will acknowledge that
they do not. It is true that according to Berkeley the world exists only
as it is perceived, and that our perceptions of it are produced by the
immediate action of God on our minds, so that everything we perceive
might be described, if not as an idea in the mind of the deity, at least
as a direct emanation from him. On this theory we might in a sense be
said to have an immediate knowledge of God. But Berkeley's theory has
found little acceptance, so far as I know, even among philosophers; and
even if we regarded it as true, we should still have to admit that the
knowledge of God implied by it is inferential rather than intuitive in
the strict sense of the word: we infer God to be the cause of our
perceptions rather than identify him with the perceptions themselves. On
the whole, then, I conclude that man, or at all events the ordinary man,
has, properly speaking, no immediate or intuitive knowledge of God, and
that, if he obtains, without the aid of revelation, any knowledge of him
at all, it can only be through the other natural channel of knowledge,
that is, through experience.

[Sidenote: The nature of experience.]

In experience, as distinct from intuition, we reach our conclusions not
directly through simple contemplation of the particular sensations,
emotions, or ideas of which we are at the moment conscious, but
indirectly by calling up before the imagination and comparing with each
other our memories of a variety of sensations, emotions, or ideas of
which we have been conscious in the past, and by selecting or
abstracting from the mental images so compared the points in which they
resemble each other. The points of resemblance thus selected or
abstracted from a number of particulars compose what we call an abstract
or general idea, and from a comparison of such abstract or general ideas
with each other we arrive at general conclusions, which define the
relations of the ideas to each other. Experience in general consists in
the whole body of conclusions thus deduced from a comparison of all the
particular sensations, emotions, and ideas which make up the conscious
life of the individual. Hence in order to constitute experience the mind
has to perform a more or less complex series of operations, which are
commonly referred to certain mental faculties, such as memory,
imagination, and judgment. This analysis of experience does not pretend
to be philosophically complete or exact; but perhaps i