l likeness to Him,
and our capacity to receive illumination from Him.[21] But this latter
{xxxii} bolder view of the inherent greatness of man's essential nature
is the prevailing tendency of these men. They are thus the forerunners
of the Quaker faith that there is something of God in man, and they
continue the direct line, which goes back for ancestry to the Socratic
movement in philosophy of those who find God involved and implicated in
the nature of normal self-consciousness and in the idea of the Good
toward which we live.[22]

Mystics and prophets, as Seely well says in _Ecce Homo_, seem to
themselves to "discover truth not so much by a process of reasoning as
by _an intense gaze_, and they announce their conclusions with the
voice of a herald, using the name of God and giving no reasons." The
rational way of approach is different. It seeks to draw out by a
process of rational argument what is involved in the outer or inner
facts that are present to consciousness. It does not claim the power
to make bricks without clay, to construct its conclusions out of
nothing. Its only legitimate field is that of interpreting experience.
There have always been men who were religious because they could not
help being religious, because a Universe without God seemed to them
utterly irrational and unthinkable. Schleiermacher is only one witness
in a long and impressive succession of thinkers that have insisted that
"consciousness of God and self-consciousness are inseparable."[23] It
is obvious even to the unmetaphysical person that self-consciousness
always presupposes and involves something prior to one's own existence
and some reality transcending the reality of one's own self. The
finite is intelligible only through the infinite, the temporal only
through the eternal. We cannot think at all without appealing to some
_permanent more of reality_ than is just now given in our particular
finite experience, and no matter how far one travels on the road of
knowledge one always finds it still necessary to make reference to _a
transcending more_. "All consciousness is," as Hegel {xxxiii} showed
in 1807, in his philosophical Pilgrim's Progress, the _Phenomenology of
Spirit_, "an appeal to more consciousness," and there is no rational
halting-place short of a self-consistent and self-explanatory spiritual
Reality, which explains the origin and furnishes the goal of all that
is real.

On the other hand, there have always be