is eminently a case for facts to testify. Facts, I
think, are yet lacking to prove "spirit-return," though I have the
highest respect for the patient labors of Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, and
Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their favorable conclusions. I
consequently leave the matter open, with this brief word to save the
reader from a possible perplexity as to why immortality got no mention
in the body of this book.

The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the "God"
of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed
with certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on
philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter
of course to be "one and only" and to be "infinite"; and the notion of
many finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to
consider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of
intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience,
as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the
infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to
is that we can experience union with SOMETHING larger than ourselves
and in that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its
passion for unity, and mysticism with its monoideistic bent, both "pass
to the limit" and identify the something with a unique God who is the
all-inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their
authority, follows the example which they set.

Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me
sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion
continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to
him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power
should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything
larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step.
It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably
even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self
would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might
conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of
inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all.[364] Thus
would a sort of polytheism return upon us--a polytheism which I do not
on this occasion defend, for my only aim at present is to keep the
testimony of religious experience