Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/148

Rh there you go round in the resistless dialectical whirligig once more! And so will your cheerfully obdurate negative send you whirling on perpetually!” And in that saying I should quite agree, and I am sure that you would, also. It is not to the force or validity of the argument that I object, but to the misinterpretation of its scope. It is a clinching dialectical thumbscrew for the torture of agnostics; yes, with reference to them and their unavoidable stadium of thinking, it is even a step of value in the struggle of the soul toward a conviction of its really infinite powers and prospects; but I cannot see in it any full proof of the real being of God. Strictly construed, it is, as I have just endeavoured to show, simply the vindication of that active sovereign judgment which is the light of every mind, which organises even the most elementary perceptions, and which goes on in its ceaseless critical work of reorganisation after reorganisation, building all the successive stages of science, and finally mastering those ultimate implications of science that constitute the insights of philosophy. If I call that active all-illumining judgment, — which is indeed my life and my light, and which shines, and will shine, unto my perfect day, and is for me in all the emergencies of experience an ever-present and practicable omniscience, or fountain of unfailing certainty, — if I call that God, then assuredly I am employing the mood of the mystic; nay, I am taking literally what he took only mystically; I am translating into the cold forms of logic, where it becomes meaningless, what his religious poesy and enthusiasm made a practical medium of exalted religious feeling, though