In my youth I was much in contact with a group of excellent Christians who held that the number of the "saved" had been definitely fixed by divine pre-ordination, the extremists placing it as low as 40,000. But looking back on those times I now see that the ardour with which we believed these things was strictly relevant to the hope each of us entertained that he himself might be included in the number aforesaid. I am very sure that our faith would have collapsed immediately had the revelation been made that the elect were composed exclusively of converted Chinamen. Our conception of the One and the Many was not so disinterested or abstract as to exclude ourselves from a fair chance of having a share in whatever good things happened to be going. And so it always is, even where more enlightened philosophies prevail. The significance of the universe, whatever it may be, is, ultimately, its significance for _me_; which is another way of saying that I attach importance to the fact that just I, and nobody else, am here to perceive the significance. There are certain forms of mysticism, mostly Indian, which would wean us from all this. They would delete the value which the soul perceives in being just this soul and no other. But I am very sure they do not succeed. Whatever fascination the thought of being absorbed into the Infinite may have for me depends on my keeping it in mind that it is I, and not somebody else, who is being absorbed. "To be interested in one's finite self to the point of wanting to get rid of it is to have a high sense of one's own importance." A divine egoism is here indicated which the subject of religion shares with the Object. "_I_ am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other God but _me_." In describing the value a man finds in his own existence as illogical, as a thing for which no reason can be given, I am referring to logic and reason as they are understood in the schools and made use of in the superficial war of minds, the lower logic and the lower reason of the unconverted or unheroic mind. But, illogical though it be in that construction, I nevertheless regard it--this value which each man finds in his being the man he is--as the growing point of the higher logic which, when fully born, reveals the Kingdoms of the Real. This is the root of the intuition of value, the first point of contact between the human mind and the things that are eternal, Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Morally it takes the form of courage, which is the foundation of virtue. In a world where no reason can be given why _this_ soul should exist at all, _this_ soul nevertheless resolves to _create_ a reason by its own valour, in the sure and certain faith that the universe, indifferent to the coward, will be friendly to the hero, will respond to his effort, will lend him its own creative energy, and bring him at last, in fellowship with the Divine Spirit which first prompted his attempt, to the haven where he would be.