h a machine, then, since it is the work not of
Nature but of man, we must suppose a conscious, constructive being. But
the second part of this reasoning is not applicable to God, even though
it be said that in Him the mechanical science and the mechanician, by
means of which the machine was constructed, are one and the same thing.
From the rational point of view this identification is merely a begging
of the question. And thus it is that reason destroys this Supreme
Reason, in so far as the latter is a person.

The human reason, in effect, is a reason that is based upon the
irrational, upon the total vital consciousness, upon will and feeling;
our human reason is not a reason that can prove to us the existence of a
Supreme Reason, which in its turn would have to be based upon the
Supreme Irrational, upon the Universal Consciousness. And the revelation
of this Supreme Consciousness in our feeling and imagination, by love,
by faith, by the process of personalization, is that which leads us to
believe in the living God.

And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you,
lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And He is
in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is
Himself creating the longing for Himself. And He is the God of the
humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of
the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to
confound the things which are mighty (i Cor. i. 27). And God is in each
one of us in the measure in which each one feels Him and loves Him. "If
of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without
sincerity of heart, and the other prays to an idol with all the passion
of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to an idol,
while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that
the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires.
And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in
theology. The venerable Father of the long beard and white locks who
appears among the clouds carrying the globe of the world in his hand is
more living and more real than the _ens realissimum_ of theodicy.

Reason is an analytical, that is, a dissolving force, whenever it
transfers its activity from the form of intuitions, whether those of the
individual instinct of preservation or those of the social instinct of
perpetuation, and appl