what we believe; we have, yet would realize every possibility that what we have affords. Doubt, I repeat, destroys nothing. From time to time certain doubting people have called their prophets impostors, and have imagined themselves able to put the impostors out of the way, but, as history has always shown, only with the result of reviving among themselves and often of awakening in the minds and hearts of others the sense and conviction of just that for which the offensive impostors may have suffered violent death. Even history's petty impostors, too, as well as those who have proved heroes and great leaders, have always had their justification. An [p.254] absolute impostor has never been. Again, certain people have cried illusion and unreality at things political or moral or even at things physical, but only in the end to feel, and to make others feel, first, their evident narrowness, if not their actual dishonesty, and then their need of a more hospitable idea of what is valid and real. Nothing can be, or ever has been, unreal. And, in general, doubt of a thing or a person or a God only needs its own conscious assertion to turn actually into an appeal from its particular object to the ideal or spirit or principle for which the object had stood, and upon this appeal even the object that has been for a moment condemned is justified and glorified. Thus, doubt may deny or depose or put to death, but as it is honest it also realizes or restores or revives. Through doubt the sensuous, which is the particular and visible, is ever becoming spiritualized; even this corruptible puts on incorruption and this mortal puts on immortality. Or, in these words, if we doubt we may reject the object, the letter, but we cannot reject the letter without accepting and asserting the spirit, and we cannot assert the spirit without recalling and exalting and even worshipping the letter. The rejection makes for universality by casting down the barriers of the particular experience of time or place, of person or nation, of the Greek perhaps, if again I may look to history, or of the Jew or of the Christian, while the recall and the worship make for definiteness. Without the previous rejection the worship could be only idolatry. So, as Descartes will be remembered virtually to have said, doubt is innately loyal to reality in [p.255] everything, and just through this loyalty the world it spurns, the world of God and man and nature, is for ever called back, a real world once more, because a realized, a spiritually realized world. Why forget, as so many seem to, that reality is an achievement; achieved it may be, as with the brook, even by a great fall?