e and life, logic and biotic. For science destroys the concept of
personality by reducing it to a complex in continual flux from moment to
moment--that is to say, it destroys the very foundation of the spiritual
and emotional life, which ranges itself unyieldingly against reason.

And this doubt cannot avail itself of any provisional ethic, but has to
found its ethic, as we shall see, on the conflict itself, an ethic of
battle, and itself has to serve as the foundation of religion. And it
inhabits a house which is continually being demolished and which
continually it has to rebuild. Without ceasing the will, I mean the will
never to die, the spirit of unsubmissiveness to death, labours to build
up the house of life, and without ceasing the keen blasts and stormy
assaults of reason beat it down.

And more than this, in the concrete vital problem that concerns us,
reason takes up no position whatever. In truth, it does something worse
than deny the immortality of the soul--for that at any rate would be one
solution--it refuses even to recognize the problem as our vital desire
presents it to us. In the rational and logical sense of the term
problem, there is no such problem. This question of the immortality of
the soul, of the persistence of the individual consciousness, is not
rational, it falls outside reason. As a problem, and whatever solution
it may receive, it is irrational. Rationally even the very propounding
of the problem lacks sense. The immortality of the soul is as
unconceivable as, in all strictness, is its absolute mortality. For the
purpose of explaining the world and existence--and such is the task of
reason--it is not necessary that we should suppose that our soul is
either mortal or immortal. The mere enunciation of the problem is,
therefore, an irrationality.

Let us hear what our brother Kierkegaard has to say. "The danger of
abstract thought is seen precisely in respect of the problem of
existence, the difficulty of which it solves by going round it,
afterwards boasting that it has completely explained it. It explains
immortality in general, and it does so in a remarkable way by
identifying it with eternity--with the eternity which is essentially the
medium of thought. But with the immortality of each individually
existing man, wherein precisely the difficulty lies, abstraction does
not concern itself, is not interested in it. And yet the difficulty of
existence lies just in the interest of the exis