ly that it would transcend anything in the way of social
significance that I now experience. But I must not conclude that there
is such a God, merely because it would be so pleasant if there were.

Then (he continued) is it necessary to conceive that this deity is
super-canine in essence? What I am getting at is this: in everyone
I have ever known--Fuji, Mr. Poodle, Mrs. Spaniel, those maddening
delightful puppies, Mrs. Purp, Mr. Beagle, even Mrs. Chow and Mrs.
Sealyham and little Miss Whippet--I have always been aware that there
was some mysterious point of union at which our minds could converge and
entirely understand one another. No matter what our difference of breed,
of training, of experience and education, provided we could meet and
exchange ideas honestly there would be some satisfying point of mental
fusion where we would feel our solidarity in the common mystery of life.
People complain that wars are caused by and fought over trivial things.
Why, of course! For it is only in trivial matters that people differ:
in the deep realities they must necessarily be at one. Now I have a
suspicion that in this secret sense of unity God may lurk. Is that what
we mean by God, the sum total of all these instinctive understandings?
But what is the origin of this sense of kinship? Is it not the
realization of our common subjection to laws and forces greater than
ourselves? Then, since nothing can be greater than God, He must BE these
superior mysteries. Yet He cannot be greater than our minds, for our
minds have imagined Him.

My mathematics is very rusty, he said to himself, but I seem to remember
something about a locus, which was a curve or a surface every point
on which satisfied some particular equation of relation among the
coordinates. It begins to look to me as though life might be a kind of
locus, whose commanding equation we call God. The points on that locus
cannot conceive of the equation, yet they are subject to it. They cannot
conceive of that equation, because of course it has no existence save
as a law of their being. It exists only for them; they, only by it. But
there it is--a perfect, potent, divine abstraction.

This carried him into a realm of disembodied thinking which his mind was
not sufficiently disciplined to summarize. It is quite plain, he said to
himself, that I must rub up my vanished mathematics. For certainly the
mathematician comes closer to God than any other, since his mind is
trained to