fer as philosophy what it may
be is only poetry or phantasmagoria, in any case a kind of mythology.
The divine Plato, after having discussed the immortality of the soul in
his dialogue _Phaedo_ (an ideal--that is to say, a lying--immortality),
embarked upon an interpretation of the myths which treat of the other
life, remarking that it was also necessary to mythologize. Let us, then,
mythologize.

He who looks for reasons, strictly so called, scientific arguments,
technically logical reflections, may refuse to follow me further.
Throughout the remainder of these reflections upon the tragic sense, I
am going to fish for the attention of the reader with the naked,
unbaited hook; whoever wishes to bite, let him bite, but I deceive no
one. Only in the conclusion I hope to gather everything together and to
show that this religious despair which I have been talking about, and
which is nothing other than the tragic sense of life itself, is, though
more or less hidden, the very foundation of the consciousness of
civilized individuals and peoples to-day--that is to say, of those
individuals and those peoples who do not suffer from stupidity of
intellect or stupidity of feeling.

And this tragic sense is the spring of heroic achievements.

If in that which follows you shall meet with arbitrary apothegms,
brusque transitions, inconsecutive statements, veritable somersaults of
thought, do not cry out that you have been deceived. We are about to
enter--if it be that you wish to accompany me--upon a field of
contradictions between feeling and reasoning, and we shall have to avail
ourselves of the one as well as of the other.

That which follows is not the outcome of reason but of life, although in
order that I may transmit it to you I shall have to rationalize it after
a fashion. The greater part of it can be reduced to no logical theory or
system; but like that tremendous Yankee poet, Walt Whitman, "I charge
that there be no theory or school founded out of me" (_Myself and
Mine_).

Neither am I the only begetter of the fancies I am about to set forth.
By no means. They have also been conceived by other men, if not
precisely by other thinkers, who have preceded me in this vale of tears,
and who have exhibited their life and given expression to it. Their
life, I repeat, not their thought, save in so far as it was thought
inspired by life, thought with a basis of irrationality.

Does this mean that in all that follows, in the ef