Some such perception and some such motive is in the consciousness Of every serious novelist and in that of every thinker. But the novelist sacrifices to a form and the thinker to a system. Each has had an anterior vision into which he lets his facts and even his emo tions melt. And this anterior vision — of a fable in the one case, Of a logical structure in the other — is nothing but a mask. For both the novelist and the philosopher is only an autobiographer in disguise. Each writes a confession; each is a lyricist at bottom. I, too, could easily have written a novel or a treatise. I have chosen to drop the mask.