But now a third element comes into it.  There is something spiritually common to nature and man behind the one, within the other.  This Something is the origin, the responsible agent for man’s and nature’s physical identity.  This Something binds the separates into a sort of whole.  This, I suppose, is what Professor Hocking refers to when he says, “the original source of the knowledge of God is an experience which might be described as of not being alone in knowing the world, and especially the world of nature."[23] Thus the religious man recognizes beyond the gulf, behind the chasm, something more like himself than it.  When he contemplates nature, he sees something other than nature; not a world which is what it seems to be, but a world whose chief significance is that it is more than it seems to be.  It is a world where appearance and reality are inextricably mingled and yet sublimely and significantly separate.  In short, the naturalist, the pagan, takes the world as it stands; it is just what it appears; the essence of his irreligion is that he perceives nothing in it that needs to be explained.  But the religionist knows that the world which lies before our mortal vision so splendid and so ruthless, so beautiful and so dreadful, does really gain both its substance and significance from immaterial and unseen powers.  It is significant not in itself but because it hides the truth.  It points forever to a beyond.  It is the vague and insubstantial pageant of a dream.  Behind it, within the impenetrable shadows, stands the Infinite Watcher of the sons of men.

[Footnote 23:  The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 236.]

In every age religious souls have voiced this unearthliness of reality, the noble other-worldliness of the goals of the natural order.  “Heard melodies are sweet, but unheard melodies are sweeter.”  Poet, philosopher and mystic have sung their song or proclaimed their message knowing that they were moving about in worlds not realized, clearly perceiving the incompleteness of the phenomenal world and the delusive nature of sense perceptions.  They have known a Reality which they could not comprehend; felt a Presence which they could not grasp.  They have found strength for the battle and peace for the pain by regarding nature as a dim projection, a tantalizing intimation of that other, conscious and creative life, that originating and directive force, which is not nature any more than the copper wire is the electric fluid which it carries—­a force which was before it, which moves within it, which shall be after it.