un the
risk of being wrong, how can the popular science professors be right in
objurgating in me as infamous a 'credulity' which the strict logic of
the situation requires? If this really be a moral universe; if by my
acts I be a factor of its destinies; if to believe where I may doubt be
itself a moral act {109} analogous to voting for a side not yet sure to
win,--by what right shall they close in upon me and steadily negate the
deepest conceivable function of my being by their preposterous command
that I shall stir neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in
eternal and insoluble doubt? Why, doubt itself is a decision of the
widest practical reach, if only because we may miss by doubting what
goods we might be gaining by espousing the winning side. But more than
that! it is often practically impossible to distinguish doubt from
dogmatic negation. If I refuse to stop a murder because I am in doubt
whether it be not justifiable homicide, I am virtually abetting the
crime. If I refuse to bale out a boat because I am in doubt whether my
efforts will keep her afloat, I am really helping to sink her. If in
the mountain precipice I doubt my right to risk a leap, I actively
connive at my destruction. He who commands himself not to be credulous
of God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality, may again and again be
indistinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them. Scepticism in
moral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for is
against. The universe will have no neutrals in these questions. In
theory as in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about a wise
scepticism, we are really doing volunteer military service for one side
or the other.

Yet obvious as this necessity practically is, thousands of innocent
magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallow
negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls.
All they need to be free and hearty again in the exercise of their
birthright is that these fastidious vetoes should be swept away. All
that the human {110} heart wants is its chance. It will willingly
forego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feel
that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no
one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs. And if
I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few
of the strings of the sophistical net that has been bindi