the intellect.  The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it.  In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it.  In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind.  Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.  Worms also feed upon corpses.  My own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the innermost recesses of my soul, once they are torn from their roots in the heart, poured out on to this paper and there fixed in unalterable shape, are already only the corpses of thoughts.  How, then, shall reason open its portals to the revelation of life?  It is a tragic combat—­it is the very essence of tragedy—­this combat of life with reason.  And truth?  Is truth something that is lived or that is comprehended?

It is only necessary to read the terrible Parmenides of Plato to arrive at his tragic conclusion that “the one is and is not, and both itself and others, in relation to themselves and one another, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.”  All that is vital is irrational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is essentially sceptical.

The rational, in effect, is simply the relational; reason is limited to relating irrational elements.  Mathematics is the only perfect science, inasmuch as it adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers, but not real and substantial things, inasmuch as it is the most formal of the sciences.  Who can extract the cube root of an ash-tree?

Nevertheless we need logic, this terrible power, in order to communicate thoughts and perceptions and even in order to think and perceive, for we think with words, we perceive with forms.  To think is to converse with oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and logic.  But may they not perhaps possess a content, an individual matter, incommunicable and untranslatable?  And may not this be the source of their power?

The truth is that man, the prisoner of logic, without which he cannot think, has always sought to make logic subservient to his desires, and principally to his fundamental desire.  He has always sought to hold fast to logic, and especially in the Middle Ages, in the interests of theology and jurisprudence, both of which based themselves on what was established by authority.  It was not until very much later that logic propounded the problem of knowledge, the problem of its own validity, the scrutiny of the metalogical foundations.

“The Western theology,” Dean Stanley wrote, “is essentially logical in form and based on law.  The Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and based on philosophy.  The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate.  The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist."[28]

And all the laboured arguments in support of our hunger of immortality, which pretend to be grounded on reason or logic, are merely advocacy and sophistry.