Yes, I know well that others before me have felt what I feel and express; that many others feel it to-day, although they keep silence about it.  Why do I not keep silence about it too?  Well, for the very reason that most of those who feel it are silent about it; and yet, though they are silent, they obey in silence that inner voice.  And I do not keep silence about it because it is for many the thing which must not be spoken, the abomination of abominations—­infandum—­and I believe that it is necessary now and again to speak the thing which must not be spoken.  But if it leads to nothing?  Even if it should lead only to irritating the devotees of progress, those who believe that truth is consolation, it would lead to not a little.  To irritating them and making them say:  Poor fellow! if he would only use his intelligence to better purpose!...  Someone perhaps will add that I do not know what I say, to which I shall reply that perhaps he may be right—­and being right is such a little thing!—­but that I feel what I say and I know what I feel and that suffices me.  And that it is better to be lacking in reason than to have too much of it.

And the reader who perseveres in reading me will also see how out of this abyss of despair hope may arise, and how this critical position may be the well-spring of human, profoundly human, action and effort, and of solidarity and even of progress.  He will see its pragmatic justification.  And he will see how, in order to work, and to work efficaciously and morally, there is no need of either of these two conflicting certainties, either that of faith or that of reason, and how still less is there any need—­this never under any circumstances—­to shirk the problem of the immortality of the soul, or to distort it idealistically—­that is to say, hypocritically.  The reader will see how this uncertainty, with the suffering that accompanies it, and the fruitless struggle to escape from it, may be and is a basis for action and morals.

And in the fact that it serves as a basis for action and morals, this feeling of uncertainty and the inward struggle between reason on the one hand and faith and the passionate longing for eternal life on the other, should find their justification in the eyes of the pragmatist.  But it must be clearly stated that I do not adduce this practical consequence in order to justify the feeling, but merely because I encounter it in my inward experience.  I neither desire to seek, nor ought I to seek, any justification for this state of inward struggle and uncertainty and longing; it is a fact and that suffices.  And if anyone finding himself in this state, in the depth of the abyss, fails to find there motives for and incentives to life and action, and concludes by committing bodily or spiritual suicide, whether he kills himself or he abandons all co-operation with his fellows in human endeavour, it will not be I who will pass censure upon him.  And apart from the fact that the evil