ly
repeat that this is misapprehension. _In concreto_, the freedom to
believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the
individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem
absurdities to him who has them to consider. When I look at the
religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I
think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically
it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our
heart, instincts, and courage, and wait--acting of course meanwhile
more or less as if religion were _not_ true[4]--till {30} doomsday, or
till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have
raked in evidence enough,--this command, I say, seems to me the
queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. Were we
scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse. If we had an
infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel
ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting
to it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word. But if we
are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know
for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle
fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell.
Indeed we _may_ wait if we will,--I hope you do not think that I am
denying that,--but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we
believed. In either case we _act_, taking our life in our hands. No
one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words
of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to
respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about
the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner
tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which
is empiricism's glory; then only shall we live and let live, in
speculative as well as in practical things.

I began by a reference to Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotation
from him. "What do you think {31} of yourself? What do you think of
the world?... These are questions with which all must deal as it seems
good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other
we must deal with them.... In all important transactions of life we
have to take a leap in the dark.... If we decide to leave the riddles
unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too,