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
consequences of a doctrine, or rather those which we call evil, only
prove, I repeat, that the doctrine is disastrous for our desires, but
not that it is false in itself, the consequences themselves depend not
so much upon the doctrine as upon him who deduces them. The same
principle may furnish one man with grounds for action and another man
with grounds for abstaining from action, it may lead one man to direct
his effort towards a certain end and another man towards a directly
opposite end. For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the
justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, or else they are our way of
trying to explain that conduct to ourselves.

Man, in effect, is unwilling to remain in ignorance of the motives of
his own conduct. And just as a man who has been led to perform a certain
action by hypnotic suggestion will afterwards invent reasons which would
justify it and make it appear logical to himself and others, being
unaware all the time of the real cause of his action, so every man--for
since "life is a dream" every man is in a condition of hypnotism--seeks
to find reasons for his conduct. And if the pieces on a chessboard were
endowed with consciousness, they would probably have little difficulty
in ascribing their moves to freewill--that is to say, they would claim
for them a finalist rationality. And thus it comes about that every
philosophic theory serves to explain and justify an ethic, a doctrine of
conduct, which has its real origin in the inward moral feeling of the
author of the theory. But he who harbours this feeling may possibly
himself have no clear consciousness of its true reason or cause.

Conse