ne of my fellows, am here
to realize myself, to live.

Yes, yes, I see it all!--an enormous social activity, a mighty
civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of
morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial
marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums, and libraries, we
shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist--for
whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?

"Why!" the reader will exclaim again, "we are coming back to what the
Catechism says: '_Q_. For whom did God create the world? _A_. For man.'"
Well, why not?--so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it
took account of these matters and were a person, would reply "For the
ant," and it would reply rightly. The world is made for consciousness,
for each consciousness.

A human soul is worth all the universe, someone--I know not whom--has
said and said magnificently. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life.
Not this life. And it happens that the less a man believes in the
soul--that is to say in his conscious immortality, personal and
concrete--the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory
life. This is the source from which springs all that effeminate,
sentimental ebullition against war. True, a man ought not to wish to
die, but the death to be renounced is the death of the soul. "Whosoever
will save his life shall lose it," says the Gospel; but it does not say
"whosoever will save his soul," the immortal soul--or, at any rate,
which we believe and wish to be immortal.

And what all the objectivists do not see, or rather do not wish to see,
is that when a man affirms his "I," his personal consciousness, he
affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true humanism--the
humanism of man, not of the things of man--and in affirming man he
affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of which we have
consciousness is that of man.

The world is for consciousness. Or rather this _for_, this notion of
finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling, is
born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are
fundamentally the same thing.

If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it
lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above
all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them light
and enjoy itself in giving them light and so live. And it woul