know it in so far as it produces sense images on our brain and enters
into our individual consciousness. The limits of my subject forbid
that I should enter into a discussion of philosophic idealism, but I
think I ought to confess at once that I can only think of existence in
terms of consciousness: nothing exists except in and for mind. The
mind that thinks the universe must be immeasurably greater than my own,
but in so far as I too am able to think the universe, mine is one with
it. All thinking starts with a paradox, even the famous saying of
Descartes, "I think, therefore I am"; and my paradox seems at least as
reasonable as any other, and has fewer difficulties to encounter than
most. I start then with the assumption that the universe is God's
thought about Himself, and that in so far as I am able to think it
along with Him, "I and my Father (even metaphysically speaking) are
one." It cannot be demonstrated beyond dispute that any two human
beings think the same universe. Strictly speaking, it is certain that
they do not in every detail. But the common dominator of our
experience, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, is the assumption that
in the main the universe is pretty much the same for one man as it is
for another. When I speak of the rolling sea, my neighbour does not
understand me to mean the waving trees, but I cannot prove that he does
not. If he is consistent in seeing water as trees and trees as water,
his mind must be constituted differently from mine and yet I may never
know it. So, by an almost unperceived act of faith, we have to take
for granted that our separate individualities meet and become one to
some extent in our common experience of this great universe, which is
at that same time the expression of God. The real universe must be
infinitely greater and more complex than the one which is apparent to
our physical senses. This becomes probable, even on material grounds,
the moment we begin to examine into the nature of sense perception.
The ear is constituted to hear just so many sounds; beyond that limit
at either end of the scale we can hear nothing, but that does not prove
that there are no more sounds to hear. Similarly the eye can
distinguish five or seven primary colours and their various
combinations; beyond that limit we are colour-blind. But suppose we
were endowed to hear and see sounds and colours a million times greater
in number than those of which we have at present an