With the demand of life for risk in action is bound up the impetus to undertake risk in thought. From this springs the moral need for faith, for belief and acceptance of some hypotheses. The very divergence or diversity of the world-religions is not discouraging but rather the reverse. It is a sign of healthy moral life. Uniformity would be highly detrimental; it would cease to express life, for with conformity of belief would come spiritual decline and stagnation. Guyau anticipates here his doctrine of a religion of free thought, a “non-religion” of the future, which we shall discuss in our next chapter, when we examine his book on that subject. In the diversity of religious views Guyau sees a moral good, for these religions are themselves an expression of life in its richness, and the conservation and expansion of this rich variety of life are precisely the moral ideal itself. We must endeavour to realise how rich and varied the nature of human life really is. Revolutionaries, Guyau points out, are always making the mistake of regarding life and truth as too simple. Life and truth are so complex that evolution is the key-note to what is desirable in the individual intellect and in society, not a revolution which must inevitably express the extreme of one side or the other. The search for truth is slow and needs faith and patience, but the careful seekers of it are making the future of mankind. But truth will be discovered only in relation to action and life and in proportion to the labour put into its realisation. The search for truth must never be divorced from the active life, Guyau insists, and, indeed, he approaches the view that the action will produce the knowledge, “He that doeth the will shall know of the doctrine.” Moreover he rightly sees in action the wholesome cure for pessimism and that cynicism which all too frequently arises from an equal appreciation of opposing views. “Even in doubt,” he exclaims, “we can love; even in the intellectual night, which prevents our seeing any ultimate goal, we can stretch out a hand to him who weeps at our feet.”[34] In other words, we must do the duty that lies nearest, in the hope and faith that by that action itself light will come. [34] _Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction_, p. 178.