Thus, whether philosophy, after having overthrown theological
dogmatism, spiritualizes matter or materializes thought,
idealizes being or realizes ideas; or whether, identifying
SUBSTANCE and CAUSE, it everywhere substitutes FORCE, phrases,
all, which explain and signify nothing,--it always leads us
back to this everlasting dualism, and, in summoning us to believe
in ourselves, compels us to believe in God, if not in spirits.
It is true that, making spirit a part of Nature, in distinction
from the ancients, who separated it, philosophy has been led to
this famous conclusion, which sums up nearly all the fruit of its
researches: In man spirit KNOWS ITSELF, while everywhere else
it seems NOT TO KNOW ITSELf--"That which is awake in man, which
dreams in the animal, and sleeps in the stone," said a
philosopher.

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