is not completeness, nor even a reasonable measure of descriptive truth; and certain considerations are omitted from M. Benda’s view which are of such moment that, if they were included, they might transform the whole issue.  Perhaps the chief of these omissions is that of an organ for thought.  M. Benda throughout is engaged simply in clarifying his own ideas, and repeatedly disclaims any ulterior pretensions.  He finds in the panorama of his thoughts an idea of infinite Being, or God, and proceeds to study the relation of that conception to all others.  It is a task of critical analysis and religious confession:  and nothing could be more legitimate and, to some of us, more interesting.  But whence these various ideas, and whence the spell which the idea of infinite Being in particular casts over the meditative mind?  Unless we can view these movements of thought in their natural setting and order of genesis, we shall be in danger of turning autobiography into cosmology and inwardness into folly.

One of the most notable points in M. Benda’s analysis is his insistence on the leap involved in passing from infinite Being to any particular fact or system of facts; and again the leap involved in passing, when the converted spirit “returns to God”, from specific animal interests—­no matter how generous, social, or altruistic these interests may be—­to absolute renunciation and sympathy with the absolute.  “That a will to return to God should arise in the phenomenal world seems to be a miracle no less wonderful (though it be less wondered at) than that the world should arise in the bosom of God.”  “Love of man, charity, humanitarianism are nothing but the selfishness of the race, by which each animal species assures its specific existence.”  “To surrender one’s individuality for the benefit of a larger self is something quite different from disinterestedness; it is the exact opposite.”  And certainly, if we regarded infinite Being as a cosmological medium—­say, empty space and time—­there would be a miraculous break, an unaccountable new beginning, if that glassy expanse was suddenly wrinkled by something called energy.  But in fact there need never have been such a leap, or such a miracle, because there could never have been such a transition.  Infinite Being is not a material vacuum “in the bosom” of which a world might arise.  It is a Platonic idea—­though Plato never entertained it—­an essence, non-existent and immutable, not in the same field of reality at all as a world of moving and colliding things.  Such an essence is not conceivably the seat of the variations that enliven the world.  It is only in thought that we may pass from infinite Being to an existing universe; and when we turn from one to the other, and say that now energy has emerged from the bosom of God, we are turning over a new leaf, or rather picking up an entirely different volume.  The natural world is composed of objects and events which theory may regard as transformations of a hypothetical