This series of contradictions into which the Englishman falls in his desire to explain the theory of a science whose end is in itself, is easily understood when it is remembered that it is an Englishman who speaks, and that the Englishman is before everything else a man.  Perhaps a German specialist, a philosopher who had made philosophy his speciality, who had first murdered his humanity and then buried it in his philosophy, would be better able to explain this theory of a science whose end is in itself and of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

Take the man Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland; read his Ethic as a despairing elegiac poem, which in fact it is, and tell me if you do not hear, beneath the disemburdened and seemingly serene propositions more geometrico, the lugubrious echo of the prophetic psalms.  It is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair.  And when he wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and that his wisdom consists in meditating not on death but on life—­homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat et eius sapientia non mortis, sed vitae meditatio est (Ethic, Part IV., Prop.  LXVII.)—­when he wrote that, he felt, as we all feel, that we are slaves, and he did in fact think about death, and he wrote it in a vain endeavour to free himself from this thought.  Nor in writing Proposition XLII. of Part V., that “happiness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself,” did he feel, one may be sure, what he wrote.  For this is usually the reason why men philosophize—­in order to convince themselves, even though they fail in the attempt.  And this desire of convincing oneself—­that is to say, this desire of doing violence to one’s own human nature—­is the real starting-point of not a few philosophies.

Whence do I come and whence comes the world in which and by which I live?  Whither do I go and whither goes everything that environs me?  What does it all mean?  Such are the questions that man asks as soon as he frees himself from the brutalizing necessity of labouring for his material sustenance.  And if we look closely, we shall see that beneath these questions lies the wish to know not so much the “why” as the “wherefore,” not the cause but the end.  Cicero’s definition of philosophy is well known—­“the knowledge of things divine and human and of the causes in which these things are contained,” rerum divinarum et humanarum, causarumque quibus hae res continentur; but in reality these causes are, for us, ends.  And what is the Supreme Cause, God, but the Supreme End?  The “why” interests us only in view of the “wherefore.”  We wish to know whence we came only in order the better to be able to ascertain whither we are going.