Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory.  “If any man will do His will—­the will of Him that sent me,” said Jesus, “he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself” (John vii. 17); and there is a well-known saying of Pascal:  “Begin by taking holy water and you will end by becoming a believer.”  And pursuing a similar train of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to regard the Christian religion as void of truth so long as he had not put it to the proof by keeping its precepts and commandments (Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, book vii., 43).

What is our heart’s truth, anti-rational though it be?  The immortality of the human soul, the truth of the persistence of our consciousness without any termination whatsoever, the truth of the human finality of the Universe.  And what is its moral proof?  We may formulate it thus:  Act so that in your own judgement and in the judgement of others you may merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that you may not merit death.  Or perhaps thus:  Act as if you were to die to-morrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized.  The end of morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to discover the finality that belongs to it—­if indeed it has any finality—­and to discover it by acting.

More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that series that constitutes the immense monody of his Obermann, Senancour wrote the words which I have put at the head of this chapter—­and of all the spiritual descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, Senancour was the most profound and the most intense; of all the men of heart and feeling that France has produced, not excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic.  “Man is perishable.  That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a just fate.”  Change this sentence from its negative to the positive form—­“And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an unjust fate”—­and you get the firmest basis of action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.

That which is irreligious and demoniacal, that which incapacitates us for action and leaves us without any ideal defence against our evil tendencies, is the pessimism that Goethe puts into the mouth of Mephistopheles when he makes him say, “All that has achieved existence deserves to be destroyed” (denn alles was ensteht ist wert doss es zugrunde geht).  This is the pessimism which we men call evil, and not that other pessimism that consists in lamenting what it fears to be true and struggling against this fear—­namely, that everything is doomed to annihilation in the end.  Mephistopheles asserts that everything that exists deserves to be destroyed, annihilated, but not that everything will be destroyed or annihilated; and we assert that everything that exists deserves to be exalted and eternalized, even though no such fate is in store for it.  The moral attitude is the reverse of this.