of the Prologue to the work above mentioned:
"The childish confidence that it is granted to us to discover truth has
long since disappeared; as we progress we become aware of the
difficulties that lie in the way of its discovery and of the limitation
of our powers. And what is the end?... If we could only succeed in
seeing clearly into ourselves!"

Seeing clearly! seeing clearly! Clear vision would be only attainable by
a pure thinker who used algebra instead of language and was able to
divest himself of his own humanity--that is to say, by an unsubstantial,
merely objective being: a no-being, in short. In spite of reason we are
compelled to think with life, and in spite of life we are compelled to
rationalize thought.

This animation, this personification, interpenetrates our very
knowledge. "Who is it that sends the rain? Who is it that thunders?" old
Strepsiades asks of Socrates in _The Clouds_ of Aristophanes, and the
philosopher replies: "Not Zeus, but the clouds." "But," questions
Strepsiades, "who but Zeus makes the clouds sweep along?" to which
Socrates answers: "Not a bit of it; it is atmospheric whirligig."
"Whirligig?" muses Strepsiades; "I never thought of that--that Zeus is
gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead." And so the old man
goes on personifying and animating the whirlwind, as if the whirlwind
were now a king, not without consciousness of his kingship. And in
exchanging a Zeus for a whirlwind--God for matter, for example--we all
do the same thing. And the reason is because philosophy does not work
upon the objective reality which we perceive with the senses, but upon
the complex of ideas, images, notions, perceptions, etc., embodied in
language and transmitted to us with our language by our ancestors. That
which we call the world, the objective world, is a social tradition. It
is given to us ready made.

Man does not submit to being, as consciousness, alone in the Universe,
nor to being merely one objective phenomenon the more. He wishes to save
his vital or passional subjectivity by attributing life, personality,
spirit, to the whole Universe. In order to realize his wish he has
discovered God and substance; God and substance continually reappear in
his thought cloaked in different disguises. Because we are conscious, we
feel that we exist, which is quite another thing from knowing that we
exist, and we wish to feel the existence of everything else; we wish
that of all the other indi