And even in Greco-Latin paganism itself the tendency towards a living monotheism is apparent in the fact that Zeus was conceived of and felt as a father, Zeus pater, as Homer calls him, the Ju-piter or Ju-pater of the Latins, and as a father of a whole widely extended family of gods and goddesses who together with him constituted the Divinity.

The conjunction of pagan polytheism with Judaic monotheism, which had endeavoured by other means to save the personality of God, gave birth to the feeling of the Catholic God, a God who is a society, as the pagan God of whom I have spoken was a society, and who at the same time is one, as the God of Israel finally became one.  Such is the Christian Trinity, whose deepest sense rationalistic deism has scarcely ever succeeded in understanding, that deism, which though more or less impregnated with Christianity, always remains Unitarian or Socinian.

And the truth is that we feel God less as a superhuman consciousness than as the actual consciousness of the whole human race, past, present, and future, as the collective consciousness of the whole race, and still more, as the total and infinite consciousness which embraces and sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human, and perhaps, super-human.  The divinity that there is in everything, from the lowest—­that is to say, from the least conscious—­of living forms, to the highest, including our own human consciousness, this divinity we feel to be personalized, conscious of itself, in God.  And this gradation of consciousnesses, this sense of the gulf between the human and the fully divine, the universal, consciousness, finds its counterpart in the belief in angels with their different hierarchies, as intermediaries between our human consciousness and that of God.  And these gradations a faith consistent with itself must believe to be infinite, for only by an infinite number of degrees is it possible to pass from the finite to the infinite.

Deistic rationalism conceives God as the Reason of the Universe, but its logic compels it to conceive Him as an impersonal reason—­that is to say, as an idea—­while deistic vitalism feels and imagines God as Consciousness, and therefore as a person or rather as a society of persons.  The consciousness of each one of us, in effect, is a society of persons; in me there are various I’s and even the I’s of those among whom I live, live in me.

The God of deistic rationalism, in effect, the God of the logical proofs of His existence, the ens realissimum and the immobile prime mover, is nothing more than a Supreme Reason, but in the same sense in which we can call the law of universal gravitation the reason of the falling of bodies, this law being merely the explanation of the phenomenon.  But will anyone say that that which we call the law of universal gravitation, or any other law or mathematical principle, is a true and independent reality, that it is an angel, that it is something which possesses