break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break
it into sciences; and then we begin to feel at home. We make ten
thousand separate serial orders of it, and on any one of these we react
as though the others did not exist. We discover among its various
parts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematical
relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), and
out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and
lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but
only _for our purpose_, the other relations being just as real and
present as they; and our purpose is to _conceive simply_ and to
_foresee_. Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends
pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and the
miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any
philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling.
It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to {120} many of our
aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends.

When the man of affairs, the artist, or the man of science fails, he is
not rebutted. He tries again. He says the impressions of sense _must_
give way, _must_ be reduced to the desiderated form.[3] They all
postulate in the interests of their volitional nature a harmony between
the latter and the nature of things. The theologian does no more. And
the reflex doctrine of the mind's structure, though all theology should
as yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavor
itself at least obeyed in form the mind's most necessary law.[4]

Now for the question I asked above: What kind of a being would God be
if he did exist? The word 'God' has come to mean many things in the
history {121} of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the 'Idee'
which figures in the pages of Hegel. Even the laws of physical nature
have, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor and
presented as the only fitting object of our reverence.[5] Of course,
if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something more
definite than this. We must not call any object of our loyalty a 'God'
without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to be
one of God's functions. He must have some intrinsic characteristics of
his own besides; and theism must mean the faith of that man who
believes that the object of _his_ loyalty has th