tatement of
fact, like the statement that Mr. Woodrow Wilson is President of the
United States, I no longer know where we are. Mr. Wells's "undying
human memory and increasing human will" cannot exactly be identified
with Public Opinion, but it belongs to the same order of ideas. Here
there is an actual workable analogy. But there is no practicable
analogy between a purely mental concept and a physical construction.
You will not help me to believe in (say) the doctrine of Original Sin,
by assuring me that it is built, like the Tower Bridge, on the
cantilever principle.

It is quite certain that, if passionate conviction and the free use of
anthropomorphic language can make a figure of speech a God, the
Invisible King is an individual entity, as detached from Mr. Wells as
Michelangelo's Moses from Michelangelo. Paradoxically enough, he has
put on "individuation" that his worshippers may escape from it. Mr.
Wells's book teems with expressions--I have given many examples of
them--which are wholly inapplicable to any metaphor, however
galvanized into a semblance of life by ecstatic contemplation in the
devotional mind. For example, when we are told that it is doubtful
whether "God knows all, or much more than we do, about the ultimate
Being," the mere assertion of a doubt implies the possibility of
knowledge of a quite different order from any that exists in the human
intelligence. Mr. Wells explicitly assures us that knowledge of the
Veiled Being is (for the present at any rate) inaccessible to our
faculties; but he implies that such knowledge _may_ be possessed by
the Invisible King; and as knowledge cannot possibly be a synthesis of
ignorances, it follows that the Invisible King has powers of
apprehension quite different from, and independent of, any operation
of the human brain. These powers may not, as a matter of fact, have
solved the enigma of existence; but it is clearly implied that they
might conceivably do so; and indeed the text positively asserts that
God knows _something_ more of the Veiled Being than we do, though
perhaps not "much." In view of this passage, and many others of a like
nature, we cannot fall back on the theory that Mr. Wells is merely
trying, by dint of highly imaginative writing, to infuse life into a
deliberate personification, like Robespierre's Goddess of Reason or
Matthew Arnold's Zeitgeist. However difficult it may be, we must
accustom ourselves to the belief that his assertions of the p