orld that cannot be construed under the form of God. My god
is my world practically recognized in respect of its fundamental or
ultimate attitude to my ideals. In the sense, then, conveyed by this
term _attitude_ my god will invariably possess the characters of
personality. But the degree to which these characters will coincide with
the characters which I assign to human persons, or the terms of any
logical conception of personality, cannot be absolutely defined.
Anthropomorphisms may be imagination or they may be literal conviction.
This will depend, as above maintained, upon the degree to which they
determine my expectations. Suppose the world to be theoretically
conceived as governed by laws that are indifferent to all human
interests. The practical expression of this conception appears in the
naturalism of Lucretius, or Diogenes, or Omar Khayyam. Living in the
vivid presence of an indifferent world, I may picture my gods as leading
their own lives in some remote realm which is inaccessible to my
petitions, or as regarding me with sinister and contemptuous cruelty. In
the latter case I may shrink and cower, or return them contempt for
contempt. I mean this literally only if I look for consequences
following directly from the emotional coloring which I have bestowed
upon them. It may well be that I mean merely to regard myself _sub
specie eternitatis_, in which case I am _personifying_ in the sense of
free imagination. In the religion of enlightenment the divine attitude
tends to belong to the poetry and eloquence of religion rather than to
its cognitive intent. This is true even of optimistic and idealistic
religion. The love and providence of God are less commonly supposed to
warrant an expectation of special and arbitrary favors, and have come
more and more to mean the play of my own feeling about the general
central conviction of the favorableness of the cosmos to my deeper or
moral concerns. But the factor of personality cannot possibly be
entirely eliminated, for the religious consciousness _creates_ a social
relationship between man and the universe. Such an interpretation of
life is not a case of the pathetic fallacy, unless it incorrectly
_reckons with_ the inner feeling which it attributes to the universe. It
is an obvious practical truth that the total or residual environment is
significant for life. Grant this and you make rational a recognition of
that significance, or a more or less constant sense of coinc