Yet let me confess that I am greatly attracted by such fine phrases as the Will of God, the Hand of God, the Great Commander.  These do most wonderfully express aspects of this belief I choose to hold.  I think if there had been no gods before, I would call this God.  But I feel that there is a great danger in doing this sort of thing unguardedly.  Many people would be glad for rather trivial and unworthy reasons that I should confess a faith in God, and few would take offence.  But the run of people even nowadays mean something more and something different when they say “God.”  They intend a personality exterior to them and limited, and they will instantly conclude I mean the same thing.  To permit that misconception is, I feel, the first step on the slippery slope of meretricious complaisance, is to become in some small measure a successor of those who cried, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.”  Occasionally we may best serve the God of Truth by denying him.

Yet at times I admit the sense of personality in the universe is very strong.  If I am confessing, I do not see why I should not confess up to the hilt.  At times in the silence of the night and in rare lonely moments, I come upon a sort of communion of myself and something great that is not myself.  It is perhaps poverty of mind and language obliges me to say that then this universal scheme takes on the effect of a sympathetic person—­and my communion a quality of fearless worship.  These moments happen, and they are the supreme fact in my religious life to me, they are the crown of my religious experiences.

None the less, I do not usually speak of God even in regard to these moments, and where I do use that word it must be understood that I use it as a personification of something entirely different in nature from the personality of a human being.

2.3.  Free will and predestination.

And now let me return to a point raised in the first Book in Chapter 1.9.  Is the whole of this scheme of things settled and done?  The whole trend of Science is to that belief.  On the scientific plane one is a fatalist, the universe a system of inevitable consequences.  But as I show in that section referred to, it is quite possible to accept as true in their several planes both predestination and free will. (I use free will in the sense of self-determinisn and not as it is defined by Professor William James, and predestination as equivalent to the conception of a universe rigid in time and space.) If you ask me, I think I should say I incline to believe in predestination and do quite completely believe in free will.  The important belief is free will.

But does the whole universe of fact, the external world about me, the mysterious internal world from which my motives rise, form one rigid and fated system as determinists teach?  Do I believe that, had one a mind ideally clear and powerful, the whole universe would seem orderly and absolutely predestined?  I incline to that belief.  I do not harshly believe it, but I admit its large plausibility—­that is all.  I see no value whatever in jumping to a decision.  One or two Pragmatists, so far as I can understand them, do not hold this view of predestination at all; but as a provisional assumption it underlies most scientific work.