To all this someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason.  “Ought, therefore can,” some Kantian will retort.  To which we shall demur:  “Cannot, therefore ought not.”  And life cannot submit itself to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.

Again, there are those who talk of the religious duty of resignation to mortality.  This is indeed the very summit of aberration and insincerity.  But someone is sure to oppose the idea of veracity to that of sincerity.  Granted, and yet the two may very well be reconciled.  Veracity, the homage I owe to what I believe to be rational, to what logically we call truth, moves me to affirm, in this case, that the immortality of the individual soul is a contradiction in terms, that it is something, not only irrational, but contra-rational; but sincerity leads me to affirm also my refusal to resign myself to this previous affirmation and my protest against its validity.  What I feel is a truth, at any rate as much a truth as what I see, touch, hear, or what is demonstrated to me—­nay, I believe it is more of a truth—­and sincerity obliges me not to hide what I feel.

And life, quick to defend itself, searches for the weak point in reason and finds it in scepticism, which it straightway fastens upon, seeking to save itself by means of this stranglehold.  It needs the weakness of its adversary.

Nothing is sure.  Everything is elusive and in the air.  In an outburst of passion Lamennais exclaims:  “But what!  Shall we, losing all hope, shut our eyes and plunge into the voiceless depths of a universal scepticism?  Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are?  Nature does not allow it; she forces us to believe even when our reason is not convinced.  Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both alike forbidden to us.  We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes, as between being and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be the extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man.  But it is not given to man to annihilate himself; there is in him something which invincibly resists destruction, I know not what vital faith, indomitable even by his will.  Whether he likes it or not, he must believe, because he must act, because he must preserve himself.  His reason, if he listened only to that, teaching him to doubt everything, itself included, would reduce him to a state of absolute inaction; he would perish before even he had been able to prove to himself that he existed” (Essai sur l’indifference en matiere de religion, iii^e partie, chap. lxvii.).

Reason, however, does not actually lead us to absolute scepticism.  No!  Reason does not lead me and cannot lead me to doubt that I exist.  Whither reason does lead me is to vital scepticism, or more properly, to vital negation—­not merely to doubt, but to deny, that my consciousness survives my death.  Scepticism is produced by the clash between reason and desire.  And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and scepticism, is born that holy, that sweet, that saving incertitude, which is our supreme consolation.