ignorance, uncertainty, or hopeless suspense; but there is a certain grave acquiescence in ignorance, a recognition of our impotence to solve momentous and urgent questions, which has a satisfaction of its own.  After high aspirations, after renewed endeavours, after bootless toil, after long wanderings, after hope, effort, weariness, failure, painfully alternating and recurring, it is an immense relief to the exhausted mind to be able to say, “At length I know that I can know nothing about anything.” ...  Ignorance remains the evil which it ever was, but something of the peace of certitude is gained in knowing the worst, and in having reconciled the mind to the endurance of it.’[16] Precisely, and what one would say of our own age is that it will not deliberately face this knowledge of the worst.  So it misses the peace of certitude, and not only its peace, but the strength and coherency that follow strict acceptance of the worst, when the worst is after all the best within reach.

Those who are in earnest when they blame too great haste after certainty, do in reality mean us to embrace certainty, but in favour of the vulgar opinions.  They only see the prodigious difficulties of the controversy when you do not incline to their own side in it.  They only panegyrise caution and the strictly provisional when they suspect that intrepidity and love of the conclusive would lead them to unwelcome shores.  These persons, however, whether fortunately or unfortunately, have no longer much influence over the most active part of the national intelligence.  Whether permanently or not, resolute orthodoxy, however prosperous it may seem among many of the uncultivated rich, has lost its hold upon thought.  For thought has become dispersive, and the centrifugal forces of the human mind, among those who think seriously, have for the time become dominant and supreme.  No one, I suppose, imagines that the singular ecclesiastical revival which is now going on, is accompanied by any revival of real and reasoned belief; or that the opulent manufacturers who subscribe so generously for restored cathedral fabrics and the like, have been moved by the apologetics of Aids to Faith and the Christian Evidence Society.

Obviously only three ways of dealing with the great problems of which we have spoken are compatible with a strong and well-bottomed character.  We may affirm that there is a deity with definable attributes; and that there is a conscious state and continued personality after the dissolution of the body.  Or we may deny.  Or we may assure ourselves that we have no faculties enabling us on good evidence either to deny or affirm.  Intellectual self-respect and all the qualities that are derived from that, may well go with any one of these three courses, decisively followed and consistently applied in framing a rule of life and a settled scheme of its aims and motives.  Why do we say that intellectual self-respect is not vigorous, nor the sense of intellectual responsibility