Bearing in mind that there can never be anything like rational certainty in one's belief system, only choices that work more or less well for you as a unique individual experiencing the eternal now of your sensory stream and awareness, with that experience illuminated by a mix of your apparent memories of the past and axiomatic extrapolation of that past into a memory of a continuously unfolding future, there is an extension of the esthetic principle expounded above that I offer up for your consideration. That is the principle of romance. I am not referring to romance in the sense of sexual (romantic) love, I am referring to the sense of wonder that accompanies, or can accompany if you permit it, every moment of the adventure of your life.
The Axiom of Romance, as I see it, is poised between the Axiom of Esthetics and the Axiom of Deity, which is precisely where I've put it! When you hung, poised, above the Pit of Existential Despair much earlier in this treatise, the thing that was horrible and almost unthinkable about that position wasn't so much that the foundations of knowledge itself were turning out to be every bit as solid as the Emperor's New Clothes as it was the realization that if we can know nothing for certain, if even the Axiom of Causality itself is just an assumption, then our life seems of a sudden to have no purpose.
Life without purpose, life as a cosmic accident in an uncaring Universe (even a causal one), an experience of life that emerges from nothingness like a slowly growing flame, burns brightly for a time, and then gutters out slowly or is blown out in an instant is somehow horrible, unthinkable. It is not just that we live only for an instant and then die (at least in terms of geological times as best as we can deduce them from the many axioms above) it is that our life did not matter. The Universe itself is here only for an instant, an eyeblink against the frightening expanse of Eternity as we intuitively perceive it. One day all that is will not be, and even the memory of its existence itself will one day perish, so why bother?
Here is where the utter freedom of one's choice of axioms can liberate one from the utter despair of this line of thinking, from the selfishness and self-orientation on the now that it encourages, from the misery of a life in spent in existential crises. There is no reason to believe in anything, to be sure. However, there is equally well no reason not to believe in something. They are both equally irrational, but the former is more than a bit silly nevertheless, just as is actually acting as if the Universe were not a causal place is silly.
I therefore choose to believe that the Universe is not a purposeless place. Nor do I choose to believe that it is even a wholly mechanical place, one where miracles cannot happen, where there is no greater degree of organization than that which appears in our simple analyses of nature via the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology that we have deduced. Even within the context of science, such a belief is not inconsistent. The theory of evolution clearly shows us how structure can emerge and self-refine in any sufficiently complex system, and what we learn from reasoning with axioms and mathematics is that anything can happen, that the Universe we appear to perceive with our senses could well be a tiny corner of all that Is, a place that might well have absolute unbreakable rules (the laws of nature) but that is nonetheless manipulable in the dynamics of a far larger and more complex space by a dynamic intelligence that could have evolved there. Eternity is a long time, after all, and there is a lot of room in infinite space even restricted to the handful of dimensions we indirectly perceive through our sensory stream.
This, then, is the Axiom of Romance. I choose to believe that all things have purpose, that there really is adventure and meaning to be found I believe that love, compassion, behaving in a way that is ``good'' as opposed to ``evil'' are all real and expressions of that purpose, things that can potentially enrich every moment of life just as despair and purposelessness and selfishness and evil can poison it. I believe that our lives matter. Can I prove it? No. Is it truly inconsistent with the axioms above? In no way, especially give the incredibly limited window through which we experience the apparent external reality. There is room for infinite embeddings of the reality we perceive in higher order realities (as discussed in a lovely braided chain in Gödel, Escher and Bach by Hofstader) and that isn't even the only possibility. Maybe my beliefs are true, maybe they are false, but regardless, they are unprovable by rational means by anything less than complete perception of all that is.
This leads me to the last meta-axiom I wish to discuss. This is perhaps the most controversial of the personal axioms. Some will reject it out of hand (utterly irrationally). Some will insist on it (along with a large dose of memetic baggage that isn't just irrational but unlikely to be consistent or correct). Still others will state the truth, which is that they don't know if it is true or not, but that is equally pointless as an observation as that is just as true of the Axiom of Causality which doubtless they adopt. You have free choice here as anywhere, of course, but it seems pointless to assert that this means that you should not choose...