purely rational, it must
involve the heart. It is not enough to think about our destiny: it must
be felt. And the would-be leader of men who affirms and proclaims that
he pays no heed to the things of the spirit, is not worthy to lead them.
By which I do not mean, of course, that any ready-made solution is to be
required of him. Solution? Is there indeed any?

So far as I am concerned, I will never willingly yield myself, nor
entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who is not penetrated with
the feeling that he who orders a people orders men, men of flesh and
bone, men who are born, suffer, and, although they do not wish to die,
die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who must be
themselves and not others; men, in fine, who seek that which we call
happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of
men to the generation which follows, without having any feeling for the
destiny of those who are sacrificed, without having any regard, not for
their memory, not for their names, but for them themselves.

All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in
the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only
those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be
persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess
great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as
regards the feelings and even morally imbecile. There have been
instances.

These clever-witted, affectively stupid persons are wont to say that it
is useless to seek to delve in the unknowable or to kick against the
pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has had to be
amputated that it does not help him at all to think about it. And we all
lack something; only some of us feel the lack and others do not. Or they
pretend not to feel the lack, and then they are hypocrites.

A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him,
"Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?" And the sage answered
him, "Precisely for that reason--because it does not avail." It is
manifest that weeping avails something, even if only the alleviation of
distress; but the deep sense of Solon's reply to the impertinent
questioner is plainly seen. And I am convinced that we should solve many
things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs,
which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and