'Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men's impossibilities, have preserv'd them.'
But, in Gloucester's case, there was no cliff and no abyss; and, in our case, it may be well to enquire whether the great gulf between the idea and the being of God has any more reality than that down which Gloucester, precipitating, flung himself. The premiss, that the idea of God is a mere verbal proposition, may be a premiss as imaginary as that from which Gloucester leaped. If the idea of God is merely a proposition in words, and if words are but words, then the gulf between idea and being is real. If the being of God is an inference from the idea of God, it is merely an inference, and an inference of no logical value. And the same remark holds equally true, if we apply it to the case of any finite personal being: if the being of our neighbours were an inference from the idea we have formed of them, it also would be an inference of no logical value. But, fortunately, their being does not depend on the idea we have formed of them: it partially reveals itself to us in our idea of them, and partially is obscured by it. It is a fact of our experience, or a fact experienced by us. We interpret it, and to some extent misinterpret it, as we do all other facts. If this partly true, and partly false, interpretation is what we mean by the word 'idea,' then it is the idea which is an inference from the being of our neighbour—an inference which can be checked by closer acquaintance—but we do not first have the idea of him, and then wonder whether a being, corresponding more or less to the idea, exists. If we had the idea of our fellow-beings first—before we had experience of them—if it were from the edge of the idea that we had to leap, we might reasonably doubt whether to fling ourselves into such a logical, or rather into such an illogical, abyss. But it is from their being as an experienced fact, that we start; and with the intention of constructing from it as logical an idea as lies within our power. What is inference is not the being but the idea, so far as the idea is thus constructed.
The idea, thus constructed, may be constructed correctly, or incorrectly. Whether it is constructed correctly or incorrectly is determined by further experience. What is important to notice is first that it is only by further experience, personal experience, that we can determine how far the construction we have put upon it is or is not correct; and, next, that so far as the construction we have put upon it is correct, that is to say is confirmed by actual experience, it is thereby shown to be not inference—even though it was reached by a process of inference—but fact. The process of inference may be compared to a path by which we struggle up the face of a cliff: it is the path by which we get there, but it is not the firm ground on which eventually we rest. The path is not that which upholds the cliff; nor is the inference that on which the being of God rests. The being of God is not something inferred but something experienced. It is by experience—the experience of ourselves or others—that we find out whether what by inference we were led to expect is really something of which we can—if we will—have experience. And that which is experienced ceases, the moment it is experienced, to be inferential. The experience is fact: the statement of it in words is truth. But apart from the experience, the words in which it is stated are but words; and, without the experience, the words must remain for ever words and nothing more than words.
If then by the idea of God we mean the words, in which it is (inadequately) stated, and nothing more, the idea of God is separated by an impassable gulf from the being of God. Further, if we admit that the idea is, by its very nature, and by the very facts of the case, essentially different from the being of God, then it is of little use to continue to maintain that the being of God is a fact of human experience. In that case, the supposed fact of experience is reduced to something of which we neither have, nor can have, any idea, or consciousness, whatever. It thereby ceases to be a fact of experience at all. And it is precisely on this assumption that the being of God is denied to be a fact of experience—the assumption that being and idea are separated from one another by an impassable gulf: the idea we can be conscious of, but of His being we can have no experience. We must therefore ask not whether this gulf is impassable, but whether it exists at all, or is of the same imaginary nature as that to which Gloucester was led by Edgar.
That there may be beings, of whom we have no idea, is a proposition which it is impossible to disprove. Such beings would be ex hypothesi no part of our experience; and if God were such a being, man would have no experience of Him. And, having no experience of Him, man could have no idea of Him. But the experience man has, of those beings whom he knows, is an experience in which idea and being are given together. Even if in thought we attend to one rather than to the other of the two aspects, the idea is still the idea of the being; and the being is still the being of the idea. So far from there being an impassable gulf between the two, the two are inseparable, in the moment of actual experience. It is in moments of reflection that they appear separable and separate, for the memory remains, when the actual experience has ceased. We have then only to call the memory the idea, and then the idea, in this use of the word, is as essentially different from that of which it is said to be the idea, as the memory of a being or thing is from the being or thing itself. If we put the memory into words, and pronounce those words to another, we communicate to him what we remember of our experience (modified—perhaps transmogrified—by our reflections upon it) but we do not communicate the actual experience, simply because we cannot. What we communicate may lead him to actual experience for himself; but it is not itself the experience. The memory may give rise, in ourselves or in others to whom we communicate, to expectation and anticipation; and the expectation is the more likely to be realised, the less the memory has been transmogrified by reflection. But, both the memory and the anticipation are clearly different from actual experience. It is only when they are confused with one aspect of the actual experience—that which we have called the idea—that the idea is supposed to be detachable from the being of whom we have actual experience. The idea is part of the experience; the memory obviously is not.
If then it be said that the being of God is always an inference and is never anything more, the reply is that the being of anything whatever that is remembered or expected is, in the moment of memory or of anticipation, inferential; but, in the moment of actual experience, it is not inferred—it is experienced. And what is experienced is, and from the beginning has always been, in religions of the lower as well as of the higher culture, at once the being and the idea of God.