Every day furnishes a new invention which this average man utilises. Every day produces a new anesthetic or vaccine from which this average man benefits. Everyone knows that, if scientific inspiration does not weaken and the laboratories are multiplied three times or ten times, there will be an automatic multiplication of wealth, comfort, health, prosperity. Far from this being the case, the post-war period has converted the man of science into a new social pariah. And note that I am referring to physicists, chemists, biologists, not to philosophers.
Philosophy needs neither protection, attention nor sympathy from the masses.
Let us, then, leave out of the question philosophy, which is an adventure of another order. The disproportion between the constant, evident benefit which science procures them and the interest they show in it is such that it is impossible to-day to deceive oneself with illusory hopes and to expect anything but barbarism from those who so behave. There may be those who feel more disturbed by other symptoms of emergent barbarism which, being positive in quality, results of action and not of omission, strike the attention more, materialise into a spectacle. Only an odd reader, ingenuous enough not to believe that he already knows definitively what life is, or at least what it is not, will allow himself to be won over by the primary meaning of these phrases, and will be precisely the one who will understand them- be they true or false. I do not conceive that it will improve my position with readers so hermetically sealed to resume my whole line of thought by saying that the primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography.