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?