For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the
justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, or else they are our way of
trying to explain that conduct to ourselves.
Man, in effect, is unwilling to remain in ignorance of the motives of
his own conduct. And just as a man who has been led to perform a certain
action by hypnotic suggestion will afterwards invent reasons which would
justify it and make it appear logical to himself and others, being
unaware all the time of the real cause of his action, so every man--for
since "life is a dream" every man is in a condition of hypnotism--seeks
to find reasons for his conduct. And if the pieces on a chessboard were
endowed with consciousness, they would probably have little difficulty
in ascribing their moves to freewill--that is to say, they would claim
for them a finalist rationality. And thus it comes about that every
philosophic theory serves to explain and justify an ethic, a doctrine of
conduct, which has its real origin in the inward moral feeling of the
author of the theory. But he who harbours this feeling may possibly
himself have no clear consciousness of its true reason or cause.
Consequently, if my reason, which is in a certain sense a part of the
reason of all my brothers in humanity in time and space, teaches me this
absolute scepticism in respect of what concerns my longing for
never-ending life, I think that I can assume that my feeling of life,
which is the essence of life itself, my vitality, my boundless appetite
for living and my abhorrence of dying, my refusal to submit to
death--that it is this which suggests to me the doctrines with which I
try to counter-check the working of the reason.
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