where we could seek the religious truth, when perchance the external world, as we assumed it, is not a truth at all? Let us consider once more our steps. Perchance the religiously inspiring reality is in some higher world. If we are only skeptical enough, perchance we shall find that Reality. Then, indeed, the old assumption of an external world of empirical facts may remain a part of our future thought, but it will get a new sense, and occupy a new place.
The first answer that occurs to this our question about the meaning of the external world that has so far troubled us, is this: The assumed world is no fixed datum, to which we are bound to submit at all hazards, but a postulate, which is made to satisfy certain familiar human needs. If this postulate is found to have no religious significance, we may supplement the doubt thus arising by remembering that we who postulated once have the right to postulate again. Our religiously satisfactory truth may be reached, not by hypotheses about powers in the empirical world, but by a deeper faith in something that is eternal, and behind or above the world of the senses.
This view gives us a new world, the world of the Postulates. We cannot be content to remain in this world, but we must pass through it on our way upwards. Let us hear it described.
I.
The world of Doubt has passed before us, a huge mass of inexplicable facts. Here and there we find
