s an unreal--that is, an ideal--_ego_ or I, and its _sum_,
its existence, something unreal also. "I think, therefore I am," can
only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of the "I am,"
which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is
knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think,
but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this
living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek
to join in wedlock life and reason!

The truth is _sum, ergo cogito_--I am, therefore I think, although not
everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all
consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness
of self, without personality? Can there exist pure knowledge without
feeling, without that species of materiality which feeling lends to it?
Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act
of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove have said: "I
feel, therefore I am"? or "I will, therefore I am"? And to feel oneself,
is it not perhaps to feel oneself imperishable? To will oneself, is it
not to wish oneself eternal--that is to say, not to wish to die? What
the sorrowful Jew of Amsterdam called the essence of the thing, the
effort that it makes to persist indefinitely in its own being,
self-love, the longing for immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and
fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is it
not therefore the true base, the real starting-point, of all philosophy,
although the philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, may not
recognize it?

And, moreover, it was the _cogito_ that introduced a distinction which,
although fruitful of truths, has been fruitful also of confusions, and
this distinction is that between object, _cogito_, and subject, _sum_.
There is scarcely any distinction that does not also lead to confusion.
But we will return to this later.

For the present let us remain keenly suspecting that the longing not to
die, the hunger for personal immortality, the effort whereby we tend to
persist indefinitely in our own being, which is, according to the tragic
Jew, our very essence, that this is the affective basis of all knowledge
and the personal inward starting-point of all human philosophy, wrought
by a man and for men. And we shall see how the solution of this inward
affective problem, a solution which may be but the desp