Let us examine it.

FOOTNOTES: 

[26] Pragmatism, a New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking.  Popular lectures on philosophy by William James, 1907.

[27] Treatise of Human Nature, book i., part iv., sect. vi., “Of Personal Identity”:  “I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”

[28] Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church, lecture i., sect. iii.

[29] 1 Cor. i. 23.

[30] Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, troisieme serie (1854-1869).  Paris, 1910.

VI

IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS

Parce unicae spes totius orbis.—­TERTULLIANUS, Adversus Marcionem, 5.

We have seen that the vital longing for human immortality finds no consolation in reason and that reason leaves us without incentive or consolation in life and life itself without real finality.  But here, in the depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and of the will and the scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace like brothers.  And we shall see it is from this embrace, a tragic—­that is to say, an intimately loving—­embrace, that the wellspring of life will flow, a life serious and terrible.  Scepticism, uncertainty—­the position to which reason, by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own validity, at last arrives—­is the foundation upon which the heart’s despair must build up its hope.

Disillusioned, we had to abandon the position of those who seek to give consolation the force of rational and logical truth, pretending to prove the rationality, or at any rate the non-irrationality, of consolation; and we had to abandon likewise the position of those who seek to give rational truth the force of consolation and of a motive for life.  Neither the one nor the other of these positions satisfied us.  The one is at variance with our reason, the other with our feeling.  These two powers can never conclude peace and we must needs live by their war.  We must make of this war, of war itself, the very condition of our spiritual life.

Neither does this high debate admit of that indecent and repugnant expedient which the more or less parliamentary type of politician has devised and dubbed “a formula of agreement,” the property of which is to render it impossible for either side to claim to be victorious.  There is no place here for a time-serving compromise.  Perhaps a degenerate and cowardly reason might bring itself to propose some such formula of agreement, for in truth reason lives by formulas; but life, which cannot be formulated, life which lives and seeks to live for ever, does not submit to formulas.  Its sole formula is:  all or nothing.  Feeling does not compound its differences with middle terms.