e facts with which it
professes to deal. If it can offer no explanation its value is nil. If
its explanation is only partial, its value will be determined by the
degree to which it can claim superiority over any other hypothesis that
is before us. But every hypothesis implies two things. There is a group
of things to be explained, and there is the hypothesis itself that is
offered in explanation. In the harmony of the two, and in the
possibility of verification, lies the only proof of truth that can be
offered.

If this be granted it at once disposes of the plea that a conviction of
the existence of God springs from some special quality of the mind which
enables man to arrive at a conclusion in a manner different from the way
in which conclusions concerning other subjects are reached. Intuition as
a method of discovering truth is pure delusion. All that can be
rationally meant by such a word as intuition is summarised experience.
When we speak of knowing a thing "intuitively," all that we can mean is
that, experience having furnished us with a sufficient guidance, we are
able to reach a conclusion so rapidly that we cannot follow the steps of
the mental process involved. That this is so is seen in the fact that
our intuitions always follow the line of our experience. A stockbroker
may "intuitively" foresee a rise or fall of the market, but his
intuition will fail him when considering the possibilities of a chemical
composition. To say that a man knows a thing by intuition is only one
way of saying that he does not know how he knows it--that is, he is
unable to trace the stages of his own mental operations. And in this
sense intuition is universal. It belongs as much to the cooking of a
dumpling as it does to the belief in deity.

But it is evident that when the theist talks of intuition, what he has
in mind is something very different from this. He is thinking of some
special quality of mind that operates independently of experience,
either racial or individual. And this simply does not exist. In religion
man is never putting into operation qualities of mind different from
those he employs in other directions. Whether we call a state of mind
religious or not is determined, not by the mental processes involved,
but by the object to which it is directed. Hatred and love, anger,
pleasure, awe, curiosity, reverence, even worship, are exactly the same
whether directed towards "God" or towards anything else. Human qualities