DEFINITIONS OF PERSONALITY.

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ality, of Whom, in man and the world, we have manifestations. That personality by which we philosophically signify selfhood, or self-realisation by a true self, must always remain much more than any formal definition of it: futile it must be to render personality in any abstract terms, if we would preserve its essence. Personality is, in fact, that which alone can explain and interpret itself. The activities of personality certainly presuppose spirit, a presupposition quite as rational as any of those to which we are accustomed in science. "In each case that which science finds as the essential reality of matter and energy is that which is imperceptible by sense. The essential reality of the tangible is the intangible; of the audible is the inaudible; of the visible is the invisible; of the divisible is the indivisible; of the perceptible is the imperceptible. Thus underlying or within the gross matter and its motions which we perceive, is a world of atomic, molecular, and ethereal matter which no human sense can grasp. In this, science presents to our thought a reality of which we can have no perception and scarcely even a conception as matter." Perfectly consonant with scientific tendency and procedure, therefore, is the presupposition of spirit as at the base of personality. Far more than the fact that he thinks or wills, is the fact that man is a self or spirit. His various capacities and activities are only so many aspects or sidelights of this truth

REESE

UN

of his selfhood. The personality of God, so far from having become a matter of mere abstract or academic interest, is, we feel bound to say, still one of fundamental moment for all speculative interest of whatsoever kind, giving, according as we posit a positive or negative attitude, a direction to all else, as has been far from sufficiently understood. We, therefore, assume a distinctly positive attitude, and maintain that nothing but true personality constitutes substantial being. It is because being can never become really intelligible to us so long as we view it only in the light of cause or of substance, or even as impersonal intelligence, that a true philosophy of theism must interpret it in terms of self-conscious personality. It is undoubtedly true that just in the personifying or personalising process did such a philosophy, and that by a psychological necessity, arise. The problem, affecting, as it does, the colligating hypothesis of the theistic philosophy, is now, we take it, seen to be one so vast, so multiform, so capable of enlightened inquiry from many points of approach, that its elucidation can only be the work of many minds.

We believe it to have grown very evident to theistic philosophy that the primal being which we call God must remain to us a sealed book, unless we are willing to read by the light which the category of personality affords. The personality of God may be no prime concern either to the documents of Christianity or to the unsophis

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ticated Christian consciousness, but it is clearly seen, we believe, to be of vital moment for the religious life in the view of reflective thought. The truth is, there have seemed to be a power and a fascination in personality, which have only become the more strikingly apparent as science has pursued its determined way with self-sufficient air into the knowledge of the world, only to find salvation from utter blankness by falling back at last on some dim shadows cast of personal presence. The supernatural, carrying in its bosom personality, with all that of which personality is capable, has been saved unto us in modern thought with a great salvation. There can be no doubt that recent theistic thought, piercing what our late laureate poet calls "the abysmal deeps of personality," has, with far firmer grasp, apprehended the fact that, in the consciousness of our own personality, whence we rise to belief in the personality of God, theistic philosophy has found—

"A tower of strength

That stands four-square to all the winds that blow."

For it has gained a new percipience of the way in which the pregnant personality of man, that personality with whose idea we are in experience so conversant, saves the personality of God from sinking for us into meaningless jargon. It has, we claim, more deeply observed how essential is the Divine Personality to religion and virtue, which

are, in their very nature and development, really impossible without the free, spiritual, and personal, to which in Deity the personal in man pays homage as to nothing beside. And indeed we take it that it has found the living religious consciousness not only crave the personality of God, but also carry in itself a subjective certainty of the Divine Personality. Such subjective certainty is a call, of course, to theoretic reason to scrutinise its bases, that it be not found to contain that which, objectively considered, is contradictory or impossible.

Το a blind, impersonal, unconscious worldmechanism, the free personality of man instinctively and persistently maintains an attitude of superiority: the very result of the Divinely personal is just-contrary to what is so often imagined -that whereby issues of vast spiritual import are made possible or verifiable to us. We venture to think theistic philosophy has reached a richer appreciation of the fact that Absolute Intelligence, properly apprehended, carries with it, by implication, Absolute Will, or, in other words, Personality. Does not the concept of personality carry with it the bright possibility of the Deity making full and practical proof to us of His love and goodness? And do not such concrete forms of His goodness and love suffuse the concept of personality with the warm glow of life? The perfect indivisible unity of God has been more conspicu

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ously presented as consisting pre-eminently of personality-personality signifying in this connection a thinking being or essence, as something which in itself (an sich) is. It has been more evident, particularly to German thought, how the conception of such a thinking being or essence carries with it all that is most important in such customary circumlocutions for personality as self-consciousness and self-determination. We are thus with Kant so far at least as when, in dealing with Transcendental Esthetic, he lays the emphasis he does on the selfactivity of the soul's life; and in self-consciousness rather than consciousness in general do we find the essential moment of personality. There is no doubt great force in Lotze's contention that just in "the true recognition of oneself as an I" does personality consist, as soon as ever one knows himself as unitary subject in opposition to his own ideas and states. But this is still vague and unsatisfying. So is Green's contention that self-objectification or self-consciousness makes up personality, wherein the part is made to do duty for the whole. Those qualities of personality which wear a volitional or an ethical or an emotional character are all sacrificed on the view of Green and others, to those of a purely reflective cast. Surely a very dwarfed conception of personality. The "root element in all personality" is, no doubt, as Professor Knight has remarked, "consciousness," and selfconsciousness was allowed to man by Spinoza, who