One of the lofty truisms--"The philosopher conquers passion by perceiving it, the artist by bodying it forth." In German it sounds still more lofty: but does not for that reason approach any nearer to the truth. "_Der Philosoph überwindet die Leidenschaft, indem er sie begreift--der Künstler, indem er sie darstellt_." (Windelband, _Praeludien_, p. 198.) 120 The Germans always try to get at _Allgemeingültigkeit_. Well, if the problem of knowledge is to fathom all the depths of actual life, then experience, in so far as it repeats itself, is uninteresting, or at least has a limit of interest. It is necessary, however, to know what nobody yet knows, and therefore we must walk, not on the common road of _Allgemeingültigkeit_, but on new tracks, which have never yet seen human feet. Thus morality, which lays down definite rules and thereby guards life for a time from any surprise, exists only by convention, and in the end collapses before the non-moral surging-up of individual human aspirations. Laws--all of them--have only a regulating value, and are necessary only to those who want rest and security. But the first and essential condition of life is lawlessness. Laws are a refreshing sleep--lawlessness is creative activity. 121 A = A.--They say that logic does not need this postulate, and could easily develop it by deduction. I think not. On the contrary, in my opinion, logic could not exist without this premiss. Meanwhile it has a purely empirical origin. In the realm of fact, A is always more or less equal to A. But it might be otherwise. The universe might be so constituted as to admit of the most fantastic metamorphoses. That which now equals A would successively equal B and then C, and so on. At present a stone remains long enough a stone, a plant a plant, an animal an animal. But it might be that a stone changed into a plant before our eyes, and the plant into an animal. That _there is nothing unthinkable_ in such a supposition is proved by the theory of evolution. This theory only puts centuries in place of seconds. So that, in spite of the risk to which I expose myself from the admirers of the famous Epicurean system, I am compelled to repeat once more that anything you please may come from anything you please, that A may not equal A, and that consequently logic is dependent, for its soundness, on the empirically-derived law of the unchangeableness of the external world. Admit the possibility of supernatural interference--and logic will lose that certitude and inevitability of its conclusions which at present is so attractive to us. 122