quently, if my reason, which is in a certain sense a part of the
reason of all my brothers in humanity in time and space, teaches me this
absolute scepticism in respect of what concerns my longing for
never-ending life, I think that I can assume that my feeling of life,
which is the essence of life itself, my vitality, my boundless appetite
for living and my abhorrence of dying, my refusal to submit to
death--that it is this which suggests to me the doctrines with which I
try to counter-check the working of the reason. Have these doctrines an
objective value? someone will ask me, and I shall answer that I do not
understand what this objective value of a doctrine is. I will not say
that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines that I am
about to set forth are those which make me live; but I will venture to
say that it is my longing to live and to live for ever that inspires
these doctrines within me. And if by means of them I succeed in
strengthening and sustaining this same longing in another, perhaps when
it was all but dead, then I shall have performed a man's work and, above
all, I shall have lived. In a word, be it with reason or without reason
or against reason, I am resolved not to die. And if, when at last I die
out, I die out altogether, then I shall not have died out of
myself--that is, I shall not have yielded myself to death, but my human
destiny will have killed me. Unless I come to lose my head, or rather my
heart, I will not abdicate from life--life will be wrested from me.

To have recourse to those, ambiguous words, "optimism" and "pessimism,"
does not assist us in any way, for frequently they express the very
contrary of what those who use them mean to express. To ticket a
doctrine with the label of pessimism is not to impugn its validity, and
the so-called optimists are not the most efficient in action. I believe,
on the contrary, that many of the greatest heroes, perhaps the greatest
of all, have been men of despair and that by despair they have
accomplished their mighty works. Apart from this, however, and accepting
in all their ambiguity these denominations of optimism and pessimism,
that there exists a certain transcendental pessimism which may be the
begetter of a temporal and terrestrial optimism, is a matter that I
propose to develop in the following part of this treatise.

Very different, well I know, is the attitude of our progressives, the
partisans of "the central current of c