It is precisely in this impossibility of attaining truth in the ultimate things that the Fundamentalists find their justification for the attempt to control the search for it. ‘You tell us,’ they say, ‘that everything must yield to the search for truth. You undermine secure, established morals and traditions in the name of truth. Then truth slips away from you and in the end you can offer us nothing but a shadow and a dream. Accepted convention is at least a solid basis for living. You have nothing solid to offer us, for any purpose, anywhere.’ And the argument would have some validity, if the inborn movements of great nature could ever be stopped by laws or legislatures or Fundamentalists. But, after all, the value of ignorance, or at least of the knowledge of ignorance, which goes with the scientific spirit, lies in the charming qualities that I have indicated earlier in this chapter, tolerance, patience, humility, gentleness. Only, to produce these qualities, the recognition of ignorance must not be aggressive, combative. Fifty years ago such recognition was erected into a dogmatic religion called Agnosticism, the triumphant, militant assertion that no man knew anything about the fundamental verities and no man could, and this dogmatism was even more exasperating than other dogmatisms, because it purported to be based on an attitude essentially undogmatic. The true, the fruitful, the profitable recognition of ignorance is not dogmatic or assertive at all. It is purely personal, begins and stops with _my_ ignorance only, and lets _your_ ignorance altogether alone. This is peculiarly true and important in the age of ignorance in which we live, the age which has piled up general knowledge with such vast celerity of accumulation that no individual can pretend to grasp more than a very small portion of it. And all we can any of us say is, I do not know. You may know, he may know, especially as he thinks he does, which goes so vastly far, but I, I, I, alas, do not. Agnosticism is too violent a word for this purely personal and infinitely humble ignorance. Scepticism even is too proud a word, too philosophical a word. Yet scepticism, if used with caution, may perhaps serve, for want of a better. But there is one thing about scepticism too often forgotten. Universal doubt surely carries with it the privilege of universal hope. The professed sceptic is too apt to be critical and cynical, to use his doubt simply to upset the certainties of other people, and to rest always in the darker side of possibility. But if anything may be true, surely the beautiful may be true, the good, the joyous, the lovable, as well as the gloomy and despondent.