one hardly grieves for Mr. Gilfil. It seems indeed that he enjoyed the greatest gift of life, a supreme and satisfying devotion. But as I lay the story down disturbing questions arise. As Mr. Gilfil sat night after night before his fire with his pipe and his book (or his newspaper) and his glass of gin and water, did the vision of Caterina never waver? Did her presence after the lapse of years never forsake him, leaving him to wonder whether after all she had been real, whether his love had been more than a youthful infatuation, whether his loyalty had not now become a formal gesture? For myself I prefer not to think so.

But the question will serve to mark the issue between sentimentalism and realism. For to call Mr. Gilfil's story sentimental means simply that we charge his author with claiming for him a depth of experience, a power of imagination, beyond the human capacity. We mean that his worship of Caterina was not a genuine experience, animated by a steady sense of her presence, but a gesture, a form of words. But this is only to put the logic of the issue—the logic of the experience of God, as I have it in mind-in line with the logic of morality as explained in Chapter XII; where it was said that the morality of an action is a question simply of the intelligence, of the genuineness of the experience lying behind it. And in line with the logic of beauty, the beauty of an object being similarly a question of how far the object is merely an object or an "expression"of a genuine experience.

In all of such matters the logic is neither the logic of mathematics (or of abstract metaphysics) in which truth is determined by the law of contradiction; nor the logic of science, in which truth is determined by the power of fact; but the less determinate logic of interpretation, of appreciation, of criticism; the logic of divination, one might almost say, yet the logic of all extra-scientific human intercourse, of all in which it is a question, from your neighbour's action and his words, not of deducing their consequences, but of realizing the experience of which they are the

expression. Such is distinctively the logic of literary and artistic criticism. When the critic tells you briefly that some of William Blake's verses are poems, others are only verses, you will be raising the question of logic when you wonder (as I often wonder) how he knows. And such also is the logic of the "inspiration" of any sacred scriptures, Christian, Mohammedan, Mormon, and of their status as a revelation of the divine. Their truth is not a question of historical authenticity, much as this may help to show what they mean; still less of miraculous attestation. Let their origin be what you please, they would be just as true or just as false as they are now. The question is a question of content and significance, of what they have to reveal; the logic of their inspiration is the logic of poetic inspiration.

In the logic of criticism, the reader will perceive, the judgment of significance is the affirmation of a "presence", of the reality somewhere in the spiritual world, if not in the world of space and time, of a personal existence. It was this aspect of the matter that led me to link Mr. Gilfil's story with the presence of the divine. For what is involved in the story is somewhat more than the preservation of a memory of sense-experience (though one may ask how the perfect preservation of a memory can differ from a present experience). A thoroughly cynical critic may ask whether Maynard Gilfil had ever really known Caterina, whether indeed her loveliness was more than a simple illusion of sex. And this will remind us that, even in the case of those who are most distinctly with us in the flesh, our grasp of themselves is a work of insight, of imagination. Do we not know that the prophet may be least recognized in his own country and his own house, and that husband and wife, father and son, may be least fitted to know one another ?

And it may help to link the logic of our neighbour's presence with that of the divine presence if I refer once more to what it means to be a "lover of books". Among undergraduate students it seems, strangely, that the presence of the writer is the last thing to be grasped: yet to me it is

the one important reality. Take such a work as T. H. Green's lectures on "Political Obligation", a deservedly classical work in political philosophy, yet assuredly drab and unadorned; brief and compact, yet exasperatingly— conscientiously-repetitious. Green is profoundly convinced that the cause of authority is the cause of God-and of Man. But he is too sensitively honorable not to explain where the cause seems weak, too innately respectful of his fellows not to give their opposing views a sympathetic consideration, and too much a lover of liberty to preach authority except in its name. To grasp these several motives is to find in a sober academic treatise a dramatic conflict, no less dramatic because quietly serious, within a human soul. It is to feel Green thinking; to experience the "presence" of the man even more immediately than if your hand held his pulse. He who expects to find in the book only a system of facts and arguments will miss the point entirely, and it will not be strange if he shall say that, in the mutual destruction of argument by argument, in the sum total he finds nothing there.

