"
[28] Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, _Lectures on the History of the Eastern
Church_, lecture i., sect. iii.
[29] 1 Cor. i. 23.
[30] Gustave Flaubert, _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.
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