forts of the
irrational to express itself, there is a total lack of rationality, of
all objective value? No; the absolutely, the irrevocably irrational, is
inexpressible, is intransmissible. But not the contra-rational. Perhaps
there is no way of rationalizing the irrational; but there is a way of
rationalizing the contra-rational, and that is by trying to explain it.
Since only the rational is intelligible, really intelligible, and since
the absurd, being devoid of sense, is condemned to be incommunicable,
you will find that whenever we succeed in giving expression and
intelligibility to anything apparently irrational or absurd we
invariably resolve it into something rational, even though it be into
the negation of that which we affirm.

The maddest dreams of the fancy have some ground of reason, and who
knows if everything that the imagination of man can conceive either has
not already happened, or is not now happening or will not happen some
time, in some world or another? The possible combinations are perhaps
infinite. It only remains to know whether all that is imaginable is
possible.

It may also be said, and with justice, that much of what I am about to
set forth is merely a repetition of ideas which have been expressed a
hundred times before and a hundred times refuted; but the repetition of
an idea really implies that its refutation has not been final. And as I
do not pretend that the majority of these fancies are new, so neither do
I pretend, obviously, that other voices before mine have not spoken to
the winds the same laments. But when yet another voice echoes the same
eternal lament it can only be inferred that the same grief still dwells
in the heart.

And it comes not amiss to repeat yet once again the same eternal
lamentations that were already old in the days of Job and Ecclesiastes,
and even to repeat them in the same words, to the end that the devotees
of progress may see that there is something that never dies. Whosoever
repeats the "Vanity of vanities" of Ecclesiastes or the lamentations of
Job, even though without changing a letter, having first experienced
them in his soul, performs a work of admonition. Need is to repeat
without ceasing the _memento mori_.

"But to what end?" you will ask. Even though it be only to the end that
some people should be irritated and should see that these things are not
dead and, so long as men exist, cannot die; to the end that they should
be convinced that to-