But if it leads to nothing? Even if it should lead only
to irritating the devotees of progress, those who believe that truth is
consolation, it would lead to not a little. To irritating them and
making them say: Poor fellow! if he would only use his intelligence to
better purpose!... Someone perhaps will add that I do not know what I
say, to which I shall reply that perhaps he may be right--and being
right is such a little thing!--but that I feel what I say and I know
what I feel and that suffices me. And that it is better to be lacking in
reason than to have too much of it.
And the reader who perseveres in reading me will also see how out of
this abyss of despair hope may arise, and how this critical position may
be the well-spring of human, profoundly human, action and effort, and of
solidarity and even of progress. He will see its pragmatic
justification. And he will see how, in order to work, and to work
efficaciously and morally, there is no need of either of these two
conflicting certainties, either that of faith or that of reason, and how
still less is there any need--this never under any circumstances--to
shirk the problem of the immortality of the soul, or to distort it
idealistically--that is to say, hypocritically. The reader will see how
this uncertainty, with the suffering that accompanies it, and the
fruitless struggle to escape from it, may be and is a basis for action
and morals.
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