ENDS AND MEANS
tion, is essentially impersonal. This direct intuition of an
impersonal spiritual reality, underlying all being, is in
accord with the findings of the majority of the world's
philosophers.
'There is,* writes Professor Whitehead, in Religion in
the Making, *a large concurrence in the negative doctrine
that the religious experience does not include any direct
intuition of a definite person, or individual. . . . The
evidence for the assertion of a general, though not univer-
sal, concurrence in the doctrine of no direct vision of a
personal God, can only be found by a consideration of
the religious thought of the civilized world. . . . Through-
out India and China, religious thought, so far as it has
been interpreted in precise form, disclaims the intuition of
ultimate personality substantial to the universe. This is
true of Confucian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy and
Hindu philosophy. There may be personal embodiments,
but the substratum is impersonal. Christian theology has
also, in the main, adopted the position that there is no
direct intuition of such a personal substratum for the
world. It maintains the doctrine of a personal GoJ.as a
truth, but holds that our belief in it is based upon in-
ference/ There seems, however, to be no cogent reason
why, from the existing evidence, we should draw such an
inference. Moreover, as I have pointed out in the pre-
ceding chapter, the practical results of drawing such an
inference are good only up to a point; beyond that point
they afe very often extremely bad.
We are now in a position to draw a few tentative and
fragmentary conclusions about the nature of the world
and our relation to it and to one another. To the casual
observer, the world seems to be made up of great numbers
of independent existents, some of which possess life and
some consciousness. From very early times philosophers'
suspected that this common-sense view was, in part at least}