rrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And
this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.

The defect of Descartes' _Discourse of Method_ lies not in the
antecedent methodical doubt; not in his beginning by resolving to doubt
everything, a merely intellectual device; but in his resolution to begin
by emptying himself of himself, of Descartes, of the real man, the man
of flesh and bone, the man who does not want to die, in order that he
might be a mere thinker--that is, an abstraction. But the real man
returned and thrust himself into the philosophy.

"_Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagee_." Thus begins the
_Discourse of Method_, and this good sense saved him. He continues
talking about himself, about the man Descartes, telling us among other
things that he greatly esteemed eloquence and loved poetry; that he
delighted above all in mathematics because of the evidence and certainty
of its reasons, and that he revered our theology and claimed as much as
any to attain to heaven--_et pretendais autant qu'aucun autre a gagner
le ciel_. And this pretension--a very laudable one, I think, and above
all very natural--was what prevented him from deducing all the
consequences of his methodical doubt. The man Descartes claimed, as much
as any other, to attain to heaven, "but having learned as a thing very
sure that the way to it is not less open to the most ignorant than to
the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead thither are
beyond our intelligence, I did not dare submit them to my feeble
reasonings, and I thought that to undertake to examine them and to
succeed therein, I should want some extraordinary help from heaven and
need to be more than man." And here we have the man. Here we have the
man who "did not feel obliged, thank God, to make a profession
(_metier_) of science in order to increase his means, and who did not
pretend to play the cynic and despise glory." And afterwards he tells us
how he was compelled to make a sojourn in Germany, and there, shut up in
a stove (_poele_) he began to philosophize his method. But in Germany,
shut up in a stove! And such his discourse is, a stove-discourse, and
the stove a German one, although the philosopher shut up in it was a
Frenchman who proposed to himself to attain to heaven.

And he arrives at the _cogito ergo sum_, which St. Augustine had already
anticipated; but the _ego_ implicit in this enthymeme, _ego cogito, ergo
ego sum_, i