Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/227

This page needs to be proofread.
190
THE CONCEPTION OF GOD

the Divine point of view. For such writers, God’s Will, through an unconscious misuse of the psychological facts, actually often gets predominantly defined in terms of our muscle and joint sensations, — a process as enlightening as if you should attribute to the All-seeing Eye the possession of our systems of after-images.

In brief, then, while it is perfectly true that our conceptions of an Absolute Thought and Experience, as well as the conception which we now seek to define, are all attained through a process of generalising from the types of thought and experience and will that we know, it is necessary to be careful in finding the motives that can warrant any such generalisation. Our right to our earlier generalisations in this paper has been as follows: Of the characteristics of our own inner life, there are two which primarily lend themselves to generalisation when we try to form the conception of some experience more inclusive or exalted than our own. These characteristics are the possession of thought, and the presence of contents or of data such as fulfil the ideas of thought, and give them concreteness. A being higher than ourselves in conscious grade must know, — of that we seem at once sure. And to know, is, on the other hand, to find ideas expressed in contents. For truth means idea fulfilled in fact. And one who knows, knows truth. But while such a formal generalisation of the essence of our own experience is common to all efforts to define the Absolute as above us in conscious grade, it is much harder to generalise accurately the phenomena of such a complex and