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.

The absolute and complete certainty, on the one hand, that death is a
complete, definite, irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness,
a certainty of the same order as the certainty that the three angles of
a triangle are equal to two right angles, or, on the other hand, the
absolute and complete certainty that our personal consciousness is
prolonged beyond death in these present or in other conditions, and
above all including in itself that strange and adventitious addition of
eternal rewards and punishments--both of these certainties alike would
make life impossible for us. In the most secret chamber of the spirit of
him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his
personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him
p