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in exceptional cases alone can any definite and direct deduction from its ordinary abstract interpretation be made. How, for example, can we ever expect to be able to predict what the conduct would be even of any omniscient being governing no more than one poor solar system for only a million years or so? How much less if, being also omnipotent, he be thereby freed from all experience, all desire, all intention! Since God, in His essential character of Ens necessarium, is a disembodied spirit, and since there is strong reason to hold that what we call consciousness is either merely the general sensation of the brain or some part of it, or at all events some visceral or bodily sensation, God probably has no consciousness. Most of us are in the habit of thinking that consciousness and psychic life are the same thing and otherwise greatly to overrate the functions of consciousness. (See James's paper Does 'Consciousness' Exist? in Jour. Phil., Psy., and Sci. Meth. I. 477; 1904 Sep. 1. But the negative reply is, in itself, no novelty.)

The effects of the second peculiarity of the hypothesis are counteracted by a third, which consists in its commanding influence over the whole