is contemporary, Hippocrates, regarded diseases
as of divine origin, and Plato believed that the sun and stars were
animated gods with their souls (_Philebus_, cap. xvi., _Laws_, x.), and
only permitted astronomical investigation so long as it abstained from
blasphemy against these gods. And Aristotle in his _Physics_ tells us
that Zeus rains not in order that the corn may grow, but by necessity
(_ex anharchest_). They tried to mechanize and rationalize God, but God
rebelled against them.

And what is the concept of God, a concept continually renewed because
springing out of the eternal feeling of God in man, but the eternal
protest of life against reason, the unconquerable instinct of
personalization? And what is the notion of substance itself but the
objectivization of that which is most subjective--that is, of the will
or consciousness? For consciousness, even before it knows itself as
reason, feels itself, is palpable to itself, is most in harmony with
itself, as will, and as will not to die. Hence that rhythm, of which we
spoke, in the history of thought. Positivism inducted us into an age of
rationalism--that is to say, of materialism, mechanism, or mortalism;
and behold now the return of vitalism, of spiritualism. What was the
effort of pragmatism but an effort to restore faith in the human
finality of the universe? What is the effort of a Bergson, for example,
especially in his work on creative evolution, but an attempt to
re-integrate the personal God and eternal consciousness? Life never
surrenders.

And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic or
anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if we thought
only for the sake of thinking and knowing, and not for the sake of
living. The very language with which we think prevents us from so doing.
Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a
mythic and anthropomorphic base. And to construct a purely rational
philosophy it would be necessary to construct it by means of algebraic
formulas or to create a new language for it, an inhuman language--that
is to say, one inapt for the needs of life--as indeed Dr. Richard
Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zuerich, attempted to do in his
_Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung_), in order to
avoid preconceptions. And this rigorous attempt of Avenarius, the chief
of the critics of experience, ends strictly in pure scepticism. He
himself says at the end