But have you ever climbed a mountain up and up and up, through thick woods, over rough, almost impassable trails, into clouds dense and chilling, stormy and angry, over treacherous snows and frightful cliffs, and come out at last on the very top to see both earth and heaven, yourself between, the clouds dispersed, the hardships and dangers all forgotten, the whole world real and yours? Well, that is doubt become achievement. Have you worked at some problem of everyday life, or a problem of science or philosophy, patiently or impatiently applying all the rules and precepts at your command, trying every resort known to you, and in final desperation many you only guess at, and then, when failure seems almost certain, caught a glimpse of the real meaning and the real way, attaining to an insight that reveals a new world to you? That, too, is doubt rewarded. Have you ever visited, perhaps more curiously than reverently, some great Catholic cathedral, or, better still, some temple of the far Orient, and watching the worshippers there, suddenly had a vision of religion as greater and deeper than any Protestantism or even than Christianity? That, again, is doubt's achievement. Have you ever suffered a great heartrending disappointment, let me say a great personal loss, and [p.256] found it seemingly impossible to return to the routine of your former life, but nevertheless, almost imperceptibly, come into a sense of presence and gain from the very thing that seemed taken from you? That, once more, is doubt without its sting, robbed of its victory. Doubt means sacrifice, often enormous sacrifice, but always a more than equal gain. The light that casts the shadows of doubt, when one can face it, and really does face it, as, for another example, in this book we have been trying to face it, is so splendid and so uplifting.
So, a third time, doubt destroys nothing; it only makes reality forever an achievement and belief a constantly active life. The fact, now no stranger to us, that doubt is social, also shows this. Doubt is social, as has been said, since by its isolation it makes the longing for company, and by its greater freedom the larger opportunity for company; and since also the very contradictions or controversies which arouse it are never merely individual, being always social also, and social relationship means effort and sacrifice, and is accordingly a peculiarly interesting witness to the losses that doubt must suffer for its greater gains. Doubt, in short, shows belief, working not merely for the reality of all things, but also for the love of all men. As social, then, as working for the love of all men, doubt involves sympathy. Yet not an easy, passive sympathy. A restless, labouring, always growing sympathy is the sympathy of the doubter; a sympathy that makes all it covers labour and grow also. Does it hurt your business to doubt it sufficiently to make you able to sympathize with the interests of [p.257] another? To this question Adam Smith gave a timely answer when at a critical moment in industrial history he found in sympathy a condition of successful competition. Does it hurt your politics, if you can lose enough of the partisan's conceit or the jingo's bombast to sympathize with the other parties or the other nations? The value of real independence in politics is one answer, and the idea of federation among competing states, or of international polity as a basis of successful national life, is another. Does it hurt your understanding to outgrow your own profoundest ideas and see some validity in the doctrines and formulæ of others? Does it hurt your Christianity to make concessions to another's Christianity or to the worship of any land or any time? The reading of the last great book, or the visit to the pagan temple, is an answer. Simply the doubter the world over, social being that he is by nature, imbued as he is with a living sympathy, must recognize, and must labour to maintain or achieve, the unity of humanity. For him just this is God, or truth, and it is worth far more than anybody's religion or than anybody's rational formulæ. It must stand, too, both as the universal authority which both religion and reason have over the lives of men and as the motive or living principle, or spirit, by which particular religions and particular formulæ, however serviceable, are forever unstable.