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then appear, with an amiable or sarcastic smile on his face ; no 
doubt it may be said that a lugubrious expression is not confined 
to those who cherish honest or dishonest doubt, but is seen in 
those whose orthodoxy is unimpeachable. Still I give you the 
fact, as it appears to me : most sceptics look unhappy, most 
believers look happy ; and so, as a counterpoise to the Nemesis of 
Faith, I claim a right to speak of the Sorrows of Scepticism. 
Whence then is the sorrow, and what is its nature ? 
“Dolor,” says the old Scholastic, “est solutio continui.” 
The definition is intended for physical pain, which was sup- 
posed in every case to be essentially connected with some inter- 
ruption of that which is normally uninterrupted. That the 
definition is not adequate I presume our modern physiology 
would tell us ; but we may accept it as containing within it a 
condition of many kinds of corporal suffering. And we may, 
mutatis mutandis, apply it to the higher nature with even 
greater correctness. If physical pain be caused by the severing 
of that which should be continuous, mental pain or sorrow is 
caused by the sundering of the soul or the mind from that 
which it yearns after, or with Avhich it imagines itself to be, in 
some way or other, united. The great poet of the world to 
come was right when he pictured, plunged in unfathomable 
woe within the impassable portals of the city of despairing 
grief, 
“ le genti dolorose 
Ch’ hanno perduto il ben dell’ intelletto.” 
Their sorrow was that they were sundered from that ayaOov 
which the intellectual, in all its varied forms, according to 
Aristotle, ityhaOai Soku, that nearer view of the Self-existent 
which Plato would consider the necessary ultimate destiny of 
intellectual being. 
I. The Sorrow of mere Negation . — The mind, from its very 
nature, seeks for the positive and affirmative, and cannot rest in 
the negative or destructive. We should hardly, perhaps, be 
ready to endorse the Hegelian doctrine, that negation and 
affirmation are two necessary parts of a truth, and that absolute 
truth consists in the relation between the two ; but I think we 
may maintain it thus far, that negation without affirmation is 
indefinite and incomplete, and that the mind cannot rest in it. 
Now the whole of Scepticism is essentially negative. Its 
scientific propositions, certainly, so far as they are concerned 
with phenomena, are positive enough; but its conclusions are 
destructive. Each of its arguments tends not so much to 
establish a new truth, as to dethrone what has been recorded 
as one ; and in too many instances one seems to feel that the 
