tradition; that is to say, by religious belief and practice.  Or they may come from the countless minor and cumulative suggestions which life makes to us, and which few of us have the subtlety to analyze.  If these suggestions of tradition or environment are met by resistance, either of the moral or intellectual order, whilst yet the deep instinct for full life remains unsatisfied, the result is an inner conflict of more or less severity; and as a rule, this is only resolved and harmony achieved through the crisis of conversion, breaking down resistances, liberating emotion and reconciling inner craving with outer stimulus.  There is, however, nothing spiritual in the conversion process itself.  It has its parallel in other drastic readjustments to other levels of life; and is merely a method by which selves of a certain type seem best able to achieve the union of feeling, thought, and will necessary to stability.

Now we have behind us and within us all humanity’s funded instinct for the Divine, all the racial habits and traditions of response to the Divine.  But its valid thought about the Divine comes as yet to very little.  Thus we see that the author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” spoke as a true psychologist when he said that “a secret blind love pressing towards God” held more hope of success than mere thought can ever do; “for He may well be loved but not thought—­by love He may be gotten and holden, but by thought never."[80] Nevertheless, if that consistency of deed and belief which is essential to full power is to be achieved by us, every man’s conception of the God Whom he serves ought to be the very best of which he is capable.  Because ideas which we recognize as partial or primitive have called forth the richness and devotion of other natures, we are not therefore excused from trying all things and seeking a Reality which fulfils to the utmost our craving for truth and beauty, as well, as our instinct for good.  It is easy, natural, and always comfortable for the human mind to sink back into something just a little bit below its highest possible.  On one hand to wallow in easy loves, rest in traditional formulae, or enjoy a “moving type of devotion” which makes no intellectual demand.  On the other, to accept without criticism the sceptical attitude of our neighbours, and keep safely in the furrow of intelligent agnosticism.

Religious people have a natural inclination to trot along on mediocre levels; reacting pleasantly to all the usual practices, playing down to the hopes and fears of the primitive mind, its childish craving for comfort and protection, its tendency to rest in symbols and spells, and satisfying its devotional inclinations by any “long psalter unmindfully mumbled in the teeth."[81] And a certain type of intelligent people have an equally natural tendency to dismiss, without further worry, the traditional notions of the past.  In so far as all this represents a slipping back in the racial progress, it has the character of sin: