coquettishly sacrilegious forms which remain to us as excellent
expressions of the "all is vanity" state of mind. Take the
following passage, for example--we must hold to duty, even
against the evidence, Renan says--but he then goes on:--

"There are many chances that the world may be nothing but a fairy
pantomime of which no God has care. We must therefore arrange
ourselves so that on neither hypothesis we shall be completely
wrong. We must listen to the superior voices, but in such a way
that if the second hypothesis were true we should not have been
too completely duped. If in effect the world be not a serious
thing, it is the dogmatic people who will be the shallow ones,
and the worldly minded whom the theologians now call frivolous
will be those who are really wise.

"In utrumque paratus, then. Be ready for anything--that perhaps
is wisdom. Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to
confidence, to skepticism, to optimism, to irony and we may be
sure that at certain moments at least we shall be with the truth.
. . . Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say
to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us.
I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a
smile. We owe it to the Eternal to be virtuous but we have the
right to add to this tribute our irony as a sort of personal
reprisal. In this way we return to the right quarter jest for
jest; we play the trick that has been played on us. Saint
Augustine's phrase: Lord, if we arc deceived, it is by thee!
remains a fine one, well suited to our modern feeling. Only we
wish the Eternal to know that if we accept the fraud, we accept
it knowingly and willingly. We are resigned in advance to losing