a necessity; I need it in order to
live.

And you, who are you? you ask me; and I reply with Obermann, "For the
universe, nothing; for myself, everything!" Pride? Is it pride to want
to be immortal? Unhappy men that we are! 'Tis a tragic fate, without a
doubt, to have to base the affirmation of immortality upon the insecure
and slippery foundation of the desire for immortality; but to condemn
this desire on the ground that we believe it to have been proved to be
unattainable, without undertaking the proof, is merely supine. I am
dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me
from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for
immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really
believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me,
wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask
the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the
principle.

But these are things which it is impossible to discuss.

It is related in the book of the Acts of the Apostles how wherever Paul
went the Jews, moved with envy, were stirred up to persecute him. They
stoned him in Iconium and Lystra, cities of Lycaonia, in spite of the
wonders that he worked therein; they scourged him in Philippi of
Macedonia and persecuted his brethren in Thessalonica and Berea. He
arrived at Athens, however, the noble city of the intellectuals, over
which brooded the sublime spirit of Plato--the Plato of the gloriousness
of the risk of immortality; and there Paul disputed with Epicureans and
Stoics. And some said of him, "What doth this babbler (_spermologos_)
mean?" and others, "He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods"
(Acts xvii. 18), "and they took him and brought him unto Areopagus,
saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is?
for thou bringest certain strange things to our ears; we would know,
therefore, what these things mean" (verses 19-20). And then follows that
wonderful characterization of those Athenians of the decadence, those
dainty connoisseurs of the curious, "for all the Athenians and strangers
which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or
to hear some new thing" (verse 21). A wonderful stroke which depicts for
us the condition of mind of those who had learned from the _Odyssey_
that the gods plot and achieve the destruction of mortals in order that
their posterity may have someth