To say that God is eternally producing things is fundamentally the same as saying that things are eternally producing God.  And the belief in a personal and spiritual God is based on the belief in our own personality and spirituality.  Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we feel God to be consciousness—­that is to say, a person; and because we desire ardently that our consciousness shall live and be independently of the body, we believe that the divine person lives and exists independently of the universe, that his state of consciousness is ad extra.

No doubt logicians will come forward and confront us with the evident rational difficulties which this involves; but we have already stated that, although presented under logical forms, the content of all this is not strictly rational.  Every rational conception of God is in itself contradictory.  Faith in God is born of love for God—­we believe that God exists by force of wishing that He may exist, and it is born also, perhaps, of God’s love for us.  Reason does not prove to us that God exists, but neither does it prove that He cannot exist.

But of this conception of faith in God as the personalization of the universe we shall have more to say presently.

And recalling what has been said in another part of this work, we may say that material things, in so far as they are known to us, issue into knowledge through the agency of hunger, and out of hunger issues the sensible or material universe in which we conglomerate these things; and that ideal things issue out of love, and out of love issues God, in whom we conglomerate these ideal things as in the Consciousness of the Universe.  It is social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct of perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see society in everything, and that shows us at last that all Nature is really an infinite Society.  For my part, the feeling that Nature is a society has taken hold of me hundreds of times in walking through the woods possessed with a sense of solidarity with the oaks, a sense of their dim awareness of my presence.

Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature—­that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short.  The action of reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.

And just as a fruitful union is consummated between the individual—­who is, in a certain sense, a society—­and society, which is also an individual—­the two being so inseparable from one another that it is impossible to say where the one begins and the other ends, for they are rather two aspects of a single essence—­so also the spirit, the social element, which by relating us to others makes us conscious, unites with matter, the individual and individualizing element; similarly, reason or intelligence and imagination embrace in a mutually fruitful union, and the Universe merges into one with God.