to speak, a hill-top view. Lifting us up to
higher levels, it ought to give us a larger synthesis. Hence, the wider
the span of experience which we are able to bring within our system, the
more valid its claim becomes: and the setting apart of spiritual
experience in a special compartment, the keeping of it under glass, is
daily becoming less possible. That experience is life in its fullness,
or nothing at all. Therefore it must come out into the open, and must
witness to its own most sacred conviction; that the universe as a whole
is a religious fact, and man is not living completely until he is living
in a world religiously conceived.

More and more, as it seems to me, philosophy moves toward this reading
of existence. The revolt from the last century's materialism is almost
complete. In religious language, abstract thought is again finding and
feeling God within the world; and finding too in this discovery and
realization the meaning, and perhaps--if we may dare to use such a
word--the purpose of life. It suggests--and here, more and more,
psychology supports it--that, real and alive as we are in relation to
this system with which we find ourselves in correspondence, yet we are
not so real, nor so alive, as it is possible to be. The characters of
our psychic life point us on and up to other levels. Already we perceive
that man's universe is no fixed order; and that the many ways in which
he is able to apprehend it are earnests of a greater transfiguration, a
more profound contact with reality yet possible to him. Higher forms of
realization, a wider span of experience, a sharpening of our vague,
uncertain consciousness of value--these may well be before us. We have
to remember how dim, tentative, half-understood a great deal of our
so-called "normal" experience is: how narrow the little field of
consciousness, how small the number of impressions it picks up from the
rich flux of existence, how subjective the picture it constructs from
them. To take only one obvious example, artists and poets have given us
plenty of hints that a real beauty and significance which we seldom
notice lie at our very doors; and forbid us to contradict the statement
of religion that God is standing there too.

That thought which inspires the last chapters of Professor 'Alexander's
"Space, Time, and Deity," that the universe as a whole has a tendency
towards deity, does at least seem true of the fully awakened human
consciousness.[31] Thoug