this purpose that the synergy of our actions is directed, even though in the next instant we may alter our purpose. And in a certain sense a man is that much more a man the more unitary his action. There are people who follow a single course of action throughout their life, whatever their purpose may be.
Then there is a principle of continuity in time. Without entering upon a discussion—an idle discussion—of whether or not I am the same person I was twenty years ago, I nevertheless think it is beyond question that the person I am today derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness, from the person who was contained in my body twenty years ago. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.
I know very well that all this is sheer platitude; but in going about the world one meets men who seem to have no sense of themselves. One of my best friends, with whom I have strolled every day for years, used to say to me, every time I spoke to him of the sense of one’s own personality: “Well now, I don’t have any sense of myself. I don’t know what you mean.”
On one occasion this friend remarked to me: “I’d like to be So-and-So,” and here he mentioned a certain man. I said: “Now that’s something I’ve never understood: that one should want to be someone else, anyone at all. To want to be someone else means that one wants to cease being who one is. I can understand one’s wanting to have what someone else has, his wealth or his knowledge. But to be someone else: that’s something I don’t understand.” It has often been said that every man who has suffered still prefers to be himself, with all his misfortunes, than someone else, even without those misfortunes. For the fact is that unfortunate men, as long as they keep their sanity in the midst of their misfortune, that is, as long as they still strive to persist in themselves, prefer misfortune to non-being. Of myself I can say that when I was a young man, even when I was a boy, I was not to be moved by the pathetic pictures of Hell that were drawn for me, for even at the time nothing seemed as terrible as Nothingness. I was already possessed of a furious hunger to be, “an appetite for divinity,” as one of our ascetics put it.
To propose to a man that he be someone else, that he become someone else, is to propose that he cease to be himself. Every man defends his own personality, and will agree to a change in his way of thinking or of feeling only in so far as the change can fit into the unity of his spirit and mesh with its continuity, in so far as this change can harmonize with and be integrated into the rest of his mode of being, thinking, and feeling, while at the same time it can be linked with his memories. Neither a man nor a people (in a certain sense a people is also a man) can be asked to make a change that will break the unity and continuity of the person. A man can be greatly changed, almost completely in fact, but only within the stream of his continuity.
It is true that so-called changes of personality take place in certain individuals; but these are pathological cases, and the proper concern of mental pathologists. In these changes of personality, memory—the basis of consciousness—is completely destroyed, so that the victim is left only with his physical organism as substratum for his individual continuity, which now ceases to be personal. For the victim, this ill is the equivalent of death; it is not the same as death only for those who are to inherit his fortune, should he have one. Such an infirmity is a revolution, a veritable revolution.
In a certain sense, any infirmity is an organic dissociation; it is a rebellion by some element or organ of the living body which breaks the vital synergy and which conspires toward an end different from that sought by other elements coordinated to it. Its end, considered in itself—that is, in the abstract—may be more elevated, more noble, more anything you like; but it is different. To fly and breathe in the air may be better than to swim and breathe in the water; but if the fins of a fish took it upon themselves to change into wings, then the fish, as fish, would perish. And it is no good saying that the fish would, in the end, become a bird, unless there were some process of continuity in the becoming. I am not sure, but perhaps it could happen that a fish might engender a bird, or another fish that would be closer to a bird than the first fish was; but a fish, the fish in question, cannot itself, during its own lifetime, turn into a bird.
Everything that conspires in me to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and, therefore, to destroy itself. Every individual who conspires among a people to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as a part of that people. Another nation, you say, is better than our own? Very possibly; though in all truth we don’t rightly understand what is meant by better or worse. Richer? Granted. More cultured? Granted likewise. They are happier? Happiness, now . . . Well, all right, granted. They are a conquering people (what is called conquering) while we are a conquered people? Congratulations to them. That’s all very well, but they are another people. And that’s enough! Because for me to become another, to break the unity and continuity of my life, would be to cease being who I am: that is, simply, to cease to be. And that—never. Anything rather than that!
Another, you say, might fill my role as well or better? Another might fulfill my social function? Yes. But he would not be I.
“I, I, I, always I,” some reader will exclaim. “And who are you?” I might reply in the words of Obermann, that great man: “In the eyes of the Universe, nothing. In my own eyes, everything.” But I would rather recall a doctrine stated by the man Kant: to wit, that we ought to think of our fellowmen, of the rest of humanity, not as means but as ends. For it is not a question of me alone; it is a question of you, protesting reader; it is a question of the other man, of each and every other man. Singular judgments have the value of universal judgments, the logicians say. The singular is not particular; it is universal.
