And what is the end?... If we could only succeed in
seeing clearly into ourselves!"
Seeing clearly! seeing clearly! Clear vision would be only attainable by
a pure thinker who used algebra instead of language and was able to
divest himself of his own humanity--that is to say, by an unsubstantial,
merely objective being: a no-being, in short. In spite of reason we are
compelled to think with life, and in spite of life we are compelled to
rationalize thought.
This animation, this personification, interpenetrates our very
knowledge. "Who is it that sends the rain? Who is it that thunders?" old
Strepsiades asks of Socrates in _The Clouds_ of Aristophanes, and the
philosopher replies: "Not Zeus, but the clouds." "But," questions
Strepsiades, "who but Zeus makes the clouds sweep along?" to which
Socrates answers: "Not a bit of it; it is atmospheric whirligig."
"Whirligig?" muses Strepsiades; "I never thought of that--that Zeus is
gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead." And so the old man
goes on personifying and animating the whirlwind, as if the whirlwind
were now a king, not without consciousness of his kingship. And in
exchanging a Zeus for a whirlwind--God for matter, for example--we all
do the same thing. And the reason is because philosophy does not work
upon the objective reality which we perceive with the senses, but upon
the complex of ideas, images, notions, perceptions, etc.
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