A CONFESSION [12]
VI
In my search for answers to life's questions I experienced
just what is felt by a man lost in a forest.
He reaches a glade, climbs a tree, and clearly sees the
limitless distance, but sees that his home is not and cannot be
there; then he goes into the dark wood and sees the darkness, but
there also his home is not.
So I wandered n that wood of human knowledge, amid the gleams
of mathematical and experimental science which showed me clear
horizons but in a direction where there could be no home, and also
amid the darkness of the abstract sciences where I was immersed in
deeper gloom the further I went, and where I finally convinced
myself that there was, and could be, no exit.
Yielding myself to the bright side of knowledge, I understood
that I was only diverting my gaze from the question. However
alluringly clear those horizons which opened out before me might
be, however alluring it might be to immerse oneself in the
limitless expanse of those sciences, I already understood that the
clearer they were the less they met my need and the less they
applied to my question.
"I know," said I to myself, "what science so persistently
tries to discover, and along that road there is no reply to the
question as to the meaning of my life." In the abstract sphere I
understood that notwithstanding the fact, or just because of the
fact, that the direct aim of science is to reply to my question,
there is no reply but that which I have myself already given:
"What is the meaning of my life?" "There is none." Or: "What
will come of my life?" "Nothing." Or: "Why does everything exist
that exists, and why do I exist?" "Because it exists."
Inquiring for one region of human knowledge, I received an
innumerable quantity of exact replies concerning matters about
which I had not asked: about the chemical constituents of the
stars, about the movement of the sun towards the constellation
Hercules, about the origin of species and of man, about the forms
of infinitely minute imponderable particles of ether; but in this
sphere of knowledge the only answer to my question, "What is the
meaning of my life?" was: "You are what you call your 'life'; you
are a transitory, casual cohesion of particles. The mutual
interactions and changes of these particles produce in you what you
call your "life". That cohesion will last some time; afterwards
the interaction of these particles will cease and what you call
"life" will cease, and so will all your questions. You are an
accidentally united little lump of something. that little lump
ferments. The little lump calls that fermenting its 'life'. The
lump will disintegrate and there will be an end of the fermenting
and of all the questions." So answers the clear side of science
and cannot answer otherwise if it strictly follows its principles.
From such a reply one sees that the reply does not answer the
question. I want to know the meaning of my life, but that it is a
fragment of the infinite, far from giving it a meaning destroys its
every possible meaning. The obscure compromises which that side of
experimental exact science makes with abstract science when it says
that the meaning of life consists in development and in cooperation
with development, owing to their inexactness and obscurity cannot
be considered as replies.
The other side of science -- the abstract side -- when it
holds strictly to its principles, replying directly to the
question, always replies, and in all ages has replied, in one and
the same way: "The world is something infinite and
incomprehensible part of that incomprehensible 'all'." Again I
exclude all those compromises between abstract and experimental
sciences which supply the whole ballast of the semi-sciences called
juridical, political, and historical. In those semi-sciences the
conception of development and progress is again wrongly introduced,
only with this difference, that there it was the development