Apart from this, however, and accepting
in all their ambiguity these denominations of optimism and pessimism,
that there exists a certain transcendental pessimism which may be the
begetter of a temporal and terrestrial optimism, is a matter that I
propose to develop in the following part of this treatise.
Very different, well I know, is the attitude of our progressives, the
partisans of "the central current of contemporary European thought"; but
I cannot bring myself to believe that these individuals do not
voluntarily close their eyes to the grand problem of existence and that,
in endeavouring to stifle this feeling of the tragedy of life, they
themselves are not living a lie.
The foregoing reflections are a kind of practical summary of the
criticism developed in the first six chapters of this treatise, a kind
of definition of the practical position to which such a criticism is
capable of leading whosoever will not renounce life and will not
renounce reason and who is compelled to live and act between these upper
and nether millstones which grind upon the soul. The reader who follows
me further is now aware that I am about to carry him into the region of
the imagination, of imagination not destitute of reason, for without
reason nothing subsists, but of imagination founded on feeling. And as
regards its truth, the real truth, that which is independent of
ourselves, beyond the reach of our logic and of our heart--of this truth
who knows aught?
FOOTNOTES:
[31] See Troeltsch, _Systematische christliche Religion_, in _Die Kultur
der Gegenwart_ series.
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