Now my most comprehensive belief about the external and the internal and myself is that they make one universe in which I and every part are ultimately important.  That is quite an arbitrary act of my mind.  It is quite possible to maintain that everything is a chaotic assembly, that any part might be destroyed without affecting any other part.  I do not choose to argue against that.  If you choose to say that, I am no more disposed to argue with you than if you choose to wear a mitre in Fleet Street or drink a bottle of ink, or declare the figure of Ally Sloper more dignified and beautiful than the head of Jove.  There is no Q.E.D. that you cannot do so.  You can.  You will not like to go on with it, I think, and it will not answer, but that is a different matter.

I dismiss the idea that life is chaotic because it leaves my life ineffectual, and I cannot contemplate an ineffectual life patiently.  I am by my nature impelled to refuse that.  I assert that it is not so.  I assert therefore that I am important in a scheme, that we are all important in that scheme, that the wheel-smashed frog in the road and the fly drowning in the milk are important and correlated with me.  What the scheme as a whole is I do not know; with my limited mind I cannot know.  There I become a Mystic.  I use the word scheme because it is the best word available, but I strain it in using it.  I do not wish to imply a schemer, but only order and co-ordination as distinguished from haphazard.  “All this is important, all this is profoundly significant.”  I say it of the universe as a child that has not learnt to read might say it of a parchment agreement.  I cannot read the universe, but I can believe that this is so.

And this unfounded and arbitrary declaration of the ultimate rightness and significance of things I call the Act of Faith.  It is my fundamental religious confession.  It is a voluntary and deliberate determination to believe, a choice made.

2.2.  On using the name of god.

You may say if you will that this scheme I talk about, this something that gives importance and correlation and significance, is what is meant by God.  You may embark upon a logical wrangle here with me if you have failed to master what I have hitherto said about the meaning of words.  If a Scheme, you will say, then there must be a Schemer.

But, I repeat, I am using scheme and importance and significance here only in a spirit of analogy because I can find no better words, and I will not allow myself to be entangled by an insistence upon their implications.