The external basis of the idea of God is thus constituted by the forces operating in the universe. The universe is a unitary whole, greater and more powerful than ourselves, and its operations have resultants in certain main directions--these are phenomena which we constatate like any other phenomena. They, and that other phenomenon of our contact with the Universe and our exposure to the play of its forces, give us our objective knowledge of God. The rest of our idea of God, the inner component, depends upon the mode of action of our minds. So far, then, we have shown that recent advance in science, particularly in our understanding of evolution, has enabled us to give a more objective account than ever before of what is involved in the concept _God_, and so to pave the way for a consensus of thought on the question. It will be observed that there is no idea of personality implicit in this conception of God--God may or may not possess personality. It will be for us later to investigate that particular aspect of the problem. It now remains to deal with the inner reality. Man has a wholly new type of mind. He is social and capable of speech. He generalizes, and he has a very highly developed power of association. This combination gives him a great many possibilities hitherto denied to life. In the first place, he is able to order his experiences in a totally new way, differing from the old very much as a classified card-index differs from a rough diary-record of events. The organization of his mind is elastic, capable of indefinite expansion and of specialization in any direction. That being so, there will be always parts of his mind wholly or at least partially undeveloped; and in any case the capacities which he must employ in his everyday life, the region of his mind illuminated by the attention needed in the struggle for existence, constitute but a fraction of his mental self and its potentialities. This brings us on to one of the most important achievements of modern psychology--the discovery and analysis of the subconscious. Impossible here to go into detail; we must content ourselves with a few broad statements. When we speak of the subconscious mind, we mean that in man there exist processes which appear for many reasons to be of the same nature as those of the normal mind (in that they are associated with the same parts of the nervous system, fulfil the same general biological functions, and probably operate through similar mechanisms), with the single exception that we are not conscious of them as such.[50]