The will and the intelligence have need of one another, and the reverse of that old aphorism, nihil volitum quin praecognitum, nothing is willed but what is previously known, is not so paradoxical as at first sight it may appear—­nihil cognitum quin praevolitum, nothing is known but what is previously willed.  Vinet, in his study of Cousin’s book on the Pensees of Pascal, says:  “The very knowledge of the mind as such has need of the heart.  Without the desire to see there is no seeing; in a great materialization of life and of thought there is no believing in the things of the spirit.”  We shall see presently that to believe is, in the first instance, to wish to believe.

The will and the intelligence seek opposite ends:  that we may absorb the world into ourselves, appropriate it to ourselves, is the aim of the will; that we may be absorbed into the world, that of the intelligence.  Opposite ends?—­are they not rather one and the same?  No, they are not, although they may seem to be so.  The intelligence is monist or pantheist, the will monotheist or egoist.  The intelligence has no need of anything outside it to exercise itself upon; it builds its foundation with ideas themselves, while the will requires matter.  To know something is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it, to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself.

Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they have need of one another.  There is no religion without some philosophic basis, no philosophy without roots in religion.  Each lives by its contrary.  The history of philosophy is, strictly speaking, a history of religion.  And the attacks which are directed against religion from a presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks from another but opposing religious point of view.  “The opposition which professedly exists between natural science and Christianity really exists between an impulse derived from natural religion blended with the scientific investigation of nature, and the validity of the Christian view of the world, which assures to spirit its pre-eminence over the entire world of nature,” says Ritschl (Rechtfertgung und Versoehnung, iii. chap. iv.  Sec. 28).  Now this instinct is the instinct of rationality itself.  And the critical idealism of Kant is of religious origin, and it is in order to save religion that Kant enlarged the limits of reason after having in a certain sense dissolved it in scepticism.  The system of antitheses, contradictions, and antinomies, upon which Hegel constructed his absolute idealism, has its root and germ in Kant himself, and this root is an irrational root.

We shall see later on, when we come to deal with faith, that faith is in its essence simply a matter of will, not of reason, that to believe is to wish to believe, and to believe in God is, before all and above all, to wish that there may be a God.  In the same way, to believe in the immortality of the soul is to wish that the soul may be immortal, but to wish it with such force that this volition shall trample reason under foot and pass beyond it.  But reason has its revenge.