ws encircled indeed with a halo of divinity but not weighted
with the more solid substance of a kingly crown. Thus certain
extraordinary mental states, which those who experience and those who
witness them cannot account for in any other way, are often explained by
the supposed interposition of a spirit or deity. This, therefore, is one
of the two forms of experience by which men attain, or imagine that they
attain, to a knowledge of God and a communion with him. It is what I
have called the road of inward experience. Let us now glance at the
other form of experience which leads, or seems to lead, to the same
goal. It is what I have called the road of outward experience.

[Sidenote: Tendency of the mind to search for causes, and the necessity
for their discovery.]

When we contemplate the seemingly infinite variety, the endless
succession, of events that pass under our observation in what we call
the external world, we are led by an irresistible tendency to trace what
we call a causal connexion between them. The tendency to discover the
causes of things appears indeed to be innate in the constitution of our
minds and indispensable to our continued existence. It is the link that
arrests and colligates into convenient bundles the mass of particulars
drifting pell-mell past on the stream of sensation; it is the cement
that binds into an edifice seemingly of adamant the loose sand of
isolated perceptions. Deprived of the knowledge which this tendency
procures for us we should be powerless to foresee the succession of
phenomena and so to adapt ourselves to it. We should be bewildered by
the apparent disorder and confusion of everything, we should toss on a
sea without a rudder, we should wander in an endless maze without a
clue, and finding no way out of it, or, in plain words, unable to avoid
a single one of the dangers which menace us at every turn, we should
inevitably perish. Accordingly the propensity to search for causes is
characteristic of man in all ages and at all levels of culture, though
without doubt it is far more highly developed in civilised than in
savage communities. Among savages it is more or less unconscious and
instinctive; among civilised men it is deliberately cultivated and
rewarded at least by the applause of their fellows, by the dignity, if
not by the more solid recompenses, of learning. Indeed as civilisation
progresses the enquiry into causes tends to absorb more and more of the
highest intelle