, conducive to being it,
ends by forming our objective. We need that others should believe in our
superiority to them in order that we may believe in it ourselves, and
upon their belief base our faith in our own persistence, or at least in
the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him who
congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are
to him who recognizes the truth or the goodness of the cause itself. A
rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and
characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius
than hit the mark with the crowd. Rousseau has said in his _Emile_ (book
iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the
truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well
that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports
it because it is his. There is not a single one of them who, if he came
to know the true and the false, would not prefer the falsehood that he
had found to the truth discovered by another. Where is the philosopher
who would not willingly deceive mankind for his own glory? Where is he
who in the secret of his heart does not propose to himself any other
object than to distinguish himself? Provided that he lifts himself above
the vulgar, provided that he outshines the brilliance of his
competitors, what does he demand more? The essential thing is to think
differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists
he would be a believer." How much substantial truth there is in these
gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity!
This violent struggle for the perpetuation of our name extends backwards
into the past, just as it aspires to conquer the future; we contend
with the dead because we, the living, are obscured beneath their shadow.
We are jealous of the geniuses of former times, whose names, standing
out like the landmarks of history, rescue the ages from oblivion. The
heaven of fame is not very large, an
Notka biograficzna
Opona Pościel
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (September 29, 1864December 31, 1936) was an essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher from Spain.
John Middleton Murry (August 6, 1889 March 12, 1957) was an English writer. A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married, as her second husband, in 1918. Following her death, he edited her work. He was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, along with the writer Joyce Cary, a lifelong friend.
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