ies he hears a mole crying, "I pity them with their sun!"

There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led
back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that
they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in
any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove
God.

We salute them as philosophers, while inexorably denouncing their
philosophy.

Let us go on.

The remarkable thing about it is, also, their facility in paying
themselves off with words. A metaphysical school of the North,
impregnated to some extent with fog, has fancied that it has worked a
revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the
word Will.

To say: "the plant wills," instead of: "the plant grows": this would be
fecund in results, indeed, if we were to add: "the universe wills." Why?
Because it would come to this: the plant wills, therefore it has an _I_;
the universe wills, therefore it has a God.

As for us, who, however, in contradistinction to this school, reject
nothing a priori, a will in the plant, accepted by this school, appears
to us more difficult to admit than a will in the universe denied by it.

To deny the will of the infinite, that is to say, God, is impossible on
any other conditions than a denial of the infinite. We have demonstrated
this.

The negation of the infinite leads straight to nihilism. Everything
becomes "a mental conception."

With nihilism, no discussion is possible; for the nihilist logic doubts
the existence of its interlocutor, and is not quite sure that it exists
itself.

From its point of view, it is possible that it may be for itself, only
"a mental conception."

Only, it does not perceive that all which it has denied it admits in the
lump, simply by the utterance of the word, mind.

In short, no way is open to the thought by a philosophy which makes all
end in the monosyllable, No.

To No there is only one reply, Yes.

Nihilism has no point.

There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything
is something. Nothing is nothing.

Man lives by affirmation even more than by bread.

Even to see and to show does not suffice. Philosophy should be an
energy; it should have for effort and effect to ameliorate the condition
of man. Socrates should enter into Adam and produce Marcus Aurelius; in
other words, the man of wisdom should be made to emerge from the man
of felici