t is the whole human race that is
involved, it is the ultimate finality of all our civilization. I am but
one, but all men are I's.

Do you remember the end of that _Song of the Wild Cock_ which Leopardi
wrote in prose?--the despairing Leopardi, the victim of reason, who
never succeeded in achieving belief. "A time will come," he says, "when
this Universe and Nature itself will be extinguished. And just as of the
grandest kingdoms and empires of mankind and the marvellous things
achieved therein, very famous in their own time, no vestige or memory
remains to-day, so, in like manner, of the entire world and of the
vicissitudes and calamities of all created things there will remain not
a single trace, but a naked silence and a most profound stillness will
fill the immensity of space. And so before ever it has been uttered or
understood, this admirable and fearful secret of universal existence
will be obliterated and lost." And this they now describe by a
scientific and very rationalistic term--namely, _entropia_. Very pretty,
is it not? Spencer invented the notion of a primordial homogeneity, from
which it is impossible to conceive how any heterogeneity could
originate. Well now, this _entropia_ is a kind of ultimate homogeneity,
a state of perfect equilibrium. For a soul avid of life, it is the most
like nothingness that the mind can conceive.

* * * * *

To this point, through a series of dolorous reflections, I have brought
the reader who has had the patience to follow me, endeavouring always to
do equal justice to the claims of reason and of feeling. I have not
wished to keep silence on matters about which others are silent; I have
sought to strip naked, not only my own soul, but the human soul, be its
nature what it may, its destiny to disappear or not to disappear. And we
have arrived at the bottom of the abyss, at the irreconcilable conflict
between reason and vital feeling. And having arrived here, I have told
you that it is necessary to accept the conflict as such and to live by
it. Now it remains for me to explain to you how, according to my way of
feeling, and even according to my way of thinking, this despair may be
the basis of a vigorous life, of an efficacious activity, of an ethic,
of an esthetic, of a religion and even of a logic. But in what follows
there will be as much of imagination as of ratiocination, or rather,
much more.

I do not wish to deceive anyone, or to of