PERSONALITY AS INFINITE.

say,

315

have shown—and unsatisfying to the religious need and interest. We hold that such knowing and acting as are involved in religious communion, when that communion is viewed in a pantheistic colouring from Spinozan, Schellingian, or Schleiermacherian view - points are not to be thought of without a fortunate subreption, an unperceived drawing upon theistic modes of representation. The infinity of God—an infinity which here means not something positive, but merely, let us say, the fact that God is not a finite entity— has been said to be endangered through personality. But it is not realised that it is precisely in denying Him the power of being personal, or of so limiting Himself as to allow us to be personal, that His infinitude is already parted with. This self-limitation of the Infinite-the great renunciation-is yet really its self-assertion and its selfrevelation. We cannot represent to ourselves an infinity of being, nor can we a qualitative infinity of force. Force has, for realistic thought, no meaning, so long as it remains a mere potence, and assumes not determinateness somewhere. Taking God as the principle in which the world is grounded, what then is it, it may still be properly asked, but a veiled dogmatism which proceeds from the contrast in which God stands to the world, to construe His relation to it as one simply of difference on every side? Why should it appear so credible a thing that God should sustain to the world a re

lation of simple difference on every hand? Has idealism no more truth for us when, in dealing with the living reality of the world, it sets it forth as what is known as objectified spirit? What sort of place shall yet be reserved for Him in our thought when the highest essence shall really appear to be the vast system of world-reality, eternally at rest, only appearing to us under guises of change and causal event? Is it only thus we have pressed beyond the region of pure unintelligibility to find in Nature the infinite organism which is the product of the Infinite and self-conscious Mind ?

We do not profess to share the position of those philosophers of our time who treat inquiry into the theoretic aspects of infinite in relation to finite as mere wandering in cloudland. We begin by accepting the Infinite as meaning not the really negative thing implied in mere indefinite extension beyond limits, but the positive conception of it as ground of all unity, root of all being, and condition of all consciousness. It is as sharers in the Infinite that the infinite is capable-by the "cognitive leap"-of being perceived by us. And we go on to ask, What valid title has ever been adduced to assume that the absolute consciousness in God cannot coexist with His relative consciousness, which latter is the source of all dependent being and result? By what right shall we deny this freedom of the relative to the Absolute, and that, too, without prejudice to His absolute perfection? Is He not still the

PERSONALITY AS ABSOLUTE.

317

Absolute Personality, when we have allowed Him in His objective action the freedom of the relative? And, if that be so, what is to be said of those who hold, with Dr Paul Carus, speaking in the name of monism, that “an absolute God, just as an absolute soul, is not distinguishable at all from a ghost," and that "the idea of a God, absolutely existing, has become a superstition"! Everything is thus plainly "a part of the All" in a sense in which the soul of theistic philosophy can take no pleasure. Undoubtedly the God set up by Dr Carus as super-personal and as the Eternal of nature is a Deity historically non-existent, even in the case of those who thought the super-personal conception was theirs. He is set up, besides, as part of a system which is self-destructive and irrational; for to it personality belongs not to God, exists for science only as illusion, and yet-mirabile dictu !— forms the basis of man's moral activity.

Not thus has theistic philosophy forgotten that it is just personality itself—the thing questionedwhich determines what is reality, and what illusion. For to it, amid those shifting illusions and changing theories which make up, in the world of thought,

"The infernal hurricane that never rests,"—

"La bufera infernal che mai non resta,"

the personality of the Deity is that which abides. as changeless soul and centre of all things. Seeing that we shall, in the chapter on the "Per

sonality of Man," build up an argument for the personality of Deity on the ground of our own true personality, let it be here said, to prevent misconception, that, in so doing, we are indeed far from wishing it to be thought that, in those hours when the sense of our own personality has least hold upon us, we may not adhere to the absoluteness and personality of Deity as forcing themselves upon us-in fact, peering through every pore of the universe. Woe is his who in those hours shall not find it so! The sense of self gone, and no Absolute Personality pressing any sense of Itself through the universe upon him, he, in a universe so mindless, can but fall a prey to a devouring Materialism or-if any prefer-an engulfing Pantheism. He is, in any case, left with nothing but what, in the most tragic issue that can present itself to any human being under heaven, the poet Shelley, not without touch of sublimity, styles,

"The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!"

How then shall we represent to ourselves this personality of God? of Himself given by the world imply such

Do not the practical proofs God to us as He works in

a succession in these proofs

or effects as already involves a time course-a course in which God may be said to be the moving impulse of

"Time's pauseless feet and world-wide wings"?

SPACE AND TIME RELATIONS.

319

To the postulation of such a temporal succession for the Deity both Pfleiderer and Lotze seem to feel pressed, the latter by statements of his own, although he has elsewhere advanced the timelessness of Deity. We are free to confess ourselves by no means so convinced of the inconceivability of the spirit positing "itself out of itself" and finding "itself submitted to the condition of time," as Professor Veitch, when inveighing against the Hegelian view in his Dualism and Monism,' seems to have been. This we say as to the root-question of the spirit's passing into time. —the manifestation of the Absolute in the timeprocess, which else were illusion without, of course, committing ourselves to the Hegelian philosophy of history in its entirety. Surely it has grown very clear that no evolution can really bring forth Time, and that Time is the necessary presupposition—thanks most of all to Kant-even of our understanding evolutionary processes themselves, or the successions that appear in consciousness. If the world-process must needs be in real time-time which is but the presage of eternityand if God should act upon the world within this time-process, what necessity exists for reason either that we should deny Him the power of any but an absolute mode of action, or make Him so subject to change by His objective action that He should be no more eternal while the time-process lasts? Is it to come to this that Deity shall not