Page:Tolstoy - Pamphlets.djvu/176

Rh cannot know Him otherwise, and yet we cannot realise one single being as pervading all. In this we find the chief incomprehensibleness of God. If God be not One, then He becomes diffused, non-existent, whereas if He be One, then we involuntarily represent Him to ourselves as a personality, and He is no longer the Higher Being, the All. And, nevertheless, to know God, to lean on Him, we are forced to conceive Him both as pervading all, and at the same time as One.

The world is certainly not such as we conceive it. Other instruments of perception will give us other worlds. But however that which we call the world may change, our relation to it is undoubtedly as we conceive it, is unchangeable, being based on that in us which perceives; and which perceives not only in me but in all conscious life. This perceiving element is the same everywhere, in all, and in oneself. It is both God Himself, and that limited part of Him which constitutes my real self.

But what is this God, — the eternal, infinite, omnipotent, which has become mortal, limited, weak ? Wherefore has God subdivided Himself? I do not know, but I do know that this is so, and that in this is life. All that we