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. “The wicked man has said in his heart: There is no God.” And there is truth in this. For it is possible for a righteous man to say in his head: God does not exist. But only the wicked can say it in his heart. Not to believe that there is a God or to believe that there is not a God, is one thing; to resign oneself to there not being a God is another thing, though an inhuman and horrible thing; but not to wish that there is a God exceeds every other moral aberration. Although in fact those who deny God do so because of their despair at not finding Him. And now once again there comes the rational question, the question of the Sphinx--the Sphinx, in effect, is reason--does God exist? This eternal and eternalizing Person who gives meaning--I do not add “human,” for there is no other meaning--to the universe, is He a substantial something external to our consciousness, external to our desire? Here you have something that is insoluble, and it is better that it should be insoluble. Let it suffice for reason that the impossibility of His existence cannot be proved. To believe in God is to long for His existence, and, furthermore, it is to act as if He existed. It is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. * * * * *