For the fact is that the sciences, important to us as they are and indeed indispensable for our life and thought, are in a certain sense more extraneous to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end, that is to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are, at bottom, a matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind called theoretical, is like a mechanical discovery--that of the steam-engine, the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane--a thing that is useful for something. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in enabling us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But she, what is she useful to us for? A man takes an electric tram to go to hear an opera and asks himself: Which is in this case more useful, the tram or the opera? Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to an activity. But in fact this feeling, instead of being a consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or of not understanding the world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And this, like everything affective, has subconscious, perhaps unconscious, roots. It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas. Man, they say, is a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly--but then perhaps the crab also resolves equations of the second degree inwardly. And thus in a philosopher what must most concern us is the man. * * * * * Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to man, to each man, to each “I.” What is this idol--call it Humanity or call it what you will--to which all men and each individual man must be sacrificed? For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen, for my children, and these sacrifice themselves in their turn for theirs, and theirs again for those who come after them, and so on in a never-ending series of generations. And who receives the fruit of this sacrifice? Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live. And what is this right to live? They tell me that I have come into the world to realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here to realize myself, to live.