ereby each individual thing endeavours to persist involves no finite
time but indefinite time. That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza wish
never to die and that this longing of ours never to die is our actual
essence. Nevertheless, this poor Portuguese Jew, exiled in the mists of
Holland, could never attain to believing in his own personal
immortality, and all his philosophy was but a consolation which he
contrived for his lack of faith. Just as other men have a pain in hand
or foot, heart-ache or head-ache, so he had God-ache. Unhappy man! And
unhappy fellow-men!

And man, this thing, is he a thing? How absurd soever the question may
appear, there are some who have propounded it. Not long ago there went
abroad a certain doctrine called Positivism, which did much good and
much ill. And among other ills that it wrought was the introduction of a
method of analysis whereby facts were pulverized, reduced to a dust of
facts. Most of the facts labelled as such by Positivism were really only
fragments of facts. In psychology its action was harmful. There were
even scholastics meddling in literature--I will not say philosophers
meddling in poetry, because poet and philosopher are twin brothers, if
not even one and the same--who carried this Positivist psychological
analysis into the novel and the drama, where the main business is to
give act and motion to concrete men, men of flesh and bone, and by dint
of studying states of consciousness, consciousness itself disappeared.
The same thing happened to them which is said often to happen in the
examination and testing of certain complicated, organic, living chemical
compounds, when the reagents destroy the very body which it was proposed
to examine and all that is obtained is the products of its
decomposition.

Taking as their starting-point the evident fact that contradictory
states pass through our consciousness, they did not succeed in
envisaging consciousness itself, the "I." To ask a man about his "I" is
like asking him about his body. And note that in speaking of the "I," I
speak of the concrete and personal "I," not of the "I" of Fichte, but of
Fichte himself, the man Fichte.

That which determines a man, that which makes him one man, one and not
another, the man he is and not the man he is not, is a principle of
unity and a principle of continuity. A principle of unity firstly in
space, thanks to the body, and next in action and intention. When we
walk, one foot does no