When every question seems accidental and peripheral, when the mind seeks ever
greater problems, it turns out that in its procedure it no longer comes up
against any object but the diffuse obstacle of the Void. Thereupon, the
philosophic energy, exclusively oriented toward the inaccessible, is exposed
to ruin. Scrutinizing things and their temporal pretexts, it imposes salutary
embarrassments upon itself; but, if it seeks an increasingly general
principle, it is lost and annihilated in the vagueness of the Essential.