Tragic Sense Of Life

or happy or

pate my i

didst before I

N:

: By su

n, Act II.

ove. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion; love is consolat

tempo stesso,

ró la

opard

um of the beloved, something beyond, a

is that we never succeed in reducing love either to a purely intellectual or to a purely volitional element, putting aside that part in it which belongs to the feeling, or, if you like, to the

elves on the earth only on condition that we die, that we yield up our life to others. The humblest forms of animal life, the lowes

ct of generation consists in a being's ceasing to be what it was, either wholly or in part, in a splitting up, in a partial death. To live is to give oneself, to perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself and to give oneself is to die. The supreme delight of begetting is perhaps nothing but a foretaste of death, the eradication of

of conjunction. The same impulse that joins their bodies, separates, in a certain sense, their souls; they hate one another, while they embrace, no less than they love, and above all they contend with one another, they contend for a

trumentality of the other, though without being at the time conscious of it or purposing it, he thereby seeks his own enjoyment. Each one of the lovers is an immediate

are only a means, for an end; and therein lies the essence of sin, in taking means for ends, in not recognizing or in disesteeming the end. And since it takes enjoyment for the end, whereas it is only the means, and not perpetuation,

nd daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth of eternal despair, out of which spring hope and consolation. For out of this carnal and primitive love of which I

o one another; but of this love is begotten a fruit of their flesh-a child. And perchance this child, begotten in death, falls sick and dies. Then it comes to pass that over the fruit of their carnal fusion and spiritual separation and estrangement, their bodies now separated and cold with sorrow but united by sorrow their souls, the lovers, the parents, join in an embrace of despair, and then is born, of the death of the child of their flesh, the true spiritual love. Or rather, when the bond of flesh which

between the lovers, the stronger is the impulse that urges them towards one another, and their happiness in loving one another turns to bitterness, and their unhappiness in not being able to love freely and openly grows heavier, and they pity one another from the bottom of their hearts; and this common pity, which is their common misery and their common happiness, gives fire and fuel to their love. And they suffer their joy, enjoying their suffering. A

less, defenceless infant that craves the mother's milk and

d because they have touched the depth of their own misery, their own apparentiality, their own nothingness, and then, turning their newly opened ey

from the passer-by. True alms is pity rather than the pittance that alleviates the material hardships of life. The beggar shows little gratitude for alms thrown to him by one who hurries past with averted face; he is more grateful to him who pities him

eels that his desire makes him suffer. Isabel had compassion upon Lorenzo, Juliet upon Romeo, Francesca upon Paolo. Woman seems to say: "Come

cious of being love, of the love that is not purely animal, of the love, in

itum quin pr?volitum, that we know nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desir

own emptiness, that you are not all that you are not, that you are not what you would wish to be, that you are, in a word, only a nonentity. And in touching your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent base, in not reaching your own infinity, still less your own ete

love-all your fellows and brothers in this world of appearance, these unhappy shadows who pass from nothingness to nothingness, these sparks of consciousness which shine for a moment in the infinite and eternal darkness. And this compassionate feeling for other men, for your fellows, beginning with those most akin to you, those with whom you live, w

l to go on being always oneself, and no more than oneself, without being able to be at the same t

hings in your own consciousness, upon which all things have traced their painful impression-you will arrive at the abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of som

far as it is like ourselves, and the more like it is the more we love; and thus our pity for things, and with it our love, grows in proportion as we discover in them the likenesses which they have with ourselves. Or, rather, it is love itself, which of itself tends to grow, that reveals these resemblances to us. If I am moved to pity

it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which love, personalizing all that it l

-Consciousness taken captive by matter and struggling to free himself from it. We personalize the All in o

f distinct from other beings, and this feeling of distinction is only reached through an act of collision, through suffering more or less severe, through the sense of one's own limits. Consciousness of oneself is s

sciousness, save by suffering? When we enjoy ourselves we forget ourselves, forget that we exist; we pass over into another,

maggior

arsi del t

a mi

; but if there is no greater sorrow than the recollection in adversity of happy bygone day

a Theban at a banquet (book ix., chap. xvi.). And it is true. With knowledge and desire we can embrace everything, or almost everything; with the will nothing, or almos

e may say that this likeness provokes our pity, it may also be maintained that it is our reservoir of pity, eager to diffuse itself

the actions of those most akin to myself, of my fellow-men, I feel-or, rather, I co-feel-a state of consciousness similar to that which lies beneath my own actions. On hearing my brother give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes and cries in the depth

sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle

one other than the vital process of philosophy in the contest of life against reason and of reason against lif

hat of modern educated men, but felt and imagined, such as must have been that of primitive men. This was their own poetry, which with them was inborn, an innate faculty, for nature had furnished them with such feelings and such imaginations, a faculty born of the ignorance of causes, and therefore begetting a universal sense of wonder, for knowing nothing they marvelled greatly at everything. This poetry had a divine origin, for, while they inven

an immense image of such a personage as we call sympathetic Nature is denied to us, for though the phrase 'Dame Nature' may be on our lips, there is nothing in our minds that corresponds with it, our minds being occupied with the false, the non-existent." "To-day," Vico continues,

coexist, and although antagonistic they lend one another mutual support. High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny and begins to affirm something, whenever it becomes really positi

