And even if this belief be absurd, why is its exposition less tolerated than that of others much more absurd?  Why this manifest hostility to such a belief?  Is it fear?  Is it, perhaps, spite provoked by inability to share it?

And sensible men, those who do not intend to let themselves be deceived, keep on dinning into our ears the refrain that it is no use giving way to folly and kicking against the pricks, for what cannot be is impossible.  The manly attitude, they say, is to resign oneself to fate; since we are not immortal, do not let us want to be so; let us submit ourselves to reason without tormenting ourselves about what is irremediable, and so making life more gloomy and miserable.  This obsession, they add, is a disease.  Disease, madness, reason ... the everlasting refrain!  Very well then—­No!  I do not submit to reason, and I rebel against it, and I persist in creating by the energy of faith my immortalizing God, and in forcing by my will the stars out of their courses, for if we had faith as a grain of mustard seed we should say to that mountain, “Remove hence,” and it would remove, and nothing would be impossible to us (Matt. xvii. 20).

There you have that “thief of energies,” as he[12] so obtusely called Christ who sought to wed nihilism with the struggle for existence, and he talks to you about courage.  His heart craved the eternal all while his head convinced him of nothingness, and, desperate and mad to defend himself from himself, he cursed that which he most loved.  Because he could not be Christ, he blasphemed against Christ.  Bursting with his own self, he wished himself unending and dreamed his theory of eternal recurrence, a sorry counterfeit of immortality, and, full of pity for himself, he abominated all pity.  And there are some who say that his is the philosophy of strong men!  No, it is not.  My health and my strength urge me to perpetuate myself.  His is the doctrine of weaklings who aspire to be strong, but not of the strong who are strong.  Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality.  In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death.

Before this terrible mystery of mortality, face to face with the Sphinx, man adopts different attitudes and seeks in various ways to console himself for having been born.  And now it occurs to him to take it as a diversion, and he says to himself with Renan that this universe is a spectacle that God presents to Himself, and that it behoves us to carry out the intentions of the great Stage-Manager and contribute to make the spectacle the most brilliant and the most varied that may be.  And they have made a religion of art, a cure for the metaphysical evil, and invented the meaningless phrase of art for art’s sake.