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trying to ‘ justify the ways of God to man ’ by talking about the goal of history and man ’ s place in space and time. Kierkegaard was a deeply religious soul for whom all this was unutterably shallow. He declared: Put me in a System and you negate me—I am not just a mathematical symbol—I am.
    Now obviously, such a denial that logic and scientific analysis can lead to truth has curious consequences. Our science is built on the assumption that a statement like ‘ All bodies fall at thirty-two feet per second in the earth ’ s gravitational field ’ has a definite meaning. But if you deny the ultimate va li dity of logic, it becomes nonsensical. And if you don ’ t deny logic, it is difficult, thinking along these lines, to pull up short of Wells and John Stuart Mill. That is why Kierkegaard phrases it: Is an Existentialist System possible; or, to put it in another way, Can one live a philosophy without negating either the life or the philosophy? Kierkegaard ’ s conclusion was No, but one can live a religion without negating life or religion. We need not pause here over the reasoning that led him to this conclusion (readers interested enough can consult the Unscientific Postscript). What is worth noticing at this point is that his affirmation of Christian values did not prevent him from violently attacking the Christian Church on the grounds that it had solved the problem of living its religion by cutting off its arms and legs to make it fit life. It is also an amusing point that the other great Existentialist philosopher of the nineteenth century, Frederick Nietzsche, attacked the Christian church on the opposite grounds of its having solved the problem by chopping down life to fit the Christian religion. Now, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were trained thinkers, and both took a certain pride in stating that they were Outsiders. It follows that we should find in their works a skilled defence of the Outsider and his position. And this in fact is what we do find.
    Nietszche and Kierkegaard evolved a philosophy that started from the Outsider; nowadays, we use Kierkegaard ’ s phrase in speaking of it, and call it Existentialism. When, in the nineteen-twenties, Kierkegaard was re-published in German, he was taken up by the professors, who discarded his religious conclusions, and used his methods of analysis to construct the so-called Existenzphilosophie. In doing so, they removed the emphasis from the Outsider and threw it back again on to Hegelian metaphysics. Later, in France, Existentialism was popularized by the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who once more restored emphasis to the Outsider, and finally arrived at their own conclusions upon the question of how to live a philosophy: Sartre in his ‘ doctrine of commitment ’ (which we shall touch upon later) and Camus with the belief: Remain an Outsider. We must examine each of these in turn.
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    In his early novel, La Nausee, Sartre skilfully synthesizes all the points we have already considered in connexion with Wells and Barbusse: the unreality, the rejection of people and civilized standards, and, finally, the ‘ cinema sheet ’ of naked existence, with ‘ no way out or round or through ’ .
    La Nausee purports to be the journal of an historian named Roquentin: not a full-fledged scientific historian like Wells, but a literary historian who is engaged in unearthing the life of a shifty diplomat-politician named Rollebon. Roquentin lives alone in a Hotel in Le Havre. His life would be a quiet record of research, conversations in the library, sexual intercourse with the cafe patronne: ‘ I live alone, entirely alone; I never speak to anyone, never; I rec eive nothing, I give nothing. .. ’
    But a series of revelations disturb him. He stands on the beach and picks up a flat stone to skim on the sea, and suddenly ... ‘ I saw something which disgusted me; I no longer know whether it was the stone or the sea. ’ He drops the stone and walks