Note 50 — IX

As, for example, that God is an omniscient mind. This is the last vestige of that barbaric theology which regarded God as a vigorous but uncertain old gentleman with a beard and an inordinate lust for praise and propitiation. The modern idea is, indeed, scarcely more reasonable than the one it has replaced. A mind thinks, and feels, and wills; it passes from phase to phase; thinking and willing are a succession of mental states which follow and replace one another. But omniscience is a complete knowledge, not only of the present state, but of all past and future states, and, since it is all there at any moment, it cannot conceivably pass from phase to phase, it is stagnant, infinite, and eternal. An omniscient mind is as impossible, therefore, as an omnipresent moving body. God is outside our mental scope; only by faith can we attain Him; our most lucid moments serve only to render clearer His inaccessibility to our intelligence. We stand a little way up in a scale of existences that may, indeed, point towards Him, but can never bring Him to our scope. As the fulness of the conscious mental existence of a man stands to the subconscious activities of an amœba or of a visceral ganglion cell, so our reason forces us to admit other possible mental existences may stand to us. But such an existence, inconceivably great as it would be to us, would be scarcely nearer that transcendental God in whom the serious men of the future will, as a class, believe.