se it or not;
therefore we can make true moral progress or fall into real errors. Wisdom
and genius lie in discerning this prescribed task and in doing it readily,
cleanly, and without distraction. Folly on the contrary imagines that any
scent is worth following, that we have an infinite nature, or no nature in
particular, that life begins without obligations and can do business
without capital, and that the will is vacuously free, instead of being a
specific burden and a tight hereditary knot to be unravelled. Some
philosophers without self-knowledge think that the variations and further
entanglements which the future may bring are the manifestation of spirit;
but they are, as Freud has indicated, imposed on living beings by external
pressure, and take shape in the realm of matter. It is only after the
organs of spirit are formed mechanically that spirit can exist, and can
distinguish the better from the worse in the fate of those organs, and
therefore in its own fate. Spirit has nothing to do with infinite
existence. Infinite existence is something physical and ambiguous; there
is no scale in it and no centre. The depths of the human heart are finite,
and they are dark only to ignorance. Deep and dark as a soul may be when
you look down into it from outside, it is something perfectly natural; and
the same understanding that can unearth our suppressed young passions, and
dispel our stubborn bad habits, can show us where our true good lies.
Nature has marked out the path for us beforehand; there are snares in it,
but also primroses, and it leads to peace.

V

THE PRESTIGE OF THE INFINITE

"The more complex the world becomes and the more it rises above the
indeterminate, so much the farther removed it is from God; that is to say,
so much the more impious it is." M. Julien Benda[12] is not led to this
startling utterance by any political or sentimental grudge. It is not the
late war, nor the peace of Versailles, nor the parlous state of the arts,
nor the decay of morality and prosperity that disgusts him with our
confused world. It is simply overmastering respect for the infinite. _La
Trahison des Clercs_, or Treason of the Levites, with which he had
previously upbraided the intellectuals of his time, now appears to consist
precisely in coveting a part in this world's inheritance, and forgetting
that the inheritance of the Levites is the Lord: which, being interpreted
philosophically, means that a philosopher is