Everyone is familiar with the telling dramatic force of the device which consists in involving a philosophical hero, a man addicted to principles of high generality, in sudden overwhelming emotional chaos, in which all his philosophy goes to smash. The refractoriness of sexual love, for instance, to all his theories is such a delicious _reductio ad absurdum_ of the theories. First you make your philosopher develop his maxims, in a besotted, fatuous conviction of their infallibility: then a particularly impossible she enters, one who is conspiciously unfitted, by artlessness or disabilities of worldly station, for the upsetting of principles great and high. The philosopher goes through his paces, eating his maxims whole, with unction; and you have the spectacle of Life rising serene, untouched, above the futilities of theory. The theory doesn’t work. The obvious conclusion is that there is some fundamental incommensurability between it and the simple facts of life that can flout it so. _Simon the Jester_ is a very delightful example of what I mean. Simon is bound to come to grief, he is so smugly philosophical. The wise novel-reader knows what to expect. Not that philosophy is not an ornament to a man, a civilizing, disciplining exercise. All that is one thing, but acting as if such notions _apply_ is quite another. This good philosophical chap gives the result of his philosophy in regulating his life, as follows: “Surely no man has fought harder than I have done to convince himself of the deadly seriousness of existence; and surely before the feet of no man has Destiny cast such stumbling-blocks to faith ... No matter what I do, I’m baffled. I look upon sorrow and say, ‘Lo, this is tragedy!’ and hey, presto! a trick of lightening turns it into farce. I cry aloud, in perfervid zeal, ‘Life is real, life is earnest, and the apotheosis of the fantastic is not its goal,’ and immediately a grinning irony comes to give the lie to my _credo_. “Or is it that, by inscrutable decree of the Almighty Powers, I am undergoing punishment for an old unregenerate point of view, being doomed to wear my detested motley for all eternity, to stretch out my hand forever to grasp realities and find I can do naught but beat the air with my bladder; to listen with strained ear perpetually expectant of the music of the spheres, and catch nothing but the mocking jingle of the bells on my fool’s cap? “I don’t know. I give it up.” Giving it up is obviously the moral, here. The change of attitude implied in the last words marks the beginning of an era of glorious fulfilment of life in the former philosopher’s history. What was necessary was that he should stop theorizing and learn to live. That is, philosophy, as supreme experience, is the art of living. It is the artist that really knows, that knows inwardly and truly. The genuine philosopher is the artist in living. The intellectualist philosopher is a dissector of life’s defunct remains.