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 of everything while here it is the development of the