soul--that is to say in his conscious immortality, personal and
concrete--the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory
life. This is the source from which springs all that effeminate,
sentimental ebullition against war. True, a man ought not to wish to
die, but the death to be renounced is the death of the soul. "Whosoever
will save his life shall lose it," says the Gospel; but it does not say
"whosoever will save his soul," the immortal soul--or, at any rate,
which we believe and wish to be immortal.

And what all the objectivists do not see, or rather do not wish to see,
is that when a man affirms his "I," his personal consciousness, he
affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true humanism--the
humanism of man, not of the things of man--and in affirming man he
affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of which we have
consciousness is that of man.

The world is for consciousness. Or rather this _for_, this notion of
finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling, is
born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are
fundamentally the same thing.

If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it
lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above
all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them light
and enjoy itself in giving them light and so live. And it would think
well.

And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal craving
for immortality which caused the man Kant to make that immortal leap of
which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for consciousness. If