times when God seems far off, but this is always my own fault."--

"I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time soothing,
which hovers over me. Sometimes it seems to enwrap me with sustaining
arms."

Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the
convincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are
realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an
hallucination. They determine our vital attitude as decisively as the
vital attitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense, by which
each is haunted, of the other being in the world. A lover has
notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his idol, even when
his attention is addressed to other matters and he no longer represents
her features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him
through and through. I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings
of reality, and I must dwell a moment longer on that point. They are
as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences
can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results
established by mere logic ever are. One may indeed be entirely without
them; probably more than one of you here present is without them in any
marked degree; but if you do have them, and have them at all strongly,
the probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine
perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no
adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expel from
your belief.

The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of
as RATIONALISM. Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought
ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds. Such grounds,
for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1) definitely statable
abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation; (3) definite
hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite inferences logically
drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the
rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a splendid
intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits of
it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is its result.

Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on
the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and
science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to
confess that the part of it of