We do not need God in order that He may teach us the truth of things, or the beauty of them, or in order that He may safeguard morality by means of a system of penalties and punishments, but in order that He may save us, in order that He may not let us die utterly.  And because this unique longing is the longing of each and every normal man—­those who are abnormal by reason of their barbarism or their hyperculture may be left out of the reckoning—­it is universal and normative.

Religion, therefore, is a transcendental economy, or, if you like, metaphysic.  Together with its logical, esthetic, and ethical values, the Universe has for man an economic value also, which, when thus made universal and normative, is the religious value.  We are not concerned only with truth, beauty, and goodness:  we are concerned also and above all with the salvation of the individual, with perpetuation, which those norms do not secure for us.  That science of economy which is called political teaches us the most adequate, the most economical way of satisfying our needs, whether these needs are rational or irrational, beautiful or ugly, moral or immoral—­a business economically good may be a swindle, something that in the long run kills the soul—­and the supreme human need is the need of not dying, the need of enjoying for ever the plenitude of our own individual limitation.  And if the Catholic eucharistic doctrine teaches that the substance of the body of Jesus Christ is present whole and entire in the consecrated Host, and in each part of it, this means that God is wholly and entirely in the whole Universe and also in each one of the individuals that compose it.  And this is, fundamentally, not a logical, nor an esthetic, nor an ethical principle, but a transcendental economic or religious principle.  And with this norm, philosophy is able to judge of optimism and pessimism. If the human soul is immortal, the world is economically or hedonistically good; if not, it is bad.  And the meaning which pessimism and optimism give to the categories of good and evil is not an ethical sense, but an economic or hedonistic sense.  Good is that which satisfies our vital longing and evil is that which does not satisfy it.

Philosophy, therefore, is also the science of the tragedy of life, a reflection upon the tragic sense of it.  An essay in this philosophy, with its inevitable internal contradictions and antinomies, is what I have attempted in these essays.  And the reader must not overlook the fact that I have been operating upon myself; that this work partakes of the nature of a piece of self-surgery, and without any other anesthetic than that of the work itself.  The enjoyment of operating upon myself has ennobled the pain of being operated upon.