m. It seems to me as if I have loved and
suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will
be, 'I have been dreaming.'"[26]

[26] Pensees d'un Solitaire, p. 66.

In another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of
the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to
suicide.

We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious
sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess
the objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which
their intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of
quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended. As his sense of the
real presence of these objects fluctuates, so the believer alternates
between warmth and coldness in his faith. Other examples will bring
this home to one better than abstract description, so I proceed
immediately to cite some. The first example is a negative one,
deploring the loss of the sense in question. I have extracted it from
an account given me by a scientific man of my acquaintance, of his
religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that the feeling of
reality may be something more like a sensation than an intellectual
operation properly so-called.

"Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic
and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite
consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute
Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality was not the pure
Unknowable of Spencer's philosophy, for although I had ceased my
childish prayers to God, and never prayed to IT in a formal manner, yet
my more recent experience shows me to have been in a relation to IT
which practically was the same thing as prayer. Whenever I had any
trouble, especially when I had conflict with other people, either
domestically or in the way of business, or when I was depressed in
spirits or anxious about affairs, I now recognize that I used to fall
back for support upon this curious relation I felt myself to be in to
this fundamental cosmical IT. It was on my side, or I was on Its side,
however you please to term it, in the particular trouble, and it always
strengthened me and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its
underlying and supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing
fountain of living justice, truth, and strength, to which I
instinctively turned at times of weakness, and it always b