KIERKEGAARDconcluding

...always is a glorious word which says everything at once, and is so fearfully easy to understand; but it is on the other hand the most difficult thing in the world to do something always, and on Monday afternoon at four o'clock it is extremely difficult to understand this always merely for the space of half an hour.

...and then suddenly there flashed through my mind this thought: "You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier that it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder."

Anything that is almost probable, or probable, or extremely and emphatically probable, is something he can almost know, or as good as know, or extremely and emphatically almost know--but it is impossible to believe. For the absurd is the object of faith, and the only object that can be believed.
Or suppose a man who says that he has faith, but desires to make his faith clear to himself, so as to understand himself in his fiath. Now the comedy begins again. The object of faith becomes almost probable, as good as probable, extremely and emphatically probable. He has completed his investigations, and he ventures to claim for himself that he does not believe as shoemakers and tailors and other simple folk believe, but that he has also understood himself in his believing. Strange understanding! On the contrary, he has in fact learned something else about faith than when he believed; and he has learned that he no longer believes, since he almost knows, or as good as knows, or extremely and emphatically almost knows.

Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large, whereby he becomes something infinitely great--and at the same time nothing at all.

But if a man proposes to himself every day to bear in mind and existentially to hold fast what the clergyman says on Sunday, understanding this as the earnestness of life, and therewith again understanding all his ability and inability as a jest: does this mean that he will undertake nothing at all, because everything is empty and vain? Ah, no, for then precisely he will have no occasion to appreciate the jest, since the contradiction will not arise which brings it into juxtaposition with the earnestness of life: there is no contradiction in the thought that everything is vanity in the eyes of a creature of vanity.

But last Sunday, that is to say yesterday, the clergyman said that a human being can do absolutely nothing of himself, and we all understood it. When the clergyman says it in church we all understand it, and if a man tries to express it existentially during the six days of the week so that people notice it, it is not long before we all understand--that he is crazy.

But Socrates! He puts the question objectively in a problematic manner: if there is an immortality. Must he therefore be accounted a doubter in comparison with one of our modern thinkers with the three proofs? By no means. On this "if" he risks his entire life, he has the courage to meet death, and he has the passion of the infinite so determined the pattern of his life that it must be found acceptable--if there is an immortality. Can any better proof be given for the immortality of the soul?... The "bit" of uncertainty that Socrates had helped him, because he himself contributed the passion of the infinite; the three proofs that the others have do not profit them at all, because they are and remain dead to spirit and enthusiasm, and their three proofs, in lieu of proving anything else, prove just this.