Of such sort, as I take it, is the logic of any sense of the presence of the divine; of such sort precisely though implying an exercise of imagination of vastly greater range and import; yet still natural as our knowledge of our fellows is natural, and drawn from life as any inspiration of poetry or intuition of beauty is drawn from life.

Hence just as a matter of sophistication, if you please -I feel that I must treat any ostensible experience of the presence of God with a certain reverent, though never undiscriminating, expectancy. In his introduction to the Everyman Spinoza, Santayana concludes Spinoza's message by saying "It counsels us to say to those little gnostics, those circumnavigators of being [i.e. those who have ventured to claim for themselves an experience of God]; I do not believe you God is great." This is hardly to credit Spinoza with the humility appropriate to a philosopher. And it seems to me that both a juster and a subtler warning is conveyed in the words, "He who loveth not his brother

whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?" For myself, I will not resent my neighbour's experience of God until he insists upon making this experience the major premise of a "system" of theology or of metaphysics. Then perhaps I may protest that "God is great." Meanwhile, having in mind the logic of human experience, and the arbitrary nature of any limit placed even upon human experience, I feel compelled (at the least) to agree with William James when he says, "I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe."

In all of this I am speaking mainly from the external standpoint, from the standpoint of the other person who is the critic of religious experience. For myself it often seems as if all of my own religious experience could be summed up in a wonder, curious and critical, yet not irreverent, not unbelieving, and even at times envious, about the religious experience of others. And yet I am not quite certain. When I try to state a fact (in answer perhaps to a questtionnaire) about any very personal experience of my own, it seems that the word "fact" becomes strangely inapplicable, and I seem to find here, in this most intimately personal part of life, a curious lack of distinction between stating a fact and creating it. And then I wonder what would be a minimum of religious experience. To me so much at least seems certain, that to seek the presence of God in one's own life is only fundamentally rational; and it may illustrate my sense of the rationality of this if I point to those two seemingly very simple novels of William Hale White, "Mark Rutherford's Autobiography" and his "Deliverance", in which an evangelical sense of the presence of God seems somehow to survive a Spinozistic conviction of the bigness and hardness of the world, as literature which I have read and re-read with an absorbing interest and which appeals to me as a dramatically faithful presentation of religious experience. And then I must wonder whether even Bertrand Russell's "free man", anathematizing the in

1 Pragmatism, p. 299.

sensitive universe, is not the expression of a religious experience-whether even this attitude, supposed to represent the merest of mere ideas, can fail to imply some sense of a divine presence. Certainly if we found a lower animal, a dog or a monkey, thus expressing himself, we should find it hard to dissociate such an accession of self-consciousness from the idea of a divine revelation.

Accordingly, in the "logic" of the situation, it seems to me that we must take any expression of religious experience, as we would take any piece of poetry, both sceptically and expectantly, for what it will reveal of the possibilities of experience and of insight. In such judgments we are not merely expressing a taste, we are analysing realities. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Koran, the Book of Mormonone need not, I think, be committed to any Christian theology to grasp a real difference between the Gospel of Christ and the Koran, and a possibly greater difference between either and the dull inanities of the Book of Mormon. And yet one might hesitate before pronouncing even the last to be absolutely meaningless, before declaring that there was no vision whatever in the mind of the prophet Joseph Smith. And this measure of criticism I would also apply to any individual religious experience. I will not reject it as simply strange. Take the following from Henry Ward Beecher (quoted by Leuba and James): “In an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God's taking care of those who put their trust in Him that for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and began to cry and laugh." I cannot conceive of any such exaltation of my own spirit as would make this view of the world presently real to me; yet it does not pass my comprehension. At the worst I cannot make it mere words. And if real as an experience it was an experience of reality; of reality as apprehended by one temperament, one form of receptivity. And what would be reality apart from any form of receptivity, I do not know; to me this is unreality.

If, then, it be objected that the forms of receptivity are