“Reason speaks and feeling bites” said Petrarch; but reason also bites and bites in the inmost heart.  And more light does not make more warmth.  “Light, light, more light!” they tell us that the dying Goethe cried.  No, warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we die of cold and not of darkness.  It is not the night kills, but the frost.  We must liberate the enchanted princess and destroy the stage of Master Peter.[69]

But God! may there not be pedantry too in thinking ourselves the objects of mockery and in making Don Quixotes of ourselves?  Kierkegaard said that the regenerate (Opvakte) desire that the wicked world should mock at them for the better assurance of their own regeneracy, for the enjoyment of being able to bemoan the wickedness of the world (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, ii., Afsnit ii., cap. 4, sect. 2, b).

The question is, how to avoid the one or the other pedantry, or the one or the other affectation, if the natural man is only a myth and we are all artificial.

Romanticism!  Yes, perhaps that is partly the word.  And there is an advantage in its very lack of precision.  Against romanticism the forces of rationalist and classicist pedantry, especially in France, have latterly been unchained.  Romanticism itself is merely another form of pedantry, the pedantry of sentiment?  Perhaps.  In this world a man of culture is either a dilettante or a pedant:  you have to take your choice.  Yes, Rene and Adolphe and Obermann and Lara, perhaps they were all pedants....  The question is to seek consolation in disconsolation.

The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a demi-mondaine philosophy.  Leave out the demi; call it mondaine, mundane.  Mundane—­yes, a philosophy for the world and not for philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone.  The world desires illusion (mundus vult decipi)—­either the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion.  And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded.  Blessed are they who are easily befooled!  A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, said that it was the privilege of his countrymen n’etre pas dupe—­not to be taken in.  A sorry privilege!

Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it.  “Then let him not make the demand,” it will be said, “let him resign himself, let him accept life and truth as they are.”  But he does not accept them as they are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho, who stands by his side.  And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those understand who talk thus to him, those who succeed in resigning themselves and accepting rational life and rational truth.  No, it is that the needs of his heart are greater.  Pedantry?  Who knows!...