Philosophy, then, in its last hour, knows no more than at its
birth: as if it had appeared in the world only to verify the
words of Socrates, it says to us, wrapping itself solemnly around
with its funeral pall, "I know only that I know nothing." What
do I say? Philosophy knows today that all its judgments rest on
two equally false, equally impossible, and yet equally necessary
and inevitable hypotheses,--matter and spirit. So that, while in
former times religious intolerance and philosophic disputes,
spreading darkness everywhere, excused doubt and tempted to
libidinous indifference, the triumph of negation on all points no
longer permits even this doubt; thought, freed from every
barrier, but conquered by its own successes, is forced to affirm
what seems to it clearly contradictory and absurd. The savages
say that the world is a great fetich watched over by a great
manitou. For thirty centuries the poets, legislators, and sages
of civilization, handing down from age to age the philosophic
lamp, have written nothing more sublime than this profession of
faith.
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