ual tastes, I believe that a candid consideration of piecemeal
supernaturalism and a complete discussion of all its metaphysical
bearings will show it to be the hypothesis by which the largest number
of legitimate requirements are met. That of course would be a program
for other books than this; what I now say sufficiently indicates to the
philosophic reader the place where I belong.

If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God's
existence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no
hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of "prayerful
communion," especially when certain kinds of incursion from the
subconscious region take part in it, immediately suggests. The
appearance is that in this phenomenon something ideal, which in one
sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not ourselves,
actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy, and
produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways. If, then,
there be a wider world of being than that of our every-day
consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us are
intermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects be the
openness of the "subliminal" door, we have the elements of a theory to
which the phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so
impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the
hypothesis which they so naturally suggest. At these places at least,
I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will,
produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest
of our experience belongs.

The difference in natural "fact" which most of us would assign as the
first difference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I
imagine, be personal immortality. Religion, in fact, for the great
majority of our own race MEANS immortality, and nothing else. God is
the producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is
written down as an atheist without farther trial. I have said nothing
in my lectures about immortality or the belief therein, for to me it
seems a secondary point. If our ideals are only cared for in
"eternity," I do not see why we might not be willing to resign their
care to other hands than ours. Yet I sympathize with the urgent
impulse to be present ourselves, and in the conflict of impulses, both
of them so vague yet both of them noble, I know not how to decide. It
seems to me that it