from side to side, from aspect to aspect, than they are intent on resolving what it is, after all, that the discussion comes to and to which solution, when everything has been said and heard, the balance of truth really to incline.  There are too many giggling epigrams; people are too willing to look on collections of mutually hostile opinions with the same kind of curiosity which they bestow on a collection of mutually hostile beasts in a menagerie.  They have very faint predilections for one rather than another.  If they were truly alive to the duty of conclusiveness, or to the inexpressible magnitude of the subjects which nominally occupy their minds, but really only exercise their tongues, this elegant Pyrrhonism would be impossible, and this light-hearted neutrality most unendurable.

Well has the illustrious Pascal said with reference to one of the two great issues of the modern controversy:—­’The immortality of the soul is a thing that concerns us so closely and touches us so profoundly, that one must have lost all feeling to be indifferent as to knowing how the matter is.  All our actions and all our thoughts must follow such different paths, according as there are eternal goods to hope for or are not, that it is impossible to take a step with sense and judgment, without regulating it in view of this point, which ought to be our first object....  I can have nothing but compassion for those who groan and travail in this doubt with all sincerity, who look on it as the worst of misfortunes, and who, sparing no pains to escape from it, make of this search their chief and most serious employment....  But he who doubts and searches not is at the same time a grievous wrongdoer, and a grievously unfortunate man.  If along with this he is tranquil and self-satisfied, if he publishes his contentment to the world and plumes himself upon it, and if it is this very state of doubt which he makes the subject of his joy and vanity—­I have no terms in which to describe so extravagant a creature.’[15] Who, except a member of the school of extravagant creatures themselves, would deny that Pascal’s irritation is most wholesome and righteous?

Perhaps in reply to this, we may be confronted by our own doctrine of intellectual responsibility interpreted in a directly opposite sense.  We may be reminded of the long array of difficulties that interfere between us and knowledge in that tremendous matter, and of objections that rise in such perplexing force to an answer either one way or the other.  And finally we may be despatched with a eulogy of caution and a censure of too great heat after certainty.  The answer is that there is a kind of Doubt not without search, but after and at the end of search, which is not open to Pascal’s just reproaches against the more ignoble and frivolous kind.  And this too has been described for us by a subtle doctor of Pascal’s communion.  ’Are there pleasures of Doubt, as well as of Inference and Assent?  In one sense there are.  Not indeed if doubt means