There was once a brook that ran, at times slowly, at times more rapidly, through fields and woods, under trees and over rocks. At every chance, whatever the obstacles in its course, it fell, much or little, as it could; but impatience and uncertainty filled its life as the minutes and the hours passed. Had life nothing more in store for its troubled waters? Was this groping downward all? Were the memory and the accompanying hope, which haunted every thwarted move, of no avail? Would true fulness of life never be attained? But a great moment for the brook came, rewarding it at last, bringing assurance in place of threatened despair. A precipice intervened, and the waters fell hundreds of feet; a glorious fall --spray, sunlight, colour, eloquence. "Now," spoke the brook from the deep, smooth pool below, "now I have lived; now I know that my life was real and that my life was good, for I have found myself, I have found my world; and I have found them where I thought them not. And, speaking so, the brook flowed on contented. The confession of doubt, which we set out to make with all possible candour, is now nearly concluded even to the harvesting of the promised fruit. The confession began, as will be remembered, with recognition of certain general and easily demonstrated facts, of [p.249] which there were five, as follows: (1) We are all universal doubters. (2) Doubt is essential to all consciousness. (3) Even habit, though confidence be the horse, has doubt sitting up behind. (4) Like pain or ignorance, doubt is a condition of real life. (5) And the sense of dependence, so general to human nature, gives rise to doubt, although also, like misery, it always seeks company--the company of nature, of man, of God. Then, after this beginning, which left us by no means so hopeless as might have been expected, we proceeded to try the doubter, nay, to try ourselves, first before the court of ordinary life with its ordinary views of things, and secondly, before the court of science, and, in both trials, we found the doubting justified. Alike in ordinary life and in science, even in science where such a result was perhaps hardly to be expected, we found what at least seemed like illusion and what certainly was paradox, and almost against our will we had to conclude that a spirit of contradiction and duplicity and vacillation dwelt at the very centre and the very heart of our human experience. This spirit of violence, too, as the evidence of its presence accumulated, bade fair to dispel whatever hope our confession had left us. Yet out of the evidence there gradually did appear a reason for deepest assurance, and in the end our fear, not our hope, was dispelled. Contradiction was seen in its very nature to possess positive value. It was seen to protect experience, even while experience was specific and concrete, definite and individual, against