a person or a self-consciousness. It is (as Dr.
McTaggart holds) the unity of a Society, but of a Society (as I have
attempted to argue) which emanates from, and is controlled by and guided
to a preconceived end by, a single rational Will.[8]

(5) _The intuitive theory of religious knowledge_. In other quarters
objection will probably be taken to my not having recognized the
possibility of an immediate knowledge of God, and left the idea of God to
be inferred by intellectual processes which, when fully thought out,
amount to a Metaphysic. It will be suggested that to make religious
belief dependent upon Reason is to make it impossible to any but trained
Philosophers or Theologians. Now there is no doubt a great
attractiveness in the theory which makes belief in God depend simply upon
the immediate affirmation of the individual's own consciousness. It
would be more difficult to argue against such a theory of immediate
knowledge or intuition if we found that the consciousness of all or most
individuals does actually reveal to them {107} the existence of God:
though after all the fact that a number of men draw the same inference
from given facts does not show that it is not an inference. You will
sometimes find Metaphysicians contending that nobody is really an
Atheist, since everybody necessarily supposes himself to be in contact
with an Other of which he is nevertheless a part. I do not deny that, if
you water down the idea of God to the notion of a vague 'something not
ourselves,' you may possibly make out that everybody is explicitly or
implicitly a believer in such a Deity.

I should prefer myself to say that, if that is all you mean by God, it
does not much matter whether we believe in Him or not. In the sense in
which God is understood by Christianity or Judaism or any other theistic
Religion it is unfortunately impossible to contend that everybody is a
Theist. And, if there is an immediate knowledge of God in every human
soul, this would be difficult to account for. Neither the cultivated nor
the uncultivated Chinaman has apparently any such belief. The ignorant
Chinaman believes in a sort of luck or destiny--possibly in a plurality
of limited but more or less mischievous spirits; the educated Chinaman,
we are told, is for the most part a pure Agnostic. And Chinamen are
believed to be one-fifth of the human race. The task of the Missionary
would be an easier one if he could {108} appeal to any such wi