If the Real is present to all forms of existence as the ground of their ever-changing being, and if ‘things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’, finite persons will naturally tend to be conscious of the Real as a divine Thou. And so we find that from the earliest forms of archaic religion through the still- developing post-axial traditions the forms of experience in which, according to our hypothesis, the Real is present to human consciousness have usually (though not always) been hypostatised divine persons.