286 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



subconscious reservoirs of energy and being avail- 

 able for the personal self, and of organizing the ideas 

 of external reality into a single organized mental 

 whole — the idea of God — capable of reacting with 

 the personal self by interpenetration. 



Although he was moving to quite other conclu- 

 sions, it is worth recalling James's ideas. For in- 

 stance, "The line of least resistance ... is to accept 

 the notion . . . that there is a God, but that he is 

 finite. . . . These, I need hardly tell you, are the 

 terms in which common men have usually carried on 

 their active commerce with God; and the Monistic" 

 [sc. Absolutist] "perfections that make the notion of 

 him so paradoxical practically and morally are the 

 colder addition of remote professorial minds oper- 

 ating in distans upon conceptual substitutes for him 

 alone." (James, W, p. 311.) 



I may perhaps be rebuked for trying to analyse the 

 unanalysable, for neglecting the supreme and suffic- 

 ing fact of experience of God in favour of the un- 

 profitable and impossible task of catching the in- 

 finite in an intellectual net. There are two answers 

 to this. One is that unanalysed experience is selfish 

 because less communicable: with that we deal later. 

 The other is even more important: it is this. Hu- 

 manity at large is not content with emotional ex- 

 perience alone, however complete and apparently 

 satisfying: it has always demanded an intellectual 

 formulation of the reality with which it is in contact, 



