We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively
religious sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot
tell) possess the objects of their belief, not in the form of
mere conceptions which their intellect accepts as true, but
rather in the form of quasi-sensible realities directly
apprehended. As his sense of the real presence of these objects
fluctuates, so the believer alternates between warmth and
coldness in his faith. Other examples will bring this home to
one better than abstract description, so I proceed immediately to
cite some. The first example is a negative one, deploring the
loss of the sense in question. I have extracted it from an
account given me by a scientific man of my acquaintance, of his
religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that the feeling
of reality may be something more like a sensation than an
intellectual operation properly so-called.
"Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more
agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that
'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so
well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena.
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