ABSTRACT
I have always declined the request to expound my philosophy shortly in a popular way, partly because philosophy, like any other work of man, can only be really understood by those who are of the trade, and partly because this possessive ‘my’ has a bad sound. Any craftsman who takes up the job which a fellow-worker or predecessor has dropped, and carries it on towards perfection does not call it ‘his’ but ‘our’ work. But I have now reached the age when, as Giovanni Prati wrote, there rises in the heart ‘the sadness of the days that are no more.’ It was his fortune to know sadness but not, as we do, to despair in the encircling gloom of slaughter and destruction of all that we held dear or sacred. I have reached the age when a man’s life seems a past that he can survey at a single glance, and when he himself takes his place in ‘history’, or to put it more plainly, he looks at himself as if he were dead. That is why I am now willing to comply briefly, so far as is modest and reasonable, with the request.
