above all the case with the very poor and perhaps, if you will, very profane sort of tradition that an individual student of philosophy may find in the shape of a past piece of his own writing. It is the death of your philosophising, if you come to believe anything merely because you have once maintained it. And therefore I am not unwilling to confess that, if I had to-night to pass an examination upon the text of my book, I might very possibly get an extremely poor mark. Let us lay aside, then, for a moment, both text and tradition, and come face to face with our philosophical problem itself.
The Conception of God — this is our immediate topic. And I begin its consideration by saying that, to my mind, a really fruitful philosophical study of the conception of God is inseparable from an attempt to estimate what evidence there is for the existence of God. When one conceives of God, one does so because one is interested, not in the bare definition of a purely logical or mathematical notion, but in the attempt to make out what sort of real world this is in which you and I live. If it is worth while even to speak of God before the forum of the philosophical reason, it is so because one hopes to be able, in a measure, to translate into articulate terms the central mystery of our existence, and to get some notion about what is at the heart of the world. Therefore, when to-night I speak of the conception of God, I mean to do so in the closest relation to a train of thought concerning the philosophical proof that this conception corresponds to some living Reality. It is useless in this region to define unless one wishes
