From the superstition of a ridiculous and childish heaven and hell they have fallen into the superstition of a gross and unspiritual earth. THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE _Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto_, said the Latin playwright. And I would rather say: _Nullum hominem a me alienum puto_: I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective _humanus_ is no less suspect than its abstract substantive _humanitas_, humanity. Neither the “human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor the substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive--man. The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother. For there is something else that is also called man, and he is the subject of many more or less scientific speculations. He is the legendary featherless biped, the ξῷον πολιτικόυ of Aristotle, the social contractor of Rousseau, the _homo economicus_ of the Manchester school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnæus, or, if you like, the vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief, merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man. Our man is the other man, the man of flesh and bone--I and you, my reader, and the other man over there, all of us who weigh upon the earth. And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain self-styled philosophers like it or not. In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems are presented to us as if they grew out of one another and their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inward biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a secondary place. And it is this, nevertheless, this inward biography, that explains most things to us. It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry than to science. All philosophic systems that have been constructed as a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have in every age possessed much less consistency and less life than those which have expressed the integral desire of the spirit of their authors.