in our view of it, than any tendency to sit lightly by personality. Could we see the immanent connection of history interrupted, or, better still, completed, by the encroachments of a Higher Power, that Power we might take as a personal one. But then there is the question whether the end of history need be set in relation to a Higher Guiding Power, or only viewed as an end realisable in the richest. possible development of humanity. But the historic inquiry we do not here pursue. Theistic philosophy has not forgotten that Spencer it was who knew enough of his Unknowable to be able to assure us that choice "lay between personality and something higher," and further, that there may be "a mode of being as much transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion." It refuses, on such grounds, to lose the religious interest in the morass of the Unknowable, where foothold is clearly impossible. It is not unmindful of the fact that if He were not personal in a way to which we may not attain, then the progressive apprehension of His thought by our minds would be as meaningless as would the gradual embodiment of His will in our progressive civilisation. It recognises that it is in this high sense of personality that Pfleiderer and Paulsen aver the impossibility that God should be infra - personal. The same, it need hardly be said, holds true in the case of Lotze, who retains "perfect personality" as a special preserve of Deity. Not, let it be said, that BRITISH DEVELOPMENTS CRITICISED. 301 we regard Lotze's treatment of personality as satisfactory, for we think Pfleiderer effectively criticises Lotze's speculative theism when he shows how the finite parts dwindle, in Lotze's hands, into differences of a merely ideal character in the Divine thought, in order that the personality of Deity may be maintained. Lotze appears to us to have been smitten with an excessive fear of conceiving the Divine Being as an "extra-mundane personality," which, among other unsatisfactory results of his system, led to finite spirits being subsumed under the one allembracing Whole in a strangely unreal manner. An unsatisfactoriness, of course, resulting from Lotze's treatment of the relation of absolute and relative too much as though it were but one of whole to parts, and leading to an oscillation between acosmism and pancosmism. But theistic philosophy, keeping in view all that has now been advanced, has also remembered, and yet more forcefully pointed out, that, as against the objection to our likening the Deity, as personal, unto ourselves, the personal representation of God-Who, in Christian Theism, is the Triune God-is the highest and worthiest, the fittest and most intelligible, we can form, and that, besides, in so forming it, we are still leaving open the full possibilities of belief in any attributes He may possess other and higher than those personal ones with which they yet cannot conflict. Ultra-personal He may thus be, but not in such sense that personality shall thereby be excluded. Dr F. H. Bradley says that "feeling, thought, and volition have all defects which suggest something higher." Yes, something higher, but not necessarily something different: the Perfect Personality is such just because these defects do not hide in Him. When we say He is personal, we do not deny the uncomprehended background of personality, to which we have just alluded. But we do say that, however certain scientific conceptions, such as force, law, matter, substance, may have purged themselves of anthropomorphic elements, they are yet no more supra-personal than is theistic philosophy. Whatever subjectivism is chargeable upon the one is equally chargeable upon the other. Of course this reference to the imperfection of scientific conception is now made only as a passing matter, and because it is so often but dimly perceived from the scientific side how incomplete its own position is. The needed completion or perfection of all our conceptions is that which religion professes to give, and which theistic philosophy professes to seek in its Urgrund or personal First Principle. When we postulate the personal Deity, we know what we worship: we know how partial is our knowledge of Him, but yet how much more real and rational is our knowing Him after the analogy of all that is highest in our free, conscious, spiritual experience, than any blind taking refuge in the unimagined sublimities of the Spencerian Inscrutable Reality and Incomprehensible Power, which as BRITISH DEVELOPMENTS CRITICISED. 303 suredly could only mean a grand spiritual and philosophical anti-climax. Who would ever think of ascribing personality to such Unknowable reality? Or who could think of being satisfied simply with power, as the ultimate of ultimates in the synthetic philosophy? Reality remains for theistic philosophy bound up in the bundle of life with personality, for to that philosophy there is no more reality without a person who determines it than there is thought without a thinker who affirms it. Certainly the relative is to it real, and is not to be regarded as mere appearance- mere schein of the Absolute. And as to the Being of God, may we not say it maintains an objective reality of the personality of God, and is not content-with certain German and other thinkers-to postulate for His personality merely a subjective reality for the soul? Is it not just as our thought enters into those conceptions of personality which are the highest attainable to us that we come to any worthy sense of the transcendent nature and untranslatable fulness of the Absolute Being? Is not theistic philosophy justified in regarding the supra-personal mode of conceiving God as a way of dismissing Deity from human thought and experience altogether, and of neutralising the operations and sanctions of moral law? Is it not with reason that we have seen recent philosophy of theism more keenly demanding at once the Spencerian right to postulate super-personal life in such a way for Deity, and the mode or sphere in which such super-personal Presence or Life can be held to manifest itself? Is it any wonder that it should insist on God being in His nature capable of entering into relations that are inter-personal, on the ground that to think of Him otherwise would be to leave Him a Being so entirely without relation to all that is highest in us as really to be beneath, and not above, human personality? But in this connection we may say, as Professor James Seth, in a recent article, justly observes, that "surely the true Absolute, the true Noumenon, should rather be found in the completed system of relations than in the Unrelated; surely in the progressive apprehension of universal relations we are gradually advancing in the knowledge of reality itself." If, then, God is, as one has expressed it, "in some high and intense sense personal—in possession of His own thought and character and will-is there no need that somehow at some stage His revelation should take personal character?" We venture to think it has been more clearly realised, in our late philosophy of theism, how it is of the essence of personality to overflow in self-communication, whence the self-revelation of Deity becomes explicable. Such outflow of the energy and the thought of the Absolute towards the human soul is seen to be possible, rational, and even probable. For, as it has been put, "how should related Spirits, joined by a common creative aim, intent on whatever things are pure and good, live in presence of each |