Man is an end, not a means. All civilization is directed toward man, toward each man, toward each I. For what is that idol called humanity—or whatever else they may call it—to which all men and each individual man should be sacrificed? I can sacrifice myself for my fellow man, for my countrymen, for my children, and all of these, in their turn, may sacrifice themselves for theirs, and their sons sacrifice themselves for theirs, and so on in an unending succession of generations. And who is it, now, who receives the fruit of this sacrifice?
Those who talk to us of this fantastic sacrifice, of this dedication without object, are wont to talk also about the right to live. What is this right to live? They tell me I am here to realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellow men, am here to realize myself, to live.
Yes, yes, I see it all! One vast social activity, a mighty civilization, a great deal of science, a deal of art, of industry, of morality and then, once we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with highways, museums, and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will all remain—for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
“Wait now!” the same reader will exclaim again; “we’re back to what it says in the Catechism: ‘Q. For whom did God create the world? A. For man.’ ” Very well, then: yes. And that’s the way any man who is really a man ought to reply. An ant, if it took any notice of these things and were a person conscious of itself, would answer: “For the ant,” and that would be the right reply. The world is made for consciousness, for each consciousness.
“One human soul is worth the entire Universe,” someone said, and said magnificently. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life. Not this life. And the less a man believes in the soul—that is, in his conscious immortality, personal and concrete—the more the worth of this poor transitory life is exaggerated. And this exaggeration is the source of all that effeminate mawkishness against war. Of course, one ought not to want to die, not die the spiritual death. “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it,” says the Gospel; but it does not say “whosoever will save his soul,” his immortal soul—or the soul we believe and want to be immortal.
And all the definition-mongers of objectivism do not notice, or rather do not wish to notice, that when a man affirms his “I,” his personal consciousness, he affirms man, concrete and real man, 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 are conscious is that of man.
The world is made for consciousness. Or rather, this “for” of ours, this notion of finality—or even better than “notion,” this feeling of finality—this teleological feeling does not occur except where consciousness exists. In the end, consciousness and purpose are the same thing.
If the sun were possessed of consciousness, it would doubtless think that it existed in order to illuminate the various worlds; but it would also and above all think that the worlds existed so that it might illuminate them and take pleasure in so doing and thus live. And it would be right to think in this wise.
And this whole tragic struggle of man to save himself, that immortal longing for immortality which caused the man Kant to make the immortal leap mentioned above, all of it is no more than a fight for consciousness. If consciousness is no more—as some inhuman thinker said—than a flash of lightning between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.
Some reader may see a basic contradiction in everything I am saying, as I long on the one hand for unending life, and on the other hand claim that this life is devoid of the value assigned it. A contradiction? I should say so! The contradiction between my heart which says Yes, and my head which says No! Naturally there is a contradiction. Who does not remember those words of the Gospel which say: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief”? Contradiction? Indeed there is! Since we live solely from and by contradictions, since life is tragedy and the tragedy is in the perpetual struggle without hope or victory, then it is all a contradiction.
The values we are here discussing are, as you see, values of the heart, and—against values of the heart, reason does not avail. For reasons are only reasons, that is, not even truths. There exists a class of pedantic definition-mongers, pedants by nature and by grace, who remind me of that gentleman who, proposing to console a father whose son had just died in the flower of his youth, told him: “Patience, my friend, we all have to die!” Would you be surprised if this father were annoyed at such a piece of impertinence? For it surely was an impertinence. And there are times when even an axiom constitutes an impertinence. Often enough we might well say:
Para pensar cual tú, sólo es preciso
no tener nada mas que inteligencia.
There are people, in fact, who appear to think only with their brain, or with whatever else the specific thinking organ may be. And there are others who think with their whole body and soul, with their blood, with the narrow of their bones, with their heart and lungs and viscera, with their whole life. And the people who think only with their brain turn into definition-mongers; they become professionals of thought. And you know what a professional is? You know what a product of the division of labor is?
Take a professional boxer, for example: he has learned to hit with such economy of effort that he puts all his force into one blow, bringing into play only those muscles necessary to achieve his immediate end and concentrated purpose: to down his opponent. A blow given by a non-professional may not have as much immediate, objective efficacy, but it will have much more vital effect on the man delivering it, causing him to bring into play almost his entire body. One blow is that of a boxer, the other that of a man. And it is notorious that the Hercules of the circus, the athletes of the ring, are not generally sound of health. They floor their opponents, they lift enormous weights, but they die of tuberculosis or dyspepsia.
