But universal doubt is a _real_ experience, being real just because universal. Nothing ever is real that is not universal. What is always and everywhere is just the mark of something that really is substantial. A real [p.183] experience, however, real because universal, be it of doubt or of anything else, means a real self, so that in the always doubting self Descartes found reality, or a real self; and this always doubting self he further characterized as a thinking self. In other words, the real thinker was for him the universal doubter, and, contrariwise, the universal doubter was real, a real thinker, a real self. Before Descartes' time, to speak generally, men had identified reality with fixed condition or possession, with specific knowledge or established power or definite prerogative, divine or human, and truth was an object of faith rather than thought, say an unchanging programme for life rather than a pure principle--there is such a wide difference between a principle and a programme! But Descartes, as we have seen, identified reality with loss or privation, with such an empty-handed thing as doubt; he recognized no self but the thinker, and no thinker but the doubter. We always feel the pathos of those who, suffering constant privation, find and often declare that life is very real, and yet the sense of reality that comes in this way--namely, in the way of a privation that denies reality all residence in positive experience--is especially strong, and the pathos we feel is certainly not all. Something else hard to name appeals to us, too, and changes the pathos into a nobler because a more positive feeling--good will, perhaps, or honour--since the persistent holding to reality commands a deep respect. Yet, putting this more positive feeling apart, only the pathos of Descartes' real self, real because a thinker and thinker because a universal doubter, can occupy us now. Enough if we see that [p.184] the reality was as indubitable as the universal doubt, the self always being real up to the reality of its experience, and that the pathos is not more for him than for the sceptics and mystics and mathematicians of his time. But, again, in the Latin words, burdened, as so often the Latin has been, with the experience of all Christendom: _Dubito, cogito; ergo sum_. I doubt, I think; I as doubter and thinker am.