In what at first sight might seem a very strange way, the movement that sustained lyricism in the nineteenth century was one and the same as that by which man obtained positive knowledge of himself; but is it surprising that the figures of knowledge and those of language should obey the same profound law, and that the irruption of finitude shoulddominate, in the same way, this relation of man to death, which, in the first case, authorizes a scientific discourse in a rational form, and, in the second, opens up the source of a language that unfolds endlessly in the void left by the absence of the gods'?