And what is the concept of God, a concept continually renewed because springing out of the eternal feeling of God in man, but the eternal protest of life against reason, the unconquerable instinct of personalization?  And what is the notion of substance itself but the objectivization of that which is most subjective—­that is, of the will or consciousness?  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; and behold now the return of vitalism, of spiritualism.  What was the effort of pragmatism but an effort to restore faith in the human finality of the universe?  What is the effort of a Bergson, for example, especially in his work on creative evolution, but an attempt to re-integrate the personal God and eternal consciousness?  Life never surrenders.

And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic or anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if we thought only for the sake of thinking and knowing, and not for the sake of living.  The very language with which we think prevents us from so doing.  Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a mythic and anthropomorphic base.  And to construct a purely rational philosophy it 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 Zuerich, 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 experience, ends strictly in pure scepticism.  He himself says at the end of the Prologue to the work above mentioned:  “The childish confidence that it is granted to us to discover truth has long since disappeared; as we progress we become aware of the difficulties that lie in the way of its discovery and of the limitation of our powers.  And what is the end?...  If we could only succeed in seeing clearly into ourselves!”

Seeing clearly! seeing clearly!  Clear vision would be only attainable by a pure thinker who used algebra instead of language and was able to divest himself of his own humanity—­that is to say, by an unsubstantial, merely objective being:  a no-being, in short.  In spite of reason we are compelled to think with life, and in spite of life we are compelled to rationalize thought.