rovidential leadings, and finds no intellectual
difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by
interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that
causally determine the real world's details. In this the refined
supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of
existence. For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality,
and never bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The
ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning
of facts; it is a point of view for judging facts. It appertains to a
different "-ology," and inhabits a different dimension of being
altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain. It
cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and interpolate
itself piecemeal between distinct portions of nature, as those who
believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to prayer, are
bound to think it must.

Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity
or scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with
the Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made
here below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of
the piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic supernaturalism
surrenders, it seems to me, too easily to naturalism. It takes the
facts of physical science at their face-value, and leaves the laws of
life just as naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case
their fruits are bad.

It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments
which may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the
existence of systematic pessimism proves. In this universalistic way
of taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to
me to evaporate. Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it
hard to believe that principles can exist which make no difference in
facts.[362] But all facts are particular facts, and the whole interest
of the question of God's existence seems to me to lie in the
consequences for particulars which that existence may be expected to
entail. That no concrete particular of experience should alter its
complexion in consequence of a God being there seems to me an
incredible proposition, and yet it is the thesis to which (implicitly
at any rate) refined supernaturalism seems to cling. It is only with
experience en bloc, it says, that the Absolu