If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. The cultivation of any branch of science whatever—of chemistry, physics, geometry, philology—may be a labor of differentiated specialization (and even then, it may be that only in a very restricted sense and within very narrow limits); but philosophy, like poetry, is a labor of integration and synthesis, or else it is merely pseudo-philosophical erudition.
All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dim begging of the question. We learn something either for an immediate practical end, or in order to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the learning which appears most theoretical to us, that is, that knowledge having the least immediate application to the non-intellectual necessities of life, answers to a need no less real because it is intellectual, to reasons of economy in our thinking, to a principle of unity and continuity in our consciousness. But just as a bit of scientific knowledge has its finality in the rest of knowledge, so the philosophy that we would make our own has also its extrinsic object—it has reference to our whole destiny, to our attitude toward life and the universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy is to reconcile intellectual needs with the needs of the heart and will. For it is on this point that all philosophy which attempts to undo the eternal and tragic contradiction underlying our existence falls to pieces. But is this contradiction always faced?
Little can be expected from a ruler, for example, who has not at some time or other concerned himself, even though only dimly, with the first beginning and final end of all things, most especially of man, with his first why and his final wherefore.
And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must involve the heart. It is not enough to think, we must also feel, our destiny. And the would-be leader of his fellowmen who affirms and proclaims that things above the rooftops leave him cold, does not deserve to lead them. Though, of course, this does not mean that any ready-made solution need be demanded of him. A solution? Is there indeed any solution?
For my part, I would never willingly follow or bestow my confidence on any popular leader who is not impregnated with the idea that whoever leads a people leads men, men of flesh and blood, men who are born, suffer, and, even though they would not die, do die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who must be whoever they are, and not anyone else; men, in short, who seek what we call happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice a generation of men to the generation that follows them, without any regard for the destiny of those sacrificed: not just regard for their memory or their names, but regard for the men themselves.
All the talk about a man living on in his children, or in his works, or as part of the Universe, is but vague lucubration satisfactory only to people who suffer from emotional stupidity—though these same people may also possess a certain intellectual distinction. For one may boast a great talent, what we know as a great talent, and be a dunce as regards feeling, and even a moral imbecile. There have been instances.
The affective dunces with talent are wont to say that it is useless to try and delve into the unknowable or to wrestle against thorns. It is as if one were to tell a man whose leg has been amputated that it is no good thinking about it. And all of us have suffered some amputation; some of us feel it, and others simply do not. Or, some pretend they do not feel anything, and these are the hypocrites.
A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him: “Why do you weep thus, if weeping is of no use?” And the wise man answered: “Precisely for that reason, because it’s no use.” Of course, weeping does have some use, even if only to give relief, but the profound sense of Solon’s reply to his impertinent questioner comes through. And I am convinced we would solve many questions if we only went out into the streets and bruited our sorrows—which would probably turn out to be one single common sorrow—and joined in weeping and crying out to Heaven and calling upon God, even if He did not hear us—though He would certainly. The holiest attribute of a temple is that it is a place where men weep in common. A Miserere sung in common by a multitude flailed by destiny is worth a whole philosophy. To cure the plague is not enough, it must also be lamented with bitter tears. Yes, we must learn to weep! Perhaps that is the supreme wisdom. Wherefore? Ask Solon.
There is something which, for want of a better name, we shall call the tragic sense of life, and it carries along with it an entire conception of the Universe and of life itself, an entire philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may animate, and does animate, not only individual men, but entire peoples. And this sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though later these ideas react upon it and corroborate it. Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness, dyspepsia, for example; but at other times it is constitutional. And it is no good talking, as we shall see, of men sound and unsound. Apart from the fact that there is no normal standard of health, no one has ever proved that man must necessarily be joyful by nature. But there is more to it than that: man, because he is man, because he possesses consciousness, is already, in comparison to the jackass or the crab, a sick animal. Consciousness is a disease.
There are many examples of flesh and blood men who have been instinct with the tragic sense of life. I think at once of Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, René, Obermann, James Thomson, Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard—men weighed down with wisdom rather than with knowledge.
There may be those who believe that any one of these men adopted his attitude—as if such attitudes could be adopted, as one adopts a posture—in order to call attention to himself or perhaps to ingratiate himself with those in power, with his superiors, perhaps. No one is more petty than the man who sets out to reconstruct the intentions of others. But honni soit qui mal y pense. And I make use of a French proverb so as not to set down a much more energetic one in Spanish, which, however, borders on coarseness.
And there are also, I believe, whole peoples who possess this tragic sense of life as well.
It is to this question that we must now turn our attention, beginning with the matter of health and disease.
[*The asterisk alongside any page’s number indicates that there is material on that page which is annotated in the Notes at the end of this volume.]