hers makes us conscious, unites with
matter, the individual and individualizing element; similarly, reason or
intelligence and imagination embrace in a mutually fruitful union, and
the Universe merges into one with God.

* * * * *

Is all this true? And what is truth? I in my turn will ask, as Pilate
asked--not, however, only to turn away and wash my hands, without
waiting for an answer.

Is truth in reason, or above reason, or beneath reason, or outside of
reason, in some way or another? Is only the rational true? May there not
be a reality, by its very nature, unattainable by reason, and perhaps,
by its very nature, opposed to reason? And how can we know this reality
if reason alone holds the key to knowledge?

Our desire of living, our need of life, asks that that may be true which
urges us to self-preservation and self-perpetuation, which sustains man
and society; it asks that the true water may be that which assuages our
thirst, and because it assuages it, that the true bread may be that
which satisfies our hunger, because it satisfies it.

The senses are devoted to the service of the instinct of preservation,
and everything that satisfies this need of preserving ourselves, even
though it does not pass through the senses, is nevertheless a kind of
intimate penetration of reality in us. Is the process of assimilating
nutriment perhaps less real than the process of knowing the nutritive
substance? It may be said that to eat a loaf of bread is not the same
thing as seeing, touching, or tasting it; that in the one case it enters
into our body, but not therefore into our consciousness. Is this true?
Does not the loaf of bread that I have converted into my flesh and blood
enter more into my consciousness than the other loaf which I see and
touch, and of which I say: "This is mine"? And must I refuse objective
reality to the bread that I have thus converted into my flesh and blood
and made mine when I only touch it?

There are some who live by air without knowing it. In the same way, it
may be, we live by God and in God--in God the spirit and consciousness
of society and of the whole Universe, in so far as the Universe is also
a society.

God is felt only in so far as He is lived; and man does not live by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God
(Matt. iv. 4; Deut. viii. 3).

And this personalization of the all, of the Universe, to which we are
led by