What is more, owing to our power of framing general concepts and ideals, and of accumulating past and future in our present, we can focus a vast deal to one point. In such experiences, whether they come through religion, or love, or art, we may say that although we are but a system of relations, we touch the Absolute--although we are mortal, we mount to the Eternal for a moment. Only, to guard against error, we must remember that it is obviously not in reality the Absolute or the Eternal that we attain to, but only the nearest approximation to them of which we are capable. We can therefore sum up this second part of our investigation by saying that religion, to be more than mere ritual, must involve the possibility of harmonizing the parts of the soul, of wiping out the sense of sin, of sublimating instinct, of rendering the subconscious reservoirs of energy and being available for the personal self, and of organizing the ideas of external reality into a single organized mental whole--the idea of God--capable of reacting with the personal self by interpenetration. Although he was moving to quite other conclusions, it is worth recalling James’s ideas. For instance, “The line of least resistance ... is to accept the notion ... that there is a God, but that he is finite.... These, I need hardly tell you, are the terms in which common men have usually carried on their active commerce with God; and the Monistic” [sc. Absolutist] “perfections that make the notion of him so paradoxical practically and morally are the colder addition of remote professorial minds operating _in distans_ upon conceptual substitutes for him alone.” (James,’09, p. 311.) I may perhaps be rebuked for trying to analyse the unanalysable, for neglecting the supreme and sufficing fact of experience of God in favour of the unprofitable and impossible task of catching the infinite in an intellectual net. There are two answers to this. One is that unanalysed experience is selfish because less communicable: with that we deal later. The other is even more important: it is this. Humanity at large is _not_ content with emotional experience alone, however complete and apparently satisfying: it has always demanded an intellectual formulation of the reality with which it is in contact, as well as emotional experience of it, and so far as we can judge it will always continue to do so.