THE PERSONAL DEITY 167 



mind. Theology has striven to separate the two, 

 has abstracted the soul as an independent existence, 

 and regarded it as a projection from and part of a 

 general soul of humanity, existing distinct from 

 and outside of individual men. For the mechanism 

 of Niagara we have the bodily mechanism, and for 

 the personality in control, instead of the humble 

 representative of applied science, the humble 

 individual soul, acting upon orders received from 

 and owing allegiance to an external deity of which 

 it forms a part. 



H. G. Wells has defined the main difference 

 between an ordinary, modern, intelligent, well- 

 educated, benevolent and morally right-minded 

 atheist or agnostic and the genuine religious 

 enthusiast, as being in the former's view of his, as 

 I have indicated, very high-minded and unimpeach- 

 able personality as a separate isolated existence, 

 independent of all others, and the latter's view that 

 what is benevolent, high-minded and noble in his 

 personality is not a natural consequence of the life- 

 process, but part of a personal God, who responds 

 to and lives in the closest relationship with the 

 individual souls of men. 



The engineers in the power-house of Niagara are 

 assuredly not isolated existences actuating their 

 machinery out of their own self-sufficiency. They 

 take their instructions from a superior, and the 

 science and practice embodied in those orders are an 

 accumulation of all that is best in the labours of 

 many men, alive and dead. No single mind could 

 create that knowledge, even if one could be found 

 fully to comprehend it. If you talk to these men at 

 their work, you would find, no doubt, that they were 

 astonishingly self-contained, knowing little of and 

 caring less for the mere theoretical amateurs who, 

 with a few bits of sealing-wax and wire and some 



