Beauty and fragrance surround us.  But emerging from its doors, we find ourselves meeting the cold glances of those who deal in other kinds of reality; and discover that such spiritual life as we possess has got to accommodate itself to the conditions in which they live.  If the claim of religion be true at all, it is plain that the conservatory-type of spiritual world is inconsistent with it.  Imperfect though any conception we frame of the universe must be—­and here we may keep in mind Samuel Butler’s warning that “there is no such source of error as the pursuit of absolute truth”—­still, a view which is controlled by the religious factor ought to be, so to speak, a hill-top view.  Lifting us up to higher levels, it ought to give us a larger synthesis.  Hence, the wider the span of experience which we are able to bring within our system, the more valid its claim becomes:  and the setting apart of spiritual experience in a special compartment, the keeping of it under glass, is daily becoming less possible.  That experience is life in its fullness, or nothing at all.  Therefore it must come out into the open, and must witness to its own most sacred conviction; that the universe as a whole is a religious fact, and man is not living completely until he is living in a world religiously conceived.

More and more, as it seems to me, philosophy moves toward this reading of existence.  The revolt from the last century’s materialism is almost complete.  In religious language, abstract thought is again finding and feeling God within the world; and finding too in this discovery and realization the meaning, and perhaps—­if we may dare to use such a word—­the purpose of life.  It suggests—­and here, more and more, psychology supports it—­that, real and alive as we are in relation to this system with which we find ourselves in correspondence, yet we are not so real, nor so alive, as it is possible to be.  The characters of our psychic life point us on and up to other levels.  Already we perceive that man’s universe is no fixed order; and that the many ways in which he is able to apprehend it are earnests of a greater transfiguration, a more profound contact with reality yet possible to him.  Higher forms of realization, a wider span of experience, a sharpening of our vague, uncertain consciousness of value—­these may well be before us.  We have to remember how dim, tentative, half-understood a great deal of our so-called “normal” experience is:  how narrow the little field of consciousness, how small the number of impressions it picks up from the rich flux of existence, how subjective the picture it constructs from them.  To take only one obvious example, artists and poets have given us plenty of hints that a real beauty and significance which we seldom notice lie at our very doors; and forbid us to contradict the statement of religion that God is standing there too.