But all such criticism rests upon a fallacy, or rather a brace of interrelated fallacies. There can be no disproportion between consciousness and the unconscious, because they are absolutely incommensurable; and number, in relation to consciousness, is an illusion. Consciousness, wherever it exists, is single, indivisible, inextensible; and other consciousnesses, and the whole external universe, are, to the individual percipient, but shapes in a more or less protracted dream. Why should we trouble about vastness--mere extension in space? There is a sense in which the infinitesimally small is more marvellous, more disquieting, than the infinitely great. The ant, the flea, nay, the phagocyte in our blood, is really a more startling phenomenon than all the mechanics and chemistry of the heavens. In worrying about the bigness and the littleness of things, we are making the human body our standard--the body whose dimensions are no doubt determined by convenience in relation to terrestrial conditions, but have otherwise no sort of sanctity or superiority, rightness or fitness. It happens to be the object to which is attached the highest form of consciousness we know; but consciousness itself has neither parts nor magnitude. And consciousness itself is essentially greater than the very vastness which appals us, seeing that it embraces and envelops it. Enormous depths of space are pictured in my brain, through my optic nerve; and what eludes the magic mirror of my retina, my mind can conceive, apprehend, make its own. It is not even true to say that the mind cannot conceive infinity--the real truth (if I may for once be Chestertonian), the real truth is that it can conceive nothing else. "When Berkeley said there was no matter"--it mattered greatly what he said. Nothing can be more certain than that, apart from percipience, there is no matter that matters. From the point of view of pantheism (the only logical theism) God, far from being a Veiled Being, or an Invisible King, is precisely the mind which translates itself into the visible, sensible universe, and impresses itself, in the form of a never-ending pageant, upon our cognate minds. It has been thought that human consciousness may have come into being because God wanted an audience. He was tired of being a cinematograph-film unreeling before empty benches. Some people have even carried the speculation further, and wondered whether the attachment of percipience to organized matter, as in the case of human beings, may not be a necessary stage in the culture of a pure percipience, capable of furnishing the pageant of the universe with a permanent and appreciative audience. In that case the Scottish Catechism would be justified, which asks "What is the chief end of man?" and answers (as Stevenson says) nobly if obscurely: "To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." But enough of these idle fantasies. What is certain is that we can hold up our heads serenely among the immensities, knowing that