At First Sight, One Does Not See

For A Long Time It Has Been Known That The First Systems Of Representations With Which Men Have Pictured To Themselves The World And Themselves Were Of Religious Origin. There Is No Religion That Is Not A Cosmology At The Same Time That It Is A Speculation Upon Divine Things. If Philosophy And The Sciences Were Born Of Religion, It Is Because Religion Began By Taking The Place Of The Sciences And Philosophy.

There Is A Collective As Well As An Individual Humor Inclining Peoples To Sadness Or Cheerfulness, Making Them See Things In Bright Or Somber Lights. In Fact, Only Society Can Pass A Collective Opinion On The Value Of Human Life; For This The Individual Is Incompetent.

Sadness Does Not Inhere In Things; It Does Not Reach Us From The World And Through Mere Contemplation Of The World. It Is A Product Of Our Own Thought. We Create It Out Of Whole Cloth.

If One Class Of Society Is Obliged, In Order To Live, To Take Any Price For Its Services, While Another Can Abstain From Such Action Thanks To Resources At Its Disposal Which, However, Are Not Necessarily Due To Any Social Superiority, The Second Has An Unjust Advantage Over The First At Law. In Other Words, There Cannot Be Rich And Poor A Birth Without There Being Unjust Contracts.

It Is Not Human Nature Which Can Assign The Variable Limits Necessary To Our Needs. They Are Thus Unlimited So Far As They Depend On The Individual Alone. Irrespective Of Any External Regulatory Force, Our Capacity For Feeling Is In Itself An Insatiable And Bottomless Abyss.