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lating rationality and personality for God on no better grounds than that he does not seem capable of conceiving Deity without attaching to Divine personality the merely contingent defects and limitations that pertain to rationality and personality as found in man. In consequence of this, he sacrifices "the symbol of personality, because personality implies limitation, and to speak of an infinite personality is to cheat oneself with a phrase that is empty of meaning." Not the only way, let it be said, of cheating oneself so long as such a phrase as "Cosmic theism" is allowed to dupe us by making us believe that such things as reason and righteousness, intelligence and freedom, cannot be ascribed to Deity save under the "quasi-human" forms. Fiske would impute and assume. We believe that theistic philosophy is to-day more thoroughly alive to the necessity-a necessity arising out of the new unwonted endeavours to discredit theism on grounds specifically religious-of setting the consciousness and personality of God, Who alone is absolute end (Selbstziel and Selbstzweck), on a truly philosophical basis. Recent theistic philosophy has at least begun to sift to the bottom the specious arguments by which objection has now on speculative grounds been taken to the contradictions involved, as is alleged, in any possible construction of a conscious Divine Personality. And it has, as we think, more satisfactorily shown the real harmony of such a Divine Absolute as God the

self-conscious Personality-the Personality with an absolute consciousness (the vónois vonσews of Aristotle) with the postulates of the religious consciousness. The feelings most characteristic of religion and worship are such as simply cannot breathe and act before a mere impersonal energy or unconscious power in nature. Should the actual results be by any accounted small, up to the present, the extreme difficulty of the new burdens and undertakings imposed upon theistic thought is not to be forgotten. That thought has remembered the need, of which Arnold spake, of our being "able to cleave to a power of goodness appealing to our higher and real self," but it has advanced into deeper insight of the truth that the powers in the world that make for righteousness, for goodness, never could be impersonal, without an immediate lowering effect on the aspirations and endeavours of the human personality, which instinctively reserves its highest homage for the personal. And so it has more explicitly recognised the essentialness of personality in the Deity to man's true fellowship with the Divine.

From this conception of personality the idea of corporeity is, of course, to be banished, even if this means a call to mental energy which not all are willing to meet in this sphere. From Spinoza to Matthew Arnold place has been found for the view that we limit the infinite when we regard it as personal—an absurd result of treating the infinite

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as a mere aggregate of things finite. When personality is viewed thus as necessarily limited, it is so as the unfortunate result of viewing personality after a quantitative mode of thinking. Here we may say that nothing could exceed the completeness with which recent philosophical theism has shown what gratuitous and unwarranted assumption underlies such asseverations as that of the author of Natural Religion,' that "personality involves a body and mortality." It has surely seen that personality, in its essential idea, involves nothing of the sort, and that its conscious self-hood has nothing essentially to do either with shape or outline or location in space, or any of the other conceivable limitations that mark personality in the usual sense. It has laid bare the contradiction clearly involved in the supposition of those who would condition Absolute Intelligence on corporeality or the possession of a brain. It has, we believe, been attaining firmer grasp of the fact that personality is properly apprehended, neither after quantitative dimensions nor qualitative degrees, but as a thing of free, original movement, a result of self-determining power. Personality it sees not to "depend upon a past or present contraposition of the ego to the non-ego; but, conversely, it consists in an immediate esse per se, forms the necessary prius of this contraposition wherever it takes place." Hence it reaches, in the case of God, unconditioned-because infinite

personality. Only, such free, volitional, self-determination must be premised, in His case, to extend to His nature no less than to His character. Therefore we say that the greater stress on personality, as it is claimed for the universal and omnipresent God, and on personality, as it is in man, marks for us a gratifying advance in the recent philosophy of theism, which has indeed more clearly seen how it is the very absence of personality in God-the lack of sensibility and self-determining power— which would really constitute limitation in Him as the impersonal. We see, then, how personality encompasses the path of our thought, and besets it behind and before. If thought ascends up into heaven, personality is there: if it makes its bed in Sheol, personality is there: if it takes the wings of the morning, and dwells in the uttermost parts of the sea, there also personality meets and holds it fast.

But, while personality thus lays hold upon thought, it has become always more apparent how possible it is for thought to rest in personality as a metaphysical conviction, without corresponding realisation of the encompassing presence of the God Who is a Person. And may we not say that this recognition has saved thought from remaining purely rationalistic? May we not, with the strongest reason, hope, too, that the Absolute Personality has been able, in His untranslatable fulness, to shake off the incubus of those specu

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lative limitations, with which non-theistic thought has been pleased to invest Him, yea, to do so "with as much ease as Samson his green withes"? Even theistic thought has advanced beyond the view of Lipsius — who retains so many points of community with his precursor Biedermann, to both of whom we shall again advert—that the Divine Essence is annulled when personality which, on his philosophical presentation, means a necessary finitising of the Infinite-is predicated of it in the interests of practical religious needs. For, our late philosophy of theism has very clearly perceived how, in such a view, thought is confounded with mental representation (Vorstellung), and definition with limitation or lack of reality. Personality is still, as Mansel said, "the noblest of all existence of which men dream, for it is that which knows, not that which is known." Indeed, since Mansel, whose serviceable though not satisfactory representations may be acknowledged, the philosophy of theism has, with an almost wearisome iteration we mean no blame to it, for it has been needed - shown that personality need not be finite, since the assumption that determinateness, as the essence of being, means limitation, is so unwarranted. Also since, as Lotze -according to Ladd-has said, "it suffices for laying the foundation" of personality "if a spiritual being has the faculty of apprehending itself as 'I' in opposition to its own states, which are only its