Initium sapientiae timor Domini, it is said, meaning perhaps timor mortis, or it may be, timor vitae, which is the same thing.  Always it comes about that the beginning of wisdom is a fear.

Is it true to say of this saving scepticism which I am now going to discuss, that it is doubt?  It is doubt, yes, but it is much more than doubt.  Doubt is commonly something very cold, of very little vitalizing force, and above all something rather artificial, especially since Descartes degraded it to the function of a method.  The conflict between reason and life is something more than a doubt.  For doubt is easily resolved into a comic element.

The methodical doubt of Descartes is a comic doubt, a doubt purely theoretical and provisional—­that is to say, the doubt of a man who acts as if he doubted without really doubting.  And because it was a stove-excogitated doubt, the man who deduced that he existed from the fact that he thought did not approve of “those turbulent (brouillonnes) and restless persons who, being called neither by birth nor by fortune to the management of public affairs, are perpetually devising some new reformation,” and he was pained by the suspicion that there might be something of this kind in his own writings.  No, he, Descartes, proposed only to “reform his own thoughts and to build upon ground that was wholly his.”  And he resolved not to accept anything as true when he did not recognize it clearly to be so, and to make a clean sweep of all prejudices and received ideas, to the end that he might construct his intellectual habitation anew.  But “as it is not enough, before beginning to rebuild one’s dwelling-house, to pull it down and to furnish materials and architects, or to study architecture oneself ... but it is also necessary to be provided with some other wherein to lodge conveniently while the work is in progress,” he framed for himself a provisional ethic—­une morale de provision—­the first law of which was to observe the customs of his country and to keep always to the religion in which, by the grace of God, he had been instructed from his infancy, governing himself in all things according to the most moderate opinions.  Yes, exactly, a provisional religion and even a provisional God!  And he chose the most moderate opinions “because these are always the most convenient for practice.”  But it is best to proceed no further.

This methodical or theoretical Cartesian doubt, this philosophical doubt excogitated in a stove, is not the doubt, is not the scepticism, is not the incertitude, that I am talking about here.  No!  This other doubt is a passionate doubt, it is the eternal conflict between reason and feeling, science and life, logic and biotic.  For science destroys the concept of personality by reducing it to a complex in continual flux from moment to moment—­that is to say, it destroys the very foundation of the spiritual and emotional life, which ranges itself unyieldingly against reason.