It is enough to make one lose one's head, as those scrupulous people are aware, who the more they attempt to perfect their examination of conscience the more they are confused. No other counsel can be offered to them than that of examining themselves certainly, but not overmuch, of looking rather ahead than behind, or only looking behind to the extent that it is necessary to look. We certainly know our own history and that of the world that surrounds us, but how little and how meagrely in comparison with our infinite desire for knowledge!
The best way of ending this vexation of spirit is that which I have followed, that of pushing it to its extreme limit, and then of imagining for a moment that all the interrogations mentioned, together with the infinite others that could be mentioned, have been satisfied; satisfied as interrogations that continued to the infinite can be satisfied--that is to say, by affording an immediate answer to them, one after the other, and by causing the spirit to enter the path of a vertiginous process of satisfactions, always obtained to the infinite. Now, were all those interrogations satisfactorily answered, were we in possession of all the answers to them, what should we do? The road of progress to the infinite is as wide as that to hell, and if it does not lead to hell it certainly leads to the madhouse. And that infinite, which grows bigger the moment we first touch it, does not avail us; indeed it fills us with fear. Only the poor finite assists us, the determined, the concrete, which is grasped by thought and which lends itself as base for our existence and as point of departure for our action. Thus even were all the particular infinities of infinite history offered for the gratification of our desire, there would be nothing else left for us to do but to clear our minds of them, to _forget_ them, and to concentrate upon that particular point alone which corresponds to a problem and constitutes living, active history, _contemporary history_.
And this is what the spirit in its development accomplishes, because there is no fact that is not known at the moment of its being done, by means of the consciousness that germinates perpetually upon action; and there is no fact that is not forgotten sooner or later, but may be recalled, as we remarked when speaking of dead history revived at the touch of life, of the past that by means of the contemporaneous becomes again contemporaneous. Tolstoi got this thought fixed in his mind: not only is no one, not even a Napoleon, able to predetermine with exactitude the happenings of a battle, but no one can know how it really did happen, because on the very evening of its ending an artificial, legendary history appears, which only a credulous spirit could mistake for real history; yet it is upon this that professional historians work, integrating or tempering imagination with imagination. But the battle is known as it gradually develops, and then as the turmoil that it causes is dissipated, so too is dissipated the turmoil of that consciousness, and the only thing of importance is the actuality of the new situation and the 'new disposition of soul that has been produced, expressed in poetical legends or availing itself of artificial fictions. And each one of us at every moment knows and forgets the majority of his thoughts and acts (what a misfortune it would be if he did not do so, for his life would be a tiresome computation of his smallest movements!); but he does not forget, and preserves for a greater or less time, those thoughts and sentiments which represent memorable crises and problems relating to his future. Sometimes we assist with astonishment at the awakening in us of sentiments and thoughts that we had believed to be irrevocable. Thus it must be said that we know at every moment all the history that we need to know; and since what remains over does not matter to us, we do not possess the means of knowing it, or we shall possess it when the need arises. That 'remaining' history is the eternal phantom of the 'thing in itself,' which is neither 'thing' nor 'in itself,' but only the imaginative projection of the infinity of our action and of our knowledge.