infinite, and since man began the relation of the finite to the infinite has been sought out and expressed.
All these conceptions in which the finite has been adjusted to the infinite and a meaning found for life—the conception of God, of will, of goodness—we submit to logical examination. And all those conceptions fail to stand reason’s criticism.
Were it not so terrible it would be ludicrous with what pride and self-satisfaction we, like children, pull the watch to pieces, take out the spring, make a toy of it, and are then surprised that the watch does not go.
A solution of the contradiction between the finite and the infinite, and such a reply to the question of life as will make it possible to live, is necessary and precious. And that is the only solution which we find everywhere, always, and among all peoples: a solution descending from times in which we lose sight of the life of man, a solution so difficult that we can compose nothing like it—and this solution we light-heartedly destroy in order again to set the same question, which is natural to everyone and to which we have no answer.
The conception of an infinite god, the divinity of the soul, the connection of human affairs with God, the unity and existence of the soul, man’s conception of moral goodness and evil—are conceptions formulated in the hidden infinity of human thought, they are those conceptions without which neither life nor I should exist; yet rejecting all that labour of the whole of humanity, I wished to remake it afresh myself and in my own manner.
I did not then think like that, but the germs of these thoughts were already in me. I understood, in the first place, that my position with Schopenhauer and Solomon, notwithstanding our wisdom, was stupid: we see that life is an evil and yet continue to live. That is evidently stupid,