which rationalism can give an account is
relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige
undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs,
and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to
convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are
opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come
from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which
rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses,
your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises,
of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and
something in you absolutely KNOWS that that result must be truer than
any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may
contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding
belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when
it argues against it. That vast literature of proofs of God's
existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so
overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in
libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to
believe in the kind of God it argued for. Whatever sort of a being God
may be, we KNOW to-day that he is nevermore that mere external inventor
of "contrivances" intended to make manifest his "glory" in which our
great-grandfathers took such satisfaction, though just how we know this
we cannot possibly make clear by words either to others or to
ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to account for your persuasion
that if a God exist he must be a more cosmic and tragic personage than
that Being.

The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate
reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of
reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.
Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great
world-ruling systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic
philosophy, may grow up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets
up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized
philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned
and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument
is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but
follow. If a person feels the presence of a living God after the
fashi