s volition shall trample reason under
foot and pass beyond it. But reason has its revenge.

The instinct of knowing and the instinct of living, or rather of
surviving, come into conflict. In his work on the _Analysis of the
Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical_,[32] Dr.
E. Mach tells us that not even the investigator, the savant, _der
Forscher_, is exempted from taking his part in the struggle for
existence, that even the roads of science lead mouth-wards, and that in
the actual conditions of the society in which we live the pure instinct
of knowing, _der reine Erkenntnisstrieb_, is still no more than an
ideal. And so it always will be. _Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_,
or perhaps better, _primum supervivere_ or _superesse_.

Every position of permanent agreement or harmony between reason and
life, between philosophy and religion, becomes impossible. And the
tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle
between reason and life--reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing
it to submit to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing
reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its own vital desires.
And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of
religion.

Our sense of the world of objective reality is necessarily subjective,
human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will always rise up against
rationalism; reason will always find itself confronted by will. Hence
the rhythm of the history of philosophy and the alternation of periods
in which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual forms, with
those in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to materialist forms,
although both of these classes of forms of belief may be disguised by
other names. Neither reason nor life ever acknowledges itself
vanquished. But we will return to this in the next chapter.

The vital consequence of rationalism would be suicide. Kierkegaard puts
it very well: "The consequence for existence[33] of pure thought is
suicide.... We do not praise suicide but passion. The thinker, on the
contrary, is a curious animal--for a few spells during the day he is
very intelligent, but, for the rest, he has nothing in common with man"
(_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, chap iii., Sec. 1).

As the thinker, in spite of all, does not cease to be a man, he employs
reason in the interests of life, whether he knows it or not. Life cheats
reason and reason cheats l