hic systems
are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously, and
their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inner
biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a
secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that
explains for us most things.

It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry
than to science. All philosophic systems which have been constructed as
a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have
in every age possessed much less consistency and life than those which
expressed the integral spiritual yearning of their authors.

And, though they concern us so greatly, and are, indeed, indispensable
for our life and thought, the sciences are in a certain sense more
foreign to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end--that is
to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are fundamentally a
matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind called
theoretical, is, like a mechanical discovery--that of the steam-engine,
the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane--a thing which is useful
for something else. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in enabling
us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But she,
wherefore is she useful to us? A man takes an electric tram to go to
hear an opera, and asks himself, Which, in this case, is the more
useful, the tram or the opera?

Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary
conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception,
a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to outward
action. But the fact is that this feeling, instead of being a
consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our
philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the
world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And life,
like everything affective, has roots in subconsciousness, perhaps in
unconsciousness.

It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it
is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps
pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been
defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which
differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason.
More often I have se