And this tragic sense is the spring of heroic achievements.
If in that which follows you shall meet with arbitrary apothegms,
brusque transitions, inconsecutive statements, veritable somersaults of
thought, do not cry out that you have been deceived. We are about to
enter--if it be that you wish to accompany me--upon a field of
contradictions between feeling and reasoning, and we shall have to avail
ourselves of the one as well as of the other.
That which follows is not the outcome of reason but of life, although in
order that I may transmit it to you I shall have to rationalize it after
a fashion. The greater part of it can be reduced to no logical theory or
system; but like that tremendous Yankee poet, Walt Whitman, "I charge
that there be no theory or school founded out of me" (_Myself and
Mine_).
Neither am I the only begetter of the fancies I am about to set forth.
By no means. They have also been conceived by other men, if not
precisely by other thinkers, who have preceded me in this vale of tears,
and who have exhibited their life and given expression to it. Their
life, I repeat, not their thought, save in so far as it was thought
inspired by life, thought with a basis of irrationality.
Does this mean that in all that follows, in the efforts of the
irrational to express itself, there is a total lack of rationality, of
all objective value? No; the absolutely, the irrevocably irrational, is
inexpressible, is intransmissible.
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