consciousness of itself and others, that it is a person?  No, it is nothing but an idea without any reality outside of the mind of him who conceives it.  And similarly this God-Reason either possesses consciousness of himself or he possesses no reality outside the mind that conceives him.  And if he possesses consciousness of himself, he becomes a personal reason, and then all the value of the traditional proofs disappears, for these proofs only proved a reason, but not a supreme consciousness.  Mathematics prove an order, a constancy, a reason in the series of mechanical phenomena, but they ’do not prove that this reason is conscious of itself.  This reason is a logical necessity, but the logical necessity does not prove the teleological or finalist necessity.  And where there is no finality there is no personality, there is no consciousness.

The rational God, therefore—­that is to say, the God who is simply the Reason of the Universe and nothing more—­consummates his own destruction, is destroyed in our mind in so far as he is such a God, and is only born again in us when we feel him in our heart as a living person, as Consciousness, and no longer merely as the impersonal and objective Reason of the Universe.  If we wish for a rational explanation of the construction of a machine, all that we require to know is the mechanical science of its constructor; but if we would have a reason for the existence of such a machine, then, since it is the work not of Nature but of man, we must suppose a conscious, constructive being.  But the second part of this reasoning is not applicable to God, even though it be said that in Him the mechanical science and the mechanician, by means of which the machine was constructed, are one and the same thing.  From the rational point of view this identification is merely a begging of the question.  And thus it is that reason destroys this Supreme Reason, in so far as the latter is a person.

The human reason, in effect, is a reason that is based upon the irrational, upon the total vital consciousness, upon will and feeling; our human reason is not a reason that can prove to us the existence of a Supreme Reason, which in its turn would have to be based upon the Supreme Irrational, upon the Universal Consciousness.  And the revelation of this Supreme Consciousness in our feeling and imagination, by love, by faith, by the process of personalization, is that which leads us to believe in the living God.

And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you, lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him.  And He is in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is Himself creating the longing for Himself.  And He is the God of the humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (i Cor. i. 27).  And God is in each one of us