I found that not only did Solomon declare that he hated life, for all is vanity and vexation of spirit; but that Sakya Muni, the Indian sage, equally decided that life was a great evil; while Socrates and Schopenhauer agree that annihilation is the only thing to be wished for.  But neither these testimonies of great minds nor my own reasoning could induce me to destroy myself.  For a force within me, combined with an instinctive consciousness of life, counteracted the feeling of despair and drew me out of my misery of soul.  I felt that I must study life not merely as it was amongst those like myself, but as it was amongst the millions of the common people.  I reflected that knowledge based on reason, the knowledge of the cultured, imparted no meaning to life, but that, on the other hand, amongst the masses of the common people there was an unreasoning consciousness of life which gave it a significance.

This unreasoning knowledge was the very faith which I was rejecting.  It was faith in things I could not understand; in God, one yet three; in the creation of devils and angels.  Such things seemed utterly contrary to reason.  So I began to reflect that perhaps what I considered reasonable was after all not so, and what appeared unreasonable might not really be so.

I discovered one great error that I had perpetrated.  I had been comparing life with life, that is, the finite with the finite, and the infinite with the infinite.  The process was vain.  It was like comparing force with force, matter with matter, nothing with nothing.  It was like saying in mathematics that A equals A, or O equals O. Thus the only answer was “identity.”

Now I saw that scientific knowledge would give no reply to my questions.  I began to comprehend that though faith seemed to give unreasonable answers, these answers certainly did one important thing.  They did at least bring in the relation of the finite to the infinite.  I came to feel that in addition to the reasoning knowledge which I once reckoned to be the sole true knowledge, there was in every man also an unreasoning species of knowledge which makes life possible.  That unreasoning knowledge is faith.

What is this faith?  It is not only belief in God and in things unseen, but it is the apprehension of life’s meaning.  It is the force of life.  I began to understand that the deepest source of human wisdom was to be found in the answers given by faith, that I had no reasonable right to reject them, and that they alone solved the problem of life.

IV.—­Mistakes Apprehended

Nevertheless my heart was not lightened.  I studied the writings of Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity.  I also studied actual religious life by turning to the orthodox, the monks, and the Evangelicals who preach salvation through faith in a Redeemer.  I asked what meaning was given for them to life by what they believed.  But I could not accept the faith of any of these men, because I saw that it did not explain the meaning of life, but only obscured it.  So I felt a return of the terrible feeling of despair.