ave arisen without
the knowledge and sympathy and full understanding of the Sustainer and
Comprehender of it all. Nor can functions be expected in the creature
which transcend the power of the Creator.

All our faculties, sensations, and emotions must therefore be
understood, and in a sense possessed, in some transcendental and to us
unimaginable form, by the Deity.

I know that it is possible to deny His existence, just as it is
possible to deny the existence of an external world or to maintain that
reality is limited to our sensations. If the Deity has a sense of
humour, as undoubtedly He has, He must be amused at the remarkable
philosophising faculty recently developed by the creature which on this
planet has become most vigorously selfconscious and is in the early
stages of progress towards higher things--a philosophising faculty so
acute as to lead him to mistrust and throw away information conveyed to
him by the very instruments which have enabled him to become what he
is; so that having become keenly alive to the truth that all we are
directly aware of is the fruit of our own sensations and consciousness,
he proceeds to the grotesque supposition that these sensations and
consciousness may be all that really exists, and that the information
which for ages our senses have conveyed to us concerning external
things may be illusory, not only in form and detail and appearance, but
in substantial fact.

He must be pleased, also, with the enterprise of those eager
philosophers who are so strenuously impressed with the truth of some
ultimate monistic unification, as to be unwilling to concede the
multifariousness of existence--who decline to speak of mind and matter,
or of body and spirit, or of God and the world, as in any sense
separate entities--who stigmatise as dualistic anything which does not
manifestly and consciously strain after an ultimate monistic view--and
who then, as a climax, on the strength of a few years' superficial
experience on a planet, by the aid of the sense organs which they
themselves perceive to be illusory whenever the actual reality of
things is in contemplation, proceed to develop the theory that the
whole has come into being without direct intelligence and apart from
spiritual guidance, that it is managed so well (or so ill) that it is
really not managed at all, that no Deity exists, and that it is absurd
to postulate the existence of a comprehensive and all-inclusive guiding
Mind.

To