body, we believe that the divine person lives and exists
independently of the universe, that his state of consciousness is _ad
extra_.

No doubt logicians will come forward and confront us with the evident
rational difficulties which this involves; but we have already stated
that, although presented under logical forms, the content of all this is
not strictly rational. Every rational conception of God is in itself
contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for God--we believe that God
exists by force of wishing that He may exist, and it is born also,
perhaps, of God's love for us. Reason does not prove to us that God
exists, but neither does it prove that He cannot exist.

But of this conception of faith in God as the personalization of the
universe we shall have more to say presently.

And recalling what has been said in another part of this work, we may
say that material things, in so far as they are known to us, issue into
knowledge through the agency of hunger, and out of hunger issues the
sensible or material universe in which we conglomerate these things; and
that ideal things issue out of love, and out of love issues God, in whom
we conglomerate these ideal things as in the Consciousness of the
Universe. It is social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct
of perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see society
in everything, and that shows us at last that all Nature is really an
infinite Society. For my part, the feeling that Nature is a society has
taken hold of me hundreds of times in walking through the woods
possessed with a sense of solidarity with the oaks, a sense of their dim
awareness of my presence.

Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and
anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes
everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to
supernaturalize Nature--that is to say, to make it divine by making it
human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of
reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.

And just as a fruitful union is consummated between the individual--who
is, in a certain sense, a society--and society, which is also an
individual--the two being so inseparable from one another that it is
impossible to say where the one begins and the other ends, for they are
rather two aspects of a single essence--so also the spirit, the social
element, which by relating us to ot