It should be possible to restore to the word "philosophy" its original meaning: philosophy —the "love of wisdom" — is the science of all the fundamental principles; this science operates with intuition, which "perceives," and not with reason alone, which "concludes." Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: philosophy is supposed to reason without any premise (voraussetzungsloses Denken), as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt.(1)

The solution to the problem of knowledge — if there is a problem — could not possibly be this intellectual suicide that is the promotion of doubt; on the contrary, it lies in having recourse to a source of certitude that transcends the mental mechanism, and this source — the only one there is — is the pure Intellect, or Intelligence as such. The so-called century of "enlightenment" did not suspect its existence; for the Encyclopedists, all that the Intellect had offered — from Pythagoras to the Scholastics — was merely naive dogmatism, even "obscurantism." Quite paradoxically, the cult of reason ended in the sub-rationalism — or "esoterism of stupidity" — that is existentialism in all its forms; it is to illusorily replace intelligence with "existence."

Some have believed it is possible to replace the premise of thought by the arbitrary, empirical and altogether subjective element that is the "personality" of the thinker, which amounts to the very
destruction of the notion of truth; one may as well renounce all philosophy. The more thought wishes to be "concrete," the more it is perverse; this began with empiricism, the first step towards the dismantling of the spirit; originality is sought, and perish the truth.(2)