t does not make more warmth.
"Light, light, more light!" they tell us that the dying Goethe cried.
No, warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we die of cold and not of darkness.
It is not the night kills, but the frost. We must liberate the enchanted
princess and destroy the stage of Master Peter.[69]

But God! may there not be pedantry too in thinking ourselves the objects
of mockery and in making Don Quixotes of ourselves? Kierkegaard said
that the regenerate (_Opvakte_) desire that the wicked world should mock
at them for the better assurance of their own regeneracy, for the
enjoyment of being able to bemoan the wickedness of the world
(_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, ii., Afsnit ii., cap. 4,
sect. 2, b).

The question is, how to avoid the one or the other pedantry, or the one
or the other affectation, if the natural man is only a myth and we are
all artificial.

Romanticism! Yes, perhaps that is partly the word. And there is an
advantage in its very lack of precision. Against romanticism the forces
of rationalist and classicist pedantry, especially in France, have
latterly been unchained. Romanticism itself is merely another form of
pedantry, the pedantry of sentiment? Perhaps. In this world a man of
culture is either a dilettante or a pedant: you have to take your
choice. Yes, Rene and Adolphe and Obermann and Lara, perhaps they were
all pedants.... The question is to seek consolation in disconsolation.

The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration,
essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a
_demi-mondaine_ philosophy. Leave out the _demi_; call it _mondaine_,
mundane. Mundane--yes, a philosophy for the world and not for
philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The
world desires illusion (_mundus vult decipi_)--either the illusion
antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to
reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever
wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed
are they who are easily befooled! A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, said
that it was the privilege of his countrymen _n'etre pas dupe_--not to be
taken in. A sorry privilege!

Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. "Then let him
not make the demand," it will be said, "let him resign himself, let him
accept life and truth as they are." But he does not accept them as they
are, and he asks for sig