My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge, except a denial of life; and in faith I could find nothing but a denial of reason, still more impossible to me than a denial of life.
Finally I saw that my mistake lay in ever expecting an examination of finite things to supply a meaning to life. The finite has no ultimate meaning apart from the infinite. The two must be linked together before an answer to life's problems can be reached.
It had only appeared to me that knowledge gave a definite answer—Schopenhauer's answer: that life has no meaning, and is an evil. On examining the matter further, I understood that the reply is not positive: it was only my feeling that made it seem so. The reply, strictly expressed as the Brahmins and Solomon and Schopenhauer express it, amounts only to an indefinite answer, like the reply given in mathematics when instead of solving an equation we find we have solved an identity: X = X, or 0 = 0. The answer is, that life is nothing. So that philosophic knowledge merely asserts that it cannot solve the question, and the solution remains, as far as it is concerned, indefinite. And I understood, further, that however unreasonable and monstrous might be the replies given by faith, they had this advantage, that they introduce into each reply a relation between the finite and the infinite, without which relation no reply is possible.
Whichever way I put the question, that relation appeared in the answer. How am I to live?—According to the law of God. What real result will come of my life?—Eternal torment or eternal bliss. What meaning has life, that death does not destroy?—Union with the eternal God: heaven.
Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life; and that consequently it makes life possible.
Where there is life, there, since man began, faith has made life possible for him; and the chief outline of that faith is everywhere and always one and the same. Faith does not consist in agreeing with what some one has said, as is usually supposed; faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself, but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he does not see and recognise the visionary nature of the finite, then he believes in the finite; if he understands the visionary nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live.
What am I?—A part of the infinite. In those few words lies the whole problem.
I began dimly to understand that in the replies given by faith, is stored up the deepest human wisdom.
I understood this; but it made matters no better for me.