appears to be a kind of animal; it is
impossible to distinguish its members; I only see two eyes, eyes which
gaze at me with a human gaze, the gaze of a fellow-being, a gaze which
asks for pity; and I hear it breathing. I conclude that in this formless
mass there is a consciousness. In just such a way and none other, the
starry-eyed heavens gaze down upon the believer, with a superhuman, a
divine, gaze, a gaze that asks for supreme pity and supreme love, and in
the serenity of the night he hears the breathing of God, and God touches
him in his heart of hearts and reveals Himself to him. It is the
Universe, living, suffering, loving, and asking for love.

From loving little trifling material things, which lightly come and
lightly go, having no deep root in our affections, we come to love the
more lasting things, the things which our hands cannot grasp; from
loving goods we come to love the Good; from loving beautiful things we
come to love Beauty; from loving the true we come to love the Truth;
from loving pleasures we come to love Happiness; and, last of all, we
come to love Love. We emerge from ourselves in order to penetrate
further into our supreme I; individual consciousness emerges from us in
order to submerge itself in the total Consciousness of which we form a
part, but without being dissolved in it. And God is simply the Love that
springs from universal suffering and becomes consciousness.

But this, it will be said, is merely to revolve in an iron ring, for
such a God is not objective. And at this point it may not be out of
place to give reason its due and to examine exactly what is meant by a
thing existing, being objective.

What is it, in effect, to exist? and when do we say that a thing exists?
A thing exists when it is placed outside us, and in such a way that it
shall have preceded our perception of it and be capable of continuing to
subsist outside us after we have disappeared. But have I any certainty
that anything has preceded me or that anything must survive me? Can my
consciousness know that there is anything outside it? Everything that I
know or can know is within my consciousness. We will not entangle
ourselves, therefore, in the insoluble problem of an objectivity outside
our perceptions. Things exist in so far as they act. To exist is to act.

But now it will be said that it is not God, but the idea of God, that
acts in us. To which we shall reply that it is sometimes God acting by
His idea,