This view of the relation of the material to the spiritual world perhaps relieves to some extent a tension between science and religion. Physical science has seemed to occupy a domain of reality which is self-sufficient, pursuing its course independently of and indifferent to that which a voice within us asserts to be a higher reality. We are jealous of such independence. We are uneasy that there should be an apparently self-contained world in which God becomes an unnecessary hypothesis. We acknowledge that the ways of God are inscrutable; but is there not still in the religious mind something of that feeling of the prophets of old, who called on God to assert his kingship and by sign or miracle proclaim that the forces of Nature are subject to his command? And yet if the scientist were to repent and admit that it was necessary to include among the agents controlling the stars and the electrons an omnipresent spirit to whom we trace the sacred things of consciousness, would there not be even graver apprehension? We [Pg 282] should suspect an intention to reduce God to a system of differential equations, like the other agents which at various times have been introduced to restore order in the physical scheme. That fiasco at any rate is avoided. For the sphere of the differential equations of physics is the metrical cyclic scheme extracted out of the broader reality. However much the ramifications of the cycles may be extended by further scientific discovery, they cannot from their very nature trench on the background in which they have their being—their actuality. It is in this background that our own mental consciousness lies; and here, if anywhere, we may find a Power greater than but akin to consciousness. It is not possible for the controlling laws of the spiritual substratum, which in so far as it is known to us in consciousness is essentially non-metrical, to be analogous to the differential and other mathematical equations of physics which are meaningless unless they are fed with metrical quantities. So that the crudest anthropomorphic image of a spiritual deity can scarcely be so wide of the truth as one conceived in terms of metrical equations.