on the contrary, every physical process, even the most minute apparently taking place between two elements, is likewise an event within the Eternal, on Whose constant presence all possibility of action depends, even so the quietly advancing formation of the organic germ is no isolated, independent event, but a development of the Infinite itself. Fostered by it, received by it into its own inner being, this natural event there excites the creative power to new development; and as our human soul receives stimuli from without and answers them by the production of a sensation, so the consistent unity of the Infinite Being lets itself be stimulated by this internal event of physical development to produce out of itself the soul appropriate to the growing organism." (Microcosmus,' vol. i. p. 390. T. & T. Clark.)

Does not philosophy of theism, however, seem haunted with a feeling that this very inquiry into the origin of our selfhood or personality - that possible ultimate here-may not be philosophical? If personality be such an ultimate, it must be vain to seek to reduce or explain it, attempt this as men may. It is only the person who can enter into the terms I and THOU. We claim personality for ourselves because we know, and think, and feel, and will, as we do, and have the consciousness of being able to do all these. Self-consciousness is, then, just that intuitive knowledge of itself which mind or self as a permanent power or ex

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istence possesses amid its own operations or activities. Of these mental acts and the mind's states we have knowledge in virtue of self-consciousness, which implies the knowledge, not of mere baseless and vanishing states, but also of an indivisible self or individual being, though a knowledge that is not complete. For, "self-consciousness," as Du Prel, in his 'Philosophy of Mysticism,' has strikingly said, "may be as inadequate to the ego, as consciousness to the world; or the ego may as much exceed self-consciousness as the world exceeds consciousness." Our notion of personality has thus become widened by the recognition of the fact that our whole or total self is so far from being fully manifested in any of the forms of consciousness known to us. That psychical phenomenon, which we designate the ego, is now more distinctly seen to be a developing rather than an original entity. The true unity of the person was never more clearly recognised as resting upon the unity of consciousness. This real unity is viewed as due to the self-activity of the soul in midst of the manifoldness of our impressions and those influences that are borne in upon us in experience. Our knowledge of self or the ego, which, as we have just seen, is so far from being an abstraction or mere ideal, is knowledge in a mode of consciousness which is immediate though imperfect. I know myself with a directness and positiveness which do not obtain in the case

of my knowledge of any other. of any other. I do and must perceive myself as the perceiving self that I am. Hence I come to know myself as a centre of conscious and active power. Certainly I have no deeper or more abiding perception of my being than as an active, persistent individual or unit in midst of every change of feeling, thought, or action. Mind is the great reality: for anything I can know, matter and force may be no more than the "mere names for certain forms of consciousness." The consciousness of my knowing is-with that of my being-the only certitude I possess in the presence of reality.

Not alone the unity of our individuated being, but also the permanence of its self-identical, conscious subject, our late theistic philosophy has more successfully maintained against such recent efforts to explain the permanent identity of the conscious entity as that of the psychology of Professor William James, of Harvard. Not that it has any quarrel with the life of consciousness being, by Professor James, made up of a continuous "stream," since he preserves, in each successive consciousness, the truth of our self-identity. But we ask, has it not very clearly perceived that, in the stress which Professor James, in his reckoning with the facts of consciousness, puts on the state of consciousness by which the ego or subject is, on his theory, brought forward and transmitted from consciousness to consciousness throughout the long

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succession, we have a hysteron-proteron, in which the primacy of the subject has been shunted on to the state? Has it not kept in view, too, what power the conscious mind of man possesses of marking itself off in distinction from the "stream already spoken of? It surely sees that these states are states of mine-that is, of my consciousness-and that without me they can do nothing,-in fact, do not exist. Certainly it has viewed as a reasonable expectation that Professor James and all who grant -as do not the followers of Hume - the ego, should go on to acknowledge how irrefragable has grown the proof of the producing ego as the primal and perduring reality. It plainly perceives that without such primal unit or essence as that which we call mind, with its unexampled unity, the very notion of stream or series or succession would

in its dependence upon a constant — be rendered impossible to us. And it has very decidedly regarded as untenable, and quite unsupported by the facts of consciousness, such a position as that in which Professor James draws, from the "verifiable" character of the " passing thought," the disastrous conclusion "that thought is itself the thinker"! Unwilling as Professor James shows himself to postulate a permanent ego or soul as the basis of man's personality, he yet sends forth. his "thought" clothed upon with what are virtually so many of the wonted powers or rights of the soul as serve to show how difficult it has been

for him to keep clear of spiritualistic implications and conceptions. There is absolutely no warrant for his treating thought a mere faculty of mind -as though it were mind itself. It is utterly absurd to regard thought-the act or product of our spiritual entity as the entity itself. The very laws of thought and the sure facts of consciousness proclaim it untenable and subversive of all knowledge that thought should be held as the thinker.

But to return to our own position. My idea of personality or personal being originates in my selfconsciousness, and is realised in myself, in my own. intellectual personality as the ego that thinks and knows itself; it does not spring merely from my distinguishing it from the impersonal and irrational. Professor Samuel Harris says: "In his personality every man is individual and alone; others can approach the barriers of this solitude and send in intelligence, influence, or sympathy; but no man can scale the barriers into the personality of another to think, or feel, or determine, or act for him, to take his responsibility, or to participate in his consciousness" (Philosophical Basis of Theism,' p. 414). No doubt my individual consciousness is enlarged by continuous contact with the consciousness of the countless selves of humanity making up the race, which race-consciousness penetrates and pervades mine, yet so as my own personality shall never be frustrated or neutralised. But personality