ides, when we speak of "England," we do not think only or mainly
of its physical aspects. We think of it as a great community, with an
ancient, and in some ways admirable, tradition of political life, with
a splendid record of achievement in both material and spiritual
things, with a great past, and (we hope) a greater future. In all
these cases the parts have been fused into a whole by human effort,
either consciously or instinctively applied; and it is in virtue of
this effort alone that the whole transcends its parts. But in the case
of a God "synthetized" out of the thought and feeling of untold
generations of men, the analogy breaks down at every point. To assume
that portions of psychic experience are capable of vital coalescence,
is to beg the whole question. We know that stone can be piled on
stone, that men can be trained to form a platoon, a cohort, a phalanx;
but that detached fragments of mind are capable of any sort of
cohesion and organization we do not know at all. And, even if this
point could be granted, where is the organizing power? We should have
to postulate another God to serve as the architect or the
drill-sergeant of our synthetic divinity. Nor would it help matters to
suggest that the God (as it were) crystallized himself; for that is to
assume structural potentialities in his component parts which must
have come from somewhere, so that again we have to presuppose another
God. It is true, no doubt, that portions of thought and feeling can be
collected, arranged, edited, in some sense organized, by human effort;
but the result is an encyclopaedia, a thesaurus, an anthology, a
liturgy, a bible--not a God. It may, like the Vedas, the Hebrew
Scriptures and the Koran, become an object of idolatry; but even its
idolaters see in it only an emanation from God, not the God himself.
All this argument may strike the reader as extremely nebulous, but I
submit that the fault is not mine. It was not I who sought to
demonstrate the reality of a figure of speech by placing it on all
fours with a cathedral and a regiment. The whole contention is so
baffling that reason staggers and flounders as in a quicksand. It
rests upon a mixture of categories, as palpable and yet as elusive as
anything in _The Hunting of the Snark_.

If you tell me that Public Opinion is a God, I am quite willing to
consider whether the metaphor is a luminous and helpful one. But if
you protest that it is no metaphor at all, but a literal s