fective. It is very likely to be so. And herein lies the value of laboratory experiment; it helps the imagination. But this only means that imagination may more or less anticipate fact; more in some men, less in others. So far, then, as imagination is in good working order it gets further into reality, on the basis of the reality already grasped, and needs not to wait passively for the deliverance of fact.1

This union of consistency and fact, or of consistency and experience, is well described by Professor A. E. Taylor in his "Elements of Metaphysics" as "immediate experience", though it is not brought out to my own satisfaction that immediate experience implies imagination. What I would drive home, then, if I can, is that this immediate experience is no "mere experience" but an experience of reality. And therefore another illustration. A few years ago the newspapers were for some time full of a case in which a man and a woman had been found in a lonely spot, clearly murdered. There were several clues of more or less significance, but the case has remained a "mystery". I need give no details. I will simply point out that if your imagination is working on such a case it is working really towards a certain goal: namely, the immediate experience of the murderer. His experience (let us say it need not be true absolutely) would give us the reality. But how would you get at that experience? There are no rules. It would be a "moral" rather than a logical process, a matter of insight and intuition based upon the situation, including the human situation, as thus far presented. Yet the successful intuition would be a

1 For those who insist upon the ritual of verification I will relate the following, told me by a salesman in a department-store. A woman came to his counter and asked for a pencil and piece of paper upon which to do some calculation. After a few minutes she returned the pencil and departed, leaving her calculation upon the counter. It was found to be this: $1.00

.75

$1.75

I wonder if any reader of mine could conceive that by such his mental arithmetic had received an added shade of "verification ".

grasp of the whole reality. You would then see the situation as the man himself saw it; and in that seeing there would be a fullness and a coherence of detail which would be-not, as I was about to write, its own authentication of reality, but reality itself.

And it matters not for our conception that you never quite get that finally full and critical grasp, and that fact is therefore almost invariably illuminating. For though you get it not before the fact, neither have you got it completely after the fact, and certainly not from the "dead weight" of fact. Truth is relative, and relative to sophistication; and its nature is apprehended if we can see the difference between the earlier and the later stage of sophistication.

As a final illustration-very significant for any moral conception of truth-I will instance the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I do not believe in the resurrection of Christ, and it is unlikely that I shall believe in it-not, however, as I conceive, upon any a priori grounds, logical or scientific, but because I do not expect to find the satisfying 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 Berkeleian “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.

T

HE purpose of this essay on the critical life has 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 experience 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.

§ 67

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 was 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"