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GOD.
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demand our attention. It is sometimes surmised by enm that God is an all-pervading existence, even Vedanta holding its Brahman to be actually omni-present in the physical sense. But the idea is not in consonance with reason in any sense. For none of the two ways in which we can conceive the existence of God--that is, as an individual being, or an essence--can ever make him coincide with boundless space. As regards the former, it is sufficient to say that our conception of a living being is so radically different from the notions we have of space, that it would be an act of self-deceiving legerdemain on the part of fantasy to imagine their coinciding in respect of physical extension. This objection also holds good with regard to the omni-presence of God as an essence, which is further inadmissible on the ground that it is not in the nature of a metaphysical abstraction to enjoy general pervasion in the spatial sense. However choice the words that might be used to describe its conception in our minds, howsoever elegant the phrases we might employ in alluding to it, the fact remains that our notion of the quality of consciousness is a metaphysical abstraction, out and out, and is as unthinkable as a self-subsisting substance as matter apart from the multitude of atoms which really and truly represent all that nature acknowledges to be valid in our notion of materiality, i.e., matter. And, if nature does not allow matter to have a wider pervasion than the limits of a solitary atom, would it allow consciousness to extend its dominion beyond the four corners of the soul ? The metaphysician who hopes to steal a march on this wide-awake' divinity' through
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