"The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism"
About this Quote
Belief, Nathan implies, is not a soft landing but a hard-won clearing. “The path of sound credence” doesn’t run around doubt; it runs straight through it, through a “thick forest” dense enough to slow you down, scratch you up, and force you to navigate by something sturdier than instinct. The metaphor is doing tactical work: skepticism isn’t a fashionable pose or a permanent address. It’s terrain. You pass through it to earn a kind of confidence that can survive weather.
Nathan’s intent reads like an editor’s credo forged in the early-20th-century American media churn: the rise of mass advertising, boosterism, political sloganeering, and the culture industry’s talent for selling certainty. As a critic associated with the Algonquin set and The American Mercury orbit, he treated sentimentality and received wisdom as raw material for puncture. The line carries that dry, corrective energy. “Sound” is the tell; he’s not praising contrarianism for its own sake. He’s warning that untested conviction is just another product on the shelf.
Subtext: skepticism is not nihilism. It’s quality control. The forest is “thick” because credible belief is costly in attention and time; it requires you to check sources, tolerate ambiguity, and resist the seductions of easy coherence. Nathan also slips in a rebuke to the credulous reader: if your faith hasn’t been inconvenienced by doubt, it probably hasn’t met reality yet. In an era when public opinion was becoming an industrial output, he argues that the only beliefs worth keeping are the ones that have survived the editorial process of suspicion.
Nathan’s intent reads like an editor’s credo forged in the early-20th-century American media churn: the rise of mass advertising, boosterism, political sloganeering, and the culture industry’s talent for selling certainty. As a critic associated with the Algonquin set and The American Mercury orbit, he treated sentimentality and received wisdom as raw material for puncture. The line carries that dry, corrective energy. “Sound” is the tell; he’s not praising contrarianism for its own sake. He’s warning that untested conviction is just another product on the shelf.
Subtext: skepticism is not nihilism. It’s quality control. The forest is “thick” because credible belief is costly in attention and time; it requires you to check sources, tolerate ambiguity, and resist the seductions of easy coherence. Nathan also slips in a rebuke to the credulous reader: if your faith hasn’t been inconvenienced by doubt, it probably hasn’t met reality yet. In an era when public opinion was becoming an industrial output, he argues that the only beliefs worth keeping are the ones that have survived the editorial process of suspicion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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