The rational God, therefore--that is to say, the God who is simply the
Reason of the Universe and nothing more--consummates his own
destruction, is destroyed in our mind in so far as he is such a God, and
is only born again in us when we feel him in our heart as a living
person, as Consciousness, and no longer merely as the impersonal and
objective Reason of the Universe. If we wish for a rational explanation
of the construction of a machine, all that we require to know is the
mechanical science of its constructor; but if we would have a reason for
the existence of such a machine, then, since it is the work not of
Nature but of man, we must suppose a conscious, constructive being. But
the second part of this reasoning is not applicable to God, even though
it be said that in Him the mechanical science and the mechanician, by
means of which the machine was constructed, are one and the same thing.
From the rational point of view this identification is merely a begging
of the question. And thus it is that reason destroys this Supreme
Reason, in so far as the latter is a person.
The human reason, in effect, is a reason that is based upon the
irrational, upon the total vital consciousness, upon will and feeling;
our human reason is not a reason that can prove to us the existence of a
Supreme Reason, which in its turn would have to be based upon the
Supreme Irrational, upon the Universal Consciousness.
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