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To this point, through a series of dolorous reflections, I have brought the reader who has had the patience to follow me, endeavouring always to do equal justice to the claims of reason and of feeling.  I have not wished to keep silence on matters about which others are silent; I have sought to strip naked, not only my own soul, but the human soul, be its nature what it may, its destiny to disappear or not to disappear.  And we have arrived at the bottom of the abyss, at the irreconcilable conflict between reason and vital feeling.  And having arrived here, I have told you that it is necessary to accept the conflict as such and to live by it.  Now it remains for me to explain to you how, according to my way of feeling, and even according to my way of thinking, this despair may be the basis of a vigorous life, of an efficacious activity, of an ethic, of an esthetic, of a religion and even of a logic.  But in what follows there will be as much of imagination as of ratiocination, or rather, much more.

I do not wish to deceive anyone, or to offer as philosophy what it may be is only poetry or phantasmagoria, in any case a kind of mythology.  The divine Plato, after having discussed the immortality of the soul in his dialogue Phaedo (an ideal—­that is to say, a lying—­immortality), embarked upon an interpretation of the myths which treat of the other life, remarking that it was also necessary to mythologize.  Let us, then, mythologize.

He who looks for reasons, strictly so called, scientific arguments, technically logical reflections, may refuse to follow me further.  Throughout the remainder of these reflections upon the tragic sense, I am going to fish for the attention of the reader with the naked, unbaited hook; whoever wishes to bite, let him bite, but I deceive no one.  Only in the conclusion I hope to gather everything together and to show that this religious despair which I have been talking about, and which is nothing other than the tragic sense of life itself, is, though more or less hidden, the very foundation of the consciousness of civilized individuals and peoples to-day—­that is to say, of those individuals and those peoples who do not suffer from stupidity of intellect or stupidity of feeling.

And this tragic sense is the spring of heroic achievements.

If in that which follows you shall meet with arbitrary apothegms, brusque transitions, inconsecutive statements, veritable somersaults of thought, do not cry out that you have been deceived.  We are about to enter—­if it be that you wish to accompany me—­upon a field of contradictions between feeling and reasoning, and we shall have to avail ourselves of the one as well as of the other.

That which follows is not the outcome of reason but of life, although in order that I may transmit it to you I shall have to rationalize it after a fashion.  The greater part of it can be reduced to no logical theory or system; but like that tremendous Yankee poet, Walt Whitman, “I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me” (Myself and Mine).