So, although grossly misused if directly courted, this defect of experience has its place, even its ideal value, in experience, and what on the surface seemed an almost if not quite hopeless reason for doubt, has truly become all but transfigured, seeming now a source of real assurance. With Heraclitus of old, only perhaps seeing even more than he saw, we can glory in a world of strife. Doubting all things, we can yet believe that all things work together for what is real, for what is good. But let me now put the result, so far secured, of our confession of doubt in a new way. For a life in which every thing has an opposite, every idea a counter-idea, truth very plainly, as has indeed been frequently said, cannot be a specific consciousness nor reality a fixed thing. Truth is not a creed, but a spirit. Reality is not a thing, but a life. And for being a spirit truth is only the more realistic? For being a life, reality is only the more substantial. Perfection, too, even the Perfect One, with whom we associate the true and the real, is no particular separate being in a certain established exclusive status, at once infinitely and passively excellent, but a power ever dwelling in the strife that makes for movement and poise. For being such a power, too, he is only more surely perfect, only more certainly infinite and excellent. Such terms as spirit, life, and power are confessedly somewhat dangerous terms to use. Especially the first is liable to misunderstanding. Yet, whatever [p.153] common usage may be, when I say that truth is not a creed but a spirit, that reality is not a thing but a power, the reference is directly to that agent or principle of validity which has been found to hold our experience, naturally so faulty, to contact and intimacy with the real world. A spirit of truth, a principle of validity there is, to which the very faults of experience give witness, and in view of this we who doubt, who doubt the particular things, the creeds and the objects generally, the definite forms and ideas, the habits and standpoints of our everyday life or our scientific theory, may yet believe; we may believe in the real spirit, or power, which makes all things parties to the divided labour of a real life.[2] [1] This limitation is shown, for example, in the logical principle of identity.