And this one solution, which we find everywhere, at all times, and with all the nations,—a solution brought down from a time in which the life of humanity is lost for us, a solution which is so difficult that we can do nothing like it, we frivolously destroy in order to put once more the question which is inherent in every man, and for which we have no answer.
The conception of an infinite God, of the divineness of the soul, of the connection of human affairs with God, of the unity, the essence of the soul, of the human conception of moral good and evil, are concepts that have been worked out in the remote infinitude of human thought, concepts without which there would be no life and no I, and yet I, rejecting all that labour of all humanity, want to do everything anew and in my own way.
I did not think so at that time, but the germs of the thoughts were already within me. I saw, in the first place, that my position, with that of Schopenhauer and Solomon, in spite of our wisdom, was stupid: we understood life to be an evil, and yet we lived. It is stupid, because, if life is stupid,—and I am so fond of what is rational,—life ought to be destroyed, and there would not be any one to deny it. In the second place, I saw that all our reflections whirled about in a magic circle, like a wheel that does not catch in the cog. No matter how much and how well we might reflect upon the matter, we could not get an answer to the question, except that was always equal to , and so our path was evidently faulty. In the third place, I began to understand that in the answers which faith gave there was preserved the profoundest wisdom of humanity, and that I had no right to refute them on the basis of reason, and that these main answers were the only ones that gave an answer to the question of life.
