And this doubt cannot avail itself of any provisional ethic, but has to found its ethic, as we shall see, on the conflict itself, an ethic of battle, and itself has to serve as the foundation of religion.  And it inhabits a house which is continually being demolished and which continually it has to rebuild.  Without ceasing the will, I mean the will never to die, the spirit of unsubmissiveness to death, labours to build up the house of life, and without ceasing the keen blasts and stormy assaults of reason beat it down.

And more than this, in the concrete vital problem that concerns us, reason takes up no position whatever.  In truth, it does something worse than deny the immortality of the soul—­for that at any rate would be one solution—­it refuses even to recognize the problem as our vital desire presents it to us.  In the rational and logical sense of the term problem, there is no such problem.  This question of the immortality of the soul, of the persistence of the individual consciousness, is not rational, it falls outside reason.  As a problem, and whatever solution it may receive, it is irrational.  Rationally even the very propounding of the problem lacks sense.  The immortality of the soul is as unconceivable as, in all strictness, is its absolute mortality.  For the purpose of explaining the world and existence—­and such is the task of reason—­it is not necessary that we should suppose that our soul is either mortal or immortal.  The mere enunciation of the problem is, therefore, an irrationality.

Let us hear what our brother Kierkegaard has to say.  “The danger of abstract thought is seen precisely in respect of the problem of existence, the difficulty of which it solves by going round it, afterwards boasting that it has completely explained it.  It explains immortality in general, and it does so in a remarkable way by identifying it with eternity—­with the eternity which is essentially the medium of thought.  But with the immortality of each individually existing man, wherein precisely the difficulty lies, abstraction does not concern itself, is not interested in it.  And yet the difficulty of existence lies just in the interest of the existing being—­the man who exists is infinitely interested in existing.  Abstract thought besteads immortality only in order that it may kill me as an individual being with an individual existence, and so make me immortal, pretty much in the same way as that famous physician in one of Holberg’s plays, whose medicine, while it took away the patient’s fever, took away his life at the same time.  An abstract thinker, who refuses to disclose and admit the relation that exists between his abstract thought and the fact that he is an existing being, produces a comic impression upon us, however accomplished and distinguished he may be, for he runs the risk of ceasing to be a man.  While an effective man, compounded of infinitude and finitude, owes his effectiveness precisely to the conjunction of these two elements