The Most Important Fact In The World

The Mazeppist cannot improve upon Walter Pater's description of the two "large" classes of minds who, together, comprise the endangered species known as religious humanists:

Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be sure that the sacred story is true. It is philosophical, doubtless, and a duty to the intellect to recognize our doubts, to locate them, perhaps to give them practical effect. It may be also a moral duty to do this. But then there is also a large class of minds which cannot be sure it is false—minds of very various degrees of conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest. They will think those who are quite sure it is false unphilosophical through lack of doubt. For their part, they make allowance in their scheme of life for a great possibility, and with some of them that bare concession of possibility (the subject of it being what it is) becomes the most important fact in the world.

—Walter Pater, Review of Mrs. Ward’s Robert Elsmere
Essays from "The Guardian" (London: Macmillan, 1910), 67-68.

I suspect that, although Pater wrote as if he were describing the thoughts of other people, he was really describing his own two-mindedness about religious belief. I would be surprised to learn that he did not, throughout his life, repeatedly cross the invisible line that divides one "class" from another.

His intellectual honesty is so rare in these days of desperate religious certainty. Had he the courage to write about his own hopes and doubts in the first person, he would have achieved the admirable candor of Montaigne.