What is truth?  There are two kinds of truth—­the logical or objective, the opposite of which is error, and the moral or subjective, the opposite of which is falsehood.  And in a previous essay I have endeavoured to show that error is the fruit of falsehood.[46]

Moral truth, the road that leads to intellectual truth, which also is moral, inculcates the study of science, which is over and above all a school of sincerity and humility.  Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are—­that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them be.  In a religiously scientific investigation, it is the data of reality themselves, it is the perceptions which we receive from the outside world, that formulate themselves in our mind as laws—­it is not we ourselves who thus formulate them.  It is the numbers themselves which in our mind create mathematics.  Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.  And it is the gateway of religion; but within the temple itself its function ceases.

And just as there is logical truth, opposed to error, and moral truth, opposed to falsehood, so there is also esthetic truth or verisimilitude, which is opposed to extravagance, and religious truth or hope, which is opposed to the inquietude of absolute despair.  For esthetic verisimilitude, the expression of which is sensible, differs from logical truth, the demonstration of which is rational; and religious truth, the truth of faith, the substance of things hoped for, is not equivalent to moral truth, but superimposes itself upon it.  He who affirms a faith built upon a basis of uncertainty does not and cannot lie.

And not only do we not believe with reason, nor yet above reason nor below reason, but we believe against reason.  Religious faith, it must be repeated yet again, is not only irrational, it is contra-rational.  Kierkegaard says:  “Poetry is illusion before knowledge; religion illusion after knowledge.  Between poetry and religion the worldly wisdom of living plays its comedy.  Every individual who does not live either poetically or religiously is a fool” (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, chap. iv., sect. 2a, Sec. 2).  The same writer tells us that Christianity is a desperate sortie (salida).  Even so, but it is only by the very desperateness of this sortie that we can win through to hope, to that hope whose vitalizing illusion is of more force than all rational knowledge, and which assures us that there is always something that cannot be reduced to reason.  And of reason the same may be said as was said of Christ:  that he who is not with it is against it.  That which is not rational is contra-rational; and such is hope.

By this circuitous route we always arrive at hope in the end.

To the mystery of love, which is the mystery of suffering, belongs a mysterious form, and this form is time.  We join yesterday to to-morrow with links of longing, and the now is, strictly, nothing but the endeavour of the before to make itself the after; the present is simply the determination of the past to become the future.  The now is a point which, if not sharply articulated, vanishes; and, nevertheless, in this point is all eternity, the substance of time.