I think M. Benda succeeds admirably in the purpose announced in his title
of rendering his discourse coherent. If once we accept his definitions,
his corollaries follow. Clearly and bravely he disengages his idea of
infinity from other properties usually assigned to the deity, such as
power, omniscience, goodness, and tutelary functions in respect to life,
or to some special human society. But coherence is not completeness, nor
even a reasonable measure of descriptive truth; and certain considerations
are omitted from M. Benda's view which are of such moment that, if they
were included, they might transform the whole issue. Perhaps the chief of
these omissions is that of an organ for thought. M. Benda throughout is
engaged simply in clarifying his own ideas, and repeatedly disclaims any
ulterior pretensions. He finds in the panorama of his thoughts an idea of
infinite Being, or God, and proceeds to study the relation of that
conception to all others. It is a task of critical analysis and religious
confession: and nothing could be more legitimate and, to some of us, more
interesting. But whence these various ideas, and whence the spell which
the idea of infinite Being in particular casts over the meditative mind?
Unless we can view these movements of thought in their natural setting and
order of genesis, we shall be in danger of turning autobiography into
cosmology and inwardness into folly.

One of the most notable points in M. Benda's analysis is his insistence on
the leap involved in passing from infinite Being to any particular fact or
system of facts; and again the leap involved in passing, when the
converted spirit "returns to God", from specific animal interests--no
matter how generous, social, or altruistic these interests may be--to
absolute renunciation and sympathy with the absolute. "That a will to
return to God should arise in the phenomenal world seems to be a miracle
no less wonderful (though it be less wondered at) than that the world