re of
knowing, only awakes and becomes operative after the necessity of
knowing for the sake of living is satisfied; and although sometimes in
the conditions under which the human race is actually living it may not
so befall, but curiosity may prevail over necessity and knowledge over
hunger, nevertheless the primordial fact is that curiosity sprang from
the necessity of knowing in order to live, and this is the dead weight
and gross matter carried in the matrix of science. Aspiring to be
knowledge for the sake of knowledge, to know the truth for the sake of
the truth itself, science is forced by the necessities of life to turn
aside and put it itself at their service. While men believe themselves
to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in
truth. The variations of science depend upon the variations of human
needs, and men of science are wont to work, willingly or unwillingly,
wittingly or unwittingly, in the service of the powerful or in that of a
people that demands from them the confirmation of its own desires.

But is this really a dead weight that impedes the progress of science,
or is it not rather its innermost redeeming essence? It is in fact the
latter, and it is a gross stupidity to presume to rebel against the very
condition of life.

Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and
primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. This
necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge
and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches,
tastes, and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear,
touch, taste, and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or the
loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is
environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in
which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch,
and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could
not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common
sense.

Man, then, in his quality of an isolated individual, only sees, hears,
touches, tastes, and smells in so far as is necessary for living and
self-preservation. If he does not perceive colours below red or above
violet, the reason perhaps is that the colours which he does perceive
suffice for the purposes of self-preservation. And the senses themselves
are simplifying apparati which