evidence. What would that evidence be? Well, in reading the accounts given in the gospels, which tell us that Jesus met several persons after his resurrection and conversed with them, one's feeling is, I think, if only those conversations had been recorded! If only those meetings had been presented so vividly and fully that in reading the accounts we could measurably find ourselves there! Then we should know whether Christ had risen or not. And we should know it through a critical appropriation of the experience then offered us. Suppose that a dead friend of yours appeared to you-say in your sleep. Suppose that you then had an old-time heart to heart talk with him. A real conversation; not a Platonic or Berkleian "dialogue" in which it is the chief function of one person to say "Very true" to the other, but a conversation in which each response stands for fresh thought. Suppose that he communicated and made intelligible to you some of the experience of death and resurrection. Could any logician ever convince you that it was not your friend, and that he had not returned from the dead? And then why is it that the spirit-manifestations of psychical research remain so unconvincing? Not, I should say, because of any defect in scientific method, but because the spirits when they return have so little to tell us.

CHAPTER XVI

THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE

§ 67. Knowledge and "communion with the divine". § 68. The motive of knowledge and the motive of love. § 69. The idea of God and the presence of God.

HE purpose of this essay on the critical life has

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been to develop the motif of self-consciousness; to

follow it, I might say, to the end. But to this pursuit, it should now be clear, there can be none but a temporal end. There can be no logical conclusion: the critical process reduced to a conclusion would be a reductio ad absurdum. And therefore the intention of these two concluding chapters (which are to form a continuous discourse) is not to arrive at a conclusion but to suggest the deeper and more comprehensive question; which will yet express the realities of human nature and of human life so far as it be a significant question. In the end what is being presented is a point of view; and the last term in a point of view is not the top-story of a house, its security guaranteed by the solidity of the under-structure, but a horizon, where vision is dimmest and least certain and thought is more than ever of the nature of opinion.

Truth, it has just been said, is the expression, not of theoretical consistency, nor of verifying fact, but of satisfied imagination; and a satisfied imagination (to the degree that imagination is ever satisfied) is an immediate experi

ence of reality, an awareness of the presence of reality. But to speak of a satisfied imagination is at once to ask what will satisfy the imagination deeply and if possible finally: what are the desires, the yearnings, of an unsatisfied imagination? This is to raise the question of religion; its meaning, its reality as something more than a form of words; and then to ask about the significance of religion for human experience in general, and especially for the experience expressed in poetry and art.

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For what I would say of religion I find a convenient text and introduction in the following from Burnet's "Greek Philosophy": "Greek philosophy is based on the faith that reality is divine, and that the one thing needful is for the soul, which is akin to the divine, to enter into communion with it. It was in truth an effort to satisfy what we call the religious instinct." In modern terms this means, as he explains, that Greek philosophy was more akin to religion than to science. The Greek philosophers were not "intellectualists".

Yet the motive fundamental to the Greek imagination Iwas the desire to know. And it is in connection with this motive that I would consider the faith that reality is divine. That reality is divine-what does this mean more than that reality is real? What is meant by "the divine"? To me this can mean only that reality is personal-it surely does not mean that reality is merely big, or that it is merely mysterious-and therefore it means that impersonal reality is a false or merely conventional appearance.

I should put the matter simply, by saying that reality is God, if this were not to suggest an appeal, not as I

intend, to the religious imagination, but to the current system of theology (the science of God!) for which "God" is a person if not indeed the only person. Now in the logic of the religious instinct it may very well be that for you or for me God is just one person—and for each a different person. The system of theology, however, in which God is conceived as "the Lord and Proprietor of the Universe" (in Butler's phrase), the absolute monarch, the sole creator of moral distinctions and the sole arbiter of the worth of men-this "system" is to me less suggestive of the religious instinct than of the logic of authority. Its appeal, I should say, is not to the soul of man but to the conveniences of social order, and in particular to the supreme convenience of conceiving the human social order as continuous with the order of the universe, thus bringing the fear of God into the government of men. It is in this sense only that I can understand why a faith definitely monotheistic must be the religion of civilization. This means, however, that the conception of God as one and only is the expression of the same administrative convenience as that which prescribes one President for the United States or for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Hence as against this systematic view I prefer to speak generally, if vaguely, of "the divine", and of the presence of the divine as in another connection one might speak of the presence of the human.

For a concrete sense of the divine presence and an obvious expression of the religious instinct one is likely to turn not to the wise and cultivated but, say, to the Russian peasant, to whom it seems that God is ever vaguely present, or to the desert Mohammedans in whom religion, "the factious passion of their Semitic souls", as Doughty

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puts it, suggests "the Lord's hand working in all about them", and "they call upon God in every mouthful of words". For them it seems, in the words of Thales, that "all things are full of gods". But in thus appealing to the mujik or to the Bedouin we seem to be clearly turning our backs upon the critical life. And this is to state the question forming my first topic, namely, whether "God" or "the divine" is a term of significance for any critical imagination. Does "God" express an idea or is it only a word—a verbal expression which sophisticated reflection has shown to be without meaning? This I believe to be the form which the question tends finally to take. He to whom "God" conveys an intelligible meaning will, I suspect, ever hesitate before a final disbelief. The conclusive disbelief expresses itself by saying that, whatever the word may mean to others, it means nothing to me.

My suggestion will be, then, that critical reflection, so far from dissolving the conception of the divine, only makes the conception truly significant-if under critical reflection we include the consciousness of self. For it seems true enough that reflection upon "the world"—the world presented by the sciences, notably by astronomy and geology, a world extended in an infinity of space and time in which you and I are nowhere-tends to dissipate the meaning of divinity. But this is not the world in which we live, and reflection confined to such a world is not reflective human experience. Any least reflective human experience involves a consciousness-an even painful consciousness of self; the presence in me of an activity of intelligence which "naturalistic" explanations of human life persistently overlook. When, for example, naturalism ascribes religion to fear it is usually upon the assumption