t, _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.

_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 sav