Page 038 CHAPTER IV THE Year of Philosophy in the
life of a young Frenchman was, in my
time, the year of intellectual puberty. One can see in Barres'
Deracine's
the significance for him and his friends of their encounter with
the philosopher Burdeau, and in the biographies of Proust the
role played by the philosopher Darlu in the formation of Proustian
doctrine.
For ten years all our attention, first as boys, then as young
men had been concentrated upon questions of form, grammar, style.
Suddenly
the depths were lighted up. Epictetus and Epicurus, Plato and
Aristotle, Descartes and
Spinoza, Locke and Kant, Hegel and Bergson, contended for mastery
in
our minds. The metaphysicians dissolved the universe into transparent
clouds or dilated the individual until he became coterminous
with the world. The moralists proposed contradictory doctrines
to justify
unvarying virtues. Dizzy and intoxicated, blind and drunk with
power, the young man would allow himself to be deliciously borne
away in the whirlwind of ideas. |
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