living organisms, by consciousnesses akin to our own, and a profound
longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to
star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of
transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe
that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less
degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves,
but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His
finality as we feel it.

What would a universe be without any consciousness capable of reflecting
it and knowing it? What would objectified reason be without will and
feeling? For us it would be equivalent to nothing--a thousand times more
dreadful than nothing.

If such a supposition is reality, our life is deprived of sense and
value.

It is not, therefore, rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels
us to believe in God. And to believe in God--I must reiterate it yet
again--is, before all and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger
for divinity, to be sensible of His lack and absence, to wish that God
may exist. And it is to wish to save the human finality of the Universe.
For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if
it be that our consciousness is based upon a Consciousness, if
consciousness is the end of the Universe.

"The wicked man hath said in his heart, There is no God." And this is
truth. For in his head the righteous man may say to himself, God does
not exist! But only the wicked can say it in his heart. Not to believe
that there is a God or to believe that there is not a God, is one thing;
to resign oneself to there not being a God is another thing, and it is a
terrible and inhuman thing; but not to wish that there be a God exceeds
every other moral monstrosity; although, as a matter of fact, those who
deny God deny Him because of their despair at not finding Him.

And now reason once again confronts us with the Sphinx-like
question--the Sphinx, in effect, is reason--Does God exist? This eternal
and eternalizing person who gives meaning--and I will add, a human
meaning, for there is none other--to the Universe, is it a substantial
something, existing independently of our consciousness, independently of
our desire? Here we arrive at the insoluble, and it is best that it
should be so. Let it suffice for reason that it cannot prove the
impossibility of His existence.

To believe in G