he experience, the words in which it is stated are but
words; and, without the experience, the words must remain for ever
words and nothing more than words.

If then by the idea of God we mean the words, in which it is
(inadequately) stated, and nothing more, the idea of God is separated
by an impassable gulf from the being of God. Further, if we admit that
the idea is, by its very nature, and by the very facts of the case,
essentially different from the being of God, then it is of little use
to continue to maintain that the being of God is a fact of human
experience. In that case, the supposed fact of experience is reduced
to something of which we neither have, nor can have, any idea, or
consciousness, whatever. It thereby ceases to be a fact of experience
at all. And it is precisely on this assumption that the being of God
is denied to be a fact of experience--the assumption that being and
idea are separated from one another by an impassable gulf: the idea we
can be conscious of, but of His being we can have no experience. We
must therefore ask not whether this gulf is impassable, but whether it
exists at all, or is of the same imaginary nature as that to which
Gloucester was led by Edgar.

That there may be beings, of whom we have no idea, is a proposition
which it is impossible to disprove. Such beings would be _ex hypothesi_
no part of our experience; and if God were such a being, man would
have no experience of Him. And, having no experience of Him, man could
have no idea of Him. But the experience man has, of those beings whom
he knows, is an experience in which idea and being are given together.
Even if in thought we attend to one rather than to the other of the two
aspects, the idea is still the idea of the being; and the being is
still the being of the idea. So far from there being an impassable gulf
between the two, the two are inseparable, in the moment of actual
experience. It is in moments of reflection that they appear separable
and separate, for the memory remains, when the actual experience has
ceased. We have then only to call the memory the idea, and then the
idea, in this use of the word, is as essentially different from that of
which it is said to be the idea, as the memory of a being or thing is
from the being or thing itself. If we put the memory into words, and
pronounce those words to another, we communicate to him what we
remember of our experience (modified--perhaps transmogrified--by our
re