I do not know, I do not know, I do not know....  And perhaps I may be saying fundamentally the same thing, although more confusedly, that my imaginary adversaries say, only more clearly, more definitely, and more rationally, those adversaries whom I imagine in order that I may have someone to fight.  I do not know, I do not know....  But what they say freezes me and sounds to me as though it proceeded from emptiness of feeling.

And, returning to our former question, Is virtue knowledge?—­Is knowledge virtue?  For they are two distinct questions.  Virtue may be a science, the science of acting rightly, without every other science being therefore virtue.  The virtue of Machiavelli is a science, and it cannot be said that his virtu is always moral virtue It is well known, moreover, that the cleverest and the most learned men are not the best.

No, no, no!  Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics how to be good.  And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be the pedantry of logic, or of esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy.

Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make either heroes or saints.  Perhaps the saint is he who does good not for good’s sake, but for God’s sake, for the sake of eternalization.

Perhaps, on the other hand, culture, or as I should say Culture—­oh, this culture!—­which is primarily the work of philosophers and men of science, is a thing which neither heroes nor saints have had any share in the making of.  For saints have concerned themselves very little with the progress of human culture; they have concerned themselves rather with the salvation of the individual souls of those amongst whom they lived.  Of what account in the history of human culture is our San Juan de la Cruz, for example—­that fiery little monk, as culture, in perhaps somewhat uncultured phrase, has called him—­compared with Descartes?

All those saints, burning with religious charity towards their neighbours, hungering for their own and others’ eternalization, who went about burning hearts, inquisitors, it may be—­what have all those saints done for the progress of the science of ethics?  Did any of them discover the categorical imperative, like the old bachelor of Koenigsberg, who, if he was not a saint, deserved to be one?

The son of a famous professor of ethics, one who scarcely ever opened his lips without mentioning the categorical imperative, was lamenting to me one day the fact that he lived in a desolating dryness of spirit, in a state of inward emptiness.  And I was constrained to answer him thus:  “My friend, your father had a subterranean river flowing through his spirit, a fresh current fed by the beliefs of his early childhood, by hopes in the beyond; and while he thought that he was nourishing his soul with this categorical imperative or something of that sort, he was in reality nourishing it with those waters which had their spring in his childish days.  And it may be that to you he has given the flower of his spirit, his rational doctrines of ethics, but not the root, not the subterranean source, not the irrational substratum.”