The idea, thus constructed, may be constructed correctly, or incorrectly. Whether it is constructed correctly or incorrectly is determined by further experience. What is important to notice is first that it is only by further experience, personal experience, that we can determine how far the construction we have put upon it is or is not correct; and, next, that so far as the construction we have put upon it is correct, that is to say is confirmed by actual experience, it is thereby shown to be not inference--even though it was reached by a process of inference--but fact. The process of inference may be compared to a path by which we struggle up the face of a cliff: it is the path by which we get there, but it is not the firm ground on which eventually we rest. The path is not that which upholds the cliff; nor is the inference that on which the being of God rests. The being of God is not something inferred but something experienced. It is by experience--the experience of ourselves or others--that we find out whether what by inference we were led to expect is really something of which we can--if we will--have experience. And that which is experienced ceases, the moment it is experienced, to be inferential. The experience is fact: the statement of it in words is truth. But apart from the experience, the words in which it is stated are but words; and, without the experience, the words must remain for ever words and nothing more than words. If then by the idea of God we mean the words, in which it is (inadequately) stated, and nothing more, the idea of God is separated by an impassable gulf from the being of God. Further, if we admit that the idea is, by its very nature, and by the very facts of the case, essentially different from the being of God, then it is of little use to continue to maintain that the being of God is a fact of human experience. In that case, the supposed fact of experience is reduced to something of which we neither have, nor can have, any idea, or consciousness, whatever. It thereby ceases to be a fact of experience at all. And it is precisely on this assumption that the being of God is denied to be a fact of experience--the assumption that being and idea are separated from one another by an impassable gulf: the idea we can be conscious of, but of His being we can have no experience. We must therefore ask not whether this gulf is impassable, but whether it exists at all, or is of the same imaginary nature as that to which Gloucester was led by Edgar.