equired for the immediate
and definite object of his action--to knock out his opponent. A blow
given by a non-professional will not have so much immediate, objective
efficiency; but it will more greatly vitalize the striker, causing him
to bring into play almost the whole of his body. The one is the blow of
a boxer, the other that of a man. And it is notorious that the Hercules
of the circus, the athletes of the ring, are not, as a rule, healthy.
They knock out their opponents, they lift enormous weights, but they die
of phthisis or dyspepsia.

If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is
above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. The
cultivation of any branch of science--of chemistry, of physics, of
geometry, of philology--may be a work of differentiated specialization,
and even so only within very narrow limits and restrictions; but
philosophy, like poetry, is a work of integration and synthesis, or else
it is merely pseudo-philosophical erudition.

All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowledge for the sake of
knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the
question. We learn something either for an immediate practical end, or
in order to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the knowledge that
appears to us to be most theoretical--that is to say, of least immediate
application to the non-intellectual necessities of life--answers to a
necessity which is no less real because it is intellectual, to a reason
of economy in thinking, to a principle of unity and continuity of
consciousness. But just as a scientific fact has its finality in the
rest of knowledge, so the philosophy that we would make our own has also
its extrinsic object--it refers to our whole destiny, to our attitude in
face of life and the universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy
is to reconcile intellectual necessities with the necessities of the
heart and the will. For it is on this rock that every philosophy that
pretends to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction, the basis of
our existence, breaks to pieces. But do all men face this contradiction
squarely?

Little can be hoped from a ruler, for example, who has not at some time
or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first
beginning and the ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with
the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny.

And this supreme preoccupation cannot be