And the truth is that we feel God less as a superhuman consciousness
than as the actual consciousness of the whole human race, past, present,
and future, as the collective consciousness of the whole race, and still
more, as the total and infinite consciousness which embraces and
sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human, and perhaps,
super-human. The divinity that there is in everything, from the
lowest--that is to say, from the least conscious--of living forms, to
the highest, including our own human consciousness, this divinity we
feel to be personalized, conscious of itself, in God. And this gradation
of consciousnesses, this sense of the gulf between the human and the
fully divine, the universal, consciousness, finds its counterpart in the
belief in angels with their different hierarchies, as intermediaries
between our human consciousness and that of God. And these gradations a
faith consistent with itself must believe to be infinite, for only by an
infinite number of degrees is it possible to pass from the finite to the
infinite.
Deistic rationalism conceives God as the Reason of the Universe, but its
logic compels it to conceive Him as an impersonal reason--that is to
say, as an idea--while deistic vitalism feels and imagines God as
Consciousness, and therefore as a person or rather as a society of
persons. The consciousness of each one of us, in effect, is a society of
persons; in me there are various I's and even the I's of those among
whom I live, live in me.
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