that the proof offered for the Cosmic Consciousness seems to me insufficient. All I am able to make of it is this: The analogy in the case of each of us, who knows that he is conscious, though to the outside observer there is nothing of him discernible but phenomena purely physical; still more, the analogy of the reasoning by which each extends this assurance of his own reality, to interpret similar physical phenomena into the existence of other persons, animating bodies like his own, — these analogies would, in all reason, lead us to say that there might well be a Cosmic Mind animating all Nature, but by no means that there is such a Mind. True enough, there is the same kind of reason for believing in such a Mind as for believing in the minds of our fellow-men, — if, indeed, the real warrant for this belief be only the warrant of analogy. But, even on that warrant, the value of the analogy will finally depend on the degree to which we can match, in Nature as a whole, the test-phenomena that prompt us to conclude the existence of human minds besides our own. The chief of these tests are speech and purposive movement; and Bishop Berkeley’s captivating metaphors about them notwithstanding, the literal fact is that Nature answers to neither; or, rather, we have no means of ascertaining, from her, whether she does or not.
Coming to the second question, I find myself in still greater difficulties. I cannot see how a Cosmic Consciousness, with its intrinsic immanence in Nature, can be reconciled with real freedom at all; and its consistency with an immortality truly personal is
