ENDS AND MEANS
stances. De Sade is the one completely consistent and
thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
If I have lingered so long over a maniac, it is because his
madness illuminates the dark places of normal behaviour.
No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love
of truth is always mingled to some extent with the need,
consciously or unconsdously felt by even the noblest and
the most intelligent philosophers, to justify a given form
of personal or social behaviour, to rationalize the traditional
prejudices of a given class or community. The philosopher
who finds meaning in the world is concerned, not only to
elucidate that meaning, but also to prove that it is most
clearly expressed in some established religion, some
accepted code of morals- The philosopher who finds
no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively
with a problem in pure metaphysics^; he is also concerned
to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally
should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should
not seize political power and govern in the way that they
find most advantageous to themselves. The voluntary, as
opposed to the intellectual, reasons for holding the doctrines
of materialism, for example, may be predominantly erotic,
as they were in the case of Lamettrie (see his lyrical account
of the pleasures of the bed in La Volupte and at the end of
L*Homme Machine), or predominantly political, as they
were in the case of Karl Marx. The desire to justify a par-
ticular form of political organization and, in some cases,
of a personal will to power, has played an equally large
part in the formulation of philosophies postulating the
existence of a meaning in the world. Christian philosophers
have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the
capitalistic system, the use of torture, die censorship of the
press, and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the
* tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New
England. In all these cases they have shown that the mean-
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