ve hinted at, if it gives
no explanation, at least supplies a framework for many questions which
attract us, and do so even from the point of view of religion: for
instance the collective, diffuse, and almost divisible nature of
consciousness in the lower stages, its increasing and ever more strict
centralisation, the natural relationship of the psychical in man to the
psychical in general, and yet its incommensurability and superiority to
all the world.

But let us once more turn from all the poetical and imaginative
illustrations of the relation of God to the world, which can at best be
only provisional, and only applicable at certain points, to the more
general aspect of the problem. Religion itself consists in this: believing
and experiencing that in time the Eternal, in the finite the Infinite, in
the world God is working, revealing Himself, and that in Him lies the
reason and cause of all being. For this it has names like creation,
providence, self-revelation of God in the world, and it lives by the
mysteries which are indicated under these names. The mysteries themselves
it recognises in vague or naive forms of conception long before it
attempts any definite formulation. If dogmatics begin with the latter,
some form or other of the stiff and wooden doctrines of _concursus_, of
_influxus ordinarius_ and _extraordinarius_ usually develops with many
other subtleties, which are nothing more than attempts to formulate the
divine influence in finite terms, and to think of it as a force along with
other forces. Two series of causes are usually distinguished; the system
of causes and effects within the world, according to which everything
natural takes place, the "_causae secundariae_"; and in addition to these
the divine causality co-operating and influencing the others, ordering
them with gentle and delicate pressure, and guiding them towards their
true end, and which may also reveal itself as "_extraordinaria_" in
miracles and signs. This double operation is regarded as giving rise to
all phenomena, and in it consists guidance, dispensation, providence, and
natural revelation.

This kind of conception is extremely primitive, and is unfavourable to
religion itself, for in it mystery is done away with and arranged
according to rubric, and everything has become quite "simple." Moreover,
this doctrine has a necessary tendency to turn into the dreaded "Deism."
According to the deistic view, God made the world in the begin