nite to the
infinite.

Deistic rationalism conceives God as the Reason of the Universe, but its
logic compels it to conceive Him as an impersonal reason--that is to
say, as an idea--while deistic vitalism feels and imagines God as
Consciousness, and therefore as a person or rather as a society of
persons. The consciousness of each one of us, in effect, is a society of
persons; in me there are various I's and even the I's of those among
whom I live, live in me.

The God of deistic rationalism, in effect, the God of the logical proofs
of His existence, the _ens realissimum_ and the immobile prime mover, is
nothing more than a Supreme Reason, but in the same sense in which we
can call the law of universal gravitation the reason of the falling of
bodies, this law being merely the explanation of the phenomenon. But
will anyone say that that which we call the law of universal
gravitation, or any other law or mathematical principle, is a true and
independent reality, that it is an angel, that it is something which
possesses consciousness of itself and others, that it is a person? No,
it is nothing but an idea without any reality outside of the mind of him
who conceives it. And similarly this God-Reason either possesses
consciousness of himself or he possesses no reality outside the mind
that conceives him. And if he possesses consciousness of himself, he
becomes a personal reason, and then all the value of the traditional
proofs disappears, for these proofs only proved a reason, but not a
supreme consciousness. Mathematics prove an order, a constancy, a reason
in the series of mechanical phenomena, but they 'do not prove that this
reason is conscious of itself. This reason is a logical necessity, but
the logical necessity does not prove the teleological or finalist
necessity. And where there is no finality there is no personality, there
is no consciousness.

The rational God, therefore--that is to say, the God who is simply the
Reason of the Universe and nothing more--consummates his own
destruction, is destroyed in our mind in so far as he is such a God, and
is only born again in us when we feel him in our heart as a living
person, as Consciousness, and no longer merely as the impersonal and
objective Reason of the Universe. If we wish for a rational explanation
of the construction of a machine, all that we require to know is the
mechanical science of its constructor; but if we would have a reason for
the existence of suc