reason. And if by imagination is
understood a faculty which fashions images capriciously, I will ask:
What is caprice? And in any case the senses and reason are also
fallible.

We shall have to enquire what is this inner social faculty, the
imagination which personalizes everything, and which, employed in the
service of the instinct of perpetuation, reveals to us God and the
immortality of the soul--God being thus a social product.

But this we will reserve till later.

And now, why does man philosophize?--that is to say, why does he
investigate the first causes and ultimate ends of things? Why does he
seek the disinterested truth? For to say that all men have a natural
tendency to know is true; but wherefore?

Philosophers seek a theoretic or ideal starting-point for their human
work, the work of philosophizing; but they are not usually concerned to
seek the practical and real starting-point, the purpose. What is the
object in making philosophy, in thinking it and then expounding it to
one's fellows? What does the philosopher seek in it and with it? The
truth for the truth's own sake? The truth, in order that we may subject
our conduct to it and determine our spiritual attitude towards life and
the universe comformably with it?

Philosophy is a product of the humanity of each philosopher, and each
philosopher is a man of flesh and bone who addresses himself to other
men of flesh and bone like himself. And, let him do what he will, he
philosophizes not with the reason only, but with the will, with the
feelings, with the flesh and with the bones, with the whole soul and the
whole body. It is the man that philosophizes.

I do not wish here to use the word "I" in connection with
philosophizing, lest the impersonal "I" should be understood in place of
the man that philosophizes; for this concrete, circumscribed "I," this
"I" of flesh and bone, that suffers from tooth-ache and finds life
insupportable if death is the annihilation of the personal
consciousness, must not be confounded with that other counterfeit "I,"
the theoretical "I" which Fichte smuggled into philosophy, nor yet with
the Unique, also theoretical, of Max Stirner. It is better to say "we,"
understanding, however, the "we" who are circumscribed in space.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is
inhuman. And if we say that theoretical philosophy addresses itself to
practical philosophy, truth to goodness, science to ethics