any fatal digression or partiality of view. It was deeply conservative, corrective, and [p.250] compensative in its effect, but it was all this without ever being merely negative or destructive towards anything, since its own efficiency required persistent individual differences. To experience it gave movement, constant unity or wholeness, realistic value and poise, practicality, and, lastly, social expression. And we were able, accordingly, to conclude, in so many words, that both ordinary life and science, so given to duplicity in their standpoint and in their ideas, were really building well, far better, indeed, than they seemed or than they clearly knew. Contradiction, in short, as we came to see it, meant unity, but not an empty, abstract unity; it meant unity rich and real with an infinity of differences; and so what had at first appeared an uncompromising reason for doubt turned, right before our doubter's eyes, into an unassailable ground of belief, making the very world which we had been so uncertain about a world for an inviolable faith. But truth, we saw at once, could no longer be identified with a formal idea, known or unknown or unknowable; reality could no longer have the character of a fixedly constituted thing, whether such a thing were present in experience or not; and perfection, even the perfection of God, could no longer be a mere status, a passive possession of certain characters, attributes, or prerogatives. Truth became, as was said, in want of a better word, a spirit; reality was a life; perfection was a power. And thereupon, with the new view thus afforded us, coupled as it was especially with the sense in which personally a man could claim reality for himself and yet be party to the factional life of society, we were able to turn to [p.251] Descartes, an early modern doubter, a father confessor of many doubters, and, overlooking some of his shortcomings in thought and character, to appreciate both the use that he made of doubt, the intimacy that he, too, found between doubt and faith, and the world of reality, of most vital sympathy between the material and the spiritual, of genuine, personal individuality, and of immortality, through which he led us, doubter, universal doubter though he was. That great Frenchman, as we were enabled to understand him, got back the world, the self and the God which he seemed to have lost, but he got them all back transfigured. He got them back, not by denying and excluding what appeared negative and treacherous in their nature, but by facing this and using it, by accepting it and turning it even against itself. The very Paris to which he returned as believer was the same Paris, the Paris of doubt and of evil in all its forms, that earlier, hopeless and despairing, he had put behind him. And, once more, his experience was ours, and so helped us to interpret and deepen ours, quickening the value of our own previous discovery that within the very