Man is an end, not a means.  All civilization addresses itself to man, to each man, to each I. What is that idol, call it Humanity or call it what you like, to which all men and each individual man must be sacrificed?  For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen, for my children, and these sacrifice themselves in their turn for theirs, and theirs again for those that come after them, and so on in a never-ending series of generations.  And who receives the fruit of this sacrifice?

Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live.  What is this right to live?  They tell me I am here to realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here to realize myself, to live.

Yes, yes, I see it all!—­an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums, and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist—­for whom?  Was man made for science or was science made for man?

“Why!” the reader will exclaim again, “we are coming back to what the Catechism says:  ‘Q.  For whom did God create the world? A.  For man.’” Well, why not?—­so ought the man who is a man to reply.  The ant, if it took account of these matters and were a person, would reply “For the ant,” and it would reply rightly.  The world is made for consciousness, for each consciousness.

A human soul is worth all the universe, someone—­I know not whom—­has said and said magnificently.  A human soul, mind you!  Not a human life.  Not this life.  And it happens that the less a man believes in the soul—­that is to say in his conscious immortality, personal and concrete—­the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory life.  This is the source from which springs all that effeminate, sentimental ebullition against war.  True, a man ought not to wish to die, but the death to be renounced is the death of the soul.  “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it,” says the Gospel; but it does not say “whosoever will save his soul,” the immortal soul—­or, at any rate, which we believe and wish to be immortal.

And what all the objectivists do not see, or rather do not wish to see, is that when a man affirms his “I,” his personal consciousness, he affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true humanism—­the humanism of man, not of the things of man—­and in affirming man he affirms consciousness.  For the only consciousness of which we have consciousness is that of man.

The world is for consciousness.  Or rather this for, this notion of finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling, is born only where there is consciousness.  Consciousness and finality are fundamentally the same thing.