obbed with life. They were implicated in the structure of language itself. Xenophon tells us (Memorabilia, i., i., 6-9) that among phenomena Socrates distinguished between those which were within the scope of human study and those which the gods had reserved for themselves, and that he execrated the attempt of Anaxagoras to explain everything rationally. His contemporary, Hippocrates, regarded diseases as of divine

ciousness? For consciousness, even before it knows itself as reason, feels itself, is palpable to itself, is most in harmony with itself, as will, and as will not to die. Hence that rhythm, of which we spoke, in the history of thought. Positivism inducted us into an age of rationalism-that is to say, of materialism, mechanism, or mortalism; an

t would be necessary to construct it by means of algebraic formulas or to create a new language for it, an inhuman language-that is to say, one inapt for the needs of life-as indeed Dr. Richard Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zürich, attempted to do in his Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung), in order to avoid preconceptions. And this rigorous attempt of Avenarius, the chief of the critics of

and was able to divest himself of his own humanity-that is to say, by an unsubstantial, merely objective being: a no-being, i

s atmospheric whirligig." "Whirligig?" muses Strepsiades; "I never thought of that-that Zeus is gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead." And so the old man goes on personifying and animating the whirlwind, as if the whirlwind were now a king, not without consciousness of his kingship. And in exchanging a Zeus for a whirlwind-God for matter, for example-we all do

, spirit, to the whole Universe. In order to realize his wish he has discovered God and substance; God and substance continually reappear in his thought cloaked in different disguises. Because we are conscious, w

dynamism, the supposition that every sensation comes to us, causatively, from another spirit-that is, from another consciousness. And his doctrine has a certain affinity with those of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The former's doctrine of the Will and the latter's doctrine of the Unconscious are already impl

even a certain personality to the plants themselves. And this doctrine of his carried him logically to pessimism, for the true property and most inward function of the will is to suffer. The will is a force which feels itself-that is, which suffers. And, some

f these that the foundation of morals is compassion. Only his lack of the social and historical sense, his inability to feel that humanity also is a person, although a colle

for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of Darwin left out of account the inward force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation? Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only ext

s in the limbo of subconsciousness. Not more absurd than so many other dreams which pass as valid theories is the belief that our cells, our globules, may possess something akin to a rudimentary cellular, globular consciousness or basis of consciousness. Or that they may arrive at possessing such consciousness. And since we have given a loose rein to the fancy, we may fancy that these cells may communicate with one anothe

d co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their activity our consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness or the souls of all these cells entered completely into our consciousness, into the composite whole, if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my bodil

ath constitute our life. And their sudden and violent death constitutes our pain. And in like manner, in the h

Supreme Consciousness to be completely blotted out? After I have died, God will go on remembering me, and to be

e rejoined that so also our soul has made our body as much as, if

consciousness, feeling the pain of the discords which are produced within it, pity reveals to us the likeness of the whole universe with ourselves; it reveals t

lief in our own personality and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we feel God to be consciousness-that is to say, a person; and because we desire ardently that o

rms, the content of all this is not strictly rational. Every rational conception of God is in itself contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for God-we believe that God exists b

as the personalization of the univers

deal things issue out of love, and out of love issues God, in whom we conglomerate these ideal things as in the Consciousness of the Universe. It is social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct of perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see society in everything

kes everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature-that is to say, to make it divine by making

is impossible to say where the one begins and the other ends, for they are rather two aspects of a single essence-so also the spirit, the social element, which by relating us to others makes us cons

ll ask, as Pilate asked-not, however, only to turn a

the rational true? May there not be a reality, by its very nature, unattainable by reason, and perhaps, by i

perpetuation, which sustains man and society; it asks that the true water may be that which assuages our thirst,

aps less real than the process of knowing the nutritive substance? It may be said that to eat a loaf of bread is not the same thing as seeing, touching, or tasting it; that in the one case it enters into our body, but not therefore into our consciousness. Is this true? Does not the loaf of brea

be, we live by God and in God-in God the spirit and consciousness of soci

not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceede

ed by love, by pity, is the personalization of a person who embraces an

sing a purpose. And, as we shall see, faith in God is based simply upon the vital need of giving finality to existence, of making it answer to a pu

ble to understand how in God we live, move, and have our being. That great visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, saw or caught a glimpse of this in his book on Heaven and Hell (De Coelo et Inferno, lii.), when he tells us: "An entire angelic society appears sometimes in the form of a single angel, which also it hath been granted me by the Lord to see. When the

and their limitation? And are we not, perhaps, ideas of this total Grand Consciousness, which by thinking of us as existing confers existence upon us? Does not our existence consist in being perceived and felt by God? And, further on

), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is the unthinkable by God. Is it not written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word-that is to say, with His thought-

our souls may serve as nutriment to the Universal Soul. Yes, I enrich God, because before I existed He did not think of me as existing, because I am one more-one more even though among an infinity of others-who, having really lived, really suffered, and really loved, abide in His bosom. It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to m

appearance. There is nothing truly real save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves, and desires, save consciousness; there is nothing substantial but consciousness. And we need God in order to save

cal God or the Supreme Reason, and of the vital G

TNO

humaniza, y a

he verbs crear, to create, and creer, to believe: "Porque creer en