ting being--the man who
exists is infinitely interested in existing. Abstract thought besteads
immortality only in order that it may kill me as an individual being
with an individual existence, and so make me immortal, pretty much in
the same way as that famous physician in one of Holberg's plays, whose
medicine, while it took away the patient's fever, took away his life at
the same time. An abstract thinker, who refuses to disclose and admit
the relation that exists between his abstract thought and the fact that
he is an existing being, produces a comic impression upon us, however
accomplished and distinguished he may be, for he runs the risk of
ceasing to be a man. While an effective man, compounded of infinitude
and finitude, owes his effectiveness precisely to the conjunction of
these two elements and is infinitely interested in existing, an abstract
thinker, similarly compounded, is a double being, a fantastical being,
who lives in the pure being of abstraction, and at times presents the
sorry figure of a professor who lays aside this abstract essence as he
lays aside his walking-stick. When one reads the Life of a thinker of
this kind--whose writings may be excellent--one trembles at the thought
of what it is to be a man. And when one reads in his writings that
thinking and being are the same thing, one thinks, remembering his life,
that that being, which is identical with thinking, is not precisely the
same thing as being a man" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_,
chap. iii.).

What intense passion--that is to say, what truth--there is in this
bitter invective against Hegel, prototype of the rationalist!--for the
rationalist takes away our fever by taking away our life, and promises
us, instead of a concrete, an abstract immortality, as if the hunger for
immortality that consumes us were an abstract and not a concrete hunger!

It may indeed be said that when once the dog is dead there is an end to
the rabies, and that after I have died I shall no more be tortured by
this rage of not dying, and that the fear of death, or more properly, of
nothingness, is an irrational fear, but ... Yes, but ... _Eppur si
muove!_ And it will go on moving. For it is the source of all movement!

I doubt, however, whether our brother Kierkegaard is altogether in the
right, for this same abstract thinker, or thinker of abstractions,
thinks _in order that_ he may exist, that he may not cease to exist, or
thinks perhaps in order