such a superhuman consciousness is a reality is a thesis precisely
equivalent to the assertion that our experience has any real sense or
connection whatever_ beyond the mere fragment of connectedness that,
at any one instant, we directly grasp.

Furthermore, to call such a larger consciousness--inclusive of our
own, but differing from ours, in form, by the vastness of its span and
the variety and completeness of the connections that it surveys--to
call it, I say, a _supernatural_ consciousness is to use a phraseology
that can be very {268} deliberately and, if you choose, technically
defended. By "natural" we mean simply: Subject to the laws which hold
for the sorts of beings whose character and behaviour our empirical
sciences can study. If you suddenly found that you could personally
and individually and clearly grasp, by an act of direct attention, the
sense and connection of thousands of experiences at once, instead of
the three or four presented facts of experience whose relations you
can now directly observe in any one of your moments of consciousness,
you would indeed say that you had been miraculously transformed into
another type of being whose insight had acquired an angelic sort of
wealth and clearness. But whenever you assert (as every scientific
theory, and every common-sense opinion, regarding the real connections
of the facts of human experience requires you to assert), that not
only thousands, but a countless collection of data of human experience
actually possess a perfectly coherent total sense and meaning, such as
no individual man ever directly observes, this your assertion, which
undertakes to be a report of facts, and which explicitly relates to
facts of experience, implies the assertion that there exists such a
superhuman survey of the real nature and connection of our own natural
realm of conscious life. We ourselves are strictly limited by the
natural conditions that determine our own form of consciousness. And
no conditions can be regarded by us as more characteristically natural
than are these. For {269} us human beings to transcend those
conditions, by surveying countless data at once, would require an
uttermost exception to the natural laws which are found to govern our
human type of consciousness. To believe that any man ever had
accomplished the direct survey of the whole range of the physical
connections of the solar and stellar systems at once--in other words,
had grasped the whole rang