in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement.  A good illustration of this last case is to be found in that terrible Athenian ironist, Socrates, of whom Xenophon relates in his Memorabilia that he discovered to Theodata, the courtesan, the wiles that she ought to make use of in order to lure lovers to her house so aptly, that she begged him to act as her companion in the chase, suntherates, her pimp, in a word.  And philosophy is wont, in fact, not infrequently to convert itself into a kind of art of spiritual pimping.  And sometimes into an opiate for lulling sorrows to sleep.

I take at random a book of metaphysics, the first that comes to my hand, Time and Space, a Metaphysical Essay, by Shadworth H. Hodgson.  I open it, and in the fifth paragraph of the first chapter of the first part I read: 

“Metaphysics is, properly speaking, not a science but a philosophy—­that is, it is a science whose end is in itself, in the gratification and education of the minds which carry it on, not in external purpose, such as the founding of any art conducive to the welfare of life.”  Let us examine this.  We see that metaphysics is not, properly speaking, a science—­that is, it is a science whose end is in itself.  And this science, which, properly speaking, is not a science, has its end in itself, in the gratification and education of the minds that cultivate it.  But what are we to understand?  Is its end in itself or is it to gratify and educate the minds that cultivate it?  Either the one or the other!  Hodgson afterwards adds that the end of metaphysics is not any external purpose, such as that of founding an art conducive to the welfare of life.  But is not the gratification of the mind of him who cultivates philosophy part of the well-being of his life?  Let the reader consider this passage of the English metaphysician and tell me if it is not a tissue of contradictions.

Such a contradiction is inevitable when an attempt is made to define humanly this theory of science, of knowledge, whose end is in itself, of knowing for the sake of knowing, of attaining truth for the sake of truth.  Science exists only in personal consciousness and thanks to it; astronomy, mathematics, have no other reality than that which they possess as knowledge in the minds of those who study and cultivate them.  And if some day all personal consciousness must come to an end on the earth; if some day the human spirit must return to the nothingness—­that is to say, to the absolute unconsciousness—­from whence it sprang; and if there shall no more be any spirit that can avail itself of all our accumulated knowledge—­then to what end is this knowledge?  For we must not lose sight of the fact that the problem of the personal immortality of the soul involves the future of the whole human species.