Yes, perhaps, as the Sage says, “nothing worthy proving can be proven, nor yet disproven”; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which may conduce to life, to eternal life?  Eternal life, not eternal knowledge, as the Alexandrian gnostic said.  For living is one thing and knowing is another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital.  And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.

The defect of Descartes’ Discourse of Method lies not in the antecedent methodical doubt; not in his beginning by resolving to doubt everything, a merely intellectual device; but in his resolution to begin by emptying himself of himself, of Descartes, of the real man, the man of flesh and bone, the man who does not want to die, in order that he might be a mere thinker—­that is, an abstraction.  But the real man returned and thrust himself into the philosophy.

“Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagee.”  Thus begins the Discourse of Method, and this good sense saved him.  He continues talking about himself, about the man Descartes, telling us among other things that he greatly esteemed eloquence and loved poetry; that he delighted above all in mathematics because of the evidence and certainty of its reasons, and that he revered our theology and claimed as much as any to attain to heaven—­et pretendais autant qu’aucun autre a gagner le ciel.  And this pretension—­a very laudable one, I think, and above all very natural—­was what prevented him from deducing all the consequences of his methodical doubt.  The man Descartes claimed, as much as any other, to attain to heaven, “but having learned as a thing very sure that the way to it is not less open to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead thither are beyond our intelligence, I did not dare submit them to my feeble reasonings, and I thought that to undertake to examine them and to succeed therein, I should want some extraordinary help from heaven and need to be more than man.”  And here we have the man.  Here we have the man who “did not feel obliged, thank God, to make a profession (metier) of science in order to increase his means, and who did not pretend to play the cynic and despise glory.”  And afterwards he tells us how he was compelled to make a sojourn in Germany, and there, shut up in a stove (poele) he began to philosophize his method.  But in Germany, shut up in a stove!  And such his discourse is, a stove-discourse, and the stove a German one, although the philosopher shut up in it was a Frenchman who proposed to himself to attain to heaven.