t they are the contents of daily life that goes by the
name of history of philosophy? In fact, experience as it comes from
moment to moment is not one, harmonious and orderly, but multifold,
discordant, and chaotic. Its stuff is not spirit, but stones and railway
wrecks and volcanoes and Mexico and submarines, and trenches, and
frightfulness, and Germany, and disease, and waters, and trees, and
stars, and mud. It is not eternal, but changes from instant to instant
and from season to season. Actually, men do not live forever; death is a
fact, and immortality is literally as well as in philosophic discourse
not so much an aspiration for the continuity of life as an aspiration
for the elimination of death, purely _im_mortality. Actually the will is
not free, each interest encounters obstruction, no interest is
completely satisfied, all are ultimately cut off by death.

Such are the general features of all human experience, by age
unwithered, and with infinite variety forever unstaled. The traditional
philosophic treatment of them is to deny their reality, and to call them
appearance, and to satisfy the generic human interest which they oppose
and repress by means of the historical reconstruction in imaginative
dialectic of a world constituted by these most generalized value-forms
and then to eulogize the reconstruction with the epithet "reality."
When, in the course of human events, such reconstruction becomes limited
to the biography of particular individuals, is an expression of their
concrete and unique interest, is lived and acted on, it is called
paranoia. The difference is not one of kind, but of concreteness,
application, and individuality. Such a philosophy applied universally in
the daily life is a madness, like Christian Science: kept in its proper
sphere, it is a fine art, the finest and most human of the arts, a
reconstruction in discourse of the whole universe, in the image of the
free human spirit. Philosophy has been reasonable because it is so
unpersonal, abstract, and general, like music; because, in spite of its
labels, its reconstructions remain pure desiderates and value-forms,
never to be confused with and substituted for existence. But
philosophers even to this day often have the delusion that the
substitutions are actually made.[92]

IV

It is the purity of the value-forms imagined in philosophy that makes
philosophy "normative." The arts, which it judges, have an identical
origin and an indisti