“What do I want?  I want certainty, or quasi-certainty, on those points on which if a man is content to remain uncertain, he is a fool or a brute; points respecting which it is no more possible for a genuine sceptic—­for I speak not of the thoughtless lover paradox, or the queer dogmatist who resolves that nothing is true—­to still the soul, than nakedness can render us insensible to cold; or hunger cure its own pangs by saying, ’Go to, now; I have nothing to eat.’  The generality of mankind are insensible to these questions only because they imagine, even though it may be falsely, that they possess certainty.  They are problems which, whenever there is elevation of mind enough to appreciate their importance, engage the real doubter in a life-long conflict; and to attempt to appease restlessness of such a mind by the old prescriptions,—­the old quackish Epicurean nostrum of ’Carpe diem,’—­’Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow die,’—­’We do not know what the morrow may bring—­is like attempting to call back the soul from a moral syncope by applying to the nostrils a drop of eau de Cologne.  ’Enjoy to-day, we do not know what the morrow will bring!’ Why, that is the very thought which poisons to-day.  No, a soul of any worth cannot but feel an intense wish for the solution of its doubts, even while it doubts whether they can be solved.”

“‘Carpe diem’ certainly would not be my sole prescription,” said Fellowes; “you have not told me yet what you want.”

“No, but I will.  The questions on which I want certainty are indeed questions about which philosophers will often argue just to display their vanity, as human vanity will argue about any thing; but they are no sooner felt in their true grandeur, than they absorb the soul.”

“Still, what is it you want?”

“I want to know—–­whence I came; whither I am going.  Whether there be, in truth, as so many say there is, a God,—­a tremendous personality, to whose infinite faculties the ‘great’ and the ‘little’ (as we call them) equally vanish,—­whose universal presence fills all space, in any point of which he exists entire in the amplitude of all his infinite attributes,—­whose universal government extends even to me, and my fellow-atoms, called men,—­within whose sheltering embrace even I am not too mean for protection;—­whether, if there be such a being, he is truly infinite; or whether this vast machine of the universe may not have developed tendencies or involved consequences which eluded his forethought, and are now beyond even his control; —­whether, for this reason, or for some other necessity, such infinite sorrows have been permitted to invade it;—­whether, above all, He be propitious or offended with a world in which I feel too surely, in the profound and various misery of man, that his aspects are not all benignant;—­how, if he be offended, he is to be reconciled;—­whether he is at all accessible, or one to whom the pleasures and the sufferings of the poor child of dust are equally