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 despairing
renunciation of the attempt at a solution, is that which colours all the
rest of philosophy. Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge
there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the enquiry into
the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore,"
the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive
others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself.
And this personal and affective starting-point of all philosophy and all
religion is the tragic sense of life. Let us now proceed to consider
this.
FOOTNOTE:
[10] _The Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study
of Theology_, by the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour London, 1895: "So
it is with those persons who claim to show by their example that
naturalism is practically consistent with the maintenance of ethical
ideals with which naturalism has no natural affinity.
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