tify and educate the minds that cultivate it? Either the one or the
other! Hodgson afterwards adds that the end of metaphysics is not any
external purpose, such as that of founding an art conducive to the
welfare of life. But is not the gratification of the mind of him who
cultivates philosophy part of the well-being of his life? Let the reader
consider this passage of the English metaphysician and tell me if it is
not a tissue of contradictions.

Such a contradiction is inevitable when an attempt is made to define
humanly this theory of science, of knowledge, whose end is in itself, of
knowing for the sake of knowing, of attaining truth for the sake of
truth. Science exists only in personal consciousness and thanks to it;
astronomy, mathematics, have no other reality than that which they
possess as knowledge in the minds of those who study and cultivate them.
And if some day all personal consciousness must come to an end on the
earth; if some day the human spirit must return to the nothingness--that
is to say, to the absolute unconsciousness--from whence it sprang; and
if there shall no more be any spirit that can avail itself of all our
accumulated knowledge--then to what end is this knowledge? For we must
not lose sight of the fact that the problem of the personal immortality
of the soul involves the future of the whole human species.

This series of contradictions into which the Englishman falls in his
desire to explain the theory of a science whose end is in itself, is
easily understood when it is remembered that it is an Englishman who
speaks, and that the Englishman is before everything else a man. Perhaps
a German specialist, a philosopher who had made philosophy his
speciality, who had first murdered his humanity and then buried it in
his philosophy, would be better able to explain this theory of a science
whose end is in itself and of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

Take the man Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland; read his
_Ethic_ as a despairing elegiac poem, which in fact it is, and tell me
if you do not hear, beneath the disemburdened and seemingly serene
propositions _more geometrico_, the lugubrious echo of the prophetic
psalms. It is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair. And when
he wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and
that his wisdom consists in meditating not on death but on life--homo
liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat et eius sapi