Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

The ether is, in effect, merely a hypothetical entity, which is of value only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we seek to explain—light, or electricity, or universal gravitation—and only so far as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. Similarly the idea of God is also an hypothesis which is of value only in so far as we explain by means of it that which we seek to explain—the essence and existence of the Universe—and only so long as these cannot be explained better in some other way. And since in reality we explain the Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the idea of God, the supreme petitio principii, fails of its purpose.

But if the ether is nothing but an hypothesis intended to explain light, air on the other hand is a thing that is directly felt; and even though it did not enable us to explain sound, we should have a direct sensation of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way, God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a directly felt reality; and although the idea of Him may not enable us to explain either the existence or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this feeling—mark it well, for herein lies its tragicness and the whole tragic sense of life—is a feeling of hunger for God, of lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance, to wish that there may be a God, not to be able to live without Him.

So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason in search of God, I could not find Him, for I was not taken in by the idea of God, neither could I take an idea for God; and it was then, as I wandered among the wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought to seek no other consolation than the truth, meaning thereby reason, and yet for all that I was not comforted. But as I sank deeper and deeper into rational scepticism on the one hand and into heart’s despair on the other, the hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation of spirit made me feel the want of God, and with the want of Him, His reality. And I wished that there might be a God, that God might exist.

The problem of the existence of God, a problem that is rationally insoluble, is in its essence none other than the problem of consciousness, the very problem of the substantial existence of the soul, the very problem of the perpetuity of the human soul, the very problem of the human finality of the Universe. To believe in a living and personal God, in an eternal and universal consciousness that knows us and loves us, is to believe that the Universe exists for man. For man, or for a consciousness of the same order as the human consciousness, of the same nature, although sublimated, a consciousness that is cognizant of us, in whose depths our memory lives for ever.

Perhaps by a supreme and desperate effort of resignation we might succeed in making the sacrifice of our personality if we knew that in dying it would go to enrich a Supreme Personality, a Supreme Consciousness, if we knew that the Universal Soul was nourished by our souls and had need of them. Perhaps we might meet death with a desperate resignation or with a resigned desperation, delivering up our soul to the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the work that bears the stamp of our personality, if this humanity were in its turn to bequeath its soul to another soul after the ultimate extinction of consciousness upon this earth with its burden of longings. But if it be otherwise?

And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human collective consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe and if this Consciousness is eternal, why should not our own individual consciousness, yours, reader, and mine, not be eternal?

In the whole of the vast universe must there needs be such a thing as a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, an exception united to a organism that can only live between such and such degrees of heat, a transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity to wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living organisms, by consciousness akin to our own, and there is an element of profound longing in the dream of the transmigration of our souls through the stars that people the vast remotenesses of the heavens. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or lesser degree, extends through all things. We wish not only to save ourselves but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His felt finality.

What would a universe be without any consciousness to reflect it and to know it? What would the objectified reason be, without will and without feeling? For us it would be the same as nothing—a thousand times more dreadful than nothing.

If such a supposed universe is reality, then our life lacks value and meaning.

It is not, therefore, rational necessity but vital anguish that leads us to believe in God. And to believe in God—I must repeat it again—is, before all and above all, to feel hunger for God, hunger for divinity, to feel the lack and absence of God, to wish that God may exist. And it is to wish to save the human finality of the Universe. For we might even succeed in resigning ourselves to being absorbed by God if our consciousness rests upon a Consciousness, if consciousness is the end of the Universe.