ies it to the essence and matter of them. Reason
orders the sensible perceptions which give us the material world; but
when its analysis is exercised upon the reality of the perceptions
themselves, it dissolves them and plunges us into a world of
appearances, a world of shadows without consistency, for outside the
domain of the formal, reason is nihilist and annihilating. And it
performs the same terrible office when we withdraw it from its proper
domain and apply it to the scrutiny of the imaginative intuitions which
give us the spiritual world. For reason annihilates and imagination
completes, integrates or totalizes; reason by itself alone kills, and it
is imagination that gives life. If it is true that imagination by itself
alone, in giving us life without limit, leads us to lose our identity in
the All and also kills us as individuals, it kills us by excess of life.
Reason, the head, speaks to us the word Nothing! imagination, the heart,
the word All! and between all and nothing, by the fusion of the all and
the nothing within us, we live in God, who is All, and God lives in us
who, without Him, are nothing. Reason reiterates, Vanity of vanities!
all is vanity! And imagination answers, Plenitude of plenitudes! all is
plenitude! And thus we live the vanity of plenitude or the plenitude of
vanity.

And so deeply rooted in the depths of man's being is this vital need of
living a world[42] illogical, irrational, personal or divine, that those
who do not believe in God, or believe that they do not believe in Him,
believe nevertheless in some little pocket god or even devil of their
own, or in an omen, or in a horseshoe picked up by chance on the
roadside and carried about with them to bring them good luck and defend
them from that very reason whose loyal and devoted henchmen they imagine
themselves to be.

The God whom we hunger after is the God to whom we pray, the God of the
_Pater Noster_, of the Lord's Prayer; the God whom we beseech, before
all and above all, and whether we are aware of it or not, to instil
faith into us, to make us believe in Him, to make Himself in us, the God
to whom we pray that His name may be hallowed and that His will may be
done--His will, not His reason--on earth as it is in heaven; but feeling
that His will cannot be other than the essence of our will, the desire
to persist eternally.

And such a God is the God of love--_how_ He is it profits us not to ask,
but rather let each consult