Manchester school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnæus, or, if you like, the
vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age
nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief,
merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man.

The man we have to do with is the man of flesh and bone--I, you, reader
of mine, the other man yonder, all of us who walk solidly on the earth.

And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the
subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain
self-styled philosophers like it or not.

In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems
are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously, and
their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inner
biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a
secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that
explains for us most things.

It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry
than to science. All philosophic systems which have been constructed as
a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have
in every age possessed much less consistency and life than those which
expressed the integral spiritual yearning of their authors.

And, though they concern us so greatly, and are, indeed, indispensable
for our life and thought, the sciences are in a certain sense more
foreign to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end--that is
to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are fundamentally a
matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind called