EVOLUTION AND THE 
 
 DOCTRINE OF THE 
 
 TRINITY
 
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 C. F. CLAY, MANAGER 
 LONDON : FETTER LANE, E. C. 4 
 
 NEW YORK C. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
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 ALL RIGHTS KESKRVKD
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE 
 
 DOCTRINE OF THE 
 
 TRINITY 
 
 BY 
 
 STEWART A. McDOWALL, B.D. 
 
 * -""" 
 
 TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
 CHAPLAIN AND ASSISTANT MASTER AT WINCHESTER COLLEGE 
 
 Author of Evolution and the Need of Atonement 
 Evolution and Spiritual Life 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1918
 
 TO MY WIFE
 
 PREFACE 
 
 IT is occasionally possible to disarm a critic by antici- 
 pating his criticisms. There is a frank ingenuousness 
 about the proceeding that is somewhat disconcerting. 
 That fact, however, is not my main reason for using 
 this Preface to draw attention to two characteristics 
 of the pages that follow, which may very likely, and 
 perhaps justly, be selected for adverse comment. Any- 
 one who tries to think honestly can only be grateful 
 when his theories are subjected to criticism. There 
 comes a stage when he can no longer act as his own 
 critic. Then he must get the help he needs from others. 
 In those conditions he is justly entitled, as it seems to 
 me, to explain why he has set out his theories in the 
 particular form in which they are submitted to the 
 critics; and it is only this liberty I claim. 
 
 There is, unquestionably, full room at present for a 
 restatement of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity in 
 terms that are consonant with modern thought. Indeed, 
 it is not too much to say that there is urgent need of 
 such a restatement. A vague pantheism is the charac- 
 teristic product of the religious speculation of to-day, 
 and Christian doctrine, if not Christian ethics, is in 
 danger of losing its hold on the minds of the most able 
 among the younger men and women of England. Pan- 
 theism, with its emphasis on ultimate Unity, is not im- 
 pressed by the tritheistic expression of Christian belief 
 which passes popularly for Trinitarian doctrine. 
 
 It seemed to me that an attempt to formulate the 
 doctrine anew from the standpoint of evolution, how- 
 ever inadequately carried out, might prove useful as a
 
 viii Preface 
 
 preliminary step, and might further serve an end in 
 showing that the truth of a doctrine does not stand or 
 fall by the terminology in which it is expressed. Ter- 
 minology may become archaic, words may change their 
 meaning, but the deposit of truth is unaffected if we 
 would only realise it. 
 
 The best way to start such a restatement of the 
 Doctrine of the Holy Trinity seemed to be by examining 
 anew the conception of personality, both in its manward 
 and Godward aspects. When this had been done, a 
 fresh start was made in the examination of Christhood 
 the link between Godhead and manhood. Yet another 
 starting point presented itself in the almost universal 
 belief in human immortality. Lastly, the evolution of 
 personality itself demanded consideration. 
 
 As in each and all of these matters one was almost 
 immediately faced with the double problem of imman- 
 ence and transcendence, it quickly became clear that 
 little progress could be made until these had been care- 
 fully considered. Therefore a preliminary chapter on 
 this subject was worked out. Although logically this 
 chapter had to stand first, it is recommended that the 
 reading of it be postponed until the first five chapters, at 
 least, if not the whole of the rest of the book, have been 
 studied. The subject matter is peculiarly difficult and 
 technical, and its importance may escape notice until 
 the reader has actually been brought face to face with 
 the problems as they occur in the general discussion. 
 
 It will be seen that the bulk of the book, therefore, 
 consists of a series of separate essays which converge 
 upon the different aspects of personality. As such they 
 are necessarily not very closely articulated with one 
 another, and it is only in the final chapter that they 
 are linked so that a judgment of the evidence as a whole 
 becomes possible. 
 
 Moreover a certain amount of material is common to
 
 Preface ix 
 
 the subject matter of all the essays, and consequently 
 there must be a measure of repetition, and still more of 
 discussion of the same questions from somewhat different 
 stand-points. It seemed preferable, for many reasons, 
 to retain the original structure instead of recasting 
 the whole in such a way as to give a greater sense of 
 unity. I could see no near prospect of finding time to 
 re-write the book. Some years' delay at least would 
 have been inevitable; and the need of restatement of 
 fundamentals is so urgent, in view of the awakened 
 interest of all classes in matters of religion and the wide- 
 spread vagueness of religious thought, that it seemed 
 undesirable to hold back anything, however unworthy 
 of its subject, that might hasten the appearance of 
 fuller and more competent treatises. Being, professedly, 
 no more than a preliminary study, there seemed to be 
 a certain advantage in issuing it in a form which left 
 the framework visible. A builder's plan is less satisfying 
 than a picture of a completed building, but it has its 
 uses. 
 
 Again, the original form of any thought on ultimate 
 things must necessarily be technical, if it is to give a 
 true idea of the foundation of the arguments on which 
 the theory is based. When, and if, the theory has been 
 approved, it can be put out in more general form, but 
 not before. Since, then, the present volume was bound 
 to be technical in parts, it seemed best to omit all more 
 general discussion, including such vitally important 
 questions as the relation of Trinitarian doctrine to the 
 Christian life and experience, reserving them, possibly, 
 for treatment in a more general book, if such a book 
 should later seem to be desirable as meeting a need. 
 Finally, the fact that one had come to a standstill on 
 the side of pure reasoning seemed to indicate the need 
 of criticism. For all these reasons I decided to let my 
 essay stand or fall in its present guise.
 
 x Preface 
 
 The objection to form may come from any critic. A 
 different one will surely come also from the evolutionist. 
 The book is written backwards. To find any but inci- 
 dental discussion of the lower stages of life you must 
 turn to the end. The explanation of this is simple. 
 
 In Evolution and the Need of Atonement we started 
 from the beginning, the simplest organism, and we found 
 the necessity for a teleological interpretation of the 
 evolutionary process. 
 
 In this book, therefore, following a sound metaphysi- 
 cal principle, we start from the end, and, after a pre- 
 liminary discussion of the problem of Being and Becom- 
 ing, consider first of all the Being of God, as the Ground 
 of Reality (Chapter I). I cannot think that this will 
 seem an unreasonable proceeding either to the philoso- 
 pher or to the religious-minded man. From our study 
 we conclude that the thought, and the very nature, of 
 man must mirror God truly, if incompletely (Chapter 
 II). Then we proceed to discuss the personality of man, 
 and to argue from that to the personality of God; and 
 we find in man just that triunity that seems to be de- 
 manded in the Being of God (Chapter III). Turning to 
 the problem of Christhood we then discuss the necessity 
 of God becoming Man, apart from the questions of sin 
 and atonement, in order to make the Divine Experience 
 completely coincident with the human, so that human 
 experience in its turn may be completely coincident 
 with the Divine, rendering perfect union possible be- 
 tween God and man. Some consequences and implica- 
 tions of Christhood are discussed at considerable length 
 (Chapters IV and V). 
 
 Next, we argue the identity between the nature of 
 man and that of God, finding in this identity the only 
 sure intellectual ground of belief in human immortality 
 (Chapter VI). In the consideration of the awakening of 
 personality in man we next link up the preconscious
 
 Preface xi 
 
 stages with the conscious, and find the unity of process 
 that we need. This we had already found foreshadowed 
 in Christhood. In passing through the recapitulatory 
 stages that are characteristic of a child's development, 
 and in the continuity of the germ-plasm involved in 
 His birth from the Virgin Mary, we' find evidence of the 
 solidarity and oneness of the life and process from first 
 to last (Chapter VII). Finally we gather up the threads 
 by means of a discussion of what is meant by the evolu- 
 tion of transcendence (Chapter VIII). 
 
 A change of attitude in regard to one or two matters 
 will be noticed if the book is compared with my pre- 
 vious ones. That is inevitable. Thought is bound to 
 correct and amplify earlier thought in matters which had 
 received inadequate consideration. But I dare to hope 
 that what change there is represents an advance. More- 
 over, I am not conscious of any radical disagreement 
 between my earlier and later reasonings. In a few 
 minor points there is disagreement, but as far as I am 
 aware, the bigger changes are rather in the direction of 
 amplification than of any real difference of view. 
 
 In this book, as in its predecessors, the existence of 
 spiritual phenomena and of a spiritual environment has 
 been assumed. One or two correspondents have raised 
 objection to the use of the word spiritual without defini- 
 tion of its exact meaning. It has been suggested that 
 the word conveys simply the same idea as personal] or 
 that it connotes mind, ideas being spiritual phenomena. 
 Considering the vagueness with which the terms spirit 
 and spiritual are generally used, it may not be out of 
 place to attempt here a definition that will make clear 
 the meaning we attribute to them in our discussions. 
 One definition that has been suggested to me is "Per- 
 sonality minus matter." This comes near the truth; but 
 if we use matter in its strict connotation, the words would 
 imply that any non-material body, such as is desider-
 
 xii Preface 
 
 ated by spiritualists and theosophists, would be spirit, 
 which I am not disposed to grant. (I do not say that 
 there is real evidence that such bodies exist, but one 
 must at least admit that their existence is possible.) If 
 we widen the mode of expression into "Personality 
 minus any limiting factor" we have to admit that by 
 self-limitation spirit lessens its spirituality, whereas 
 self-limitation is characteristic of perfect spirit. On the 
 whole I am inclined to think that we cannot get much 
 nearer to the truth than by saying that "Spirit is the 
 originative Reality that lies behind the power of self- 
 expression." 
 
 The word originative points to the creative activity 
 of spirit, and involves a judgment of values. Moreover, 
 in man the existence of judgments of value constitutes 
 a response to the spiritual environment, and substan- 
 tiates his appreciation of it as in the category of absolute 
 Reality. 
 
 Further, this definition draws attention to the self- 
 existence of the spiritual and to the implication of 
 self-expression as a necessary consequence of self-exist- 
 ence. It indicates the important truth that spirit must 
 be at least personal, without committing us to any pre- 
 mature statement that spirit is itself actually personal. 
 Finally, since objectless self-expression is an impossible 
 conception, the definition foreshadows the need for in- 
 terpenetration and sharing of the self-experience which 
 we find to be an integral quality of spiritual Being. 
 
 Among all sorts and conditions of the younger genera- 
 tion a great search is in progress. Young men and women 
 are caring for truth more than for anything else, and it 
 is a truly religious fervour which repels so many from 
 a Church whose doctrines are cast in an antiquated and 
 misleading phraseology. They do not understand 
 formulae which recall long-dead issues. They know 
 nothing of the difficulties of the early Church; they
 
 Preface xiii 
 
 know nothing of mediaeval speculations. They do 
 know the difficulties and speculations of to-day, and on 
 these official Christian formulae cast little light. Truth 
 that slew an ancient heresy is quite competent to deal 
 with a modern one, but it cannot do so by persistently 
 aiming at the spot where the old one stood and dis- 
 charging a stream of missiles at a mouldering heap of 
 dust. Let Truth turn round and face the new adver- 
 saries, let her discard the cross-bow for the rifle, and 
 she will find them as little invincible as the old. She 
 herself is clad in armour of proof, like that of magic gift 
 in fairy-lore, and nothing can harm her. Of course, as 
 long as we persist in putting a glass shade over Truth, 
 to change our metaphor, so long will our nerves be 
 shaken by the crash when it is shivered to atoms, and 
 the more foolish will cry out that Truth is shattered 
 past repair. Some of our lesser formulae are glass 
 shades verbal inspiration was one and their shatter- 
 ing is great grief to the lower middle class intellect, 
 because they conferred such distinction upon the official 
 Parlour. The admirers of glass shades do not s'ee the 
 tragedy of the younger generation who are driven from 
 their home into the garish, undesirable freedom of the 
 street by the formal symmetry of the dreary parlour, 
 opened only for chilly use on Sundays. Can we not give 
 them sound doctrine in a more acceptable shape? They 
 would welcome it. See how they greet an honest book 
 in which the deepest problems are handled with sim- 
 plicity however ignorant. They have not received 
 enough instruction to be able to recognise the tragic 
 humour of a situation which finds them so ignorant 
 that they applaud when Comte's Religion of Humanity 
 is proclaimed as the newest truth; when Kant's Thing- 
 in-Itself stalks, an unrecognised ghost, full across the 
 path'of a distracted but inattentive Hamlet who cannot 
 understand why his world is out of joint; when Lotze's
 
 xiv Preface 
 
 vindication of Personality is so completely ignored that 
 Time seems hardly yet pregnant with it; when all the 
 most indefensible blossoms of mediaeval speculation 
 have been culled and gathered into a bouquet of un- 
 approachable hideousness and labelled official Chris- 
 tianity ! So long as there is evidence of honest thought, 
 they welcome anything. Why not? In their own 
 ignorance who can expect them to be swift to mark the 
 ignorance of others? They are tired of childish lullabies. 
 What they ask is a clarion-call to thought and prayer. 
 Dare we refuse them? This book cannot begin to 
 satisfy their need, nor is it meant to. But its faults, its 
 errors, its weaknesses, its difficulties, do constitute a 
 challenge to those who are worthier to serve the younger 
 thought of England. I am certain that it is possible to 
 restate the Christian Fundamentals in terms that are 
 clear and simple, yet commend themselves under mod- 
 ern conditions ; for they are true. The way to such a new 
 formulation must be paved with hard thought, and this 
 book is but one short length of paving. Let others 
 correct and trim it, lay it more truly, pave the rest of 
 the road ; then let it be beautified, made straight and 
 pleasant, till a highway appears in which men may walk 
 surely, and way-faring men, even fools, not err therein. 
 I wish to take this opportunity of expressing my 
 gratitude for the ready help given to me in the course of 
 my work. Dr J. E. McTaggart and Canon V. F. Storr 
 have read Chapters I-III and made valuable suggestions 
 and criticisms, and they have further allowed me the 
 privilege of a full discussion of certain questions. They 
 are, however, in no way responsible for the general 
 views that are here put forward. Most of their sugges- 
 tions have been embodied, or modifications of expression 
 made to meet the points they raised. Some few, depend- 
 ing on a definite difference of standpoint, have been 
 passed over after full consideration.
 
 Preface xv 
 
 To Mrs R. B. Goodden I am indebted for several 
 valuable hints, and much suggestive criticism while the 
 writing of the book was in progress. 
 
 To my wife, my thanks are, as always, due for assist- 
 ance of every kind, and for using curb and spur as need 
 was. Her power of critical judgment, her accuracy and 
 originality of thought, have been invaluable. Besides 
 this more general assistance she further undertook the 
 dull labour of compiling the synopsis and of revising 
 the book in proof. 
 
 The blame of faults of all kinds must rest only on 
 myself, the credit of some thoughts that are of value 
 must be shared with these my friends. 
 
 S. A. McD. 
 
 WlNTON, 
 
 January 1918. 
 
 6.-
 
 SYNOPSIS 
 
 PACK 
 
 PREFACE . vii 
 
 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 Both plain man and philosopher agree as to the reality and 
 necessity of the conceptions of Immanence and Transcen- 
 dence, X 
 
 but there is divergence of opinion as to the interpretation 
 
 of the terms 3 
 
 Summary of the discussion of the matter in Evolution and 
 Spiritual Life ; which led to the conclusion that "just as God 
 is Transcendent and Immanent, so man too is transcendent 
 and immanent" . . . . . * . 3 
 
 The personal nature of God is assumed throughout this 
 book as a fundamental truth 5 
 
 Criticism of the theories expressed by the phrases "Box 
 Immanence," and "Body Immanence" or "Work Imma- 
 nence," the last being the nearest to the truth ... 7 
 
 What is Reality for God? Are time and space as real for 
 Him as for us? . . .... . ' . . .12 
 
 What is the relation of His Attributes to His Real Being? 13 
 
 The type of the Absolutely Real is the Unity of self-con- 
 sciousness; .......... 14 
 
 which involves internal differentiation .... 15 
 
 God's Attributes are seen as the projections of His Personal 
 Nature into time and space conditions .... 15 
 
 The connection between being and becoming 16 
 
 God's work can only be accomplished by the free co-opera- 
 tion of men's wills. God and men indwell the Cosmos, and to- 
 gether work out their freedom from limitation . . .18 
 
 Plurality is real. Men cannot be fragments of God, because 
 personality cannot fragment 19 
 
 Perfect penetrability will solve the difficulty of plurality in 
 
 the simultaneous 20 
 
 The problem of degrees of reality 21
 
 xviii Synopsis 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The reality of immanence is of a different kind from the 
 absolute reality of transcendence; but immanence is con- 
 tinually passing over into transcendence with the removal 
 of limitation 23 
 
 In the end man imposes self-limitation upon himself, be- 
 coming like God in so doing 24 
 
 A mathematical illustration of this truth .... 24 
 The problem of the limitation of the knowledge of God ; . 26 
 
 brought about by the existence of other wills not in line 
 with His will 28 
 
 Consideration of the difficulty involved in the idea that a* 
 Transcendent God knows everything, while as Immanent 
 His knowledge is limited 29 
 
 Ultimate Reality for God and man lies in relationship love 31 
 Recapitulation 32 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE TRIUNITY OF GOD 
 
 "Creative finalism " best describes the evolutionary process, 
 
 as it is truer to see in it tractation rather than impulsion . 36 
 
 A brief account of orthodox Christian teaching as to the nature 
 
 of the Being of God 38 
 
 (1) Our knowledge of the existence of God rests on His self- 
 revelation under conditions apprehensible to us, which 
 means, directly or indirectly, apprehensible to our reason 39 
 
 (2) Our knowledge of the nature of God, as seen in His man- 
 ward aspects, rests on our recognition of His attributes . 40 
 
 As far as God is Immanent His attributes are ideals and not 
 realities; and He moves towards them with the passing away 
 of His Immanence. His omnipotence, omniscience, etc., are 
 not complete in time and space. As Transcendent He can 
 have no Attributes, and we shall know Him eventually as 
 I AM, as Eternal Love 47 
 
 Even now, in as far as we are transcendent and capable of 
 love, we know God directly and come into immediate con- 
 tact with Him, without the mediation of His attributes . 48 
 
 (3) Our knowledge of the essential or subjective Being of God 
 rests in part upon His special revelation throughout the ages 
 to men who sought the truth single-heartedly, which revela-
 
 Synopsis xix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 lion was completed in the revelation of the Incarnation ; but 
 also in part on man's knowledge that personality can only 
 mean one thing; imperfect or perfect as may be, but 
 essentially the same; that, so, if we are persons and God is 
 Personal, we can learn His real and absolute being by learn- 
 ing our own, through the infinite projection of that self- 
 knowledge so slowly won 49 
 
 Definitions of the word hyposiasis. It is proposed to use it 
 
 in this book as almost interchangeable with ' person ' . .49 
 
 God is self-differentiated into I and Thou the Logos is be- 
 gotten of God and so is eternally His Other, . . .51 
 
 but unity is restored by the action of the Holy Spirit pro- 
 ceeding equally from Father and from Son. Being and 
 Thought are made one again in the Essential Freedom of 
 the Spirit 52 
 
 Love implies activity, functioning externally as well as 
 internally; therefore God created a world in which loving 
 beings would come to be; . . . . . . -53 
 
 and He indwells the world as Holy Spirit, ... 54 
 
 and became Incarnate in order that His Experience might 
 be wholly coincident with man's, to the end that created 
 spirits might become one with Him in love 55 
 
 Formulation of some of the difficulties that are involved in 
 
 the conception of the Holy Trinity 56 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE TRIUNITY OF MAN 
 
 Mediate knowledge of another person, be he man or God, 
 must precede immediate knowledge 59 
 
 We can argue from man's personality to that of God; man 
 
 is the microcosm of the whole of God .... 62 
 
 The existence of other beings external to a man is necessary 
 
 to his process of becoming 63 
 
 Man is creative; he is begotten; and he indwells matter . 64 
 
 The fatherhood of man . . . 65 
 
 The sonship of man ........ 67 
 
 The mediating function of man is fulfilled through his 
 body 69
 
 xx Synopsis 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The body is a means of self-manifesta,tion, both to the self 
 and to others ......... 70 
 
 The fret spirit, or principle of unity, in man 73 
 
 Spirit is immanent in matter when the matter serves as the 
 vehicle of the spirit's activities, for then the sense of the 
 otherness of the matter is lost '. . . . . -74 
 
 God can think the Cosmos as an 'other,' as a self-limitation; 
 but inasmuch as His purpose is being worked out through 
 His indwelling, it becomes no longer an 'other' but a part 
 of Himself 76 
 
 For man, matter only acquires meaning, as opposed to mere 
 otherness, when he for the time indwells it. All matter 
 acquires its meaning and purpose from the fact that it is 
 indwelt by God 77 
 
 Man can look upon himself as I and thou ; but he knows that 
 he is one, and this unity is brought about by his spirit of 
 freedom 77 
 
 Freedom to fulfil the ends willed by the self completes the 
 unity of the self 78 
 
 The three aspects of activity (fatherhood), thought (son- 
 ship) and the freedom (spirithood) that makes it possible 
 for the self to link the two first together, are as necessary 
 to man's transcendent existence as to his existence in time 
 and space .......... 80 
 
 Revelation apart, we see the necessity for the triune 
 functioning of God, in His relation to the Cosmos. The 
 creative function of the Father; the mediating function of 
 the Son; and the energising force of the indwelling Spirit . 82 
 
 Oneness is threefold, when it is the oneness of a person . 83 
 
 And each of the three aspects is necessarily hypostatised 
 when we think of it, e.g. I cannot think of myself as creative 
 merely, but as a creative being 84 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE TRIUNITY OF PERSONALITY 
 
 The psychologist finds the human mind to be threefold ; the 
 philosopher declares human personality to be threefold; the 
 Christian theologian believes Divine Personality to be 
 threefold . 86
 
 Synopsis xxi 
 
 PACK 
 
 The PSYCHOLOGIST divides the mind-states into cog- 
 nition, affection and conation ...... 87 
 
 Cognition is the act of the mind whereby it perceives and 
 associates .......... 87 
 
 Affection is the feeling or emotion which links the cognitive 
 function to the 87 
 
 Conation, the creative striving, the action, which results . 87 
 
 The element of freedom in any person resides, of course, 
 in the middle term, the affection. This term unites the 
 other two .......... 89 
 
 The three functions are always present and acting, though 
 
 one may predominate at any moment .... 89 
 
 The freedom and unity of a person depend upon this 
 threefold functioning 90 
 
 The PHILOSOPHER analyses human personality into 
 three constituents, will, intellect and emotion. Wilfrid Rich- 
 mond in his Personality as a Philosophical Principle shows 
 that in every activity of the will, intellect and emotion play 
 their part. Similarly, into every activity of the intellect, 
 will and emotion enter. And in every activity of emotion, 
 will and intellect are found. The three are inseparable parts 
 of one whole. Personality can be denned as the capacity for 
 fellowship 91 
 
 It is clear that conation is the manifestation of will, cog- 
 nition the basis of intellect, while affection emerges as 
 emotion .......... 94 
 
 The THEOLOGIAN conceives God as Father, Son and 
 Spirit. Each Person of the Godhead is not merely a mode 
 or aspect, but has all three essentials of a complete Per- 
 sonality .......... 95 
 
 There is a close connection, which we shall prove to be 
 identity, between conation, will and Fatherhood; . . 96 
 
 also between cognition, intellect and Sonship; ... 96 
 and between affection, emotion and Spirithood ... 97 
 
 Freedom resides in the emotion; the highest emotion, 
 perfect love, is perfect freedom, while the lower the 
 emotion (e.g. fear) the greater the limitation . . 99 
 
 Perfect love is an emotion of transcendence . . . 103 
 
 In the relation of the personality to itself also are found 
 these three aspects 104
 
 xxii Synopsis 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Freedom comes with the unity of three differents. Unity is 
 
 a system, which we may designate Infinite Reciprocity . 106 
 
 Each hypostasis is not merely a being, it is a person, as each 
 contains all three elements, though the emphasis is differ- 
 ently placed in each 107 
 
 The Godhead, if it is a Personality, must be in fact a 
 Unity, which unity is substantiated or determined as itself, 
 by three Persons, completely interpenetrating, yet each 
 differentiated from the others by the stress or emphasis of 
 its individual functioning ....... 108 
 
 Consideration of the difficulty that by the above reasoning 
 personalities might be split up into three persons an in- 
 definite number of times 109 
 
 Recapitulation HI 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE INCARNATION 
 
 In the past, the Divinity of Christ, rather than His 
 Humanity, was insisted upon, . . . . . .116 
 
 though recent thought has begun to swing in the opposite 
 direction, and to emphasise the doctrine of the Kenosis as 
 originally taught by St John and St Paul . . . . 117 
 
 Every human being, during pre-natal and post-natal life, 
 recapitulates, physically, mentally and spiritually, the 
 history of the evolution of the human race . . . 117 
 
 Christ, as a human being, did this too . . . .120 
 
 He identified Himself with the whole of organic life and 
 development by recapitulating it in His own experience . 124 
 
 The evolution of man has been misdirected by his own sin, 
 and we have seen reason to believe that the whole human 
 race is imbued with a taint of positive evil . . .125 
 
 Hence appears a dilemma: either Christ must have been 
 affected with the stain of humanity's misdirection of its own 
 evolution, or there must have been something not quite 
 normally human in the nature of His Manhood . .126 
 
 We are forced to reject the first alternative. Christ was 
 Perfect Man, not merely an example of the best that was 
 possible to mankind gone wrong 128
 
 Synopsis xxiii 
 
 PACK 
 
 But if Christ did not bear the burden of the misdirection of 
 the race through sin, can we say that He was completely 
 identified with fallen humanity? 131 
 
 Yes, because of His own free will he identified Himself with 
 fallen mankind. His will brought about the identification as 
 the necessary consequence of complete interpenetration. 
 His experience of isolation from God on the Cross was the 
 isolation of manhood that had failed, not of His own perfect 
 Manhood 131 
 
 The Virgin Birth symbolises the necessary break with 
 normal human inheritance which made Christ's freedom 
 from inherited disability possible . . . i . 133 
 
 A discussion of the difficulties involved in Christ's apparent 
 memory of Transcendent Existence. "Before Abraham 
 was, I am" *.- ". 136 
 
 All three Persons of the Holy Trinity are Immanent in the 
 Cosmos as well as Transcendent . . . . 136 , 
 
 The relation between the Incarnate Son and the Holy 
 Trinity 138 
 
 Bergson's theory of memory throws light on our problem of 
 Christ's memory . . . . . . . .142 
 
 As Perfect Man Christ would have a strong sense of union 
 with God, just as good and pure men mystics especially 
 have had in all ages. And inasmuch as the perfection of His 
 Manhood exceeded the imperfection of that of ordinary 
 men, so would His sense of union with God have exceeded 
 theirs, even to the extent of making it possible for Him to 
 realise real and complete union with the Father . . 144 
 
 Thus His knowledge of oneness with the Father was an 
 intuition rather than a memory, and was His in virtue of 
 His Manhood 148 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE INCARNATION 
 
 (continued) 
 
 An attempt to trace the effect of the Incarnation of the Son 
 upon His Eternal Being necessitates an inquiry into the 
 nature of memory 151 
 
 (a) Freud's theory. Every impression received by the 
 senses leaves its mark on the brain . . . . 152
 
 xxiv Synopsis 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The 'censor' in the mind represses lawless ideas. 'Re- 
 pressions' and their results (phobias and symptoms of many 
 kinds) 153 
 
 The method of psycho-analysis for discovering repression- 
 complexes, .......... 155 
 
 which can also be discovered by the interpretation of 
 dreams, since every dream is a wish-fulfilment . .156 
 
 The formation of repression-complexes can be prevented by 
 'sublimation.' i.e. by consciously directing the impulse 
 along other channels, since the danger lies in preventing its 
 discharge in some activity 157 
 
 Freud's theory is materialistic; but a mechanical basis is 
 what we should expect, as a determinate environment is 
 necessary for the emergence of free spirits . . .158 
 
 (6) Bergson divides memory into habit and pure memory, 
 
 the habit-phenomena being localised in the brain . . 159 
 
 All memory is directed towards the future . . .160 
 
 Freud, all unintentionally, admits teleology, since he states 
 that the censor is working towards an end . . .162 
 
 Freud's description of the one 'censor' does not tally per- 
 fectly with the facts of mental life. It would be truer to say 
 that each lower impulse is repressed by a corresponding 
 higher idea, so that as many ' censors ' are called into being 
 as there exist anti-social impulses to be dealt with . .164 
 
 The past is ever active in the now, yet the spirit must leave 
 past stages behind 164 
 
 The danger arising from the "conspiracy of silence" . .166 
 The place of the censor in the history of evolution . . 168 
 
 As all memories persist, and as Christ passed through all the 
 stages of a man's growth and development, therefore He is 
 as near to us in childhood as in manhood, and can enter 
 perfectly into all our experience 169 
 
 His perfect Manhood is taken up into His Godhead . . 169 
 
 Though the abstract idea of the necessity of the Incarnation 
 commends itself to man's reason, somehow the actualisation 
 of it in time (the coming of Christ in a certain year of the 
 Roman Empire) gives rise to questionings . . . .170 
 
 But these difficulties disappear before a truer view of the 
 nature of time. The Incarnation is an eternal fact . .174
 
 Synopsis xxv 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A discussion of the nature of the memory of the ascended 
 Christ 176 
 
 Can we reconcile the idea of an added experience to the idea 
 
 of a Transcendent God? 178 
 
 Is the end experienced by God even before process? . .179 
 
 The study of personality, and the doctrine of the Trinity, 
 furnish us with material for the solution of this problem . 181 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
 Chance impressions received in early childhood, especially 
 emotional shocks, have a very great effect on the mental 
 outlook of the adult 186 
 
 There exists widespread doubt as to human immortality in 
 spite of a strong yearning for life after death. This is due to 
 the unsound theological teaching prevalent, with its insist- 
 ence on the unlike ness of God and man . . . .188 
 
 Personal being both changes and persists through change . 190 
 
 If personality can be extinguished the universe is not 
 rational, for all development is crowned with the emergence 
 of personality 191 
 
 The great argument for the immortality of man lies in the 
 identity of his nature with that of God. Human transcen- 
 dence is the same as Divine Transcendence ... 194 
 
 The difficulty of accepting this idea lies in the fact that the 
 timelessness of man had a beginning, while that of God 
 always existed. But timelessness is, however, a quality of 
 bting, of personality. Does the fact that our personality is 
 in part transcendent mean that it is also immortal? . . 195 
 
 Personality in its essence connotes a threefold being; and the 
 threefold nature of man is the same as the threefold nature of 
 God, and the enduringness (timelessness) of man is the same 
 as the enduringness (timelessness) of God .... 197 
 
 The difficulty that God is uncaused, man caused, is met by 
 the contention that personality is personality whatever its 
 genesis, and that enduringness is cme of its qualities . .198 
 
 The question of memory in other possible existences; and an 
 argument against the theory of re-incarnation on earth . 201 
 
 The Doctrine of the Trinity gives a fresh cause for certainty 
 
 of our immortality 201
 
 xxvi Synopsis 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE AWAKENING OF PERSONALITY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Progress in freedom is the keynote of evolution . . 203 
 
 Man is free to choose consciously between right and wrong 
 courses of action. Christ, as Man, had to make such 
 decisions constantly 205 
 
 It seems that God must constantly renew the will to suffer 
 with His world 206 
 
 God's self-limitation, from the creation of matter to the 
 Incarnation, is one act, and the different stages cannot be 
 isolated without falling into the fallacy of dualism. Matter 
 is simply the tool of spirit; the medium through which it 
 works; the means by which growing personalities fulfil their 
 destiny. It has no objective reality apart from mind . 206 
 
 A discussion of Bergson's idea of the "inturning of the con- 
 sciousness on itself" in connection with the recurrence of 
 " closed systems " in the universe 209 
 
 True freedom lies in self -limitation; and the process of 
 winning freedom becomes identical with the process of the 
 self-imposition of laws 214 
 
 Systems tend to expand until finally there emerges the 
 fellowship of all perfected selves in perfect communion . 216 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE EVOLUTION OF TRANSCENDENCE 
 
 Recapitulation 217 
 
 The conclusion to which we are driven is that man's nature 
 and experience is the same as God's, differing only in degree. 221 
 
 Creation, to be satisfying to the creator, must lead to some- 
 thing new and something eternal 222 
 
 The evolution of transcendence is the essence of the process 224 
 
 The material in which this process takes place is the self- 
 limitation of the Transcendent God 225 
 
 To be like God, men must be self-limiting too . . . 225 
 
 When men learn to realise matter as mediating God's will, 
 they will lose all sense of its otherness, and the oppression 
 of the feeling of determination from without . . 226
 
 Synopsis xxvii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Growing control over circumstances, growing freedom, 
 characterises the process, and the end is self-limitation with 
 love as its motive ........ 226 
 
 The problem of degrees of reality and of double conscious- 
 ness for man and for God 227 
 
 God is Immanent; and experiences the temporal series . 229 
 Absolute freedom may express itself in self-limitation . 230 
 
 God is Transcendent; and experiences simultaneity. How 
 can these two experiences co-exist? . . . . .231 
 
 Man's own experience furnishes the material for a solution 232 
 
 Transcendence and Immanence are necessary correlatives of 
 each other. As God is Love, He is eternally creative and 
 therefore eternally Immanent. Nevertheless, Immanence 
 is derivative, and owes its existence to the nature of Tran- 
 scendence . 233 
 
 The question of the Transcendence of Christ during His 
 Incarnation . . . 234 
 
 God experienced the full consciousness of Christhood; 
 though Christ was not fully conscious of the Eternal series. 
 The greater included the less, not the less the greater. 
 Christ experienced real self -limitation . . . .235 
 
 In man the double consciousness exists, and we are some- 
 times aware of ourselves as transcendent beings, at other 
 times as immanent. It is a question of attention. Why 
 should this not be true of God? 238 
 
 Creativeness therefore Tri-unity is the very essence of 
 God's Being, and hence the idea of a " God before Creation " 
 is meaningless 239 
 
 Being implies process. The wholeness of the Whole realising 
 Itself as Love is perpetually re-affirmed by process. This is 
 the meaning of the statement that God is Personal, and the 
 Doctrine of the Holy Trinity is the affirmation of that basal 
 truth. Perfect freedom issuing in complete self-limitation is 
 the end of the process for man, ...... 240 
 
 the guarantee of whose immortality rests upon the nature 
 of personality, and upon the identical character of person- 
 ality in man and God 241 
 
 APPENDIX A. Note on Freud's conception of the Censor . 243 
 
 APPENDIX B. Note on some conceptions of primitive 
 religion, and their possible relation with Trinitarian 
 Doctrine * . 252
 
 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 NOTE. As suggested in the Preface, the study of this 
 chapter may be postponed with advantage until the first 
 five chapters, at any rate, have been read. 
 
 IMMANENCE and transcendence are words that must be 
 used again and again in any study directed towards the 
 fuller understanding of the problems of God and the 
 universe, for the concepts they express are essential to 
 any ultimate discussion of the facts of experience. 
 
 In the Universe we find change proceeding within the 
 realm of Time and Space. We live in a world of becom- 
 ing; and from the process of becoming we ourselves are 
 not exempt. 
 
 Yet there is within us something that will not rest 
 satisfied with a theory of mere becoming, mere change, 
 mere process. Our minds demand unity in the whole; 
 something stable that lies behind the flux of things. 
 The Many cannot bring us rest without the One. Process 
 has nothing for us unless it is directed towards an End. 
 Becoming has no real meaning without its correlative 
 Being. Time and Space, however real they may seem, 
 yet set themselves up as being in some relation of oppo- 
 sition to a far vaguer concept, in which is neither Time 
 nor Space, that lies almost unrecognised in the back of 
 our mind 1 : the concept of Simultaneity. 
 
 The intuitive grasp of these facts has its results even 
 among men who do not think deeply or clearly. Natural 
 
 1 Cf. Pringle Pattison, The Idea of God in Recent Philosophy, 
 p. 368. " If we speak of the Divine Activity as an eternal act, that 
 means for us, if we throw it, as we must, into terms of time, an act 
 which is being accomplished now, and which we are helping to 
 accomplish... the whole life of God is poured into what we call 
 our human 'Now'." et passim.
 
 2 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 religion; ready acceptance of dogmatic religion; belief 
 in th&soul and immortality; these are the offspring of 
 such vague ideas. When real thought is there the re- 
 sult is still the same ; metaphysical systems, theodicies, 
 philosophies of religion, all reflect the dual aspect of 
 Reality as being and yet becoming as becoming and 
 yet being. 
 
 The simple man who knows there is a God and the 
 philosopher who almost 1 proves His existence alike are 
 driven to conclude that He lies behind the world, behind 
 all process in some sense, as a great Creative Cause. He 
 is therefore Transcendent. 
 
 TJie simple man who knows that his life is somehow 
 guided and controlled by God, Who is near, Who is 
 more than externally omnipresent, Who is in all that 
 exists for, and happens to, a man, and the philosopher 
 who again almost 1 proves that change and process must 
 be a real part of the experience of a God Who indwells, 
 and must indwell, His created universe, are alike forced 
 to believe that God is not simply far away, but actually 
 present in His creation, Himself experiencing all the 
 changes that go on in it. God is therefore Immanent 2 . 
 
 1 Almost in both cases, for logical thought, however unassail- 
 ably accurate, starts from its unprovable postulates and axioms, 
 confirmed, but not absolutely and ultimately justified, by experi- 
 ence, without which no thought would be possible. 
 
 1 For the purposes of the present discussion I make no apology 
 for assuming the existence of God. The arguments in favour of 
 such an assumption which fall into line with the evolutionary 
 philosophy we are endeavouring to set forth will be found in my 
 Evolution and the Need of Atonement. Flint's Theism is a standard 
 work, on the more general arguments, though somewhat out of 
 date; Professor Seth's (Pringle Pattison's) books on the subject 
 are helpful, and there is a valuable summary in a few pages in 
 Lotze's Microcosmus, Bk ix. ch. iv. 2. Newest and most not- 
 able of all is Pringle Pattison's noble book on The Idea of God in 
 recent Philosophy.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 3 
 
 But when these conclusions have been reached men 
 have only touched the fringe of the problems they in- 
 volve. What do we mean by immanence and transcend- 
 ence? Do we all mean the same thing? Apparently not, 
 if we may judge by the very various doctrines that are 
 held compatible with belief in these two aspects of the 
 activity of God. One says God is Impassible, another 
 that He suffers with His creation. To one change is an 
 illusion of limited existence 1 , to another it is the reflec- 
 tion of the process by which God is making Himself 8 , to 
 another it is the expression of a kind of relaxation of the 
 limitations set upon free action by matter 8 . The exist- 
 ence of such a range of different conceptions, all acknow- 
 ledging both aspects in some measure, yet varying 
 between an emphasis on transcendence that almost 
 excludes immanence to an emphasis on immanence that 
 almost excludes transcendence, surely points to a vague- 
 ness in definition of terms that is little short of disastrous 4 . 
 
 We have dealt at some length elsewhere 6 with certain 
 aspects of the two conceptions of immanence and trans- 
 scendence and I do not propose simply to repeat the 
 arguments already used. It will be remembered that our 
 main conclusion was this. Because there is a creation, 
 and the cosmos shows many indications of order, and of 
 being a rational whole; because an ultimate standard of 
 morality is indicated; and because there appears to be 
 something that persists through change in an unchang- 
 ing self-identity, we believe that God is Transcendent. 
 Because change enters into our everyday experience, 
 
 1 Buddhism, and some forms of Hinduism. * Bergson. 
 
 1 Driesch; and, in a different manner, to a limited extent the 
 present writer. 
 
 4 A useful summary of Christian and philosophic thought on 
 the matter will be found in F. Platt's Fernley Lectures on Im- 
 manence and Christian Thought. 
 
 * Evolution and Spiritual Lift. 
 
 i a
 
 4 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 and yet is directed to an end, and is seen as purposeful 
 and progressive when regarded at large; and because 
 even our individual lives seem to be guided by some 
 influence that indwells us, yet is not ourself ; we believe 
 that God is Immanent. 
 
 If He is immanent, He must be limited by both the 
 contingency 1 and mechanism of the universe (which con- 
 tingency includes, and perhaps only includes, the effects 
 of the freedom which all organised beings present in 
 greater or less measure; while the mechanism appears 
 to be the expression of the conditions requisite for 
 development and progress). 
 
 But if He is transcendent as well, this limitation must 
 be a self-limitation, willed by Him for some end or 
 purpose; which purpose we found in the satisfaction of 
 His Being as Love through the eventual entering in of 
 other beings to share His perfect experience. 
 
 We then turned to the consideration of these created 
 beings, and found in them too, as was to be expected, a 
 persistence through change, an independence of Time 
 and Space, a permanent ego, that showed all the charac- 
 teristics of transcendence (though an imperfect trans- 
 cendence, limited by all kinds of cosmical conditions) 
 as well as finding all the phenomena of change and be- 
 coming that are characteristic of immanence. ' As was 
 to be expected,' because any being who is destined 
 eventually to share the perfect experience of God, and 
 is being prepared for it by a process of free self -creation, 
 made possible by the self-limitation of God, must surely 
 have some -point d'appui with the real and absolute 
 nature of God, as well as with that nature as revealed in 
 
 1 I use the term as a convenient mode of expressing the true 
 freedom of the activity of life, not as indicating a chasm between a 
 transcendent creative God, and free man. The immanence of God 
 cannot in fact be left out, and if He is immanent He shares the 
 human Now. Cf. Pringle Pattison, op. ci1. pp. 374-375.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 5 
 
 the processes of limitation and change. On a priori 
 grounds we should look for some such possibility of 
 relation, and this could only exist if created beings 
 possessed some measure of transcendence; and we un- 
 questionably find this. Thus we were driven to conclude 
 that just as God is transcendent and immanent, so man 
 too is transcendent and immanent ; and is passing more 
 and more from immanence to transcendence as he pro- 
 gresses. This is indeed the mark and sign of human pro- 
 gress, individual and racial. But between the imma- 
 nence and transcendence of God and man there is a dif- 
 ference, which is causal in nature. Man is not simply 
 immanent and transcendent 05 God is immanent and 
 transcendent, but also because God is immanent and 
 transcendent. 
 
 Along these lines we sought the meaning and reality 
 of eternal life, to which we shall return in the present 
 book. What is needed now is a clear statement of what 
 we mean and, equally important, of what we do not 
 mean by these two terms we so constantly use. The 
 present chapter will therefore be devoted to a definition 
 and a critique of the ideas involved in the terms imma- 
 nence and transcendence as applied to God and to man. 
 This will also entail a critique of the correlation of 
 immanence with time and space, and a discussion of 
 degrees of reality and knowledge. It is clear that any 
 adequate consideration would entail a survey of almost 
 all the material of metaphysic. No such ambitious 
 attempt will be made here. We shall only endeavour to 
 clarify our ideas, and narrow the limits of discussion by 
 indicating clearly the boundaries. 
 
 Evidently, we are making in all this the assumption 
 that God is Personal. And indeed that assumption will 
 be found to be the very starting point of our inquiry, 
 and, except incidentally, we shall offer no justification 
 of it. Since Lotze wrote his Microcosmus the conception
 
 6 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 has been placed on a firm basis of thought, and by now 
 very many of the greatest minds admit that this con- 
 ception, which constitutes the very groundwork of 
 religion (even though later, abstract speculations may 
 have masked it in some quarters), is justifiable on 
 metaphysical grounds; while I would make bold to say 
 that hardly one is uninfluenced by it 1 . The chief meta- 
 physical difficulty of belief in Divine Personality is that 
 to think of the Ego is at once to think of the Non-Ego 
 of something outside the Personality. Lotze escapes the 
 difficulty by distinguishing between thought and ex- 
 perience, thus getting away from the Hegelian stand- 
 point. "We admit that the Ego is thinkable only in 
 relation to the Non-Ego, but we add that it may be ex- 
 perienced, previous to and out of every such relation, 
 and that to this is due the possibility of its subsequently 
 becoming thinkable in that relation 2 ." Lotze elaborates 
 this proposition by showing that, though the actions of 
 finite personalities depend on external stimuli, the con- 
 
 1 For those who wish for something on a smaller scale than 
 Lotze's Microcosmus, F. B. Jevons's Personality and Harte's The 
 Philosophical Treatment of Divine Personality may serve as good 
 introductions the former dealing mainly with the concepts of 
 personality, the latter with its extension to the personality of God. 
 Illingworth's Personality, Human and Divine is a standard book ; 
 Platt's Immanence and Christian Thought, Driesch's Problem of 
 Individuality, Haldane's Mechanism, Life and Personality are all 
 suggestive in their own departments; and many other works 
 might be cited. Most important of all, perhaps, is W. Richmond's 
 Essay on Personality as a Philosophical Principle. Professor 
 Pringle Pattison's Gifford Lectures, The Idea of God in Recent 
 Philosophy, which have appeared since the bulk of this book was 
 written, should be in the hands of every serious student. The 
 implications of personality are there dealt with very fully. 
 
 1 Microcosmus, Bk ix. Ch. iv. p. 680, trs. Hamilton and Jones. 
 This Chapter, together with Bk n, Ch. v., should be read carefully 
 by the student of Personality.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 7 
 
 tent of their feelings and sensations, and hence the/orw 
 of their activities, is purely self-determined from with- 
 in 1 . The need of external stimulus is due to the limita- 
 tion of finite personality, and is not inherent in person- 
 alty per se. Personality is an ideal, and like all ideals 
 pertains in its unconditioned form only to the Infinite*. 
 In the present work we shall attempt to extend Lotze's 
 conception of self-conditioned personal activity, and to 
 show that it involves a triunity of functioning, that is 
 present even in human beings, and that supplies the 
 ground of reciprocity which is essential to a personal 
 being. In this way we shall be able more or less to avoid 
 Lotze's divorce between thought and experience, for we 
 shall see that the triune self can think itself as its own 
 other, and indeed that this self-thought is in itself a 
 necessary part of its experience. From such a concep- 
 tion, the step to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not 
 a long one. 
 
 It is desirable then that we start with the definition 
 of immanence and a discussion of its problems, for since 
 we assume a God, on other grounds, the definition of 
 transcendence will largely formulate itself, by implica- 
 tion, as we proceed. 
 
 The moment we conceive of God as immanent in His 
 creation two main classes of problems appear and de- 
 mand solution problems of His Activity, and problems 
 of Relativity. 
 
 We may call these the conative and the epistemo- 
 logical problems, since Action involves Will, and Re- 
 lativity involves degrees of reality and hence God's 
 knowledge of process. 
 
 Let us take action first. 
 
 God created the universe and indwells it. What do 
 
 1 Cf . the discussion on the freedom of emotion, injra, ch. iii. pp. 
 100-103. 
 1 Microcosmus, Bk IX. pp. 683 seqq.
 
 8 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 we mean by this statement? Do we mean that the whole 
 universe is, as it were, an assortment of strangely mixed 
 phenomena packed together in a box which is God? 
 Does the universe exist in God only? Is it all a manifes- 
 tation of Him? For this is really what immanence 
 means for the pantheist. If so, either it is His complete 
 manifestation, in which case transcendence goes, and 
 we have pure pantheism; or else it does not manifest 
 Him fully, in which case something lies behind His 
 transcendence with which we should seem to be alto- 
 gether out of touch, since it does not enter into the 
 phenomenal world at all. Of course, a third alternative 
 is possible, even on this view. We may say that we have 
 in ourselves something transcendent, that enables us 
 to reach out beyond the phenomenal universe and make 
 contact with His transcendence; but really this begs the 
 question. If we make any such assumption we assume 
 in fact that there is a part of us which God does not in- 
 dwell, which is outside Him, which does not exist in 
 Him only, yet, ex hypothesi, is created by Him. In 
 making this assumption 1 we have really got away from 
 the pure form of what we may term the Box-Immanence 
 theory. At present it is needless to discuss the issues 
 involved in any of these possibilities, for the theory 
 itself is radically unsound, as we shall see. 
 
 The other alternative we may term the theory of 
 Body-Immanence or Work-Immanence. According to 
 this view God in creating was limited by the nature of 
 what He had to create. Since the object of creation 
 was the emergence of free beings who should freely 
 enter into and share His perfect Experience of Love, the 
 creation must be of such a nature that freedom could 
 emerge, since freedom cannot be itself created directly, 
 
 1 Which undoubtedly does express one aspect of the truth, as 
 far as its emphasis on human transcendence is concerned, though 
 on the immanental side it is open to grave objection.
 
 Preliminary Considerations g 
 
 from its very nature. Compulsory freedom would not 
 be freedom at all, and the creation of freedom would in- 
 volve compulsion, and so, a contradiction. 
 
 If freedom is to emerge, it must emerge from deter- 
 mination, and hence the essence of creation must be 
 limitation. 
 
 Now if all Reality is comprehended in the experience 
 of God, and if, for the sake of simplifying argument, and 
 fully recognising the contradictory and really meaning- 
 less 1 assumption involved, we imagine, not a time but 
 a state, when nothing existed save God only, that 
 creation, in so far as it is real, must be a limitation of 
 part of His experience, and so a self-limitation, since 
 His whole experience is Himself 8 . (Of the nature of this 
 self-experience of God we shall have more to say here- 
 after, and we shall further see that our argument holds 
 good, whether there be other beings sharing that experi- 
 ence, or God alone.) 
 
 As freedom emerges in the creature and becomes more 
 and more perfected, the will of the creature becoming 
 in greater harmony with the Will of the Creator, the 
 self-limitation of God is done away. Thus it becomes 
 true in a sense to call the Universe the Body of God. For 
 a body is at once a limitation, a means by which freedom 
 is achieved, and a means of self -manifestation to others ; 
 the body is indwelt by the self or spirit ; yet it is not that 
 self, but rather the material through which the self works 
 the expression of the fact that the self is limited. 
 
 But such a view is very incomplete. It is true that 
 the Universe may be conceived as the Body of God; 
 His limitation ; the means by which He regains freedom; 
 and His self-manifestation. But fragments of it are also 
 actually the bodies of other spirits men subserving 
 
 1 Vide infra, p. 12 and ch. viii. pp. 239-240. 
 1 For a discussion of the reality of the cosmos see pp. 41-44, 
 et passim.
 
 io Preliminary Considerations 
 
 these same functions for them. Indeed in a wider sense 
 we may speak of all those parts of the whole universe of 
 which a man is conscious as being his body ; and I am 
 doubtful whether we are even justified in introducing the 
 qualifying clause. Each man is probably affected in some 
 degree by the whole universe, whether he is conscious 
 of the fact or no, and it is probably wiser to make the 
 fuller statement at once and say that in the widest sense 
 the whole universe is the body of each man in it, even 
 though he has his own fragment of it as his individual 
 body, in the common acceptation of the term. 
 
 Again, here at once we find ourselves involved in the 
 idea of reciprocity, which lies at the heart of the pro- 
 blems we have to consider. For, when we speak of the 
 Universe as the Body of God, we imply that it is, among 
 other things, a means of His self-manifestation. Mani- 
 festation to whom? Obviously to other beings; He has 
 no need to manifest Himself in limited form to Himself. 
 The very use of the term body involves us in the idea of 
 relationship with other beings. Further, we have seen 
 that, if we give the widest meaning to the concept of 
 body, this same universe is the body of these other beings 
 (who are yet, ex hypothesi, other, and so not parts of God), 
 much of it being common to all such beings, while each 
 has his individual body or body proper a thing pecu- 
 liar to himself, and yet a part of the universe, or larger 
 body, of all other beings which is his means of mani- 
 festing himself to other human beings and to God. If we 
 adopt this body-symbol, we have therefore to face such 
 problems as those of the existence of individual bodies ; 
 of a greater body common in the main to all, of which 
 the individual body is a part (in other words we have to 
 look on the sum-total of the material environment as 
 the body of each man, while admitting that a certain 
 part of that environment becomes specialised and sub- 
 ordinated to his use as the body of common parlance) ;
 
 Preliminary Considerations \ I 
 
 of the difficult question of whether the whole universe is 
 the individual body of God (which really lands us again 
 in Box-immanence and also in a contradiction) ; and of 
 the host of enigmas that present themselves in regard 
 to the relation of this body of God to the bodies of men. 
 
 It will be well, therefore, to avoid this term, in spite 
 of its obvious suggestiveness. Now I am well aware that 
 a good many of the problems that present themselves 
 are in the last resort problems of terminology. The 
 word body has such a very definite connotation that any 
 extension of its meaning however justifiable, however 
 really implicit in the very conception of a body, as 
 ordinarily understood, must bring many quite needless 
 difficulties; just as the conceptions of idealism bring us 
 up against all the apparent objections that everyday, 
 phenomenal existence presents. If therefore another 
 expression can be found less ' polarised ' in its meaning, 
 and at the same time freer from the objections that 
 obtrude themselves when we are driven to speak of a 
 body which is common to many beings, and of which 
 different parts have different degrees of mediateness in 
 their relation to different beings, it will be desirable to 
 use it. Such a term, I think, may be found in the phrase 
 Work-Immanence, and to this term we shall adhere, 
 even though it will involve a consideration of the rela- 
 tion between the body and the work. 
 
 What, then, do we mean by Work-Immanence, and 
 what is the radical unsoundness of the conception of 
 Box-Immanence? Very simply, we mean by Work- 
 Immanence, that the phenomenal and noumenal uni- 
 verse is not wholly within God a part or even a mani- 
 festation of His Being 1 but is rather something which 
 
 1 The Universe, as His creation, must be a manifestation of His 
 Nature and His Being, but it is primarily the medium created for 
 self-manifestation of the created, finite centres of being we call 
 men. The implications of this fact will be discussed later.
 
 12 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 He creates as the means of realising the emergence of 
 free beings, which is itself the purpose of His Creation. 
 The Universe is His work; it is, naturally, within His 
 experience, but it is not merely a part of Himself. It is 
 the expression of the fact that He has limited Himself; 
 it is the region of His experience in which He is under- 
 going process or becoming, and in which He is therefore 
 in duration, at least, and probably in space. At the same 
 time we must guard very carefully against any spatial 
 conception of immanence itself, or we shall be landed 
 once more in the box difficulty. 
 
 At this point it is clear that we are up against the 
 problems of Reality and of Knowledge, as well as the 
 problems of Time and Space. Is the experience of be- 
 coming the immanental experience as real for God as 
 His transcendent experience? Are time and space as 
 real for Him as for us? What is Reality for God? Is His 
 knowledge complete in the immanent sphere? Such are 
 a few of the questions that confront us. 
 
 Let us begin with Reality. In order to get a clear 
 view of the nature of the issues we will begin with the 
 same contradictory and really meaningless 1 assumption 
 that there was a state when God existed alone, before 
 any creation. What would Reality mean then for God? 
 Clearly, His self-experience. Of the nature of this self- 
 experience we shall have much to say in the succeeding 
 chapters, and we shall see that it involves a Trinitarian 
 
 1 Meaningless, because it implies a before and after in the trans- 
 cendent experience of God, which experience is essentially simul- 
 taneous it introduces a time-element into absolute Being. Con- 
 tradictory because it implies a creative will which only became 
 active at a certain moment, and so introduces change into the 
 nature of God. God is Cause of the Cosmos only because the Cos- 
 mos as a whole is the expression of the nature of His Being as Love, 
 which term implies activity and the existence of 'otherness.' 
 The fact that God is eternally creative does not, of course, affect 
 the obvious truth that this universe had a beginning.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 13 
 
 conception of the Godhead. Now God is revealed in the 
 Cosmos as possessed of Will, Power, Activity, Wisdom, 
 Righteousness, Eternity, Love. Either these are attri- 
 butes, representing simply His relations to the limited 
 world He has created, in which case we are left with the 
 hopeless difficulty of the Kantian Thing-in-Itself, un- 
 knowable, the bare formlessness that remains when 
 the attributes are stripped away or else in some way 
 they are expressions of His Real Nature. Anyhow, as 
 they stand, they are the characteristics which we should 
 postulate of an Eternal Personality, for they underlie 
 that capacity for fellowship which is the most satis- 
 factory definition of personality 1 , as we shall see later. 
 Unquestionably some of these terms do represent His 
 relation to other beings in the Universe of His creation ; 
 certain of them are normative, for instance, and these 
 are not for Himself, but for His creatures. On the other 
 hand it is clear that such terms as Eternity and Love 
 are for Himself as well as for His creatures. They are 
 absolute, not normative, and so are not attributes in 
 any exact sense. How then are we to escape from the 
 Kantian ding-an-sich? The attributes of God are cer- 
 tainly the manifestation, or rather the projection, of His 
 real nature into a cosmos that is in time and space, and 
 so is becoming. Nevertheless though they are attributes, 
 whose meaning is not for the Transcendent God, but for 
 His creatures 2 , and for Himself as immanently related 
 to His creatures; they are also the expression of His 
 Real and Eternal Being. Although we, in so far as 
 we are immanent, can only know Him through His 
 attributes, we are not thereby cut off from all knowledge 
 of Himself, for these represent the time and space 
 equivalent of His Real and Eternal Being. Moreover, 
 as we shall see 8 , we have a link with His Real and Time- 
 
 1 W. Richmond, Essay on Personality as a Philosophical Prin- 
 ciple. * See ch. i. pp. 40-49. ' Ch. vi.
 
 14 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 less Being, through our own transcendence; and the 
 experience which this brings confirms our belief that 
 even through His attributes we achieve true, if incom- 
 plete, knowledge of the Absolute God. 
 
 If, then, God is Eternal Love, He is Eternal Recipro- 
 city; and Wisdom, Knowledge, Righteousness, Power, 
 Activity, Will, are simply the manifestations of this 
 Love in the sphere of becoming. For Love is active; 
 does involve will, knowledge, goodness, directed to- 
 wards, and existing for, any beings who are 'other' than 
 God, and who cannot as yet enter into the full recipro- 
 city with Him that is implied in the term Perfect Love. 
 
 Now the type of the Absolutely Real is the unity of 
 self-consciousness. There is nothing so real, nothing 
 that conveys to us such a sense of absoluteness and 
 finality as the fact that I am, I will and I love, and that 
 I know that I am, I will, and I love. My will becomes 
 translated into action, and much of this action is in- 
 compatible with love as yet ; but even to ordinary men 
 with ordinary vision, love has a stability and value that 
 nothing else has. Through love we get away from time 
 altogether, and forget its very existence. 
 
 For our hypothetical God-before-a-Cosmos then, we 
 are driven to define ultimate Reality as the experience 
 of self-consciousness. 
 
 The realisation of such an experience, however, in- 
 volves a contradiction if we think of God as a pure Unity 
 without internal differentiation. A unity cannot be in 
 any sense reciprocative or indeed active, or anything 
 else at all but blank unity. God cannot be, or even ex- 
 perience, Love, if He is purely One, for He cannot love 
 Himself; there is no room for the reciprocity which is 
 the essential condition of love ; and hence He cannot be 
 Personal. If we assume that He is One and yet Personal 
 (that is to say, if we add to the concept of unity some- 
 thing else) we are still in a difficulty, for He ceases, i-pso
 
 Preliminary Considerations 15 
 
 facto, to be self-existent. For what does this added con- 
 cept of personality mean but a reciprocity between God 
 and beings outside Himself? Only by taking the reci- 
 procity as internal can we make Him at once personal and 
 self -existent 1 . And internal reciprocity involves a dif- 
 ferentiation within the Godhead, which brings us once 
 more to the confines of Trinitarian doctrine; and it is 
 along these lines that we shall, and must, seek the solu- 
 tion of the problem. We have the fact before us that 
 the most real thing for us is the unity of self-conscious- 
 ness. We find that this unity involves an internal differ- 
 entiation. A similar differentiation must also exist in 
 ourselves, if we are truly self-conscious and self -existent, 
 apart from our relations with others and we shall find 
 that it does in fact exist. Knowing, then, that it exists 
 in ourselves, we find less inherent difficulty in postula- 
 ting its existence in the God Whom common experience 
 tells us to be Personal. 
 
 With this assumption the difficulty of the ding-an-sich 
 goes, as we have said, for the attributes of God become 
 simply the projection of His Personal nature into time 
 and space conditions, and are true d-jravy cur para, reveal- 
 ing Him as the source of Radiance ; but further, as we 
 shall see, the very fact that we too are personal beings 
 gives us immediate reciprocal relations with His Trans- 
 cendent Personality, because all personal being is, in 
 itself, essentially transcendent in so far as it is truly 
 personal; and so we are not dependent solely on our 
 experience of God's attributes for our knowledge of Him. 
 
 Not God's Will, not even His Purpose, but Himself 
 indwells the cosmos. Immanence is the result of creative 
 
 1 It is for the purpose of establishing the need for internal 
 differentiation within the Godhead, if the Godhead is to be self- 
 existent, as it must be, that we have considered the abstract and 
 impossible conception of God-before-creation. Of course, as has 
 already been said, God must really be eternally creative.
 
 1 6 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 will, of purposive control, but it is neither, but some- 
 thing far more God's very Self manifested under self- 
 imposed conditions of limitation, whose existence is the 
 guarantee of love and purpose. 
 
 If, then, Absolute Reality is for God again the God- 
 before-creation the experience of the unity of self-con- 
 sciousness, what are we to say of the plurality that is 
 introduced by His creative activity? What is the rela- 
 tion of God to His Work? What is the connection 
 between being and becoming? Putting the problem in a 
 somewhat different form, is the equation / = / neces- 
 sarily true under all conditions? 
 
 I think a rough analogy may help us here. When 
 Pygmalion set to work he had first to obtain the 
 necessary material. He then shaped out the statue ; this 
 was the expression of his purpose his work, in the 
 ordinary conception of the term. Last of all the legend 
 tells of the creation of Galatea herself in the perfect 
 guise he had framed for her ; a coming that was the final 
 triumph of the activity of his personal will. 
 
 In a sense the marble was real, the statue was real, 
 and Galatea real ; but we instinctively recognise that we 
 have to deal with three very different kinds of reality 
 when we speak of the material, the work, and the 
 personal being. 
 
 The analogy is a very rough one, but it serves its pur- 
 pose in helping us to define our terms. It fails in these 
 two respects; Pygmalion's marble the material is 
 taken for granted; and the entry of spirit into Galatea, 
 though led up to by the work of many gradations of 
 urgent desire, was itself effected in a moment. In con- 
 sidering the problem of Reality which is inseparable 
 from the problem of Immanence we have to face the 
 origin of the material universe and the gradual emer- 
 gence of the free spirits which crown the work in which 
 the work finds its fruition as well as the work itself.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 1 7 
 
 Now, if we assume, as we have done elsewhere 1 , that 
 Eternal Love is of necessity externally creative, in order 
 that it may realise its self-abnegating nature through 
 other beings who may enter into and share the perfect 
 experience, it is clear that a dualism must be created, at 
 any rate in Time; for we have seen that to love, the 
 creature must be free, and to be free he must be placed 
 in conditions out of which he can win freedom. Further, 
 as long as there is anything of the clash of wills which 
 such conditions make possible between God and men, 
 and between men themselves, there must be plurality. 
 When men become perfect; their wills in full accord 
 with God's will; their love, like God's 2 , a perfect self- 
 abnegation ; their experience the same as God's a per- 
 fect reciprocity; dualism goes, and plurality vanishes 
 into, or rather is included in, a fuller unity 8 . Until then 
 there is the cosmos of God's self-limitation. This is the 
 material of His work 4 . 
 
 In this cosmos is order, purpose, form; progress to- 
 wards freedom under the urging of the vital impulse 
 is manifest; there is that reduction or release of the 
 bonds of determination which Driesch calls entelechy. 
 This form, or order, we may compare roughly to the 
 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life, passim. 
 
 1 Vide infra, ch. vii. * Evolution and Spiritual Life, ch. vi. 
 
 * A caveat may here be entered against the easy idealism which, 
 accepting over-eagerly the physical reasoning by which matter is 
 refined down and down till it is ultimately represented by stresses 
 in an all-pervading something, passes far ahead of legitimate 
 inference, and argues that matter is not matter at all, and that, by 
 an infinite fining-down of matter, we shall reach only spirit Matter 
 is matter, even if it is not so lumpy as we used to think, and to call 
 it spirit will not make it any the less matter. What this matter 
 is we do not know, and shall not till the coming of the Coccigrues. 
 All that we may say legitimately is, that it is the expression of 
 God's self-limitation, that it is radically unlike spirit, in that it is 
 not free; that it is the material of God's work and of man's.
 
 1 8 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 statue. It is something different from, and more than, 
 the mere material, on the basis of which it is framed; 
 as the shape grows more defined we see a reflection of 
 the creative mind; it is the creator's work. But until 
 the free spirit comes into it, it is incomplete, and the 
 Creator's will and desire, which prompted the work, 
 remain unsatisfied. 
 
 Let us repeat. We have before seen reason to define 
 matter or better, Nature as the expression of God's 
 self-limitation 1 . It is because God has limited Himself 
 that the achieval of freedom out of determined condi- 
 tions is possible for His creatures. His self-limitation, 
 then, provides the material. 
 
 But when we regard the work we have to recognise 
 that two factors come in ; God, indwelling and inspiring 
 His creation, and the free spirits that come to be in the 
 world. Both of these are formative principles ; the final 
 product the human person depends on the one as the 
 environment, on the other as the developing organism 
 or to speak more truly, the developing spirit. The 
 immanence of God is thus closely linked with the im- 
 manence of man, as we see again and again. (Fuller dis- 
 cussion of this point may be reserved till we consider 
 the immanence and transcendence of man.) In other 
 words the completion the coming of living spirit is 
 a gradual process, determined primarily no doubt by 
 the urgent, loving Will of God, even as Galatea came in 
 response to the yearning of Pygmalion, but yet itself 
 the free response of a free impulse in the 'work.' Thus 
 it becomes clear that the Pantheists are in a measure 
 right, in so far as the material of the Universe is within 
 the experience of God as the expression of His self- 
 limitation, but they are wofully wrong in so far as the 
 universe itself is the work of free spirits as well as of God, 
 and is not altogether a part of God. The material is in 
 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life, p. 168.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 19 
 
 God's experience, and He indwells it, but it is in man's 
 too, and he indwells it. The work is God's as He frees 
 Himself from His self-limitation, but it can only be 
 brought to completion through the free cooperation of 
 men's wills; the work is man's too, as he frees himself 
 from eternal limitation. 
 
 Is man in God, then? or will he be when all is com- 
 pleted? Is pantheism thus far true? Obviously, no; 
 and for the same reason that the Box-Immanence 
 theory is impossible. The type of absolute Reality and 
 Unity is self-consciousness-personality and person- 
 ality cannot fragment 1 . If the doctrine of pantheism 
 were true the universe would be a fragment of God, the 
 work would be a fragment of God, men would be frag- 
 ments of God and the unity of God's personality 
 would be lost. God's personality would be only in 
 process of becoming, or, at best, there would be a 
 perpetual alternation of kenosis and fulfilment ; an aim- 
 less activity ; the systole and diastole of a cosmic heart- 
 beat that led to no true activity, because to no end. 
 There would only be potential unity. God, by creating, 
 
 1 But the student of abnormal psychology may object that we 
 do actually meet with the fragmentation of personalities in the 
 pathological condition known as dissociation. I think the answer 
 lies in the fact that the state is pathological. There is a failure 
 of coordination among the neurones which leads to an alternation 
 in the phases of manifestation of the personality. One part and 
 then another predominates. But the failure is in the mechanism, 
 as is shown by the fact that the mechanism can be set right by 
 suitable treatment. Moreover, the cases themselves show clearly 
 enough that although the memory of one phase may be absent 
 from consciousness during another, as in the case of Miss Beau- 
 champ, it yet acts as a determining factor working in the sub- 
 conscious. The memories of one state are, I think, never wholly 
 absent : they can be evoked and brought into consciousness under 
 hypnosis, and on this fact is based the treatment which leads to 
 the restoration of the normal state.
 
 2O Preliminary Considerations 
 
 would have ceased to be transcendent, and so, would 
 have ceased to be God at all. The apparent unity of 
 man, too, would be merely the unity of an atom, while 
 yet purposive unity must be postulated of each man, 
 because after all man does not exist merely in a world 
 of his own, but is capable of acting on others, in con- 
 sequence of his unity, in such a way that apparent 
 cosmical order is produced : the Universe, as a whole, 
 manifesting orderly activity and indicating one Univer- 
 sal Truth. No such tissue of contradictions can' be 
 maintained for a moment. If God ever was Personal, 
 He must remain Personal, in spite of a Created Cosmos; 
 personality is the one stable thing, that cannot cease 
 nor fragment. The universe is the material of God's 
 work and of man's work too. It is created by God for 
 the purpose of the work, and He indwells it. It limits 
 Him, and is the expression of limitation in His experi- 
 ence. It is externally objective for Him as well as for 
 us, in so far as external objectiveness strictly means 
 not-self, and so, limiting-self. 
 
 True, objectiveness has another meaning which is 
 often confused with this here we reach the second part 
 of the question we have just asked Is man in God, then? 
 Other selves are probably objects even to a transcendent 
 self, when they are themselves transcendent. But their 
 objectiveness does not constitute an external plurality, 
 for they are perfectly penetrable. A is A and B is B; 
 but A can wholly place himself at the view-point of B, 
 and B of A there is no externality in the relation, even 
 though the 4-ness of A and the B-ness of B remain in 
 their self -identity. Paradoxical though this may seem, 
 we shall find it true even within the circle of a single 
 personality. I can think myself as my own object; and 
 this fact has a far deeper significance than is generally 
 recognised. 
 
 Immanence is thus seen as the Consequence of a
 
 Preliminary Considerations . 21 
 
 Ground. The Ground is the Transcendent God, Whose 
 Nature is Love eternally. The consequence is perpetual 
 creative self-limitation immanence. Creation is not 
 merely the effect produced by a Causal God, for it is the 
 expression of His very Nature. Because He is what He 
 is, perpetually-renewed creation expresses His activity 
 of Love creation means limitation, limitation, im- 
 manence. Because God is Transcendent, He must be- 
 come Immanent. 
 
 Having thus reached the conception of an immanence 
 in a Work which is itself seen as the collaboration of men 
 with God in working out His Will, we turn next to the 
 problem of degrees of reality, and to the question, not yet 
 touched upon, of whether the equation 7 = / is univer- 
 sally valid, so that we may fit these two matters into 
 their position in the doctrines of immanence and trans- 
 cendence. Then, after a few words about the immanence 
 and transcendence of man, we shall be ready to attempt 
 a conspectus of the widely diffused matters with which 
 we have been concerning ourselves, in the hope of 
 achieving some clear ideas which will guide us in our 
 further investigations. 
 
 Some retraversing of the ground is here unavoidable, 
 if we are to make our thought lucid. We have already 
 indicated that the type and expression of absolute 
 Reality is the experienced unity of self-consciousness. 
 This experience is essentially transcendent, for it is of 
 the nature / = I and has no innate relations of change 
 or becoming ; though it has the internal relation of re- 
 ciprocity as an essential feature, the self being its own 
 object, as is implied in the term self-consciousness. We 
 have seen that if God is Love, the need of external 
 activity is at least intelligible, if not (as I think it is) 
 necessarily involved. At any rate we have the fact 
 that there is a cosmos, and that this does represent an 
 external activity of God, since the pantheistic interpre-
 
 22 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 tation is not valid. This external activity involves the 
 creation of a work-material which is the expression 
 of God's self-limitation. But in the very idea of a 
 material lies the complete negation of reciprocity. The 
 material is a part of God's experience in which reci- 
 procity, and consequently Reality of the kind we have 
 called absolute, is absent. Yet the limitation, or 
 material, is real for God. We find thus two different 
 types of Reality, whose relations become clear as we con- 
 sider the work for which the material serves and exists. 
 This work is process or becoming, and with it space 
 and time appear as implications, for external material 
 involves extensity; process involves duration; and ex- 
 tensity and duration together produce what we call 
 space. The work is shared by God and men ; and there- 
 fore it is clear that God too is becoming. This is, after 
 all, the idea that lies at the root of the doctrine of im- 
 manence. Is this becoming in duration and extensity 
 real for Him? Unquestionably; if not, it is not real for 
 us either, and thought becomes impossible, action 
 valueless 1 . But it is real in a sense that obviously differs 
 from absolute Reality. The unity of perfect self-con- 
 sciousness is not there, both because there is limitation 
 and because there is plurality. We have already argued, 
 however, that, because persons are interpenetrating, 
 the process, the plurality, and the limitation, will cease 
 when all are perfected and transcendent. Reality will 
 then again be absolute for God, and for men as well ; for 
 it will be, once more, the unity of perfect reciprocity, 
 which is absolute Reality. (Of course, God has not 
 ceased to experience absolute Reality inasmuch as He 
 remains Transcendent; it is immanence, and all that 
 this implies, that is only relatively real for Him.) God 
 is Love; in those three words is the whole of ultimate 
 truth ; God ; the cause of all : God is ; the absolute of 
 1 See note on Degrees of Reality, ch. i. pp. 42-44.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 23 
 
 Transcendent Being : God is Love ; the whole doctrine of 
 unity in reciprocity, of the Holy Trinity, of creative 
 activity, of self-abnegation are implicit in this one sen- 
 tence; and the present book, with its predecessors, may 
 claim to be a brief and feeble commentary on this one 
 little statement of all the Christian creed. 
 
 Our point at present is, that the Reality of Immanence 
 is for God (and as we shall see, for man also) not merely 
 of a different degree, but of a different kind from the 
 Absolute Reality of Transcendence. But inasmuch as 
 His Immanence is continuously passing back into His 
 Transcendence, with the removal of the limitations set 
 by the opposition of men's wills and their lack of reci- 
 procity, immanent Reality is constantly passing over 
 into absolute Reality. 
 
 This conception involves the problem of whether 
 absolute Reality is receiving addition, and if so, whether 
 the term absolute is applicable at all. The consideration 
 of this we will postpone for a few pages. 
 
 Turning to man, we find the same passing of imma- 
 nence into transcendence with the coming of full self- 
 consciousness, and we see that an internal reciprocity 
 is involved in the self-consciousness of man as well as in 
 that of God, since man too thinks himself as his own 
 object 1 . Again we find the material, which for man, too, 
 is a limitation for freedom can only be won, as we have 
 repeatedly insisted, out of limitations. Again we find 
 the work, the creative shaping of life's plan, which is the 
 moulding of the spirit in time and space. Again there 
 is the growing self-experience which leaves time and 
 change behind ; the / that simply is. Thus at first sight 
 all appears the same as for God. 
 
 But it is not so. The limitation of the immanent stage 
 in man is not a self -limitation, but primarily a limita- 
 tion that comes from without. Only with growing self- 
 1 Vide infra, ch. iii.
 
 24 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 knowledge, growing union with God, does it become in 
 any degree imposed from within. It only becomes a 
 self-limitation of the same kind as God's self-limitation, 
 in self-surrendering, self-sacrificing Love. In this man 
 shows his Godhead even on earth. The only other form 
 of limitation willed by man is sin; and sin is the surren- 
 der of self to the bonds of external things. In sin I am 
 not the captain of my soul. As soon as we set up codes 
 which may not be transgressed because they represent 
 our growing sense of union with God, we begin to grow 
 more like Him in that we impose self-limitation, and 
 concurrently, free ourselves from the chains of circum- 
 stance. Doubtless when we enter into the perfect ex- 
 perience of reciprocal union with Him, we shall enter 
 into His everlasting self-abnegation of creative self- 
 limitation if it really be everlasting, as seems neces- 
 sarily the case. Then indeed shall we be like God; one 
 with Him in Perfect Love. As yet we can be united with 
 Him in so far as we are transcendent ; but our experience 
 of immanence is not the same as His. For us, immanent 
 experience starts as the only reality ; only gradually do 
 we discover that, though real within its 'own sphere, it 
 has nothing absolute about it, and cannot, hence, be 
 part of the Ultimate Reality of the transcendent sphere. 
 
 7 = / is, then, the expression of the nature of trans- 
 cendent experience. It is finally true in the sphere of the 
 Absolute, and is a complete statement of the nature of 
 absolute Reality (for the ' / ' implies all the qualities of 
 personality, which in the long run can be summed up 
 in the one word Love 1 ). 
 
 But the equation does not hold good when the limita- 
 tion of creation has come to pass. 7 C < 7 where 7 C 
 stands for the 7 limited by creation, 7 for the wholly 
 transcendent self, for limitation has come in. The 
 perfect reciprocity and perfect unity are done away for 
 1 Since personality is capacity for fellowship.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 25 
 
 the time in one region of the self-experience (though 
 God does not cease to be transcendent, because in the 
 cosmos He is immanent). This symbolic statement is, 
 however, incomplete, for it is static, and does not repre- 
 sent the dynamic nature of immanence. This we may 
 express by saying that / = / (/) that the immanent 
 / is a function of the transcendent 7 1 . For us the great 
 point is that the initial transcendent Reality is perfect 
 reciprocity, and the perpetual cycle of creation returns 
 to this again. The absolute experience of God is no 
 fuller; only, others share it. For consider. In perfect 
 reciprocity there is complete self-abnegation, complete 
 sharing of experience 2 . Nothing new is introduced by 
 the entry of others to share this experience; nor even by 
 the entry of God into conditions of pain and limitation, 
 since there is self-abnegation eternally in the self-rela- 
 tions of a God who is Love. (Death has no transcendent 
 analogue; it is purely a phenomenon of limitation in 
 time and matter, and is merely an extension of self- 
 sacrifice. It is a stage, a crisis of life, not life's ending.) 
 
 1 I am not sure that a competent mathematician could not 
 formulate an equation expressing the rate of change of / c towards 
 /, in terms of the relation between organism and environment, and 
 the pari passu removal of God's self -limitation an equation of 
 becoming that would be suggestive though it must be funda- 
 mentally remote from the truth, since no equation can take count 
 of contingency, and freedom begins as contingency, even if it ends 
 as harmonious self-determination. The equation would perhaps 
 have to be of the type 
 
 (Ic-o (!- 
 
 = / 
 
 J /,=* + </)*( + * + +)./ / = 
 
 if transcendence were wholly lost which of course it is not where 
 a + 6 + ... are phenomenal experiences of the created beings; but 
 I am not mathematician enough to envisage the form it must 
 take. 
 
 * This only becomes intelligible in the Transcendent Godhead 
 when we assume the doctrine of the Trinity (vide infra).
 
 26 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 The importance of this we shall see when we consider 
 the bearing of the statement that Christ took the man- 
 hood into God. If we believe that God is eternally 
 creative, His eternal self-sacrifice involves suffering; and 
 we are only posed by the question " Does not the actual- 
 isation of potential suffering constitute a new experience 
 for God?" when with the words actual and potential 
 we unjustifiably introduce the time-conceptions of 'be- 
 fore' and 'after' into our thought of simultaneous, 
 Eternal Being. 
 
 Alike for man and God, then, in relation to the work, 
 there is limitation by the material. For man this means 
 external limitation, which must be overcome, and yet 
 without which there could be no progress the limita- 
 tion of matter and duration; for God it means self- 
 limitation, determined by the conditions of the problem 
 the necessity for His creatures to win their own 
 freedom. 
 
 What does this limitation mean in regard to God's 
 knowledge? In transcendence there is complete pene- 
 trability, and so, complete knowledge in spite of com- 
 plete freedom of all the personal beings (for pure free- 
 dom is pure reciprocity, looked at in one way ; and the 
 two are seen to be statements of the same fact when we 
 remember that the only eternal emotion is love, and love 
 is complete mutuality and therefore complete know- 
 ledge 1 ). The Transcendent God penetrates perfectly 
 the transcendent man, as far as the region of man's 
 transcendence extends. But in immanence, freedom 
 and reciprocity are limited, and hence knowledge is 
 limited. The immanent God cannot know the emo- 
 tions and springs of action of immanent men fully (or 
 vice versa), any more than immanent men know fully 
 about each other. He can only know in so far as men 
 are ready to share their experience with Him. 
 1 Vide infra.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 27 
 
 But does the Transcendent God know about imman- 
 ent men fully? Again the answer must be no, for these 
 are different regions of His experience. As Transcend- 
 ent God he does not experience men fully, for He is not 
 transcendent in the region of His experience in which He 
 is immanent. 
 
 Yet He is absolutely transcendent. How are we to re- 
 concile the two statements with each other, and, above 
 all, how can we reconcile them with the common con- 
 viction that 'God knows'? 
 
 Let us consider this last point to begin with. Our 
 position, reached through our argument, is quite clear 
 and consistent, and it will be well to restate it, for the 
 correct statement of a problem generally brings us with- 
 in sight of the solution. 
 
 God is immanent, which involves His limitation. 
 Men individually are free to develope as they will, but 
 they too are b'mited. Limitation means absence of free- 
 dom in some region or regions of experience. This means 
 a certain degree of impenetrability; and impenetrability 
 eventually meansimperfect love ; for all the transcendent 
 activities of the perfect personality are involved in that 
 term love. But men are limited externally; have never 
 been free; have never known perfect love. 
 
 God too is limited, and this means imperfect pene- 
 trability; but not for Himself. He is perfectly pene- 
 trable, for His limitation is internal and self-determined ; 
 the very issue of eternal love. He can be penetrated, 
 but men have not yet learned union with Him; He 
 cannot penetrate their hearts unasked, for He has given 
 them freedom; they may and do bar Him out. Barred 
 out, He cannot know their inmost lives, for there is sin 
 there. Once more we see the creation and the Nature of 
 God as one Whole, whose individual parts are meaning- 
 less when isolated, and only acquire their true signifi- 
 cance when they are seen in relation to each other.
 
 28 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 For God, immanence means the winning, not of per- 
 sonality itself, but the freedom of its manifestation in 
 the cosmos. Fellowship is as yet incomplete in that 
 region of His experience. What this means we can 
 partly understand if we think of ourselves in a room full 
 of unsympathetic people. We and they alike are unable 
 to reach the others' point of view ; and so we are in part 
 ignorant of them and they of us. Lack of fellowship 
 involves lack of knowledge, and the lack is there on 
 both sides. In just this kind of way God's knowledge of 
 us must be incomplete, in so far as He is Immanent, as 
 well as our knowledge of Him, for there is much in us 
 that must be 'unsympathetic' for Him. 
 
 But what of transcendence? Surely God's knowledge 
 of us, as far as we are transcendent, is immediate and 
 complete? None the less there is contingency in the 
 cosmos and contingency real for God because there 
 are wills at work that are not wholly in accord with His. 
 If this be so, He cannot know the individual acts of indi- 
 vidual wills beforehand, when those acts do not spring 
 from a sense of fellowship with Him, but are retrograde : 
 prompted by alien, lower impulses. As Transcendent 
 the completeness and fulfilment are real for Him 
 already the whole is eternally present but not the 
 individual wrong acts. 
 
 Thus it would seem that God's knowledge is limited by 
 other wills not yet at one with Him ; not only His know- 
 ledge as self-limited and indwelling the region of His 
 self-limitation, but His transcendent knowledge. For 
 in that region of His experience He has given up trans- 
 cendence for the sake of men. Only as we get into touch 
 with His timeless, changeless Being, does He regain 
 transcendence in us. 
 
 I do not for a moment mean to imply the existence of 
 two consciousnesses in God. The artificiality of any 
 such suggestion would be equalled by its uselessness.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 29 
 
 None the less, there are, as we have already been con- 
 strained to admit, degrees of reality, and the conscious- 
 ness of these different levels of Reality must itself lie on 
 different levels. We know this in ourselves. In certain 
 of our activities we treat the phenomenal as if it were 
 the absolutely real. This is right and necessary, since, 
 for the purpose we have in view at the moment, it is the 
 only reality that concerns us, and that we can use. 
 
 At other times we see life steadily and whole, and 
 phenomenal reality takes its proper rank. We are using 
 our consciousness at the level of transcendence, and 
 higher, even absolute, reality is within our range. 
 
 May we not imagine something of the same kind to be 
 true of God? Must not God be a Pragmatist in regard to 
 the reality of Process for Process is Real to Him even 
 while He sees the whole? Is not the problem of the 
 double consciousness of God simply another aspect of 
 the problem of degrees of Reality that is to say, is it 
 not a fact that He has the ' pragmatic ' consciousness of 
 immanence, even while He has, at the same time, the all- 
 embracing consciousness of the Whole; the Ultimately 
 Real? 
 
 We shall find it very necessary to bear this question in 
 mind when we come to consider the nature of Christ's 
 consciousness, we shall set out some final conclusions 
 in the last chapter. 
 
 Once more we are met with a new realisation of what 
 His self-limitation means, and gain a little more insight 
 into His love. For God's Transcendent Self process in 
 time and space is not absolutely Real, though it is real 
 for Him in the region of His immanence in exactly the 
 same degree in which His Immanence is real for Him. 
 
 But can a thing be at the same time real and not real 
 A and not A ? What of the Principle of Identity ? 
 for this is the root of the problem. Logically, no, 
 actually, yes. For logic moves in one plane the plane
 
 3O Preliminary Considerations 
 
 of causality and only holds good there; and here we 
 are dealing with two planes. 
 
 Let us take a simple illustration. I hear a call for help 
 from the nursery; shout 'all right! I'm coming!' run 
 upstairs to see what is the matter, and find the child has 
 burnt himself. The call produces sound-waves, sets the 
 tympanum vibrating and stimulates sense-organs which 
 produce brain-changes in me. Contraction of various 
 muscles sets my voice to work to initiate trains of sound- 
 waves which will produce brain-changes in the child. 
 Contraction of other muscles produces motion, and 
 finally contact with the child. But the pain does not 
 cause the child's call any more than his call causes my 
 speech and my movements. There is a break in the 
 causal chain at each end. My free choice under the 
 stimulus of anxiety and emotions sets two causal chains 
 in action; the pain emotion of the child initiates another 
 causal chain of events. Emotion is itself the centre of 
 freedom, but there is a break at each end, where emo- 
 tion, freely acting, selects the desired causal chain. In 
 short, causality only holds good where the whole action 
 moves in one plane in this case within the categories 
 of time and space and no logic can envisage the whole 
 process, because its content is richer and fuller than the 
 reason. The importance of this will be seen later 1 . Now 
 apply this to the problem in hand. If A is becoming it 
 continues to be A, but yet grows fuller in content. Thus 
 A is A or not A according as one takes into account 
 from the first the larger concept of Order, or merely 
 the logical concept of identity according as one fixes 
 one's attention on the whole, or on the stage which 
 exists at one given moment 2 . 
 
 Thus for God as Transcendent Being A is A ; the end 
 
 1 See ch. iii. p. 98. 
 
 1 Cf. Driesch, The Problem of Individuality, ch. iii.; especially 
 the passage on the disjunctive category, p. 56.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 31 
 
 is seen as real in a sense in which the process is not. For 
 God as Immanent Being A is not A . And both these are 
 true for man as well. The end is before process for the 
 Transcendent God, but the stages of process by which that 
 end is reached are not within His transcendent knowledge, 
 for they are not in the plane of transcendence but of limita- 
 tion. As Immanent, God cannot have transcendent 
 knowledge, so here, too, His knowledge about man is 
 limited. Thus, returning to the equation / = 7 and 
 applying the thought we have just been discussing, we 
 find it true for the Transcendent God (and for trans- 
 cendent man) ; and true further (through the concept of 
 Order) for the Transcendent God even while Immanence 
 exists and this helps us to some understanding of the 
 fact that God remains Transcendent even while He is 
 Immanent. 
 
 But it is not true for Immanent God or immanent 
 man. God is becoming, as well as man ; and thus we get 
 degrees of reality ; for in immanence is imperfect reci- 
 procity, and so imperfect unity, imperfect knowledge, 
 and actual duration. 
 
 Yet this relativity which we have perforce introduced 
 into our conceptions of reality and knowledge does not 
 leave us without a hold on the absolutely Real 1 : without 
 some power of envisaging the whole. Man is transcen- 
 dent ; and transcendence is his anchor in the absolutely 
 Real, preventing drift in the currents and storms of 
 relative knowledge and reality. For transcendence is 
 the experience of reciprocity, and the unity that comes 
 from, and is, that; and man, by his transcendence, is 
 linked with the self -experience of God, which is absolute 
 Reality. There is no fear of drift or serious mistake. 
 All that is good, all that makes for love and self-abnega- 
 tion, belongs to the realm of the absolutely Real for 
 
 1 For a full discussion of the relativity of knowledge and Reality 
 see Bradley, Essays on Truth and Rtality, cf. also chh. iii.-vi. infra.
 
 32 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 absolutely Real can have no other meaning than this. 
 And this statement brings us back to our starting point ; 
 we are sure of our facts because Personality is the one 
 real, stable thing we know ; and Personality is the capa- 
 city for fellowship, which is Love. True unity is, in a 
 sense, the unity of a system, but that system is infinite 
 reciprocity, or Love; and so, is Personality. As our 
 discussion proceeds this great truth will become con- 
 tinually more full of meaning. In man we find that 
 unity is based on this. Man is a unity ; made one in the 
 freedom of emotion 1 . He is his own object, but yet he 
 is still consciously one. The plurality that bears so 
 hardly on his life, the misunderstandings and lack of 
 insight that are the source of all his pain and sorrow, 
 are the signs-manual of his limitation of his lack of 
 freedom, real to him, but not so real as the timeless 
 unity that is himself. Man, like God, is immanent, but 
 man touches the Eternal Godhead in transcendence. 
 With growing freedom comes growing love, which 
 brings him more and more into the union of complete 
 transcendence. Here lies the power for good that those 
 who believe in us wield they see through change into 
 the stable self, and make us more truly self-conscious; 
 make us realise more our eternal being ; make us ashamed 
 to do anything that may hamper the spirit with fresh 
 bonds. In that measure in which we are in communion 
 with the Transcendent God, and realise our fellowship 
 with Him, we know this inspiration in its highest form. 
 
 We are now ready to gather up the threads. 
 
 An attempt to formulate what we meant by Imma- 
 nence showed us that we could only do so by keeping 
 steadily in view the conception of Transcendence, since 
 only thus can we keep in touch with the whole. Trans- 
 cendence means both unity and activity, as well as 
 unchanging permanence. 
 
 1 Vide infra, ch. iii.
 
 Preliminary Considerations 33 
 
 The only thing we know that is active, permanent, 
 and yet essentially one is personality. It is active be- 
 cause it is in itself a reciprocity. The full meaning of this 
 we shall develope later, but it may be summed up by 
 saying that the completed personality is Love; while 
 even limited personality is best denned as capacity for 
 fellowship. By this at once the oppression of eternal 
 sameness is removed; and the external activity that 
 seeks to share the Perfect Experience becomes intel- 
 ligible, while yet that Experience remains the one 
 and indivisible Whole whose perfection cannot receive 
 addition. Eternal Life is seen as the sharing of God's 
 infinite Reciprocity. 
 
 Now if Personal Being is the essence of unity and 
 permanence, any theory of what we have termed Box- 
 Immanence, any Pantheism, becomes impossible, for it 
 would entail the fragmentation of Eternal Personality; 
 and fragmentation means the destruction of that unity 
 which is fundamental for the very existence of person- 
 ality. If it be true that all that is in the cosmos is part 
 of God, He is no longer One, and so, no longer Personal. 
 Instead we have innumerable fragments persons who 
 manifest a unity within themselves that may itself 
 be fictitious nay, must, for what safeguard have we 
 against further fragmentation? and inanimate sys- 
 tems that have a mirage-like unity of their own. 
 Thought, knowledge, even activity, become meaning- 
 less and useless on any such system. And here, I think, 
 lies the weakness of the Neo-Hegelianism that finds its 
 unity in the sum total of finite, or at least microcosmic, 
 personalities. The very unity, activity and reciprocity 
 of each human personality, its permanence amid change, 
 its transcendence, demand imperatively a larger Per- 
 sonal Cause, whose activity of love brings the cosmos 
 into being. 
 
 The only other conception of Immanence that seemed 
 MD. 3
 
 34 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 possible was what we called Work-Immanence. The 
 cosmos is external to God, inasmuch as it is a limitation 
 of perfect mutuality and freedom, while it is within 
 Him, inasmuch as it is a portion of His own Experience 
 that is limited by the activity of self-renouncement 
 which is an eternal part of Love. In this material other 
 personalities are born, for whose sake indeed it came to 
 be, and they limit God yet further, through their exter- 
 nality and limited penetrability. But they grow. They 
 grow towards freedom, which at the long last is Love; 
 and growing, they restore to God the Perfect Unity of 
 unrestricted Love. Thus God is becoming. Yet He is 
 becoming, finding self-realisation, in His own Work, as 
 His Eternal Will sees its thought take shape and life 
 eternal ; much as the sculptor realises both his ideal and 
 himself in his work. In these two senses God is imma- 
 nent; He is becoming with His work; He is realising 
 Himself in His work. This is Work-Immanence. 
 
 Turn now from the material to the Work. Man is a 
 true personality, however fettered. He too creates 
 creates himself and other men ; and he is immanent in 
 just the sense that God is immanent, because he too is a 
 personal being. But, being personal, he simply is, per- 
 sists through change, endures, and so is transcendent. 
 Thought, Will, Emotion, the trinity of personality, is 
 his. He too is satisfied in internal reciprocity, yet 
 craves that others share his experience. He is like God 
 in this also ; and the fuller development of this theme will 
 guide us in our attempt to understand the meaning of 
 the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. 
 
 The difference lies here that for the creature imma- 
 nence is the means of winning transcendence ; for God 
 immanence is the only mode of giving the power of 
 transcendence to His creatures. God's immanence is 
 creative self-abnegation; the creature's is, at first, self- 
 realisation, self-winning alone, even though from the
 
 Preliminary Considerations 35 
 
 very first there is a kind of self-denial in the refusal to 
 remain unprogressive. Since the Transcendence of God 
 implies His activity as well as His unity, it is clear that 
 His Transcendence involves His Immanence, for imma- 
 nence means the immanence of the transcendent due to 
 its activity ; while His Transcendence implies His Imma- 
 nence, for transcendence has no meaning apart from the 
 transcendence of the immanent. The two are completely 
 correlative. To the fuller elaboration of these sugges- 
 tions we shall apply our thought in the last two chapters 
 when we consider the evolution of transcendence. 
 
 3-*
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE TRIUNITY OF GOD 
 
 BECAUSE men are divine, created in the image of God 
 and destined to eternal communion with Him, our 
 spirits rove in a perpetual quest while we indwell the 
 sphere of time. Furnished with our Roll, which tells us 
 what to seek and how to seek, we pursue our journey. 
 This Roll, which is God's revelation of Himself to men, 
 through men, and through the Perfect Man, is annotated 
 with marginal notes filling out the text with the experi- 
 ence and wisdom of generations ; and year by year fresh 
 appendices of revelation are added, each with its own 
 commentary. Soiled by the mud of falls in slippery 
 places ; torn by the careless haste of doubtful and hope- 
 less moments; mildewed with neglect, when it lay for- 
 gotten in arbours of careless ease; in parts illegible, in 
 parts virgin and never read ; it is still our most precious 
 possession and only guide, for in it lie recorded the 
 revelation of God and the wisdom of the ages. Our 
 quest is God Himself; the Roll, our knowledge of Him. 
 Because of the impress of the divine similitude upon 
 our nature we are drawn to God as the needle is drawn 
 to the magnet. In life M. Bergson sees the urging of a 
 vital impulse ; it is truer, looking on all process as teleo- 
 logical, to see in the process of life tractation rather than 
 impulsion. Mere impulsion brings purposeless change, 
 unless it is directed towards a Causative Reality which 
 does not change. If it. be so directed, impulsion is a 
 meaningless term. The final causation is not in Life 
 itself, but in the Causative Reality ; not in process, but 
 in the end. Nevertheless the word impulsion does 
 present an important truth. Process and its causation 
 are different aspects consequence and ground of one
 
 CH. i] The Triunity of God 37 
 
 great whole. Revelation and evolution are the obverse 
 and reverse of the medal. The life-process is not deter- 
 mined from without; its end may be, indeed is, but not 
 itself. The individual can respond to his environment in 
 many ways, choosing his future path. And when the 
 choice is conscious, the responsibility of choice rests 
 upon the chooser. The individual creates, as well as 
 God creates his own future, and adds to the environ- 
 ment of others; himself becomes a source of tractation; 
 a causative Reality. This aspect of the process of 
 Creative Evolution, or, to use the suggestive term in- 
 troduced by Cunningham 1 , of Creative Finalism, has 
 been dealt with at some length in my Evolution and 
 the Need of Atonement and Evolution and Spiritual Life. 
 The purpose of the present book is rather to attempt 
 an examination of the other side, and to consider, from 
 the standpoint of the Christian conception of God, what 
 is the nature of the Causative Reality, and what is the 
 foundation of the tractative force that makes for crea- 
 tive finalism. If it be objected that to do this is to offer 
 a recension of the Roll of our metaphor, and that to dare 
 to make such a recension is bold and even impious, we 
 must agree to the first in some measure, and in part also 
 to the second. 
 
 Such an examination does involve a critical corre- 
 lation of all the evidence, if not a recension. It does 
 involve an apparent, though not a real, reduction of 
 revelation to the level of other evidence, because of the 
 human and fallible medium of that revelation, and be- 
 cause of its partial and progressive nature. And un- 
 questionably the attempt is a bold one, foredoomed to 
 partial failure. It cannot approach completeness, and 
 the purview of one man is very limited and one-sided. 
 But yet we dare to believe that no such attempt is im- 
 
 1 An Introduction to the Study of the Philosophy of Bergson. by 
 W. A. Cunningham, 1916.
 
 38 The Tnunity of God [CH. 
 
 pious. Human nature is divine : the mirror of the Eter- 
 nal ; and we can only envisage the Unknown through its 
 known counterpart. Because of this, the effort to under- 
 stand the Godhead through the study of manhood is 
 the most hopeful method open to the partial powers of 
 reason. 
 
 We shall therefore start from the basis of human per- 
 sonality and our knowledge of the laws which govern it, 
 and try to construct some conception of the Divine 
 Personality and the laws of Self-determination which 
 govern its Activities ; in order to find, if we may, a sure 
 foundation in reason for the revealed Nature of the 
 Godhead. 
 
 Before we begin our proper task it will be well to 
 remind ourselves briefly of the dogmatic teaching of 
 orthodox Christianity as to the nature of the Being of 
 God, casting it in a modern mould. To this and to the 
 formulation of difficulties and questionings the present 
 chapter is devoted. 
 
 (1) Our knowledge of the existence of God rests 
 on His self-revelation under conditions apprehen- 
 sible to us, which means, directly or indirectly, to 
 our reason. 
 
 (2) Our knowledge of the Nature of God 1 as seen 
 in His manward aspects of what we may call 
 His Objective Being rests on our recognition of 
 His attributes, which are manifested to us in that 
 self-revelation, and on the fact that our own nature 
 renders such recognition possible. 
 
 (3) Our knowledge of the essential or subjective 
 Being 1 of God the Being of God for Himself rests 
 in part on His special revelation throughout the 
 
 1 For justification of this distinction between God-for-Us 
 (limited human beings) and God-for-Himself, and discussion of 
 the problem of the thing-in-itself which is apparently involved, 
 see Preliminary Considerations, pp. 12-16.
 
 i] The Triunity of God 39 
 
 ages to men who sought the truth single-heartedly, 
 which revelation was completed in the revelation 
 of the Incarnation, but also in part on man's know- 
 ledge instinctive more than reasoned, as a general 
 rule, but knowledge none the less that personality 
 can only mean one thing; imperfect or perfect as 
 may be, but essentially the same; that, so, if we 
 are persons and God is Personal, we can learn His 
 real and absolute Being by learning our own, 
 through the infinite projection of that self-know- 
 ledge so slowly won. 
 
 (i) With the proofs of the existence of God we have 
 no intention of dealing in the present work. These 
 proofs find their premisses in the nature of knowledge, 
 in the existence of mind, in the evidence of purpose in 
 phenomena, in the existence of moral values and their 
 judgment; they are elaborated in countless volumes 
 along the lines of metaphysics, of ethics, of epistemology, 
 of physical and biological science. Whenever and how- 
 ever the thought of man presses reasoning about phe- 
 nomena to its ultimate issue, God is found. There may 
 be many turnings aside; false logic may for a time 
 obscure the truth, but sooner or later reason finds a God. 
 The attitude of the mystic who claims, and probably 
 claims justly, that he has immediate spiritual proof that 
 God is, just as a calculating genius arrives immediately 
 at the solution of a complex problem of arithmetic, is 
 hereby vindicated, and he takes comfort in the fact. 
 Nevertheless by so doing he implicitly admits, what he 
 explicitly denies, that the revelation of God's existence 
 is an appeal to reason. Man cannot know complete con- 
 tent unless his reason approves that which his intuition 
 acclaims. Intuition may be the guide to reason, but his 
 whole being must be satisfied before he can rest. We are 
 never satisfied unless our reason approves what we 
 believe, though we may not have trained that reason to
 
 40 The Triunity of God [CH. 
 
 search very deeply. If we accept statements made by 
 authority, for example, our preliminary acceptance of 
 that authority is based on reasoning, of however 
 inadequate a kind; if we accept the reality of mystic 
 intuition we at least justify the claims of intuition by 
 argument. And for our purpose it is immaterial whether 
 the belief comes first or the argument ; whether we argue 
 because we believe or believe because we argue. Very 
 likely belief is prior to its formal justification; very 
 likely it begins as a vague judgment of experience as 
 a whole, without formal justification by completely 
 logical methods. But the important fact for us to 
 remember is that we do in fact justify or attempt to 
 justify our beliefs by an appeal to reason. 
 
 We see evidence of this in the progressive unfolding 
 of the idea of God in primitive .and more advanced 
 religions. The representation of God at any stage is 
 such as appeals to the mind of man as rational. Thus 
 our belief in God rests in the long run on an appeal to 
 reason, even if it does not originate there. The basis of 
 faith is clearly defined ; it is no mere longing and vague 
 aspiration. 
 
 Bearing this fact in mind we may pass on to our 
 second point, while keeping clearly before us the know- 
 ledge that, God being the Eternal One, the Causative 
 Being, we could know nothing at all of Him except by His 
 revelation of Himself to our reason. That this is implicit 
 in, and inevitable from, the nature of His Personal Being 
 is another matter to which we shall return later. 
 
 (2) Our rational knowledge of God rests on the re- 
 cognition of His attributes. Were He simply One, there 
 would be nothing to be known in that empty unity. We 
 know Him in the determinations of His essential Being. 
 
 These attributes we indicate by such terms as 
 Activity, Omnipotence, Omniscience, Wisdom, Right- 
 eousness. Love and Eternity are different from the rest,
 
 i] The Triunity of God 4 1 
 
 as we shall see, but we must consider them also. God is 
 Eternal, the unchangeable I AM. But it is no dead un- 
 changeableness; rather it comprehends within itself a 
 never-ending activity. Besides the inner activity of 
 eternal reciprocity, this activity manifests itself exter- 
 nallyas creation. Why.if the internal activityof recipro- 
 city is perfect, God's activity should function externally 
 at all, is a question which may be reserved for the pre- 
 sent. The most certain fact of our experience is that 
 ourselves and the universe exist, and that, since we 
 believe that there is a God, and must believe it, our- 
 selves and the universe do represent the external 
 functioning of the activity of God. 
 
 We cannot fully understand the next point, but God 
 is certainly pure thought and knowledge, though not 
 only pure thought and knowledge. He knows Himself, 
 and knowing Himself He is omniscient, comprehending 
 all knowledge within the circle of His Being and His 
 Activities. In all His creation He is omnipresent; 
 nothing is without the perfect round of His experience. 
 He is within His creation, filling it with His presence; 
 but yet His creation is not within Himself. It is in pro- 
 cess of becoming through Him ; He is, yet is becoming 
 in it. He is not the creation which He indwells, but the 
 creation is in Him as well as through Him. It is real, 
 but is not the absolute Reality of His transcendent 
 experience, since it is becoming 1 . God is then omni- 
 
 1 Cf . Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, e.g. " And so again 
 it is with the becoming and the endless incompletion of the world. 
 To deny that this side of things is fact would in my view be 
 absurd. But on the other hand to accept this side of things as 
 real in itself and unconditionally, and to proclaim it as being in 
 its own character the last word about the Universe, to me seems 
 no less ridiculous. In this volume I have urged that what matters 
 and what is ultimately good, is the whole, and that there is no 
 aspect of life which, abstracted and set utterly by itself, can
 
 42 The Triunity of God [CH. 
 
 present, and omniscient of all reality. That which is 
 becoming has not yet achieved absolute reality, but is 
 in process of achieving it. Thus it is only relatively real, 
 and so is susceptible only of relative knowledge 1 . Hence, 
 in so far as God is indwelling the Universe He knows it 
 with the relative knowledge of a being who is in process. 
 He knows it as man knows it ; that is to say, His know- 
 ledge reaches only up to a point, and differs from man's 
 in degree, not in kind. The Immanent God is limited by 
 the contingency common to the knowledge of all im- 
 manent beings. But in so far as all process is compre- 
 hended within the circle of the eternal activity of God- 
 head, the partial knowledge of process which is being 
 experienced is swallowed up in the perfect knowledge 
 of Transcendent Experience of activity in which there 
 is no process nor duration, but only the perfect experi- 
 ence of simultaneous Reality 8 . 
 
 retain goodness. And on the other side I have insisted (if I may 
 repeat this) upon the absolute, the unassailable right of every 
 aspect of life to its own place, function and liberty." Op. cit. pp. 
 
 47L 472- 
 
 1 By relative knowledge I mean knowledge of things which are 
 real, but only in conditions of time and space. For a discussion of 
 the subject see Bradley, Appearance and Reality. 
 
 1 I imagine that the relations of being to becoming, and of 
 becoming to being, can never be satisfactorily determined by the 
 human mind. They involve the whole perplexing question of the 
 degrees of Reality, with which the present scribe is certainly not 
 competent to deal. Nevertheless a brief discussion may clear the 
 air and present the problem to our minds in its naked simplicity 
 a simplicity that only adds to its difficulty. Absolute Being we 
 can only define as the full experience of self-conditioned Reality. 
 Becoming is not absolute, because it is conditioned by something 
 that is not-self. It is not merely the experience of duration, but 
 rather of that which is implied in the word duration of something 
 that produces the changes of becoming. There could be no dura- 
 tion without change; there could be no change without something
 
 i] The Triunity of God 43 
 
 Being Omniscient God is also Omnipotent. This 
 omnipotence is realised externally as the power of 
 creating beings external to Himself. He is eternally 
 
 to cause that change as well as something that changes an 
 externality is implied in the very word duration. 
 
 These definitions do not involve immobility, inactivity, in 
 Absolute Being, unless it be denned as pure unity as well, but 
 they do involve only internal activity. As soon as external 
 activity starts, being is transformed into becoming, in part of the 
 Reality experienced at any rate, if we give to absolute being the 
 faculty of experience at all as we do when we postulate a per- 
 sonal God. And at once we reach the problem of degrees of 
 Reality. 
 
 Is becoming then rf a/? It is real in the sphere of duration. It is 
 a real experience in the realm in which, owing to duration, we are 
 able to look upon related experiences as cause and effect; or more 
 truly, because of their relatedness, as Ground and Consequence. 
 But in the absolute sphere it is outside the realm of real experi- 
 ence. It is recognised as being there a fact but only by trans- 
 jecting absolute being, by an effort of thought, into the sphere 
 where it is not absolute. This becomes clearer when we think of 
 human experience. The great, absolute reality to me. as regards 
 myself, is that I am. It requires a refocusing, an accommodation 
 of the mind's eye, to pass from that to I become and visualise that 
 fact. Yet both are to me truisms, and I recognise their obvious 
 reality in different planes. And thus to pass does not alter the 
 reality of the fact that I am, even to me. The difference lies here; 
 that this is more absolutely and antecedently real than that / 
 become; and to grasp that I become, at all, I have to pass from 
 the absolutely real on which my attention has been fixed to the 
 relatively real of everyday experience, by a conscious effort. The 
 necessity of this effort does not however in the least invalidate 
 the truth that I experience both kinds of reality. Apply this now 
 to God. God may must know that He is becoming. The ex- 
 perience is real to Him in His relation to the Universe; but to His 
 Absolute Being it is only relatively real appreciated as real only 
 by the effort (if we may call it so) of transjection into the duration- 
 sphere; which effort is the realisation of self -limitation. 
 
 Finally, this becoming will only cease to be even relatively real
 
 44 The Triunity of God [CH. 
 
 making something new; beings who are centres of 
 activity external to Himself, yet comprehended within 
 the circle of the perfect experience. His omnipotence is 
 manifested in self-limitation a kenosis eternally des- 
 tined to fulfilment as a pleroma. 
 
 All His activities are determined by His Goodness. 
 In perfect wisdom and in perfect righteousness He pro- 
 mulgates His self-determined fiat. It is hard at first to 
 see what can be meant by the goodness of God, His 
 righteousness and His wisdom. Surely, a man may say, 
 goodness implies choice, and the possibility of evil. If 
 you postulate goodness of God you at once introduce 
 the possibility of evil; you return to the cosmogony of 
 the Zend Avesta; the opposing principles of good and 
 evil, Ormuzd and Ahriman, come into being. 
 
 Let us first consider the point in relation to the uni- 
 verse. Righteousness and wisdom supply a norm 
 whereby the fluctuating standards of mankind may be 
 regulated. They correct the mutability of human 
 thought. In relation to the created universe then, the 
 postulation of these attributes is in fact an affirmation 
 of the freedom of man to choose as he will. He can 
 choose whether he will be like God or no ; he is truly free. 
 
 for God when His creatures are united with Him ; enfolded in the 
 union of perfect love. Then there can be no more becoming, even 
 though there is a certain measure, not of externality, since there 
 is perfect interpenetration, but of otherness due to the absence of 
 fusion or absorption of personalities into one impersonal essence. 
 The otherness will be the same in kind as the otherness which differ- 
 entiates the Persons of the Godhead, though differing in degree, 
 since men are caused, God uncaused. But as all will be complete 
 and transcendent there can be no change, and so no becoming. 
 The activity will be mutual, interpenetrative. (The cessation of 
 becoming for the Timeless and Absolute Being, only suggests a 
 difficulty how anything can cease for the Absolute God when 
 the origin of the experience of becoming in self-limitation is for- 
 gotten. See Preliminary Considerations.)
 
 i] The Triunity of God 45 
 
 We see then that goodness postulated of the Godhead 
 opposes an unchanging moral standard to all the changes 
 and chances of humanity's vagaries. God is good in 
 relation to His creatures. Evil is not His creation, but 
 theirs. It is the misapplication of freedom; the refusal 
 to conform to the true standard. This we have worked 
 out at length elsewhere. 
 
 But in what sense can we say that God is absolutely 
 good? for the goodness we have been describing, is in a 
 sense relative. The question can only arise from an in- 
 complete understanding of the problem. Absolute good- 
 ness is simply the expression of the nature of the God- 
 head ; for it is the expression of His Love, which we have 
 next to consider. Being absolute, it is not relative to 
 anything. It is not goodness-as-compared-with-evil- 
 ness, but simply the manifestation of eternal love. As 
 goodness it only comes to have a meaning when it 
 becomes normative; that is, when it is considered as 
 relative to that which is becoming to that which is not 
 in itself absolute. In other words, like the attributes of 
 Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, it is a mode 
 of manifestation of the Godhead to beings external to 
 Himself. It is not an attribute of God-for-Himself 
 alone. His internal activity is for Himself: His eternity, 
 and His love. These are included in the / Am. They 
 have a meaning apart from creative activity. The 
 others are expressions of His nature, to His creatures. 
 And since we shall see that God's activity is implicit in 
 His love, we find that the attributes of God for Himself 
 are summed up in the phrase "God is love"; the 'is' 
 being not of time but expressing His eternal simul- 
 taneity. The other attributes we may call, using the 
 word of the writer to the Hebrews, aTravyda-nara, beams 
 of His Radiance, made visible as they fall upon the 
 created world. 
 
 A very striking fact now becomes apparent. We have
 
 46 The Triunity of God [CH. 
 
 to say that Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, 
 Goodness are attributes of God : means of His self-mani- 
 festation to others: of the revelation of His absolute 
 Nature; and yet at the same time we have to say.that 
 "of course as Immanent God, He cannot be Omnipo- 
 tent, Omniscient, Omnipresent in an absolute sense, or 
 even Good." The terms are all relative to His Uni- 
 verse; and once we get to the universe we find His 
 activity, and so the manifestation of His attributes, 
 hampered by a very real contingency. He would be 
 omniscient, but for the fact that man is free ; He would 
 be omnipotent but for the fact that to manifest omnipo- 
 tence would involve self-contradiction, since He has 
 granted man free activity; He would be omnipresent if 
 man did not keep Him out of that part of his soul which 
 is dedicated to evil; He would be good, if man would 
 recognise Him as the Norm but man insists that Good 
 is something else, freely chooses something else as Good, 
 and since Good is merely normative, God cannot be that 
 Good. Real Good is the manifestation-to-others of Love. 
 But what men call good is a certain easy-going kjnd of 
 happiness-mongering. And that is therefore Good; it is 
 what they mean by Good. The whole problem of pain 
 arises from taking man's norm of goodness, assuming 
 that it is the same as God's norm, and then calling it 
 absolute two fatal blunders. There is no such thing as 
 absolute Good. Good ought to mean absolute love seen 
 as a normative principle in the sphere of becoming. It 
 does mean something quite different. Therefore God 
 is not even manifested to men as good. In this fact lies, 
 perhaps, the solution of the problem of pain. The 
 question is seen to be one of terminology. Goodness is 
 properly the manifestation of Love under the condition 
 of limitation. What men call good is a creation of their 
 own inadequate reason, and in this sense God is not 
 good. Our main point, however, is something different
 
 i] Tke Triuntty of God 47 
 
 that Good is merely a normative principle. God is 
 Dot Good for Himself He is simply Love. But Love, 
 in its manifestation to beings who are incomplete and 
 becoming, must impose a norm ; and this norm is good- 
 ness. Man, moreover, by importing mistaken mean- 
 ings into the term, confuses the issue, and creates for 
 himself an artificial but insoluble problem of pain. 
 
 As far as the Immanent God, then, is concerned, His 
 attributes are ideals rather than realities. They repre- 
 sent what would be if men's wills were completely free, 
 and wholly aligned with His, and were yet becoming. 
 In other words the attributes become true at the mo- 
 ment when they cease to be. For when they became true 
 God would cease to be immanent; all change would be 
 swallowed up in transcendence. Thus Omnipotence, 
 Omniscience, Omnipresence, Goodness, are ideals of the 
 Immanent God; divine, far-off events to which the 
 whole creation moves together with Him. Though these 
 are His attributes, He achieves neither the one nor the 
 other, as Immanent ; as Transcendent He can have no 
 attributes, for transcendent knowledge of Him must be 
 immediate. We shall know Him as I AM : as Eternal 
 Love. Viewed from this angle, the self-limitation of 
 God in creation acquires fresh meaning, becomes fresh 
 marvel. We seem to get behind God's attributes to 
 His real Being, which is Love. We get behind difficulties 
 ethical, difficulties spiritual, difficulties natural into a 
 blinding dazzle of the eternal Truth that is so over- 
 whelming that we have to get used to it before we can 
 see at all. But one of the great realities the light brings 
 out seems to be that man realises the relation between 
 the immanence of God and of himself, seeing both as 
 aspects of the great Whole of God's love, as Ground and 
 Consequence; that he recognises the event to which 
 both move; recognises the love of God that is content 
 to accept even self-limitation of His own attributes
 
 48 The Triunity of God [CH. 
 
 His own powers of manifesting Himself for the sake of 
 His creation; begins to understand what that day, when 
 all that is in part shall be done away, will mean for God 
 as well as for Him ; begins to share God's joy beforehand. 
 In relation to Himself, then, God is Love; in relation 
 to His universe He is, or, strictly, approaches, Wisdom, 
 Power, Knowledge, Goodness as well. But we must 
 later inquire into the implications of the eternal fact of 
 Love as God's self-expression, and we shall find that it 
 is rooted in the inter-relation of persons. Indeed in the 
 three words ' God is Love ' the personality and plurality 
 of the Godhead are implicitly stated. In His creation, 
 too in the finite universe as soon as personality 
 comes into being, love has a meaning. Man becomes 
 able to realise something of the real nature of God's 
 Being when he begins to understand the word love, and 
 He begins to understand what love is only when he 
 reaches the stage of self-consciousness and becomes a 
 person. Understanding, however feebly, he comes into 
 personal contact and communion with God Himself; no 
 longer merely experiences the manifestation of His 
 attributes, which are His relations to the universe, in 
 so far as it is external to Him. For love, even faulty 
 human love, is not of time, but constitutes the bond of 
 union between eternal beings. Not until the transcend- 
 ent ego comes into being does love exist, and this love 
 expresses the realisation of the mutual penetrability of 
 persons, which lies at the root of eternal life. Man still, 
 of course, experiences the attributes of God, because he 
 is still becoming; but he learns to understand them; 
 learns their significance as the beams of love's radiance ; 
 and so learning he is beginning to understand God. God 
 is revealed in His attributes in the illumination of the 
 universe by the divine radiancy the source is made mani- 
 fest but man, because he is personal, as God is per- 
 sonal, is not content to rest in the knowledge of God's
 
 i] Tke Triunity of God 49 
 
 nature from His attributes. He must know God Him- 
 self as one person knows another. And the beginning 
 and ending of this knowledge can be found only in love. 
 
 (3) In the end of the last section we foreshadowed 
 the method by which we propose to approach the pro- 
 blems of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Personality 
 and Love are the wards of the key by which we shall 
 try to unlock one of the doors of our understanding of 
 this central mystery of Godhead. For the moment, how- 
 ever, we will rest content with offering a brief resum 
 of the doctrine as usually held by the Church. This is 
 generally assumed to be based mainly on revelation. 
 How far this assumption is true, and what the nature of 
 that revelation is, we shall have briefly to consider later. 
 
 The Christian doctrine of the Godhead is, then, that 
 It is Three in One and One in Three. The One God 
 exists in the Unity of perfect Love, yet there are three 
 hypostases in Him. These hypostases are not attributes, 
 nor varying manifestations of activity; for alike in 
 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all the divine attributes 
 are present in relation to the Cosmos, and of each is it 
 equally true that God is Love, where the three words 
 receive each one the signification we have already given 
 to them. Neither are they personae, masks, for each 
 reveals, not hides, the Godhead. Nor are they aspects, 
 for each reveals the complete Godhead, at any rate by 
 implication. In fact.the word hypostasis has undergone 
 many changes in the exact shade of its meaning. Origin- 
 ally it denoted simply the idea of reality. In the Stoic 
 Philosophy it was equivalent to ov<ria l . At the time of 
 the council of Nicaea it lay rather more than midway 
 between mode and person, inclining to the latter. 
 Dorner, one of the protagonists of the Kenotic theory, 
 definitely states that a distinction must be drawn be- 
 tween hypostasis and person tending in this to the 
 1 Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation, p. 576.
 
 50 The Triunity of God [CH. 
 
 impersonal conception of the being of the Logos before 
 the Incarnation which was so characteristic, in a differ- 
 ent form, of the theology of the Eastern Fathers 1 . With 
 such a point of view I cannot agree. Valuable though it 
 is in laying stress upon the reality of the kenosis and the 
 gradual growth of our Lord's human personality, any- 
 thing which seems to depersonalise the Holy Trinity in 
 any degree appears to me essentially mistaken. I pro- 
 pose to use the terms hypostasis and person as almost 2 
 interchangeable; and indeed we shall find that, as our 
 argument proceeds, the personal nature of each hypo- 
 stasis becomes more and more marked. Thus, though we 
 use the word Logos, and indeed start from a conception 
 of the Logos almost Philonic, from the very first we 
 shall have always in the back of our minds the personal, 
 not the impersonal idea of His nature. In each hypo- 
 stasis, then, is the whole nature of Godhead revealed. 
 Each is a Person, in the modern sense of the term, fully 
 self -revealing, not a persona, the mask that conceals the 
 common clay of the actor, as the original word meant, 
 nor even an actor in the drama of the universe, as it 
 later came to mean 8 . In the modern sense a Person is a 
 complete self-identity, fundamentally different from all 
 others; conscious of others; with his own peculiar 
 experience, yet able to share the experience of others. 
 A person is self -revealing, penetrable, penetrating; 
 manifesting attributes by which he-may be apprehended 
 by others. Yet in the closer relationships the appre- 
 hension is largely, and can be imagined completely, 
 
 1 For these, as for other points of detail, I am indebted to 
 Professor H. R. Mackintosh's admirable work on The Person of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 1 Not quite. See the discussion of the emphasis of each hypo- 
 stasis, ch. iii. pp. 1 08 seqq. 
 
 * In Trinitarian doctrine the word was introduced by Tertullian 
 from Roman Law. Ottley. op. cit. p. 578.
 
 i] The Triunity of God 5 1 
 
 independent of these attributes, being mediated by pure 
 mutuality, of which love is the expression. In this 
 sense the Godhead is three Persons. On the other hand 
 we must be most careful not to entangle our thought in 
 false conceptions which endanger the essential mono- 
 theism that underlies both Christian and metaphysical 
 belief in God. "If the term 'person' in Trinitarian 
 doctrine is more than 'aspect,' it is certainly less than 
 'individual.' After all, it is a fundamental truth that 
 the world is upheld by God, not by a constituent, or 
 part of God. There are spheres in which division of 
 labour is unmeaning 1 ." "Person, in Trinitarian usage, 
 is a mode of being which serves as a ground or basis 
 (a real ground or basis) of special function, but just 
 stops short of separate individuality, since it implies 
 distinction without division 2 ." Moreover God is Three 
 Persons eternally, and not merely in relation to the 
 Cosmos as Sabellius taught. He could not be Father 
 unless He was self-distinguished into an Other. He 
 could not be the Son unless He was similarly self-distin- 
 guished. Further He would be Chaos, not Order, if there 
 were not a divine Principle of Thought in Him which 
 made Him rational in His mutual and eternal Activity. 
 For in the Eternal God, Thought and Being are one. 
 
 This eternal Principle of Thought, or Logos, medi- 
 ates His activities. The Logos is thus in a sense 
 derivative, but yet a definite and distinct Hypostasis. 
 The Logos is Begotten of God, and so is His Son; 
 eternally His Other. The Logos is the expression of 
 God's recognition of Otherness in Himself, without 
 which Activity and Love would be impossible: He is 
 the reality of God's self-division into I and Thou. And 
 without this reality of self -differentiation, God could not 
 be self-conscious. 
 
 1 Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ, p. 485. 
 1 Sanday, quoted by Mackintosh, op. cit. p. 524.
 
 52 The Triunity of God [CH. 
 
 Yet in I and Thou, taken alone, unity is lost. Of 
 necessity the Godhead is divided into I and Thou, 
 Father and Son. If this were all, God would suffer com- 
 pulsion, not merely from the impossibility of contra- 
 dicting His own nature, as I and Thou only, and no 
 more and this would involve the impossibility of 
 creation but also by the necessary distinction of 
 Thought and Being. The unity is restored in the Holy 
 Spirit, proceeding equally from Father and Son. Being 
 and Thought are made One again in the Essential Free- 
 dom of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is thus the expression 
 of God's recognition of the Principle of Freedom in Him- 
 self, making the activities of the Godhead glorious in 
 Love 1 . He realises the eternal creative fiat of the Father 
 through which the Godhead is active and self-conscious, 
 making Godhead not pure Thought not merely 
 rational instead of chaotic, but Personal Being also. 
 The Spirit as it were re-unites pure activity with deriva- 
 tive order, as Personal Being, in virtue of the fact 
 that the Holy Spirit Himself is derivative from, and 
 correlative with, Activity and Order, as Freedom. 
 Using abstract words like these in their own meaning 
 such a statement is void of any intelligible signification. 
 The words themselves must be made real, and more, 
 must be hypostatised, before one can begin to apprehend 
 the truth which they signify. I suppose it will always be 
 more difficult to grasp even the fringe of the truth 
 which is expressed in the personification of the Holy 
 Spirit than it is to do so in the case of the Father and 
 the Son. " I " and "Thou " are personal words. " He " 
 implies a relationship more external, which cannot be 
 applicable to the divine Trinity ; and we have no word 
 that implies the perfect relationship of a third person 
 
 1 1 am aware that the principle of Freedom has been often assigned , 
 as by Dorner, to the Logos, but this seems to me to originate in an 
 incomplete appreciation of the melaphysic of Trinitarian doctrine.
 
 i] The Triunity of God 53 
 
 to other two. This is necessarily so, because our person- 
 alities are still in a large measure isolated ; we have gone 
 so little way towards perfect union in plurality. Mutu- 
 ality we are beginning to understand, but we confine it 
 to two persons. Moreover the simple relation of mutu- 
 ality between two persons seems to us so almost perfect, 
 that a third would spoil it. The familiar proverb that 
 'two is company; three, none,' goes far deeper than is 
 generally recognised. 
 
 The necessity for this Third Person of the Holy Trinity 
 will emerge more clearly when we come to study the 
 human personality. Meantime, we must content our- 
 selves with say ing that the Godhead is, from the necessity 
 of its own nature as Love, differentiated into I and Thou, 
 Father and Son ; the Father Originative and Active, the 
 Son derivative as the mediating Principle of Ordered 
 Reason, limiting the Father, as it would seem at first 
 sight, in the modes of His Activity. But since such limi- 
 tation is a contradiction of the pure self-determination 
 of the Godhead, from Each proceeds the hypostasis of 
 Freedom which makes the mutuality of Father and Son 
 perfect once more in the mutuality of Each with the 
 Holy Spirit, who retrocedes into Each again. 
 
 But as we look deeper into the mystery of the 
 eternal Personality of God we seem to see a need of 
 the Effulgence or aTravyatrna of His Glory, upon an 
 objective manifold. Love implies activity, functioning 
 externally as well as internally. Perfect Love craves 
 that others should share that perfection, not in order 
 that It may be increased or made more perfect thereby, 
 but because love's nature is centrifugal as well as 
 centripetal. Just because God experiences perfection 
 which cannot be added to, He must needs, in the utter 
 self-lessness of perfect love, make others share it. As 
 we have seen elsewhere Love implies the existence of an 
 eternal subjective or internal manifold, but it desider-
 
 54 The Triunity of God [CH. 
 
 ates an objective, external manifold as well, to share 
 that experience. Such an external manifold must con- 
 sist of beings who can share the experience of perfect love 
 to the full, in complete union with God, but who yet 
 cannot share the primordial mutuality of His own 
 internal or subjective manifold. He is when they were 
 not. They are the creation of His Fatherhood, derived 
 from his fiat through the mediating activity of the Logos 
 in a cosmos indwelt by His Free Spirit. They cannot 
 be God, even when they share His experience. All this 
 we have dealt with at some length in Evolution and 
 Spiritual Life, and it is only necessary to refer to it 
 here in order to connect our ideas of the Eternal Being 
 of God with His manifestation of Himself in the world. 
 
 In relation to the world, then, the Fatherhood of God 
 expresses itself in creation, whereby personal beings 
 shall eventually be enabled to share His perfect experi- 
 ence. In itself this is a proof of His Love, as Father. 
 But in the method of creation mediated by the Logos, 
 in order that the freedom of the spirit of man shall not 
 be impugned and such impugning would involve an 
 unthinkable schism in the Godhead, since the Principle 
 of Freedom unites Pure Being with Pure Thought in the 
 three hypostases of the Holy Trinity God suffers self- 
 limitation in creating the conditions through which 
 freedom may be won by His creatures, thereby rendering 
 one portion of His experience imperfect; and yet 
 further, suffers the possibility of external limitation 
 from the wilful misuse of their freedom by His creatures ; 
 which possibility is eventually actualised in sin. 
 
 Finally, that freedom may be possible, and may be 
 realised in the union of the common experience of 
 process by Himself as well as His creatures, He indwells 
 the world as the Holy Spirit. Thus God Himself under- 
 goes the changes of process, in the conditions which we 
 call duration and matter, in order that His Experience
 
 i] The Triunity of God 55 
 
 may be in all ways identical with that of His creatures 
 as they evolve from unconsciousness to consciousness, 
 so that eventually union may be complete; for this 
 same end the Mediating Logos becomes Incarnate, in 
 order that, sharing to the full men's experience as 
 limited personal beings, He may be one with them, and 
 they with Him, in the experience of bodily limitation, 
 and that, with Him, they may transcend duration and 
 enter into eternal life. By man's sin the Incarnation is 
 made to involve at-one-ment in another sense, as the 
 renewal of the possibility for which the creature was 
 made. The barrier between man and God must be done 
 away. For this end God as Christ experiences all the 
 isolation of sin in needless suffering, Himself sinless, 
 thus once more sharing man's experience to the full, and 
 making union between man and God again possible. 
 Through the Incarnation they are at one, and if man 
 will accept this at-one-ness for he cannot be compelled 
 without his freedom being impugned, and so one part 
 of his god-likeness, and hence his power of entering into 
 real love of God he passes, in union with God, through 
 limitation into transcendence. These points again have 
 already been dealt with, and reference should be made 
 to Evolution and the Need of Atonement and Evolution 
 and Spiritual Life for their fuller treatment. 
 
 In the foregoing brief account we have summarised in 
 modern form what seem to us the essential implications 
 of the traditional doctrines of Christianity in regard to 
 the nature of the Godhead. If in places we have been 
 dogmatic in disputed matters, it is of set purpose. We 
 have set down nothing, we believe, that is antagonistic 
 to the fundamental teachings of the Church in any 
 degree. But in disputed matters, such as the deeper 
 problems of the Incarnation and Atonement, we have 
 definitely chosen that expression of the truth which 
 seems to us to fit in best with the aspects of human
 
 56 The Triunity of God [CH. 
 
 personality which we shall shortly have to discuss. The 
 basis of all that we have said is to be found in the Bible. 
 The right of interpretation has been freely used, with- 
 out, we believe, overstepping legitimate bounds. Chap- 
 ter and verse have not been given ; the task would be a 
 long one and for our present purpose unnecessary, since 
 the scriptural basis is to be found in many theological 
 treatises 1 . The present chapter is simply meant to set 
 out the teaching of the Church ; assuming the Authority 
 of the Bible and the Authority of Tradition. With 
 several other questions on which we have but touched 
 we shall have to deal more in detail. For instance, it is 
 certainly true to say that the hypostasis of the Holy 
 Spirit is far less clearly delineated in the revelation of 
 the Bible than are those of the Father and the Son. 
 
 Again, the whole process of reason which sub-divides 
 the Eternal, Absolute Godhead into three modes, while 
 contending that they are not modes at all, but hypo- 
 stases or persons, seems at first sight artificial and arbi- 
 trary. We can think of the three Persons of the Godhead 
 in relation to the created cosmos, though in doing so, 
 we are very apt to lose sight of the unity of the Godhead 
 in a kind of veiled tritheism, but when we come to try 
 to carry our thought back to the absolute aspect of 
 Godhead, without time or change, or anything but 
 transcendent activity, we cannot help feeling that the 
 three Persons are modes of His relation to the cosmos. 
 Even when it is pointed out that in the realm of the 
 Absolute Pure Unity must be wholly inactive and so 
 indistinguishable from Pure Nothingness, reason gives 
 
 1 In Martensen's Christian Dogmatics, for example, many refer- 
 ences are given in the course of a most able conspectus of the 
 orthodox Christian doctrine in regard to the Trinity, as under- 
 stood by a mind well versed in metaphysic, and the same is 
 true of Mackintosh's The Person of Jesus Christ, Ottley's The 
 Doctrine of the Incarnation, and many other works.
 
 i] The Triunity of God 57 
 
 but a grudging consent. However reason's hold on the 
 idea of the Nature of Eternal Being is at best very shaky. 
 And this is necessarily the case, for human thought 
 reaches out into and intersects the Absolute in a very 
 small portion of its own perimeter. Only a very small 
 portion of ourselves has reached transcendence. Mostly 
 we are concerned with existence under the conditions 
 of determined immanence of life lived under the con- 
 ditions of time and space ; of life which is in process. I 
 am as well as I become; but as yet most of me is still 
 becoming. I am there to experience becoming, and 
 in so far I am transcendent. But it is only that part of 
 me which has achieved transcendence that can enter into 
 relation with the Absolute Being of God 1 . Further, my 
 transcendent self is not pure thought or Reason. 
 Thought is only one side of that self's activities; and 
 though the human intellect must be satisfied, it cannot 
 of itself achieve complete knowledge. Herein lies the 
 greatest difficulty of our task. We can only communicate 
 our beliefs to others in words, however much we can in- 
 fluence those with whom we are in direct and intimate 
 contact by the conviction of our whole being. These 
 words must appeal mainly to the intellect, if we attempt 
 to express in them a formal proof of the grounds of our 
 belief. Thus such proof must be even to ourselves in- 
 complete. To complete it we have to try to express 
 implications not founded on pure thought, but appeal- 
 ing to other sides of our personality. In a book which 
 professes to appeal mainly to the reason such implica- 
 tions are not acceptable even if they are realised at all; 
 and besides, too often miss their mark altogether, 
 passing unrecognised. 
 
 We must be prepared, therefore, to meet with objec- 
 tions like the following. " I am prepared to grant that 
 undifferentiated Unity is equivalent to Nothingness 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life, ch. vi.
 
 58 The Triunity of God [CH. i 
 
 I am prepared to grant the need of postulating an inter- 
 nal manifold in the Godhead, in order to explain the 
 known fact of God's activity. But why hypostatise 
 these modes? And, why Three Persons? Why not two 
 or four or a dozen? Why even this apotheosis of Per- 
 sonality at all? Again why appeal to revelation, which, 
 after all, may merely represent man's own attempts to 
 reach an understanding of the Nature of God? In fact, 
 this is what revelation is ; if God were really and directly 
 revealing Himself He surely would not make so many 
 mistakes, give views of Himself so partial as to pro- 
 duce a totally erroneous impression. That such mis- 
 takes, such erroneous impressions, did historically 
 occur, not only among the less favoured nations of the 
 world, but also among the Jews, is abundantly clear 
 from the Bible itself. Why then claim anything divine 
 in this record of man's search after God? " 
 
 Many such questions may be justly asked; and at 
 present we shall attempt no categorical answer. Instead 
 we shall examine certain aspects of human personality, 
 and argue from the known. By doing this we may 
 reasonably hope to find some indications of the meaning 
 of divine Personality, some foreshadowing of the eternal 
 answer to these questionings. The last however we may 
 dismiss with a word. The evolution of man's idea of 
 God, which is the salient feature that emerges from a 
 study of comparative religion, is only explicable on the 
 assumption that there is a God who is revealing Him- 
 self. Evolution implies Revelation, in the last resort 1 . 
 In the present study we shall devote little attention to 
 Revelation. This does not mean that we refuse to it its 
 proper place. We merely assume it as obviously under- 
 lying the whole of the questions we discuss. 
 
 1 A fact which is admirably brought out in F. B. Jevons' little 
 handbook on The Idea of God in early Religions.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE TRIUNITY OF MAN 
 
 LET us now turn from the question of revealed religion 
 to consider man's own conception of God how it 
 arises and what are its salient features. No doubt, to 
 Christian and metaphysician alike, it is obvious that we 
 can only pretend to do this. Revelation is the correla- 
 tive of evolution. Man could know nothing of God if 
 He did not reveal Himself through His attributes, and 
 even if we say arbitrarily that we are going to examine 
 man's conception of God from the purely human stand- 
 point, the claim to use such a method is artificial, and 
 amounts to no more than a statement that we propose 
 to follow more or less closely the historical order of 
 man's expanding ideas of God, as he appreciates more 
 truly God's attributes. Yet even such an obvious truth 
 requires further analysis before we can see its meaning. 
 These attributes, as we have seen, constitute the 
 modes in which God is manifested to beings external to 
 Himself. Their significance is in relation to the Cosmos, 
 not to Himself. Men, in so far as they are external to 
 God, can only know Him at second-hand, through the 
 mediation of His attributes. Such knowledge, being 
 external, can never satisfy. The spirit of man yearns 
 towards immediate knowledge of God. It craves union 
 with Him, in which alone is true immediacy- We can 
 never be content to know what God is, we need to know 
 Himself. But we can only learn to know God through 
 knowing what He is. Mediate knowledge must precede 
 immediate. The reason for this is obvious. Really to 
 know a person to know him, not merely his attributes 
 means to love him. Aimer c'est tout comprendre;
 
 60 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 but also, Tout comprendre c'est aimer. The first is true 
 for creative timeless being, the second for being that is 
 in time. You can not love a person till you know him ; 
 and to know him means first to know his attributes 
 his thoughts, his interests, his activities, his character. 
 When you know his attributes and approve them 1 you 
 love him ; that is, you seek to share his life ; to know him ; 
 and so to know his activities from the inside. Further, 
 to know and love you must approve. There must be 
 a similitude and inner sympathy between your own 
 nature and his. Therefore, if you love a person you can 
 gain some understanding of his nature by examining 
 your own. The commonplace that opposite natures 
 attract one another is blatantly untrue, though com- 
 plementary natures no doubt do. A religious man is not 
 intensely attracted by a profane man whose inmost 
 thoughts are blasphemies. A pure man is not attracted 
 by a moral leper. An able man is not attracted by 
 another simply because that other is stupid, and has the 
 most profound contempt for capacity and thought. A 
 wise man is not attracted by a fool. On the other hand 
 a deep thinker who is conscious of lack of humour may 
 be attracted by one who adds humour to interest in 
 thought. A man who is sombre in his religion may be 
 attracted by a beautiful soul which is also blessed with 
 joie de vivre. The sense of lack does seek fulfilment in 
 union with another. This fact is very suggestive, but 
 it has nothing to do with the statement that like repels 
 like and attracts unlike. Two men who suffer from 
 identical defects will very likely repel one another; but 
 this is because of the absence of like qualities in each, 
 not their presence. The lack which each feels is not 
 
 1 Approval is necessary, for love is interpenetration, all but 
 identification without the loss of self-identity. Disapproval is on 
 a pedestal, and you cannot love from a pedestal. True approval 
 has nothing in it of de-kaut-en-bas, for the approval is fellowship.
 
 n] The Triunity of Man 61 
 
 satisfied by the other. The best human friendship is 
 that between persons who are identical in almost all of 
 their positive qualities and yet supply each other's lack 
 as well a lack perhaps hardly realised. Apply this fact 
 to the relation between man and God, and it is evident 
 that by considering those qualities of man in virtue of 
 which he loves God and those of whose lack in himself 
 he is conscious as a loss or defect, we may arrive at 
 some approximately true idea of the qualities or attri- 
 butes of God. 
 
 But this is not all. Because man persists, transcend- 
 ing time because he is there to experience change, and 
 is not himself simple change his nature has in it some- 
 thing that is timeless. His self-hood is transcendent, 
 and its reaching out towards God is evidence of simili- 
 tude of essential being. Man's attributes are like God's 
 attributes, and so man is drawn to God through know- 
 ledge of Him as a Being external to himself ; but besides 
 this, and evidenced by this, his essential being is like the 
 Essential Being of God, and so he craves union with 
 Him. This of course is the underlying fact in human 
 friendship too. The similarity of attributes, which 
 represent men's external relations, is evidence of an 
 inner similarity which craves satisfaction in union; the 
 immediate experience of the relationship of interpene- 
 tration. But this union or love goes behind change into 
 perdurable realities of existence. We love one another 
 with our real, lasting selves, not with the temporary 
 attraction of our immanent, changing nature, at least 
 such partial affections, if they exist at all without com- 
 mingling of the higher, are not worthy of the name of 
 love and have nothing in common with its true nature. 
 
 Man, then, is drawn to God by the similarity of his 
 own attributes to those of God; by examining the attri- 
 butes of the human personality, the projections of the 
 self towards others, we can gain some insight into the
 
 62 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 attributes of God. We can argue from man's person- 
 ality to God's, since we have seen that God is a Person. 
 But we can do more. Attributes reveal, if only partially, 
 the real being. Man loves God and feels the need of 
 union with Him because his real transcendent being is 
 similar to God's Being, otherwise there could be no 
 attraction ; for attributes, after all, are derivative, not 
 primary. Because man is in some degree absolute he is 
 not utterly debarred from absolute or immediate know- 
 ledge of God ; his absolute being resembles God's, on the 
 principle we have enunciated; we can argue from the 
 one to the other. From the attributes and being of the 
 human personality, then, we shall attempt to obtain a 
 partial presentation of the attributes and Being of God. 
 If it be objected that in doing this we are assuming 
 that God is completely mirrored in the microcosm of 
 man's soul, we simply answer that we do assume it and 
 are prepared to justify the assumption. For if the idea 
 of the external activity of Love which demands that 
 other beings should share the Perfect Experience means 
 anything at all, it means what it says, that Love wishes 
 to share with others Perfect Experience the whole and 
 not a part ; and that therefore man must be eventually 
 at any rate the microcosm of the whole of God. As 
 Athanasius expresses it "He was made man, that we 
 might be made God 1 " Thus then, to hark back to our 
 original statement of the object of our present exami- 
 nation, it is clear that to turn our back on revelation for 
 the purpose of argument is not to deny its existence. 
 The self-revelation of God is implicit in the fact that 
 men exist. That their attributes resemble His, that 
 their being mirrors His, is due to the very fact that He 
 is Love, and Love is, on one side of its nature, centri- 
 fugal and therefore creative. Creation is Love's self- 
 revelation to itself, but it is also Love's revelation to the 
 1 Quoted by Mackintosh, op. cit. p. 184.
 
 n] The Triunity of Man 63 
 
 other selves which it brings into being. It is thus clear 
 that though we may neglect revelation for the moment, 
 as we try to trace the image of macrocosmic Reality in 
 the microcosm of human personality, we implicitly 
 accept its existence; its causal significance, and its 
 meaning in process 1 . 
 
 The existence of other beings external to a man is 
 necessary to his process of becoming. He is not satis- 
 fied internally, in the mere reality of self-activities. I 
 cannot, for instance, rest satisfied in being myself, 
 loving myself, thinking myself. A person who even 
 approaches such purely internal activity is most re- 
 pulsive. The only reason we need give for this at the 
 moment is, that man is imperfect, incomplete. (The 
 ultimate reason lies obviously in his causedness man 
 is not self caused ; less obviously, but more truly, in the 
 centrifugal nature of Absolute Love, which itself can 
 never be satisfied with purely internal activity, since in 
 
 1 In arguing from human personality to the Divine we are 
 doing no new thing in searching for the mirrored image of the 
 trinity in unity and unity in trinity of Godhead in the nature of 
 humanity. " It is notorious that Augustine rested upon a trinity 
 in the individual human mind memory, understanding, and will 
 in one place; the mind, self-knowledge, and self-love in another 
 and that he used this psychological analogy without misgiving 
 to interpret the supreme Godhead, arguing on this basis that 
 each of the Persons singly is equal to all the Persons together, 
 each, that is, is simply God in a certain aspect. In like manner, 
 Aquinas views the three Persons as respectively the principles of 
 Origination, Wisdom and Will. There is obviously no tritheism 
 in a construction based on the analogy of a single human con- 
 sciousness." (Mackintosh, op. cit. p. 523.) We are in a large 
 measure going over a familiar track. Only, we contend that the 
 greater knowledge of psychology which modern research has 
 achieved, renders the path more certain. We claim to find not 
 merely analogy between, but identity in, the nature of human and 
 Divine personality.
 
 64 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 that self-abnegation is lacking.) Moreover, he inhabits 
 the sphere of time which others also inhabit, and so his 
 attributes must exist for others whether he likes it or no. 
 The only attribute of such a man would be selfishness. 
 Further he could not become, if his activities were purely 
 centripetal; he would not progress, but would stick at a 
 dead level of imperfection. However, we need not 
 worry our minds about this unpleasant hypothetical 
 being, for he could not exist long. Man is a dependent 
 creature. He has to eat and drink at least; to this 
 extent he has to recognise the existence of something 
 that is not self. And to eat and drink he generally needs 
 to recognise the existence of other people butchers; 
 publicans or water- works officials; landowners and the 
 like; or he will soon find himself in difficulties. Even if 
 he is a savage, he will have to admit the existence of 
 others born and bred in similar briar-patches, because 
 they may take a fancy to his means of subsistence, or 
 even, in a distressingly destructive manner, to him- 
 self. 
 
 For man, then, there is external otherness, which is 
 essential to his becoming. This otherness includes other 
 things and other beings. He makes use of the other 
 things as tools; as far as he can manifesting the rudi- 
 ments of creative activity. In his normal relationship 
 with other beings also he is creative; he creates in some 
 measure their environment as well as his own. Other- 
 ness is thus the basis of his ability to create. If, being 
 comparatively civilised, he starts a general shop, he 
 creates desires and the means of widening activities. 
 Even if he is a primitive savage, every act he performs 
 alters the environment not only of himself but of all 
 his neighbours. The man who first hit on the use of a 
 fish hook was a true creator. 
 
 Then he begets, expanding his own life in the lives of 
 others. He is himself begotten. He is himself influenced
 
 ii] The Triunity of Man 65 
 
 by the environment created by others. Thus he is, in a 
 sense, both father and son. 
 
 He also inspires and indwells matter, both in his own 
 body, in which he gives matter a sacramental meaning, 
 and in the external matter of which he makes a tool, 
 whether it be hammer or arrow, or a rock-chimney or 
 tree up which he climbs in pursuit of some aim. What- 
 ever he does, he for the moment makes external 
 matter part of his body, subserving his desires. He 
 makes it, too, sacramental. This he does of the motion 
 of his own will acting with some degree of freedom. He 
 is creative, he is begotten; and with his whole nature, 
 begotten and creative, he indwells determinate matter 
 making it subserve his free ends. 
 
 Let us next analyse these three conceptions more in 
 detail, as the fatherhood, sonship and freedom of man. 
 
 The idea of fatherhood is creative, but is not merely 
 creative. Will and direction and love come in. Mere 
 parentage, of course, is not fatherhood at all. One 
 could not speak of a father-snail in anything but a 
 metaphorical sense. Unintelligent cooperation in the 
 production of a small jelly in which a number of fertile 
 cells are embedded is not fatherhood 1 . Even higher up, 
 among birds for example, where parenthood includes an 
 element of direction or care, and apparent affection 
 (the reality of which is however open to considerable 
 doubt) , there is no true fatherhood. Not mere creation, 
 whether of environment or new individual, is required, 
 but purposive creation. Fatherhood is the expanding 
 of the self into wider circles of influence. It recognises 
 others and seeks to share its experience with them. 
 Itself becoming, it influences the becoming of others. 
 
 1 As a matter of fact the production of the jelly is not strictly 
 and directly the father's doing at all, and it is anyhow a secondary 
 adaptation; but one must include motherhood as an essential 
 component of the creative act we call fatherhood. 
 
 MCD. 5
 
 66 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 Itself creative, it seeks expansion in its creation an 
 expansion that involves others. All creation of the en- 
 vironment of others is fatherhood, in so far as it is con- 
 scious. 
 
 Human fatherhood is thus still closely associated with 
 mere reproduction, which is the preeminent, though by 
 no means the sole manifestation of the creative activity 
 of animals, as we have seen 1 . Among animals parent- 
 hood and the creation of environmental conditions for 
 others are alike processes the significance of which is not 
 realised. They are unconscious. Human fatherhood 
 goes far beyond either mere parenthood or mere uncon- 
 scious influence over the destinies of others. It entails 
 knowledge and will; and further it consciously creates 
 an environment that is spiritual. This creation all men 
 and women worthy of the name feel to be the most im- 
 portant of all their activities, however feebly they may 
 fulfil it. Man is a centre of will and thought, and by 
 this will and thought he originates. 
 
 In time and matter, then, man is active with the 
 particular kind of activity we call creative. This crea- 
 tive activity, whatever its apparent lowly origin in the 
 satisfaction of desire, whether reproductive or other, 
 without thought or understanding of its consequences 
 for others, becomes definitely and consciously purposive 
 in the higher stages. The fact that the environment of 
 others will be affected is understood, and in a large 
 measure, even in man as he is now, this furnishes the 
 motive of action. 
 
 We see then that creative activity is always intimately 
 connected with other beings, and comes eventually to 
 realise its own motive as thought and as love. Its final 
 purpose, we have found 2 , is interpenetration and union, 
 the sharing of experience; for towards this man is 
 
 1 Evolution and the Need of Atonement, ch. i. 
 * Evolution and Spiritual Life.
 
 n] The Triunity of Man 67 
 
 tending, and in this alone he finds rest. The time-process 
 of creative activity is completed and explained in mutual 
 relationship. Further, since the recognition of this is 
 dependent on the realisation of the ego as a persisting and 
 real existence amid all change, the thing which underlies 
 the creative impulse is timeless. The process of man's 
 fatherhood is to be explained in the light of the end; it 
 is continuous with the unconscious fatherhood of the 
 lower organisms, but the meaning of this last is to be 
 found in what it becomes or tends to, not in what it was. 
 As soon as self -consciousness is reached the self is recog- 
 nised as a purposive creator, and the passage into the 
 timeless begins. Man is always passing from immanence 
 into transcendence, from duration to simultaneity, from 
 process to pure being 1 . 
 
 But man's creativeness is not wholly external in its 
 activity. He is creative for himself as well as for others. 
 He creates himself for himself, in Time, in the process of 
 his own becoming. In that measure in which he is 
 transcendent he is a perpetual source of the activity of 
 love, directed both inwardly upon himself, as the motive 
 of his being, and the material of his inner experience, 
 and outwardly upon others, as the means of sharing 
 the experience of mutuality, both in the creative sense 
 of wishing others to share his experience, and in the 
 dependent sense of wishing to share the experience of 
 those others himself. Thus in the father aspect of man 
 there is something that is of eternity, not of time. Man 
 creates because he is, not because he becomes. Animals 
 create, but they do so unconsciously; their creative 
 activity is an insurance policy contingent on the life 
 that is yet to be, and only maturing when that life is 
 actualised. 
 
 Turn now to the aspect of man's sonship. 
 
 He feels his dependence as well as his independence. 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life, chb. v. and vi. 
 
 5*
 
 68 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 He is conscious that his existence depends on the activi- 
 ties of others. As he realises more of the problems of 
 the world he lives in, he begins to understand that he, 
 and his parents, and all other men, depend for their 
 existence on the activity of God. In other words, he is 
 conscious of sonship in the sense of external causedness. 
 This simple recognition of himself as a result, an effect, 
 is of the same nature as the recognition of simple parent- 
 hood. They are two links in the chain of becoming, 
 when becoming is looked at as the process of an external 
 manifold. They are the correlatives of progress by 
 evolution. Both are in themselves essentially temporal. 
 They have nothing of the permanence of pure being. 
 They are in time and of time ; and only of time, because 
 they have no meaning except as process. To know that 
 one is caused, by itself gives no glimmer of light upon 
 the motive of that causation, no faintest acquaintance 
 with the essential causal activity, any more than to be 
 an unconscious cause gives any notion of the motive of 
 causation or knowledge of the nature of causal activity. 
 Only when the concept of causality is absorbed in the 
 higher concept of the whole of Ground and Consequence 
 -does the true nature of causal activity become clear. 
 As we have already seen, man is also conscious of 
 sonship of dependence on others in a more subtle 
 manner, from his own inner need of sharing others' 
 experience as well as of making them share his own. 
 Thus the reaching out of personality into others, the 
 mutual interpenetration that is so fundamental a 
 character of personality, involves the external relations 
 of both fatherhood and sonship the wish to add to the 
 environment, or more basally, to the experience, of 
 others; and the wish to add to, or rather to fulfil or 
 complete, our own experience by sharing that of others. 
 Both ways, the relation is one of pure otherness, and as 
 long as we are imperfect, it is a time-relation of becom-
 
 n] The Triunity of Man 69 
 
 ing, differing in this from our conception of the absolute 
 mutuality of God's experience. 
 
 As we have just said, however, the creative activity 
 of man is not purely external; there is a fatherhood 
 a will that is directed inwards upon the self. Is there 
 also an aspect or entity we will not discuss which at 
 present- which is also directed upon the self, and which 
 differs in being a dependent and mediatorial function 
 from that creative aspect or entity we have discussed? 
 
 Undoubtedly there is this other way in which man is 
 conscious of what we may term sonship. He knows 
 himself, can stand aside, and, so to speak, watch himself. 
 He can think himself as mediator between his will and 
 his activities. And so thinking he realises that he is 
 mediator. 
 
 In point of fact it is his body which thus mediates in 
 his actual human life. The activities of the will are 
 realised in action, as ends, through the mediatorial 
 activity of the body. This would seem to be purely a 
 phenomenon of limitation in time and matter, and not 
 in any true sense sonship in any sense, that is, which 
 may be compared to the sonship of the Logos for it 
 would seem to have no sort of connection with the 
 transcendent ego. We need, then, to go back and ex- 
 amine this matter a great deal more carefully and in 
 detail. 
 
 What is a man's body? It is unquestionably the 
 means by which man's creative will becomes discharged 
 in action, and it is, further, the substratum out of which 
 the innate freedom of the life process becomes able to 
 realise itself as conscious activity. As we have seen 1 , 
 without the determined basis of the body in which 
 effect followed cause in certain sequence, the freedom 
 of self-determination could never be achieved. And 
 achieved it must be, not merely given from outside, if 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life, ch. iii.
 
 70 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 it is to be true freedom. Starting then at the point at 
 which self-consciousness has been achieved, which is all 
 that is necessary for our present purpose, we see the 
 body as the mediator of that self-consciousness in so far 
 as it affects external objects. All the activities of the 
 self are given effect through the body. The body has 
 thus a very real mediating function between will and 
 ends. 
 
 Let us next inquire what is the nature of these activi- 
 ties. In the first place there are activities which concern 
 only the individual himself. He feels a personal need of 
 food, of warmth, of shelter, of amusement, to take only 
 the simplest needs which bring him into relation with 
 external objects as things capable of satisfying him. He 
 makes tools of these objects in order to satisfy his needs 
 and desires. But as man becomes more advanced he 
 begins to feel a need for personal intercourse for 
 sharing his experience with others and for entering into 
 others' experience himself. The body now becomes a 
 means of self-manifestation, through speech, through 
 writing, through reading, through actions directed to 
 the good of others as well as of himself. These last are 
 determined by the beginnings of sympathy and love. 
 
 As time goes on men begin to interpenetrate each 
 others' personality by more subtle means. The body 
 has thus acquired a function which grows to be of 
 greater and greater import to man. It is the means of a 
 self -manifestation which grows less and less material. 
 But one cannot conceive of the function itself ever 
 ceasing to be required. The essential of personality is 
 relationship. We express this truth when we say that 
 God is Love, and when we make love the highest of 
 human activities. It would seem then that there must 
 always be a means of self-manifestation. This is what we 
 mean when we express our belief that personality itself is 
 indestructible, and that the power of relationship is one
 
 n] The Triunity of Man 7 r 
 
 of the deepest functions of personality. We shall each be 
 ourselves in timeless existence as well as in time, but the 
 self-identity is no mere isolation, but interpenetration 1 
 Thus our bodies have two functions. They mediate 
 between our wishes and our ends when those ends, 
 whether they concern persons or things, are regarded 
 simply as objects external to ourselves; but they also 
 come to mediate between ourselves and other beings, 
 the self and the other being regarded as persons, and so 
 sharing their experience more and more completely. 
 This function, later achieved, is the higher, and moves 
 outside the sphere of time, in Reality. For consider. 
 You love because you abide. That of you which func- 
 tions in love is your real eternal self, which does not 
 change. The permanent you loves the permanent he. 
 (Grammar must lapse when its correct use involves a 
 misrepresentation of the mutual causality of relation- 
 ship.) Because I am I love; not because I become or 
 change. Rather, in spite of the fact of change, I love. 
 I am not change itself, because / experience change; 
 and the same is equally true of the beings I love. As 
 we shall see when we come to consider the doctrine of 
 the Trinity in more detail, Eternally Begotten connotes, 
 not process, but reality of relationship*. So too, the 
 
 1 At first sight this would seem to contradict the fact we have 
 already stated, that in timeless existence, with its perfect pene- 
 tration, selves know each other directly, without the mediation 
 of attributes that attributes are the means of manifestation of 
 a personality to other personalities that are in process, and so 
 are in duration. This is not really so. The spiritual body is not 
 an attribute, but the expression of the self -identity. The per- 
 fected selves are different, since their process of becoming has 
 been different. They are self-identities. A is still A . and B still B, 
 though each is perfect. (See Evolution and Spiritual Life, ch. vi.) 
 The spiritual body is thus simply the ground of distinction of the 
 self-identity. 
 
 * Cf. the Note on this point, ch. vii. p. 204, in which the general
 
 72 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 essence of my relationship to other persons is eternal and 
 real. It is this relationship which is involved in the 
 power of manifesting the self to others. The love that 
 creates the environment of others, directing their experi- 
 ence and expanding it, belongs to fatherhood; the shar- 
 ing of experience belongs to sonship and depends on the 
 power of manifesting the personality. 
 
 Thus between myself and others there is an activity 
 which mediates the sharing of experience. 
 
 We have yet to consider that mediation in relation to 
 the self whose activities of love it mediates. 
 
 Man is to himself his own other. This statement may 
 appear strange, artificial, untrue, at first sight, but a 
 little consideration will show that it is none the less fact. 
 We have seen that man can stand outside himself, can 
 think himself, can love himself. He is capable of intro- 
 spection. He can and does think himself as a creative, 
 loving being. In this act of introspection his body, in 
 the sense of his power of self -manifestation, is regarded 
 in its relation to himself, not to others. He manifests 
 himself to himself. The mediatorial function of his 
 'body' discharges itself of its activities towards his 
 own thought, not towards the thought of others. I can 
 think of myself I am I ; I am this, that and the other, 
 which together make up the me-ness of me. Here I 
 mediate myself to myself. I see myself through the 
 medium of pure thought. In fact I think myself. Thus 
 in the unity that I call myself there is I and thou, though 
 I am so certain that I am one that it is difficult for me to 
 concede the fact. Yet the very existence of introspec- 
 tion is proof of its reality. 
 
 We see, then, that though the mediating function of 
 the body eventually becomes sublimated from the pure 
 time-process of a linking of will and ends, becoming the 
 
 argument is summarised as far as it relates to this particular 
 point.
 
 n] The Triunity of Man 73 
 
 means of manifestation of the personality to others, it 
 eternally persists in this absolutely real form, in relation 
 to others. But still further, as soon as I become self- 
 conscious, that is to say, as soon as I become in some 
 degree transcendent, a self that perdures, I can think 
 myself as an other; in relation to myself the manifesta- 
 tion of my personality becomes a self-manifestation; 
 and so I think myself through the mediation of my 
 self-manifestation. The importance of this fact will 
 become clear as we pursue our argument further. Con- 
 sciousness in the Bergsonian sense what Bergson calls 
 unconscious consciousness would seem to be the recog- 
 nition of an other; self-consciousness would seem to be the 
 recognition of the self as an other, as distinct from external 
 others, for self-consciousness is based on introspection 1 . 
 
 We must now turn to the third aspect of man's con- 
 sciousness. If he simply regarded himself as I and thou 
 in introspection as himself and his own other, he 
 would have no sense of unity. Yet the most salient 
 feature of his self-knowledge is that he knows himself 
 as one. I may be driven to subdivide myself into I and 
 thou fatherhood and sonship, as we have called them, 
 but I am I when all is said and done. Whence does 
 this consciousness of unity spring, if our previous analy- 
 sis of being into I and thou is correct? 
 
 Before we attempt an answer to this question we must 
 investigate the nature of immanence from a point of 
 view which differs in some degree from that we pre- 
 viously took in considering the evolution of man in 
 relation to God's purpose 2 . 
 
 Immanence involves the existence of otherness, and 
 
 1 This self-consciousness of the personal being becomes only 
 fully satisfied, of course, in the consciousness of the union of the 
 self with others. 
 
 1 Evolution and the Need of Atonement, and Evolution and 
 Spiritual Life.
 
 74 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 otherness of a particular kind. This ' other ' is a limita- 
 tion external to the self. Yet the self indwells it. Im- 
 manence is not consciousness of otherness, but exactly 
 the reverse. We can only speak of immanence when the 
 indwelling spirit ceases to be conscious of the otherness of 
 that which it indwells. This point is of such vital im- 
 portance, especially in its bearing upon our belief in the 
 immanence of God, that we must examine it at some 
 length. 
 
 We can speak of spirit as immanent in matter only 
 when that matter serves as the vehicle of the spirit's 
 activities. Matter in which spirit is immanent bears the 
 impress of that spirit. Applying this to ourselves we see 
 at once that not merely our body, but all the matter 
 with which we come into intimate contact through 
 making use of it, bears the impress of our spirit. To 
 take a very superficial illustration, it is a commonplace 
 to say that you can judge a man by his belongings his 
 books, his pictures, his furniture, his carpets, his wall- 
 papers, his hangings, and the way in which he arranges 
 his possessions. 
 
 But this is hardly what we mean by immanence. It 
 is upon a mere reflection of the personality of the man 
 that we here pass judgment. What interests us in our 
 inquiry is a subtler point the fact that when a man 
 makes use of tools, while he is using them he truly in- 
 dwells them. He is conscious of this, though we spec- 
 tators may not be. When a man speaks through a tele- 
 phone he loses all sense of the telephone's otherness 
 at any rate if it is in good order. It becomes for him 
 temporarily the vehicle of his spirit. He is no longer 
 conscious of wires and receiver and transmitter. The 
 fact that he is utilising magnets and cells and grains of 
 carbon in loose contact has no meaning for him at the 
 moment. The machine as a whole has become for him 
 temporarily part of himself. And the same is true of the
 
 "] The Triunity of Man 75 
 
 listener at the other end of the wire. The telephone is 
 nothing more than the means of communication of 
 thought ; it is no more and no less alien to the speaker 
 than his voice. So too the hammer and saw, the piano, 
 the pen, and all the other ' tools ' a man uses. For the 
 time they become part of his body. He can think of 
 them as 'others,' just as he can think of his hand or his 
 voice as an ' other.' His hand and his voice are not him- 
 self any more than his pen and his hammer are. He can 
 think of each as 'others.' But the point is that when he 
 is using them he does not so think. As long as they are 
 the means of manifesting his spirit he forgets or dis- 
 regards their otherness. For him, in fact, they are not 
 others just then. As soon as he ceases to use them they 
 may become 'others' again for him. His hand is less 
 likely to be regarded as an ' other ' than the hammer is, 
 because it is less likely to be mislaid, being in more con- 
 stant and intimate relation with him though in passing 
 it may be worth while to remark that the more often 
 anything is used the less likely it is to be mislaid. The 
 capacity for being mislaid is not a bad practical test of 
 the degree in which we regard a thing as an other in 
 ordinary life 1 . A good carpenter never mislays his tools, 
 and we say that his tools are almost a part of himself. 
 
 1 After a discussion of this point late at night with the two 
 people with whom the greater part of this book has been threshed 
 out, one of them dreamed that the whole essence of immanental 
 philosophy could be summed up in a single phrase. That phrase 
 was remembered and noted on waking. It was 'a man does not 
 mislay his only pair of trousers ' ! Could a more apt illustration 
 of the point be found ? Much of interest on the phenomena and 
 meaning of mislaying and forgetting, may be found in Freud's 
 Psychopathology of Every-day Life, though a caveat may perhaps 
 be entered in regard to the metaphysical basis of all Freud's work, 
 since the standpoint adopted is that of a somewhat crude material- 
 istic determinism.
 
 76 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 Immanence would then seem to be, for man, the tem- 
 porary or more or less permanent cessation of recogni- 
 tion of the otherness of an object, for the purpose of 
 achieving an end; such cessation of recognition being 
 thus conditioned by an element of will. 
 
 Nevertheless man is in fact still limited by the nature 
 of the object; even with a thing so much a part of him 
 as his hand he cannot see or smell; it is in fact an 
 'other.' This is obvious, for it is external to him, and 
 mediating in function; through it he achieves some- 
 thing, because he is still becoming. We may therefore 
 say that, as far as man is concerned, immanence is the 
 using of an ' other ' for the spirit's purpose of becoming, 
 the spirit finding in it something beyond mere otherness, 
 and indeed neglecting this aspect as use is made of it. 
 Otherness is for the time swallowed up in the more in- 
 clusive concept of mediation. 
 
 When one applies this same thought to the Imman- 
 ence of God in the Cosmos it is seen as singularly sugges- 
 tive. God can, apparently, think the Cosmos as an 
 ' other,' as a self -limitation ; but inasmuch as His purpose 
 is being worked out through His indwelling, it becomes 
 no longer an other, but a part of Himself; though in 
 fact it is a limitation, He does not recognise it as a 
 limitation while He works in it. This underlies Christ's 
 words 'my Father worketh until now, and I work.' 
 
 Now in becoming a tool for man matter is only sub- 
 serving that which we have seen is its proper function. 
 Man implicitly recognises this in neglecting its other- 
 ness. A tool is for him a means to an end. Thus, like 
 God, he looks on matter as purposive. As soon, that is, 
 as he, a conscious being, becomes immanent in matter 
 he does so because he finds purpose not only in himself 
 but in matter also. The stone on the beach which is 
 clearly perceived by the child, is there for him to throw. 
 Matter is there that man may use it, be it hand or hand-
 
 ii] Tke Triunity of Man 77 
 
 saw. He guides it, inspires it, gives to it its true value 
 as an instrument, because he sees purpose in it. But in 
 matter qua matter; in unperceived matter, if for the 
 moment we assume that such a thing could exist ; there 
 would be no purpose; matter derives all its meaning 
 from spirit. 
 
 We have seen that for man matter only acquires 
 meaning as opposed to mere otherness which is really 
 potential meaning when he for the time indwells it. 
 This is one of the great arguments for the immanence of 
 God. When we remember that we have learned to look 
 on matter as the expression of the self-limitation of the 
 Godhead, much light is thrown on the conception of 
 God's immanence. For such matter is purposeful has 
 a meaning and by the analogy of man's immanence it 
 would seem that it is, and must be, indwelt by the spirit 
 of God. Thus from man's immanence we argue to the 
 nature of God's immanence, since we conclude on many 
 grounds that man's spirit is similar in nature to God's 
 spirit. Man's spirit is immanent in the same sense that 
 God is immanent. Man makes use of the mediating 
 function of matter for the manifestation and perfection 
 of his freedom. His will through the mediation of 
 matter achieves freedom in time. 
 
 His indwelling spirit ever urges him on towards per- 
 fection that is, towards the completion of his unity 1 . 
 As we have seen, as soon as man becomes transcendent 
 he is able to look upon himself as both I and thou, but 
 he is at the same time conscious of the fact that he is 
 one, and that the completeness of his unity is made 
 possible because of the internal activities of his being as 
 its own subject and object. The completion of this unity 
 is the work of what we may call his spirit of freedom. 
 Let us, then, see what is the function of his freedom in 
 
 1 In union, eventually; but for the moment we are arguing as 
 if personality could exist in isolation.
 
 78 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 relation both to the time-process of his becoming and to 
 his absolute being. 
 
 We have shown already at length that evolution is the 
 process whereby personal freedom is achieved. At first 
 this striving is unconscious. The vital impulse is ever 
 struggling to achieve freedom. That its objective is 
 thus constant is due to the fact that the impulse exists 
 in a cosmos which is the expression of God's purpose. 
 Besides internal impulsion the organism is subject to 
 external tractation ; or, in biological terms we may say 
 that the direction of evolution is pre-destined by the 
 nature of the environment. The response of the indi- 
 vidual is free, the direction of the evolution as a whole 
 is determined 1 . When, however, we consider freedom in 
 relation to the individual, we see that it exists as the factor 
 which makes for self-determination. In the unconscious 
 organism freedom is manifested merely as the power of 
 utilising the environment in a very limited degree, mak- 
 ing it subserve the organism's ends. When self-con- 
 sciousness dawns, through the inturning of the con- 
 sciousness upon itself, making the individual able to 
 think himself as a 'thou,' the freedom becomes the 
 means of completing the personality, through the addi- 
 tion of the knowledge 'I can' to the knowledge that 
 'I am' and that 'I wish.' Before the dawn of self -con- 
 sciousness there was need or craving, and its fulfilment. 
 Now there is I need, I wish, I can fulfil, I can find satis- 
 faction in fulfilment. Thus freedom becomes involved in 
 the completion of the ego. One can hardly conceive the 
 nature of an experience which included simply / am and 
 / wish, without / can. A truncated personality that 
 knew itself, but simply as a bundle of volitions to which 
 it could not give the least effect, would at any rate not 
 be a unity 2 . I should think myself, and I should think 
 
 1 Evolution and the Need of Atonement, ch. i. 
 
 * Possibly this statement would not hold good for a pure
 
 n] The Triunity of Man 79 
 
 my volitions, but nothing would link those volitions to 
 the self. The self would be conscious of derivatives of 
 itself in the volitions, but the volitions could not retro- 
 cede into the self again in fulfilment. And, in point of 
 fact, it is impossible to speculate on the origin of voli- 
 tions that were all from their very nature unfulfillable. 
 A volition can only arise as the result of some relation 
 between cause and effect 1 . Every wish implies that 
 wishes are capable of fulfilment. Even the child who cries 
 for the moon does so because his wishes for other round 
 white things, the breast, the rattle, the ball.-have been 
 satisfied because he knows that his wishes so often 
 meet with fulfilment. And, in fact, his wish for the 
 moon may Deceive satisfaction in a symbolic form, as 
 we shall see when we study the mechanism of the mind 
 from the Freudian point of view. 
 
 Only by the self-fulfilment of volitions can the per- 
 sonality develope and progress as a conscious unity. It 
 is by wishing, and trying, in the certainty that the use 
 of the right means will ensure success, that man de- 
 velopes himself and advances beyond what he was. 
 Thus, then, we find that the personality which is becom- 
 ing, and exists in time, completes and fulfils itself, experi- 
 ences the emotion of satisfaction, and gains increasing 
 knowledge of its essential unity, by means of its free- 
 dom. By the reflex of this freedom the self is made more 
 glorious continually; more a self. The existence of the 
 vital impulse is evidence of God's purpose and His in 
 dwelling; man's personality is evidence of something 
 new the cooperation of conscious beings with God. 
 The spirit of man completes and perfects itself, working 
 
 determinist; but I cannot feel that a determinist can see reality 
 as one whole; personality must appear to him as epiphenomenal, 
 or else some of its most prominent characteristics must be illusory. 
 1 More strictly, since we are endeavouring to see Reality* as a 
 whole, between ground and consequence.
 
 8o The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 with the spirit of God. All that a personal being is at 
 any stage is due to this cooperation, vitalised for him 
 by the force of the questing of all creation by the ilan 
 vital. In time and matter he indwells, but this indwell- 
 ing is the means of his becoming ; and what he becomes 
 is due to the interaction of his whole self his will, his 
 activity, his freedom with his environment, which is 
 the self-limited, and so indwelling, Spirit of God. 
 
 We have seen that man's personality is made one, 
 a unity, by his freedom. But this is while he is in pro- 
 cess of bemg made, or rather, of becoming. We have 
 previously argued that in his transcendental ego his 
 creative aspect and his mediating aspect must exist. If 
 this be so, it is clear that his freedom-aspect must also 
 perdure in the realm of pure being, for otherwise he 
 would be unable to fulfil any activity whatsoever; he 
 would be eternally incomplete, and so not a person. 
 In this respect what we have said of his time-existence 
 applies with the more force to his simultaneous or time- 
 less existence 1 . For consider. 
 
 Man is in part already transcendent, as we have seen. 
 He has an absolute existence which persists through 
 change, albeit it is yet incomplete. What we find to be 
 characteristic of this partial transcendence (if we may 
 use so self-contradictory a phrase, in the absence of a 
 better, and remembering that all it implies is that being 
 really exists for us as well as becoming, in spite of the 
 fact that conditions are such as to make us often lose 
 sight of the Ground in the practical urgency of the Con- 
 sequence) must be true of absolute existence without 
 any becoming; for absolute being can have only one 
 
 1 If indeed simultaneity be purely timeless, which is, to say the 
 least of it, doubtful, at all events in relation to the experience of 
 time-existence as real. If durational time had no reality at all for 
 the transcendent God, neither would process have any; and then 
 immanence would become unreal and the cosmos meaningless.
 
 n] The Triunity of Man 81 
 
 nature, or metaphysical thought becomes impossible, 
 landing us in a hopeless tangle of contradiction entirely 
 at variance with our experience. We know that in fact 
 the world is ordered and rational, not chaotic. It is 
 characteristic of our absolute being that we know our- 
 selves and think ourselves as reasonably, not chaotically, 
 active. The nature of that activity need not concern us 
 as yet, though it is in fact interpenetration or love 
 (which involves an emotion) in the ultimate resort ; will, 
 knowledge, goodness, power, creation all subserve this 
 end. If, then, I know myself as essentially active ; if I can 
 think myself as active : view my own activity from the 
 standpoint of my own thought : it is clear that I must 
 and do also view myself as able for that activity, free to 
 will it, free to think it, free to carry it out; and that I 
 must find satisfaction in so doing. My thought and my 
 activity are unified in my freedom. Apart from my 
 freedom I should be pure activity and pure thought, 
 without the possibility of acting or thinking, without 
 any sort of link between activity or thought. And this 
 is simply meaningless. Meaning is imported at once by, 
 and only by, my freedom to act and think my freedom 
 in acting and thinking. My freedom-aspect proceeds 
 equally from my activity and my thought. The three 
 aspects together make up the fact that I am, which 
 statement of my nature implies my unity. 
 
 We are now ready to carry out our inquiry into the 
 meaning of these three aspects or modes of our person- 
 ality more systematically and in detail. We are com- 
 pelled, as we have seen 1 , to postulate a God alike from 
 biological considerations and from many others. We 
 are driven to see a purpose in creation, which purpose is 
 the emergency of free beings who shall one day enter 
 into true union with God and be like Him. The Genesis 
 statement that " In the Image of God created He him " 
 1 Evolution and the Atari of Atonement. 
 
 MOD. 6
 
 82 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 is radically true. Since, then, we find these three modes 
 or aspects in man's personality, we are bound to search 
 for their meaning, for we find that they do exist under 
 material conditions now, and it seems from our investi- 
 gation that they have an eternal meaning. 
 
 It is natural that, arguing anthropomorphically from 
 his own nature, man should see three aspects in the 
 nature of God, even before the revelation of Christ. 
 And it is too late in the day for it to be necessary for us 
 to state at length that there is essential truth under- 
 lying anthropomorphism; the fact is so obvious 1 . The 
 existence of a triunity, in manhood then, if it is real, not 
 only gives a simple explanation of man's belief in the 
 triunity of the Godhead, but points also to the fact that 
 this belief is probably correct. It is natural that we 
 should see in ourselves a reflection of the nature of the 
 Godhead, and argue from our own nature to that of God ; 
 and if it be the fact that human personality would be 
 incomplete without these three aspects, we have a strong 
 argument for the triunity of the Godhead, if God be 
 indeed personal. 
 
 Of the nature of the Godhead we have evidence in 
 revelation, but we also find it implicit in the phenomenal 
 universe. The creative function of the Father, with its 
 implied purpose, is deducible from the nature of what He 
 creates as well as other things which purpose is the 
 sharing of an experience whose character is love; the 
 necessary mediating function of the Son, which bridges 
 over the gap between time and eternity and makes the 
 union of the finite with the infinite possible (and in 
 passing we may remind ourselves that this mediation is 
 not necessary simply because of sin; its method was 
 modified by sin, that is all) ; the energising force of the 
 
 1 Reference may be made to Jevons' Introduction to the Study 
 of Comparative Religion and his Idea of God in Early Religions for 
 justification of this statement.
 
 ii] The Triunity of Man 83 
 
 spirit indwelling a cosmos whose movement towards 
 freedom is urged by the vital impulse and drawn by the 
 Spirit of God Who is free ; all these are evidence at least of 
 a triunity of functioning of the Godhead in time. Their 
 transcendent aspect need not concern us at the moment. 
 
 The connection between the three-fold activities of 
 God and man is too close and clear to be put aside. 
 Apparently oneness is threefold, when it is the oneness 
 of a person, and must be threefold from the nature of 
 personality. Triunity is what personality means and 
 connotes. The incompleteness of the lower organisms 
 lies just in this, that they have no bond of self -realisa- 
 tion between their creative power and their freedom. 
 Creation for them is unconscious, freedom is uncon- 
 scious, bodily mediation is unconscious. Each of these 
 is merely a process in time; the creatures aie becoming; 
 but they are not. They are in no way transcendent. 
 They cannot use their volition for truly creative pur- 
 poses, they cannot think themselves, they cannot act 
 with self-realised freedom. They have not achieved in 
 the least measure the unity of absolute being. 
 
 We must next inquire whether these three things 
 concerning which we have been reasoning are aspects, 
 modes, of personal being, or whether they are anything 
 more. 
 
 As long as we are dealing with unconscious organisms 
 it is, I think, not arguable that they are more than 
 aspects. Looked at from one outside point of view the 
 organism is creative; looked at from another it is media- 
 ting; looked at from another it is to a certain extent 
 free. But all through the organism is looked at. We 
 stand outside and reason about it; it does not reason 
 about itself. We see that it is an organism which be- 
 haves in this way, and we, as outsiders, analyse its 
 behaviour. But when we come to ourselves, and analyse 
 ourselves through introspection, we find a difference. 
 
 62
 
 84 The Triunity of Man [CH. 
 
 I cannot think of myself as creative or active simply, but 
 as a creative or active being; I cannot think of myself as 
 a mere other to myself but as a being that is another for 
 myself; a being which mediates thought; I cannot 
 think of myself as free ; but as a free being. 
 
 Which ever of these aspects of myself I consider I 
 promptly hypostatise it. Without this process of hypo- 
 stasis I cannot think myself at all. 
 
 The full significance of this and the suggestions that 
 follow will only emerge when we have made a much 
 more detailed study of personality, which we shall do 
 in the next chapter. 
 
 I can then, and not merely can, but I must and do, 
 look upon myself as three hypostatised functions, three 
 personal entities, when I, by introspection, consider 
 what makes up the unity that I call myself. 
 
 Our next questions follow at once from this, and are 
 vitally important. Are these hypostatised functions 
 really three separate beings? And if they are not, am I 
 not regarding one being, who is myself, in three different 
 aspects, and for the moment attaching the particular 
 aspect I am regarding to the concept of being; by a 
 certain process of abstraction excluding the others from 
 my purview for the time? 
 
 Certainly we must answer the first of these questions 
 in the negative. I am one, and any process of abstract 
 reasoning which appears to make me three is shown to 
 be false in its premisses by the very fact that it reaches 
 a conclusion definitely at variance with the very con- 
 crete fact of which I am more certain than of any other. 
 
 Is not, then, my hypostatising of the three aspects 
 of my being due to an artificial process of abstraction? 
 Again we must unhesitatingly answer No; though the 
 full reasons for doing so will only appear after we have 
 analysed the concept of personality in considerable de- 
 tail. For the moment we can only say that in these
 
 n] The Triunity of Man 85 
 
 three modes we do exist for ourselves, and in them our 
 relations to the cosmos are comprised. I know myself 
 as creator, in pure thought, and to others I am mani- 
 fested as the cause of part of their environment and 
 as mediating ray own volitions in regard to them. I 
 know myself as a unity, free to create and to mediate; 
 and others know my influence on their environment, 
 created by me through the mediation of my thought 
 and my modes of contact with that environment, as the 
 expression of my free decision as one being. That is to 
 say, both for myself and for others my hypostases are 
 three, yet I am one. The science of psychology recog- 
 nises these three in some sort as conation the creative 
 striving; as cognition the mediatorial function; and 
 as affection the feeling which links the cognitive and 
 conative functions and completes my power of affecting 
 the sphere which I indwell, through their free use by 
 myself as a purposive being. The order of these for the 
 psychologist is of course cognition the incoming per- 
 ception; affection the internal emotion; and conation 
 the striving, or outgoing effect, whether an effect on 
 the self or on an other, which represents the function of 
 the will in creation. Our next task, then, is to analyse 
 the concept of human personality, in order to see more 
 clearly that the three realities of my personal being are 
 not merely aspects, but hypostases.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE TRIUNITY OF PERSONALITY 
 
 WHEN the human mind is analysed into its constituents 
 for the purposes of the psychologist, or the human per- 
 sonality for the purposes of the philosopher, the number 
 of those constituents is found to be three. Even by 
 itself, this fact is interesting when we remember that, 
 in the religion which takes fullest account of the per- 
 sonal nature of God, the Trinity of the Godhead is the 
 fundamental doctrine. However, by itself the coinci- 
 dence may be of no evidential value ; it may be merely 
 curious. If on close examination it should turn out that 
 psychologist, philosopher, and Christian dogmatist mean 
 the same, or nearly the same, thing, mutatis mutandis, 
 when they speak of the threefold aspect of manhood and 
 of Godhead if each is expressing in his own way his 
 partial vision of one underlying truth the fact becomes 
 more than interesting. It becomes peculiarly suggestive. 
 If, finally, it can be shown, that the idea of Godhead 
 which the Christian theologian formalises in what he 
 calls the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not merely an 
 unjustified and anthropomorphic projection of what he 
 knows of limited personality into his representation of 
 God, the facts become more than suggestive; they point 
 to the nature of ultimate truth. The Trinity in Unity of 
 the Personal God is then an essential part, at least, of 
 Reality. 
 
 Clearly we must examine very carefully these con- 
 ceptions of the nature of personality, alike from the 
 point of the psychologist, philosopher, and theologian. 
 
 As we saw at the end of the last chapter, the psycho- 
 logist divides the activities of personal existence into
 
 CH. in] The Triunity of Personality 87 
 
 cognition, affection and conation. He is concerned with 
 these because his work is to analyse the behaviour of 
 living things : their purposive striving to achieve an end. 
 Cognition involves the part played by the processes 
 of apperception and association, which link both the 
 logical relations between objects and the historical 
 sequence of events. I appoint to my small boys definite 
 'boundaries' on the sea-beach within which they 
 may play at will without special permission from any 
 grown-up. As I write, I see from my window one of 
 them scrambling along a sea-wall towards a martello 
 tower, outside these boundaries. The observation links 
 itself with the fact that the tide is in, and the water deep. 
 Other apperception-masses are correlated with this. I 
 know that he can hardly swim, and that if he fell off the 
 wall he would be drowned. I know that he is disobeying 
 orders, for which the penalty is deprivation of his 
 'boundaries' for twenty-four hours, with consequent 
 imprisonment in the house except when a grown-up 
 wants to go out. I, further, see that nurse is on the 
 beach with the baby, and I wonder if she has given the 
 boy permission to go onto the sea-wall. I know that she . 
 cannot swim, and consequently, that her presence is not 
 much of a safeguard. And so on and so on. Appercep- 
 tion mass calls to associated apperception mass across 
 the deeps of my mind, through logical connection (climb- 
 fall ; water-drown ; etc.) and sequence association (com- 
 mand disobedience punishment similar occurrences 
 in the past; swimming swimming lessons progress 
 over-fearlessness, etc.). These trains of cognitive pro- 
 cess give rise to, or at least furnish the immediate 
 stimulus for, a conative impulse through the emotion or 
 affection of anxiety. I decide to lean out of the window 
 and shout to him to ask whether he has nurse's permis- 
 sion to be there. This I do, influencing his mind and 
 setting in motion another cycle of cognition, affection
 
 88 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 and conation in him. He replies that he has permission. 
 Exit the punishment-complex ; but the danger-complex 
 gives rise to a fresh conative impulse, and I decide to 
 tell him to come back. I do so, again influencing his 
 mind, and the result is not merely speech on his part, 
 but action. He comes back. 
 
 Here is a simple illustration of the three parts of my 
 psychic activity as it appears in relation to another 
 person. But we may examine it from a somewhat differ- 
 ent point of view. 
 
 My reason, mediated by my brain, recognises the situa- 
 tion, itself mediated by the sensation of sight. My body, 
 through my voice, mediates my will to alter that situa- 
 tion. My body again, through my ear, mediates a fuller 
 understanding of the situation. And, finally, through 
 my voice it mediates the desired change. Moreover, 
 in relation to my son, the environment has changed. 
 Through the action of my will, a fresh environmental 
 factor has come into being my command overriding 
 the nurse's permission to which he responds by appro- 
 priate action. I have created a fresh environmental 
 factor for him; no doubt awakening all kinds of asso- 
 ciated memories of the effects of disobedience and so on, 
 since he is a person who, like myself, makes judgments 
 of experience. Habit too cpmes in. All these have more 
 or less potency in determining the response of every 
 living organism to environmental stimulus, whether 
 that response be conscious or unconscious. 
 
 Yet again, I know that I willed to create this environ- 
 ment, and that I need not have done so if I had not pre- 
 ferred being over-careful to the boy running risks. I 
 willed to do it freely to allow my anxiety-emotion to 
 have play being conscious that the matter which I in- 
 dwelt my body, and the air would mediate the ful- 
 filment of my desires, because I indwelt it. I did not 
 think of the air as an 'other,' though it undoubtedly is
 
 in] Tlie Triunity of Personality 89 
 
 an other for me. For the moment it became part of 
 myself, while it subserved my purposes. My indwelling 
 and my freedom being completed in affection, united my 
 cognition and my conation, making it possible for me 
 as one personal being to influence my son, another per- 
 sonal being. Without this I could not have influenced 
 him at all. Thus it would seem that the affection or 
 emotion is, not freedom itself, but the index of freedom. 
 Through emotion, cognition is linked with conation. 
 Without emotion there would be no unity in our mental 
 life. Incoming tides of cognition would sweep over us; 
 and outgoing tides of conation ; related to each other 
 only as stimulus and response : unrelated to any self. 
 They are unified, and the personality is completed and 
 made free, in the sense of being truly purposive and 
 not merely causative, by affection. 
 
 It is because I am one and free through my emotion, 
 in spite of my conation and cognition being per se, and 
 ideally, independent activities, that I can influence other 
 people and things. For cognition and conation are in 
 a certain degree, though not wholly, independent. I can 
 perceive and correlate without any externally creative 
 impulse following, as when I lie among the heather and 
 drink in the beauty of the hills, the sea, the rocks 1 . I can 
 will and create without the stimulus of immediate cog- 
 nition, calling up memories on which to base my crea- 
 tion say, of fresh plans for my children in the dark 
 and with closed eyes, by linking conation with emotion. 
 Though cognition and conation are respectively pre- 
 dominant in these two cases, emotion is clearly present 
 in each, and really, some trace of the third activity. In 
 actual practice every mental process of a self includes 
 all three activities, though one may predominate. Only 
 in lunatics and possibly in babies do we get anything 
 
 1 Conation is, however, present in a subordinate degree, since 
 the claim of the thing perceived is endorsed by the. will, cf. p. 92.
 
 90 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 approaching the isolated functioning of one activity 
 and this, just because the lunatic and the new-born 
 child are not self-conscious unities. 
 
 Really, I must will myself to appreciate scenery. I 
 must relate my past experience in planning the future, 
 calling up mental images. Yet mere cognition has no- 
 thing whatever to do with mere conation, and mere co- 
 nation has nothing to do with mere cognition. They are 
 related only in the unity of myself. And this unity is 
 based on the fact that / recognise, / will, and that I am 
 free to do these things. The free unity of my personality 
 issues in cognition and conation ; but my cognition and 
 my conation equally issue in my free unity. I could not 
 think nor will unless I were one and free, but equally I 
 could not be one and free unless I could think and will. 
 Will, thought and emotion are the boundaries of the 
 triangle which is myself. Without any one of them I 
 could not be myself, I could not be free any more than 
 there could be a triangle with one of its three sides miss- 
 ing. The illustration is spatial and crude, but it may 
 serve to indicate the truth we are labouring. 
 
 Let us turn now from the psychologist to the philoso- 
 pher. For a careful, systematic, and extraordinarily 
 suggestive account of the meaning of personality to the 
 metaphysician the reader is urgently advised to study 
 Wilfrid Richmond's Essay on Personality as a Philo- 
 sophical Principle 1 . We have already had occasion to 
 refer to this work, and shall have occasion again, but 
 no passing reference can convey anything of the valuable 
 material with which a careful reading 2 will stock the 
 mind. 
 
 Briefly, the argument of the book is this. 
 
 1 Again I would refer the reader to Pringle Patrison's Gifford 
 Lectures, although the subject of personality is dealt with there 
 for the most part incidentally, and to Jevons' Personality. 
 
 1 "Careful reading," for the book is not always lucid.
 
 in] The Triunity of Personality 9 1 
 
 Starting with the premiss that we know personality 
 by experience, and indeed, that it is the preeminent fact 
 of experience, the author goes on to show that person- 
 ality has the dramatic meaning of self-manifestation, 
 the legal meaning of membership of a society of persons, 
 and the theological meaning of capacity for communion 
 in the absolute reality of the Eternal Being; while in 
 modern parlance it is simply accented individuality, but 
 always in relation to a society. Mr Richmond himself 
 defines personality as "the capacity of society, fellow- 
 ship, communion," the Swapis of icoivtavut, combining 
 the suggestions of earlier definitions. He shows that the 
 idea of personality as a limitation is entirely contrary 
 to experience; all personality is intensified in the collec- 
 tive association after which it strives, whether we con- 
 sider the region of desire and will, of intellect, or of 
 emotion. This third chapter is perhaps the most im- 
 portant in the book, and should be carefully studied. 
 After a brief examination of the relation of mere feeling 
 to self-consciousness, he proceeds to analyse the pheno- 
 mena of will, of intellect, and of emotion, as represent- 
 ing the three chief aspects and functions of personality. 
 Now it is particularly interesting to notice that he sub- 
 divides each of these, and considers them under three 
 heads. 
 
 Will is examined in regard to its motive, its mediation 
 in motives, and its ultimate principle as an impulse to- 
 wards communion. In motives it is clear that intellec- 
 tual consciousness of purpose, and an emotional content, 
 are involved, whether the motive be personal or social. 
 Moreover there is mediation in motives, for whether in 
 duty, desire, or affection, the immediate motive is con- 
 sidered mediately in its relation to general principles. 
 And the ultimate principle has always relation to com- 
 munion between the self and the world, whether the 
 immediate motive be desire, duty or affection. More-
 
 92 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 over each involves both an intellectual process of cog- 
 nition, and an emotional element. 
 
 Intellect is next examined as perception, mediation, 
 and knowledge. 
 
 Perception is shown to be the experience of a bond 
 of union between the thing and that thing's relation to 
 the perceiving self; the thing and its quality as predi- 
 cated by perceptive judgment are both elements of one 
 single experience. But perception involves will, since 
 both the object and its qualities, which are obtruded 
 upon the mind, are acknowledged and acted on by that 
 mind. I perceive a chair; and in doing so I accept its 
 existence, and its qualification of myself. Its qualifica- 
 tion of myself is realised by me as an emotion 1 . Thus 
 in perception both will and emotion have their part. 
 But perception is also collective in nature; our percep- 
 tion is, we assume, the same as the perception of another 
 would be if he were in our place. 
 
 Very generally however we seek a verification and 
 explanation of our perceptions. We then resolve facts 
 into ulterior facts, all linked together; and the linkage, 
 not the perception any longer, becomes the real thing 
 for us. We find mediation and interdependence. Finally 
 through verification and explanation, we reach scientific 
 Proof, confirming the truth we have perceived. But the 
 scientific method is really an appeal to a collective 
 standard. In this whole process will plays its part, as 
 the acceptance of the chain linking the perceived 
 phenomena; and the conviction of the truth we have 
 verified is emotional. 
 
 But further, all beliefs have to be correlated and 
 rounded off into one coherent whole. Philosophy is 
 concerned with the nature of this whole and leads to 
 knowledge. When philosophy takes cognisance of all 
 the facts, especially the facts of causality and commu- 
 
 1 Op. tit. pp. 89 seqq.
 
 in] 77/c Trinnity of Personality 93 
 
 nion, which are really known to us only through our 
 knowledge of personality, the only whole which can be 
 found is a Personal God. Only in the knowledge of a 
 personal God can intellect, will and emotion all and 
 alike find satisfaction. 
 
 Thirdly, when we study. Emotion, we find that it 
 emerges from feeling unlike intellect, which emerges 
 from perception but as it expands, growing from the 
 self-centred emotion of pleasure through the disinter- 
 ested emotion of beauty, to the emotion of love, which 
 is at the same time directed towards the self, and to- 
 wards others, transcending all selfishness in pure reci- 
 procity, we find it fulfilling itself in religion, in which 
 will and intellect and emotion achieve complete fulfil- 
 ment. It is the great unifying principle that completes 
 the freedom of man. In this notion of the communion 
 of love we find an ideal of reality that comprehends all 
 that is and all that could be an ultimate Reality 
 which has nothing beyond itself, since it includes every- 
 thing in the perfect satisfaction of all personal existence. 
 
 Now for our present purposes the most suggestive 
 fact of Mr Richmond's analysis and we need not 
 necessarily agree with him in every detail is this: 
 you may, and must, subdivide the activities of the per- 
 sonality into will, intellect, and emotion, but the very 
 subdivision defeats itself, for you find that in every 
 activity of the will intellect and emotion have their part ; 
 in every activity of the intellect, will and emotion; and 
 in every activity of emotion, will and intellect. The 
 three are inseparable parts of one whole, and have no 
 true independence in a personal being or isolated self- 
 existence. 
 
 Now when we find that the psychologist from his 
 limited and purely descriptive standpoint in just the 
 same way is bound to subdivide the activities of the 
 mind into three, cognition, affection and conation, we
 
 94 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 begin to wonder what the meaning is. For conation is 
 the manifestation of will, cognition is the basis of intel- 
 lect, and affection emerges from feeling or sensation, and 
 is emotional. It is unfortunate that Richmond, by 
 taking will, intellect, and emotion in that order, ob- 
 scures the relation of these with the terms of the psycho- 
 logist, even though he makes the relation with the terms 
 of the theologian more -easy to grasp. We have to 
 remember that the three terms are in each case the 
 expression of the existence of a cycle. Richmond starts 
 and metaphysically he is right with the creative 
 phase of the cycle. Macdougall, for example, starts 
 and psychologically he is right with the perceptive 
 or mediatorial phase of the cycle. But for theologian, 
 philosopher, and psychologist alike, the cycle consists 
 of creation, mediation, and the unifying emotion which 
 is the basis of freedom. This will become more clear as 
 our argument proceeds. 
 
 Will, intellect, and emotion form the inseparable triad 
 of consciousness. They are therefore essential to con- 
 scious being; my being as a person depends on them. 
 The unity of a person is threefold, and must be three- 
 fold; that is what the word personality connotes, 
 through its underlying suggestion of capacity for fellow- 
 ship. The lower organisms are not persons, because they 
 cannot will, though they can strive; cannot know, 
 though they can be affected in a way analogous to, if not 
 identical with, sensation; cannot experience emotion, 
 though they can adapt themselves to the serial relations 
 of their environment. The highest animals are on the 
 threshold of true willing and feeling, though probably 
 their intellectual processes get very little beyond simple 
 perception. But in none of these do they reach the 
 sense of communion, which involves as its very starting 
 point the consciousness of the self and the consciousness 
 of the freedom of the self. They may live as interde-
 
 in] The Triunity of Personality 95 
 
 pendent members of communities, but they are never, 
 as far as we can judge, conscious of themselves as parts 
 of a community, with interests and duties that can only 
 be fulfilled in fellowship. They are not truly free. 
 
 Let us now turn to the concept of the theologian. He 
 realises that God is a Person. For reasons which we 
 need not here recapitulate, he further recognises in the 
 Godhead a trinity. This trinity he hypostatises as 
 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father wills and 
 creates ; but He loves too, and His creation is an ordered 
 whole, manifesting reason. The Son is the Divine 
 Reason, and mediates the Father's activity as the Word 
 begotten of the Father. He creates and loves, and in 
 these activities will and emotion play their part. 
 
 The Holy Spirit is the Indwelling and Guiding Prin- 
 ciple of Unity, the Essential Love of God, proceeding 
 from the Father and the Son ; by Whom is freedom, and 
 through Whom man comes freely to know God. And 
 freedom involves knowledge and will. 
 
 Thus each Person of the Godhead is not merely a mode 
 or aspect but has all the three essentials of a complete 
 Personality. 
 
 Now when we think of what we have said of the 
 nature of human personality, we remember that here 
 too we found will, involving intellect and emotion; 
 intellect, involving will and emotion; and emotion, in- 
 volving will and intellect. Further, in an earlier chap- 
 ter, we saw that man is himself creative, mediating and 
 freely indwelling is himself father, son, and spirit. 
 However we regard personality we find it triune. 
 
 Clearly, our next task is to find the relation between 
 the conation, cognition and affection of the psycholo- 
 gist ; the will, intellect, and emotion of the philosopher; 
 and the wider concepts of fatherhood, sonship and 
 spirithood; before we can relate all these to the theo- 
 logian's doctrine, and arrive at our final issue the
 
 96 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 question whether these really represent three persons, 
 or three aspects, in the Godhead; and what is the re- 
 lation of these infinites of Godhead to the finites of 
 humanity. 
 
 Now it is clear that the three heads under which the 
 philosopher considers personality are essentially the 
 same as those of the psychologist. These last are 
 narrower, for psychology is a descriptive science, and 
 has little concern with the ultimate reality which is the 
 goal of philosophy. Nevertheless philosophy, whatever 
 its final purpose, must start from the known. Thus, 
 when the philosopher reasons about personality, his 
 starting-point must be the descriptive analysis of the 
 psychologist. 
 
 Remarking only that conation, cognition, and affec- 
 tion are included in the wider categories of will, intel- 
 lect, and emotion, we may therefore pass on to con- 
 sider the relation of these three with fatherhood, sonship 
 and indwelling spirithood. 
 
 We have seen that conation and will are essentially 
 creative in function. They are always directed towards 
 an 'other,' and they only rise to the full height of 
 realisation when that 'other' is a person. Thus the 
 creative aspect of will is essentially fatherhood in its 
 relation to others. But into every act of fatherhood 
 intellect and emotion enter, as we have seen. Father- 
 hood is absolutely inseparable from these. 
 
 Again cognition and intellect form the basis of pure 
 thought. You cannot think without an ' other ' which is 
 there to be thought. And the process of thinking an 
 other involves the perception of its existence, and the 
 recognition of the fact that its relation to the thinker 
 is apprehensible in the category of order or reason, and 
 not of chaos. But to think a thing is not an end-in- 
 itself. The thought must be purposive, and so related 
 to creation, and must also be the realisation of a bond
 
 m] The Triunity of Personality 97 
 
 between the thinker and the thing thought. Thought 
 thus mediates between will, on the one hand, the realisa- 
 tion of relationship on the other hand, and the thing as 
 the object of this will and this relationship. In other 
 words, the dependence of thought on will, and the 
 relationship between subject and object which both im- 
 ply, is implicitly recognised. Thought mediates between 
 will and relationship, in the directedness of each upon 
 the object of that will and relationship. If the object 
 is a person B, A being the thinker and wilier, there is 
 further the consciousness that each of these factors is 
 also present in that person B directed upon A. Finally, 
 as dependent primarily on cognition, so long as there 
 is any external other, and determining conation, but also 
 proceeding both from the thought and the will, is an 
 emotion. In this emotion the purpose both of the will 
 and the thought is to be found. It unites the two in a 
 common bond of sympathy, and without it both would 
 be meaningless, because purposeless. Ultimately, pure 
 emotion is a free cause 1 , itself governed by no relation 
 of external causality nor rational sequence, even though 
 in the experience of a limited being in his relation to 
 external objects no doubt it is true to say that sensation 
 precedes and gives rise to emotion. But even here the 
 emotion is not caused by the sensation, though it is 
 aroused by this. A blow from a stick does not cause 
 1 This statement is unaffected by the fact that in a limited 
 human personality, emotion is dependent on afferent impulses to 
 a large extent, and not entirely on internal states determined 
 solely by the nature of the personality. We shall discuss this 
 more in detail when we consider Freud's psychology. At present 
 we need only say that the apparent dependence of emotion in man 
 upon external causation is simply the evidence and result of that 
 emotion not being free. It is the mark of limitation. How sugges- 
 tive this is in regard to the self-limitation of God in creation, is 
 at once obvious. It shows how self-limitation must involve 
 suffering. To this we shall return. 
 
 M P. 7
 
 98 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 painful emotion, though I feel pain after it. The emo- 
 tion that is associated with pain is not the effect of the 
 blow, but the way in which my mind expresses some- 
 thing that lies behind and originates a suitable volition 
 and action to the afferent stimulus of the blow, which 
 is itself an experience of limitation. If I were not 
 limited, the blow would not hurt. Indeed it would be 
 impossible. But stick and the emotion associated with 
 the sensation of pain belong to totally different cate- 
 gories, and one cannot cause the other. Strict causality 
 only holds when the action moves within one category. 
 No doubt the emotion is related to pain, when the whole 
 is considered. But the point with which we are con- 
 cerned is, that this relation is not one of strict causality, 
 but is dependent on the fact that the being who is con- 
 scious of the emotion is free in some measure, limited 
 in some measure. In short, the possibility of the 
 pain-emotion is rooted in the whole nature of personal 
 being as creative, and so self-limiting. To return to the 
 illustration we used awhile ago, the call of a child in 
 pain. There is a causal chain linking the call to the 
 effect on my ear, another linking my will to help with 
 my approach to the child ; but there is a break at each 
 end. The child is free to call, and chooses to call, I am 
 free to interpret the call, and to rush to help. But be- 
 cause the child and I are, in different degrees, thinking 
 beings, the whole process does not move simply in the 
 plane of causality : freedom comes in the freedom of a 
 true emotion. The case is a good one for illustrative 
 purposes, since the partial development of the child's 
 personality is intermediate between the man whose free- 
 dom of emotion is large, and the animal which is almost 
 without freedom, and in which the pain-sensation pro- 
 duces a reflex, practically untinged by emotion. Pain 
 itself, then, is simply the sensation-link which relates 
 the limited mediating function of cognition which
 
 in] The Triunity of Personality 99 
 
 mediates the relation between the other (stick) and the 
 self (me) with the (again limited) creative function of 
 conation. In the emotion associated with it lies what 
 freedom of response there may be : of choice of the form 
 which the creative function shall take. When the emo- 
 tion is less intermingled with mere sensation, its un- 
 causedness is still more obvious. The emotion associated 
 with beauty links my perception of external things, 
 which is now in part the intellectual recognition of 
 order, to my creative sense that I can cause order. The 
 perception of beauty is markedly creative. It is the 
 harmonising of my experience of outside phenomena 
 with my knowledge of myself as a free cause of outside 
 phenomena. The sense of beauty is the realisation of 
 the possible harmoniousness of all experience, making 
 me will to make experience truly harmonious. Beauty 
 produces a yearning, that is creative in essence, for 
 higher things 1 . My emotion directs my creative imagi- 
 nation towards the ideal of harmony. 
 
 The full emotion of love, which is the common 
 multiple of all partial emotions, is itself perfect freedom, 
 making cognition one with conation, in a perfect unity 
 of harmonious experience, whose harmony is called into 
 
 1 The yearning which is the most characteristic feature asso- 
 ciated with the recognition of Beauty in an object is singularly 
 suggestive. When I see that a thing is beautiful I seem to under- 
 stand it, get inside it, feel that it has a message for me a message 
 of its relationship. And the result is a voiceless cry "I want I 
 I want I " Now this yearning is far less prominent in the sense of 
 reciprocal love, and yet there is a close resemblance between the 
 emotion of beauty and love. There is far more sense of satisfac- 
 tion, of rest, here. It may plausibly be argued, on these grounds, 
 that Beauty is really a felt-relationship, and that the dissatisfied 
 yearning is the expression of the fact that perfect relationship is 
 reciprocal. This is not the place to develope a theory of aesthetic, 
 but I cannot help feeling that in this problem of relationship a 
 clue to the meaning and nature of Beauty may be found. 
 
 72
 
 ioo The Triitnity of Personality [CH. 
 
 being by the knowledge of complete freedom, and in 
 love we find satisfaction of the sense of beauty also, for 
 there is harmony of relationship. In theory, emotion 
 qua emotion is uncaused, determining causal activity ; in 
 fact it is both centripetal and centrifugal. Centripetal, 
 in that it is roused, in limited beings, by external stimuli, 
 which seem to be themselves the causes of it, simply be- 
 cause we live in determined conditions in which our 
 emotions are not free, and tend to search for causes in- 
 stead of inhibitions we are so accustomed to the rela- 
 tion of cause and effect as essential correlatives when 
 physical determination is in question, that we mista- 
 kenly carry over the same reasoning from one level of 
 experience to another centrifugal, in that all emotions 
 are creative manifestations of our real self to ourselves 
 and to others. 
 
 Emotion is the originative force that urges to self- 
 understanding and self -revelation. 
 
 This idea of the uncausedness of pure emotion is 
 difficult, and one's first impulse is to deny it; especially 
 if, like my freest and most constant critic, one has had 
 a psychological training. We will therefore consider it 
 more at length. 
 
 Will, intellect, and emotion all emerge from the 
 primitive complex of pure sensation. Pure sensation 
 or feeling is, so to speak, the lower layer which underlies 
 consciousness. Out of consciousness arises conscious- 
 ness of objects, and then consciousness of subject. Con- 
 sciousness of objects is perception, consciousness of 
 subject in relation to objects is true self-consciousness. 
 Feeling can now be analysed in relation to the self; 
 that which determines its creative aspect recognised as 
 an emotion. Emotions themselves are of very different 
 grades. The lowest no doubt are those associated with 
 fear and pain. But in every emotion, even these, the 
 realisation of the freedom of the self to act forms a part
 
 in] The Triunity of Personality 101 
 
 of the content of the emotion. Pain involves the realisa- 
 tion that I am in some measure free to avoid the repe- 
 tition of the blow; it links cognition with conation. But 
 what I feel is a sensation pain, not freedom? Quite so. 
 The emotion aroused by pain involves the realisation 
 that I am only partially free that I am limited by my 
 body. Pain-emotion is an emotion of limitation. But it is 
 none the less true that I realise that my freedom exists; 
 that the pain gives rise to a conative attempt to increase 
 my freedom; and that the small measure of freedom I 
 do possess lies in the region of emotion 1 . 
 
 So with fear. Fear is an emotion of limitation; but 
 it usually gives rise to conation. Where it does this 
 only to a very limited extent, as in the phobias of 
 anxiety-neurosis, it loses much of its character of an 
 emotion and becomes to a large extent a simple feeling. 
 In the fear of anxiety-neurosis I, to a considerable ex- 
 tent, lose my self-consciousness. My self shrivels to the 
 likeness of a pea floating in a vast ocean of fear-sensa- 
 tion. I lose my freedom in a great measure; even in so 
 far as I am conscious of my self at all, it is only to be 
 conscious that I am not free, but limited. In this sense 
 of limitation the horror of great fear lies. There are, 
 thus, emotions which are dependent for their existence 
 
 1 It may be objected here that, as we have dented true emotion 
 to the animal, allowing to it only sensation, we have denied all 
 freedom to the animal, in patent contradiction of our whole 
 philosophy of life. This is not the case. It is clear that in the 
 present discussion we are speaking of the freedom of the true 
 alternative, as manifested in conscious choice. All we can say is, 
 that in animals the measure of freedom they possess lies in the 
 happenings, whatever they may be, that link the perception or 
 sensation with the subsequent action. And the same is true of a 
 man. Actually, the freedom he possesses at present is small : 
 such freedom as he has lies in the same region as in animals : the 
 difference is that man is conscious of this region, and gives to it, 
 as he experiences it. the title of emotion.
 
 IO2 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 on the fact of limitation, whether self-imposed or im- 
 posed from without. They are the emotions of imma- 
 nence sorrow, fear, hate and all their congeners. But 
 themselves are free, or rather, find their ground in the 
 creative and self-renouncing nature of personal being. 
 They are not consequences of the material conditions of 
 limitation, nor caused by them, but both are alike de- 
 pendent on the nature of free personal being. 
 
 But turn to an emotion such as pleasure. In pleasure 
 there is a great uprush of the sense of power of free- 
 dom. The creative self is acutely experienced. Limita- 
 tions are minimised. In a sense pleasure may be said 
 to be caused, but the statement by itself is onesided. 
 Certain sensations or feelings, which no doubt have 
 origin in perceptions, make me acutely conscious of 
 myself as controlling my own destiny. Pleasure is the 
 realisation of freedom, by the minimising of limitation. 
 
 As we have said the highest emotion, which has an 
 absolute and timeless existence, is love. It is the most 
 acutely self-conscious and creative of all. It is conscious 
 of nothing but the subject and the object as interpene- 
 trative and mutually acting on each other. There is no 
 sense of limitation at all only the perfection of free- 
 dom. It is uncaused, by any external causation. We 
 are now speaking, of course, of perfect love in perfect 
 mutuality. At first it might seem that the love is caused 
 by the object. This is not so; it is merely directed to- 
 wards the object while it flows out from its own spon- 
 taneous self-generation. It is creative ; or rather, gives 
 rise to a creative impulse 1 ; it is also receptive ; but in its 
 perfection it is not limited, still less caused, by the 
 object towards which it is directed. It is causal crea- 
 
 1 This creative aspect of love is familiar in the idealisations of 
 a lover. To the world his mistress is simply Ann Eliza Brown: 
 to himself she is unique; peerless, and almost perfect. And he is 
 right only no one else has the creative genius to understand it.
 
 in] The Triunity of Personality 103 
 
 tive; itself uncaused, yet perfected by mutuality. 
 When that mutuality is incomplete, the 'other' is 
 known as a limitation ; and the sense that the emotion's 
 freedom is not perfect, is felt as painful yearning. The 
 love is limited from without, and so in a sense experi- 
 ences external causation. But perfect love is an emotion 
 of transcendence. 
 
 Thus we see that an emotion is ideally uncaused, 
 though in our own actual experience it is intimately 
 connected with the nexus of causality. It is the self- 
 expression of freedom. In the region of emotion freedom 
 is introduced into will and thought alike, because in the 
 region of emotion we find the motive of creative activity. 
 Without it, will would be simple, purposeless causation; 
 thought would be blank, miserable order alone. It 
 enters into each, supplies the lack of each, and unites 
 both together. It indwells each, and so indwelling, 
 unites them. Furthermore, when the external object, 
 that is thought and willed and felt, is personal, the 
 emotion may rise to the height of love or perfect mutu- 
 ality of communion, for the object is itself then subject, 
 and the first subject, object also. Love is the only 
 emotion that is perfectly free, and it only when it is the 
 sole emotion; and love expresses the reality of perfect 
 communion. 
 
 Thus we see that when we pursue the ideas of will, 
 intellect, and emotion to their source we find they are 
 identical with our original concepts of fatherhood, son- 
 ship, and spirithood. 
 
 It would, however, seem that these are merely aspects 
 of personality. They are very different from moods, it 
 is true. A mood is the partial expression of a personality 
 through the purposeful suppression of another integral 
 part, one part thus receiving over-emphasis at the ex- 
 pense of another. A mood is really the refusal to share 
 with another person the whole of our nature. We
 
 IO4 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 deliberately reserve something. It is the refusal of 
 communion. And when our mood has relation to things 
 only, as when we are alone ; if, for instance, the mood is 
 one of ill-temper; we are really fixing our mind on the 
 otherness of things, instead of on their relatedness to us, 
 as things of which we can make use, in which we can 
 manifest our immanence. We refuse to recognise the 
 unity of the cosmos, attending only to the perceived as- 
 pect of discreteness. Thus a mood, being partial, and in- 
 volving reservation, is entirely different from fatherhood, 
 sonship and spirithood. Whatever these may be, they are 
 at least not partial. Each by itself involves the other two, 
 though it ts not the other two, and so involves the whole. 
 
 Along the Line we have just been pursuing we can get 
 no further. In relation to others, whether beings or 
 things, we can only say that personality has three 
 activities of functioning, which are interdependent and 
 inseparable ; and that, the more completely developed 
 the personality, the more inseparable are the functions; 
 while yet they can never merge into one another nor 
 grow less distinct. 
 
 But when we turn again, as we did in chapter i, to the 
 relation of the personality to itself as an absolute being, 
 we gain more light. 
 
 I am not eternally and originally self-existent, but 
 dependent on the creative will of God. Consequently 
 I must be always conscious that my creativeness is 
 derivative and not primary; that my thought cannot 
 satisfy itself completely in thinking myself, since I am 
 not all 1 ; that my freedom cannot find satisfaction in 
 
 1 I do not mean to imply that God either could rest satisfied 
 with purely centripetal activities; really, the idea of God-before- 
 any-cosmos, though convenient as a starting-point for certain 
 trains of reasoning, is self-contradictory, for in what we under- 
 stand by the concept God there is something eternally centrifugal, 
 creative.
 
 mj The Triunity of Personality 105 
 
 knowing myself free, without recognising that there is a 
 freedom which caused my freedom. I cannot be for 
 myself alone; and yet I cannot be in an absolute sense 
 at all if I feel that God is an external other for myself. 
 An external other must be a limitation, since it predi- 
 cates conditions which are not my conditions. Other- 
 ness can only not be a limitation when it is internalised 
 in perfect union. For instance, my will is not a limita- 
 tion of my thought, nor is my freedom a limitation of 
 either, for these are all myself. Again I do not feel that 
 others, with whom I was in perfect sympathy, would in 
 any sense limit me by their otherness, because I should 
 penetrate it, and they would penetrate my otherness. In 
 earthly life I never reach this, but I do find that the 
 more my love for friends approaches perfection, the less 
 they limit me and I them. Rather they develope my 
 personality, and I theirs. Similarly, if I know God's will 
 and thought and freedom as my own, while yet I am not 
 God but myself, I find fulfilment, not limitation, in Him. 
 And reverently we may say that the same is true forGod. 
 Each to each is no longer 'other' externally, since we 
 interpenetrate and share the same experience, but each 
 remains himself, and so is an 'other' in a sense that 
 includes no limitation, but is, so to speak, internalised, 
 having become mere differentiation. Yet though I can- 
 not be for myself alone, even in the transcendent exist- 
 ence we have just considered, and to which we approach 
 only in a very small measure in this life ; though I can- 
 not exist for myself even in the sense that God exists for 
 Himself ; yet I am self-existent, though not purely self- 
 existent. I can will myself, think myself, freely; yet 
 know myself one, in so far as I am. My will is not an 
 abstract quality that is part of myself. I am a creative 
 being. My intellect is not an abstract quality that enables 
 me to think myself. I am a thinking being. My emotion 
 is not an abstract quality that enables a whole that is
 
 106 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 me to love freely. I am a freely loving being. I cannot 
 abstract each of these qualities and all that it implies 
 and leave a residue that is myself, for these qualities 
 make up myself. I cannot abstract them and leave pure 
 empty being; the residue would be nothing. Take 
 away will, intellect, and emotion from being and there 
 is nothing at all left. These make up that of which we 
 are conscious as being ; and the idea of a being that is 
 wholly unrelated to any consciousness is meaningless; 
 esse est percipi, at least, if percipi be referred to any 
 mode of consciousness of any being. But I can abstract 
 two of these qualities and yet leave being. A purely 
 creative being is thinkable ; a purely thoughtful being 
 is thinkable; a purely loving being is thinkable. Yet 
 each is incomplete, unable to act except as a machine. 
 One can imagine a machine that constantly turns out 
 organised objects; whose sole activity this is; and that 
 machine would therefore be. So too one can imagine a 
 being that simply thinks the relations of its others ; and 
 a being that simply experiences emotion in regard to 
 its others 1 . But each would be a mere machine without 
 spontaneity. Freedom only comes in when all three are 
 linked together. Freedom thus comes with the unity of 
 three different*. Unity is a system, which we may desig- 
 nate by the term Infinite Reciprocity. 
 
 But further we must note that these incomplete beings 
 we have just been discussing are not in fact self-existent. 
 They can only exist, even in thought, in relation to their 
 others. For self-existence a unity composed of these 
 three thinkable beings is needed. And notice that it 
 must be a unity, not a mere union. It is because they 
 are one that they can be self-existent and self-satisfying 
 indeed that the beings can become selves at all. A 
 
 1 Though the emotion would be a painful one: a sense of lack: 
 a yearning: since the being would not be free to act, or to experi- 
 ence an emotion that was creative.
 
 in] The Triunity of Personality 107 
 
 personal self is thus composed of three ideal beings or 
 hypostases united into one, and thus is free to will, think, 
 love itself internally as its own other, as well as willing, 
 thinking, loving a plurality of others. We see thus that, 
 whether we consider human or divine personality, we 
 are driven to the conclusion that it must be made up of 
 three qualities, each made real, and saved from mere 
 abstraction, by the essential qualification of being. 
 
 It is perfectly true that we can regard the three as 
 qualities of one entity, as they are in fact. We have 
 said that they cannot be self-existent otherwise. The 
 point is not that these are three entities composing one 
 real being, which is manifestly untrue, but that these 
 are three qualities, each of which can be thought of as 
 compounded with being; which cannot Jt>e thought of ab- 
 stractly, apart from being ; and which yet only compose 
 one real entity where they are combined. 
 
 But though this leads us towards the Christian doc- 
 trine of the Trinity of the Godhead, it does not really 
 attain the full doctrine of the Trinity. The hypostases 
 seem to be beings, but not persons. We have a unity in 
 trinity and a trinity in unity; but the unity is a Person, 
 while the trinity is apparently made up of beings merely, 
 and only of beings through a process of analysis which 
 results in something remote from reality. 
 
 This difficulty is in fact due, however, simply to 
 the artificial process of abstraction by means of which 
 we had to analyse the material of our problem. We 
 have already seen that Richmond rightly insists on the 
 impossibility of considering the will of a person as en- 
 tirely unconnected with thought and emotion ; and this 
 interdependence is equally true of thought and emotion 
 themselves. Into every creative process thought and 
 emotion enter ; every thought involves will and emotion ; 
 every emotion, thought and will. Practically then, when 
 we think of a transcendent personality that is to say,
 
 io8 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 of a personality which simply is, and does not undergo 
 process in duration we think of a unity substantiated, 
 or determined as what it is, by three self-determining 
 qualities compounded with being, of which we may 
 speak when we abstract each from the rest a creative 
 being, a thinking being, and a freely-loving being which 
 interpenetrate in such a way that the creative being is 
 not merely a creative being, but also thinks and freely 
 experiences emotion, and so with each of the others. 
 But then, each being must be in a sense a person, since 
 each is a being manifesting will, intellect and emotion, 
 though one or other of these three predominates, thus 
 differentiating the three persons of the transcendent 
 personality, and making them not mere identities. And 
 all three are necessary to compose the unity which we 
 call the personality. If this be true of any transcendent 
 personality, it must be true of the Personality of God. 
 The Godhead if it is a Personality must be a unity, which 
 unity is substantiated or determined as itself, by three 
 persons, completely interpenetrating, yet each differentiated 
 from the others by the stress or emphasis of its individual 
 functioning, yet none of these Persons could actually 
 exist apart from the rest: the three are substantiated 
 in one Being. 
 
 Thus, from our consideration of personality we have 
 been led to the conclusion that any personality that 
 simply is, in simultaneity, is composed of three hypo- 
 stases which are not merely aspects but in very fact 
 persons, though not self-existent persons that could 
 exist as complete, in isolation ; and that without these 
 three the personality could not exist at all. Conse- 
 quently, if God be personal, He must also be Three 
 Persons in One God. 
 
 Our conclusion, if valid, must also hold good of human 
 personality under the limited conditions of earthly life; 
 for we have seen that as soon as an organism becomes
 
 in] The Triunity of Personality 109 
 
 self-conscious it enters in some degree upon transcend- 
 ence. The completion of personality is the completion 
 of the passage from immanence into transcendence 
 from becoming to being. 
 
 One point of objection to the theory outlined above 
 is very obvious. " What is there to prevent our pressing 
 the same reasoning further, and seeing in each of the 
 three persons of a complete personality yet three other 
 persons, and so on, in infinite regression: personalities 
 that become "fine by degrees and beautifully less"? 
 Since primary emotions, for instance, involve elements 
 of will and intellect ; since a primary will and intellect 
 involve each other, and emotion, in a secondary degree, 
 why should we stop short where we do? Why 3, why 
 not (3)", persons in each personality? One may be 
 driven to the illogical, unscientific answer of Professor 
 Ptthmllsprts when Ellie asked him why there aren't 
 any Water Babies " Because there ain't." One may be 
 driven to the argumentum ad hominem and say "Do you 
 mean to tell me that you are (3)" persons ? " Only then 
 one's opponent will inconveniently answer, " No, I am 
 only one; not even three, as you pretend ! If I am three 
 I don't see why I am not (3)*, and I know I am not, 
 therefore I will remain one till further notice, thank 
 you." I am not at all sure that the objection can be 
 satisfactorily met at all, nor even that it is desirable to 
 meet it. I am certain, however, that it is not a fatal one. 
 The only answer I can give verges perhaps on petitio 
 principii, but I do not think it really leads us into that 
 logical quicksand. It is this. 
 
 In the idea of infinite regress we are using a spatial 
 image of a linear type. If we must use a spatial image 
 at all here, it should be of a circular type. Imagine 
 three hoops, the circumference of each composed of three 
 equal lengths of material perfectly joined, yet one third 
 twice as heavy as either of the others. Call the heavy
 
 iio The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 third in one emotion; in the next, will; in the last, 
 thought. No one, separated and by itself, will balance 
 evenly; it will take up a certain position in relation to 
 externah objects; but if all three be imagined joined 
 together in such a way that the heavy thirds do not over- 
 lap each other, we shall have a perfectly balanced whole. 
 Let this whole stand for the personality, the individual 
 hoops for the hypostases. A crude illustration, and no 
 argument, if you will ! But if we are going to have spatial 
 images at all, I think this is closer to the truth than any 
 linear one. For the whole, perfect personality is, so to 
 speak, circular; complete and self -enclosing, with never 
 a ragged end to stick out. 
 
 This point seems to me important. After all, the type 
 of an infinite regress to which philosophers raise objec- 
 tion is what we may call the linear type, as for instance, 
 in the problem of causality. In such cases the one term 
 B is dependent on the preceding term A, but A is not 
 dependent on B. Here unquestionably the idea of 
 infinite regress is not permissible. But in what we may 
 call the circular type, where A and B and C, etc., the 
 terms, each involve the others equally and reciprocally, 
 yet when artificially isolated show this peculiarity : that 
 A , B and C involve a, b and c, and a, b and c involve a', b' 
 and c' , and so on; a, b and c, a', b' and c' ' , etc., each 
 representing the same thing as A, B and C, only rarified, 
 so to speak I am not at all sure that objection can be 
 maintained. And this is certainly the type with which 
 we have to deal in considering the trinity of personality. 
 So long as the whole is not in time there is no First-in- 
 the-series ; and we have seen that the essential feature of 
 personality is that it is not itself in time, though it may 
 indwell the temporal conditions of a cosmos. 
 
 Imagery apart, each hypostasis of the full personality 
 is complete, and identical with the rest in all but em- 
 phasis. Will, emotion, thought these merge into one
 
 in] The Triunity of Personality \ 1 1 
 
 another. They are not separable entities, as, for our 
 analysis,. we have had to conceive them. When this is 
 realised there is no room for infinite regress, at all events 
 in the ordinary sense. 
 
 We have considered the problem so far as coldly and 
 dispassionately as we were able. The full significance of 
 what we have said is beyond us, but we must neverthe- 
 less attempt some examination of its bearings, both in 
 relation to evolution, and in relation to our individual 
 experience. Before we do this however, it is important 
 to run over again the main stages of our proof, in order 
 to show that, though the method is circular, since we 
 started with an analysis of the meaning of the Trinity, 
 and returned, after analysis of personality, through 
 synthesis of personality back to the Trinity, yet our 
 argument itself was not circular, for we did not assume 
 that which we had to prove. 
 
 We first analysed to a certain extent the conceptions 
 of Fatherhood, Sonship.and Spirithood in the Godhead, 
 and showed that similar manifestations were to be found 
 in the activities of men. Man as well as God is father, 
 son and spirit. We next considered the psychologist's 
 analysis of mind into cognition, affection and conation, 
 and saw that it was included in the philosopher's more 
 complete analysis of personality into intellect, emotion 
 and will. We then showed that none of these three was 
 in actual fact able to stand on its own merits. Ab- 
 stractly, we can consider each separately, but in actual 
 fact the activity of any one of the three involves the 
 subordinate exercise of the other two. We notice 
 further that while the abstract concepts of a creative 
 being, a thinking being, and a feeling being were pos- 
 sible, they remained unreal mechanical abstractions 
 as long as we did not personalise them by admitting a 
 measure of the other two qualities into the particular 
 being we were considering. On admitting these quali-
 
 1 1 2 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 ties, the beings at once became persons composing one 
 Real Person, yet differentiated from one another in the 
 emphasis of functioning. But because a perfect per- 
 sonality must be perfectly balanced in its functioning, 
 it becomes clear that the personality must itself be a 
 complete unity made up of these three differentiated 
 persons, each of which is an essential part of personality, 
 yet, by a strange apparent contradiction, is a person 
 itself. Moreover it is not that we lay an artificial stress 
 in thought upon first one and then another of these 
 activities. An appeal to experience excludes the possi- 
 bility of this. For consider the experience of Christians. 
 They do in fact claim, not on grounds of intellect, but of 
 revelation and of their individual experience, that God 
 did create, that God in Jesus Christ was in fact the In- 
 carnate Mediator of the Creative Will, which will He 
 had mediated as the Logos 1 , and that God was actually 
 the Indwelling Spirit of Freedom, guiding the world into 
 all Truth, which Truth is the free experience of Reality. 
 And universal experience backs them up. There is a 
 world, when all is said and done; there is purpose not 
 chaos; there is emotion; there is progress towards free- 
 dom. At least, the intellect affirms these things. Since 
 there is a world, in which certain classes of phenomena 
 
 1 It may be said that the stress we have laid on the Mediatorial 
 aspect of the Son's activity exaggerates one side and lands us, or 
 tends to land us, in the same demiurgic conception that spoiled 
 Gnosticism, or the impersonality that ruined Philonism. If the 
 criticism were valid, we should find ourselves, in fact, drifting into 
 the quicksand of Docetism, on which so much of Eastern Patristic 
 theology found shipwreck, or narrowly escaped it. But really 
 against onesided emphasis of this kind we have guarded ourselves 
 most carefully by our insistence on the personal self-identity of 
 the Logos as eternal Being ; an aspect that will become more and 
 more prominent as our study goes deeper; and by our categorical 
 statements that Christ's personality did not begin with the 
 Incarnation, but was, rather, limited thereby.
 
 m] The Triunity of Personality 1 1 3 
 
 are manifested, there must be an absolute Reab'ty 
 behind. That is the conclusion of philosophy. Since 
 natural phenomena exhibit the characteristics we asso- 
 ciate with mind when we meet them on the smaller 
 scale, and since such queer things as moral judgments, 
 for instance, do exist in ourselves, the Absolute Reality 
 must be a Personal God. That is the conclusion of 
 metaphysical theology. 
 
 Again, historically, Christ did come into the world and 
 teach certain things, and many claim to have personal 
 experience that what He taught is true. There was a 
 coming of the Holy Ghost in power, whatever that may 
 mean; and its practical effect was the vitalising of the 
 Christian Church under conditions which, humanly 
 speaking, and for a false religion, were hopeless, since 
 the Church consisted mainly of illiterate men, living in 
 a conquered country torn with political dissensions; 
 amid a people whose religious leaders were occupied 
 with a stern struggle for formalism, not freedom ; amid 
 a people destined shortly to cease to be a nation, to be 
 submerged in the sweeping tide of excellent, if worldly, 
 government, and then to be given over to disorder and 
 oppression. 
 
 The threefold activity of God is a reality, not a 
 theory. It is His actual revelation of Himself in cos- 
 mical conditions. 
 
 So too is the threefold activity of man a reality. And 
 our study of the limited personality of which we have 
 immediate experience leads us to realise that each man 
 is really three persons, and only becomes a true unity 
 when these three persons are all active equally. 
 
 Lastly, let us again formulate, quite definitely, what 
 are these three persons of personality for such we must 
 call them. A perfectly clear statement on this matter 
 is essential, for here is the thread which must connect 
 together all the many things we have yet to consider. 
 MCD. 8
 
 H4 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 
 
 We have called the functions of the three fatherhood, 
 sonship, spirithood ; we will call the persons themselves 
 father, son, and spirit. The terms are convenient, be- 
 cause Christianity has rendered them familiar, and, 
 besides, they serve to remind us that, because man and 
 God alike are personal, what we say of the personality 
 of the perfect man is a fortiori true of God. 
 
 Fatherhood is creative. But because it is essentially 
 and always related to sonship and spirithood, it is 
 personal itself, and not merely part of a person. In 
 fatherhood the stress is upon will, but its function is 
 achieved by thought and love, This creative will is out- 
 wardly directed towards others which it calls into being 
 from the necessity of its own internal determination 
 towards creation ; but it is also inwardly directed upon 
 the self, as determining the nature of its self-experience. 
 A person is internally, as well as externally, active. 
 
 Sonship is mediating. It mediates the relation of 
 creator to created externally in the reasonable order of 
 experience, and it also mediates the internal relation of 
 the person to himself in thought, making the person his 
 own other. A person knows himself, as well as others. 
 Nevertheless the self-thought is willed, and it is vivified 
 by the emotion of love. But the stress is upon thought, 
 mediating relationship. 
 
 Spirithood is, as we have seen, harder to realise, for 
 7 and thou are closely related, but we have no word 
 for which means we have no articulate thought of 
 a third relationship between persons equally close 1 . 
 
 1 Mackintosh even goes so far as to say "Moreover, the argu- 
 ment for a vital duality can never yield a trinity ; it gives no help 
 in conceiving the third Person of the Godhead, thus failing at a 
 crucial point. One feels that the last part of this objection is un- 
 answerable, and must be accepted frankly. No speculative 
 argument known to the present writer has the slightest value 
 as proving a third divine distinction which is either 'Holy* or
 
 in] The Triunity of Personality \ \ 5 
 
 Yet the idea of spirithood is perfectly simple, really. 
 The stress is upon the emotion that is eternal and abso- 
 lute: love. And since the essence of love is freedom, 
 through spirithood freedom is introduced into the whole 
 personality. We have seen that even the descriptive 
 science of psychology recognises this; for in its middle 
 term, affection, which lies between the afferent per- 
 ception and the efferent striving, must lie the element 
 of freedom, if it exists at all. And it is in the middle 
 term that we find emotion. Spirithood is then the free- 
 dom of love. It proceeds from will and thought; will 
 and thought both play their part in spirithood; but it 
 retrocedes into them again, as an essential factor in 
 their activities. Externally, spirithood then becomes 
 the indwelling of free spirit in others. It confers the 
 possibility of interpenetration, through the mediation 
 of relation in sonship. Internally, it completes the unity 
 ' of the personality through its retrocession into father- 
 hood and sonship, from which again it proceeds, thus 
 completing the freedom of the whole personality. 
 
 'Spirit.' And the fact is a strong reminder that the origin of the 
 idea of spirit, in its Trinitarian meaning, lies not in philosophic 
 thought, but in history and life" (The Person of Jesus Christ, 
 p. 519). In spite of the great measure of truth in this conclusion, 
 I cannot but think it overstated. 
 
 82
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE INCARNATION 
 
 WE may now turn away from our discussion of the 
 triune nature of God and man, to consider the revelation 
 of the Godhead under the conditions in which we our- 
 selves live and move, for this is, in truth, the fullest 
 revelation of manhood itself. 
 
 An increasing number of the Christians of to-day are 
 ready to accept the Incarnation of the Godhead as 
 Jesus Christ the Saviour in all its fullness. Not so many 
 years ago the man who professed a belief that the Man- 
 hood of Christ was true manhood, with all manhood's 
 limitations in the regions of knowledge and power, was 
 looked upon with suspicion. St Paul's and St John's 
 teaching of the kenosis, in its plain meaning, was hidden 
 in a cupboard; and, lest any inquisitive person should 
 by chance open the door, that doctrinal skeleton was 
 discreetly wrapped in an ambiguous robe of common- 
 places, so that its outlines should be veiled. The 
 Divinity of Christ was rightly insisted on, but in such a 
 way that often His Manhood became an epiphenomenon, 
 and hence ultimately unreal. At any rate it was isolated 
 from the true spiritual series. The divinity of common 
 manhood was forgotten ; the unsullied godhead that is 
 enshrined in even fallen humanity was unseen ; because 
 the spots that denied the wrapping robes were examined 
 through a lens that left the rest out of focus. Humanity 
 itself seemed a disgrace when no clear thought distin- 
 guished sin from limitation. The miracles of Christ were 
 evidences of Divinity, not of Humanity made perfect 
 in limitation. His prophecies and eschatological teach-
 
 CH. iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation \ 1 7 
 
 ing were dissevered whblly from the prophetic tradition. 
 God took the form of man, not manhood itself. 
 
 Happily, in England, the last quarter of a century 
 has seen a great change a return to the doctrine of 
 Kenosis which is emphatic in St John and St Paul, 
 traceable in Irenaeus, fundamental in Luther, and over- 
 developed in igth century German theology 1 . We see 
 the Godhead now in Christ become true Man, accepting 
 all the limitations of manhood in order to make the 
 fellowship of man with God complete and eternal. We 
 see the Christ, not disgraced by the limitations of 
 humanity, but pointing the divinity of manhood's 
 spirit. We see His Godhead, not in His miracles, but in 
 His teaching, and above all in His personality; we know 
 it within ourselves through the sense of union*with God 
 which acceptance of Him brings; we know it in the fall- 
 ing away of the burden of sin. 
 
 Yet even to-day, though we recognise that no atone- 
 ment could have been wrought if Christ had not emptied 
 Himself of Godhead, accepting the full limitations of 
 fallen manhood, we hardly yet realise the complete 
 meaning of what we say, and its deep significance for 
 the relations between the Transcendent God and an 
 evolving world for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity 
 and the doctrine of Immanence. Our purpose in the 
 present chapter is to try to search out something of this 
 meaning, as far as one or two of the leading facts of 
 evolution and of human psychology are concerned. 
 
 Jesus was born a child, as man is born a child (we 
 will for the moment leave on one side the question of 
 the Virgin Birth). Now a human child, in passing 
 through its embryonic development, recapitulates, in 
 brief and incompletely, the whole history of its evolu- 
 tion. Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny, is the form of 
 statement of this Law of Von Baer familiar to students 
 1 Cf. Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ.
 
 
 : : : r~ LT. 
 
 ; r r i" r 
 
 from tie point 
 ":in as
 
 1 20 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 overshadowed, however, by a feeling of the nearness of 
 God, due in large measure to the fact that imagination 
 plays so large a part in child-life that the unseen is as 
 real as the seen, as long as the imaginative stage lasts. 
 
 Then comes the time when facts have to be corre- 
 lated. This is often a time of scepticism, or at least a 
 time of doubt, when there seems little to link spiritual 
 teaching with practical facts. And finally, arising out of 
 this comes the stage of fuller spiritual experience. (As 
 with all generalisations, individual cases often occur 
 which refuse to fall into line; facts are obstinate 
 things. But in the main what we have said is true.) 
 
 Now, if we accept the true humanity of Christ, if we 
 believe in His Incarnation in any real sense; we must 
 believe that He went through the same stages of physi- 
 cal development as an ordinary child does. As we hope 
 to show, there is nothing irreverent, but rather some- 
 thing singularly beautiful, singularly helpful and sug- 
 gestive, in the knowledge that He, like ourselves, 
 passed through a protozoan-stage, a shark-stage, and 
 the rest. But dare we draw the line even here? Does 
 not our mind urge us to make the plunge, to say that He 
 must have gone through all the psychical, the mental 
 and spiritual, stages of familiar childhood, as well as the 
 physical? May not our boldness bring a great reward 1 ? 
 For the course of boldness is the course of honesty. If 
 we really mean that Christ was Very Man we must be 
 honest with our own thought, nor fear the truth that 
 comes. Must we not say that in mind and spirit Christ 
 passed through the stages of primitive man just as any 
 child passes through these stages, though at each stage 
 He showed Himself the highest possible manifestation 
 of that stage? Must we not admit that the full realisa- 
 
 1 Take, for example, the singular freshness and beauty and 
 stimulus of Glover's The Jesus of History, in which the humanity 
 of Our Lord is treated as really human.
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 1 2 1 
 
 tion of His Mission and even of His own Divinity did 
 not come to Him till He was a full-grown man? Before 
 we consider the help that such an idea gives, let us con- 
 sider its apparent difficulty. 
 
 We have been accustomed to think of Him as realising 
 His true Nature and His Mission from the earliest years. 
 Partly, this is due to the piety of ages of literature and 
 art. The Holy Child is pictured as a child with sad eyes, 
 old beyond His years, already looking upon the sorrows 
 of the future. Raphael loved to paint Him so. The 
 Madonna of the Grand Duke shows it, and the Sistine 
 Madonna; even His play with the goldfinch is tender, 
 and has none of the abandon of childhood. Sacred 
 legend is full of His praeternatural wisdom, and His 
 preoccupation with His life-work. But is there any- 
 thing of this in the Gospels? Mary ponders His future 
 in her heart, Simeon and Anna can look into it, but we 
 are not told that He did. We hear little of his childhood 
 or adolescence, except that He worked as a common 
 carpenter; and even that from legend, and by implica- 
 tion from the Gospels; and that he played children's 
 games 1 . Had He been unlike other children, except in 
 perfect sweetness of character, and goodness, it is hard 
 to believe that we should not have heard of it, though 
 the argument from silence is always a precarious one. 
 For myself, I love to think of Him romping with other 
 children, a true child, without care or thought ; forget- 
 ful, as children are forgetful; happy, as children are 
 happy; loving toys and games as children love them. 
 
 1 Surely this is not an unjustified inference from Lc. vii. 32. 
 At any rate T. R. Glover takes this view (The Jesus of History. 
 p. 36) in commenting on Christ's parable of the children playing 
 at weddings and funerals. It is also clear from His nature parables 
 that He must have gone out into the country often for recreation 
 and amusement, for His work as a carpenter did not take Him there. 
 He speaks with all the knowledge of a shepherd or an agriculturalist.
 
 122 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 The one incident we know that seems to contradict 
 this view, is the story of His discussion with the doctors 
 in the Temple. But does it really contradict it? He 
 forgets the time like any child. He is preoccupied with 
 a sense of the nearness of God, with an interest in 
 spiritual things ; but any one who has had much to do 
 with children of six to twelve years of age knows their 
 simple and heartfelt interest in these things ; their sense 
 of God's presence 1 . Is not this an instance of the same 
 thing, only at a somewhat later age, when the faith of 
 less perfect children is commonly dominated by the 
 vivid reality of the age of fighting and hunting instincts? 
 Though by the age of twelve in most the realisation of 
 the divine is somewhat overlaid by the pressing interests 
 of immediate life, this is not always so, and in One who 
 grew in grace as Jesus grew, it could not be so at all. 
 Was His interest more than the perfect example of the 
 wisdom, insight and love of a little child? Are we to 
 make Him different from all the rest of humanity, and 
 so to lose the gift which His true Manhood brought, by 
 attributing to Him a premature realisation of Divinity? 
 Is it not true to say that our inclination to do this is the 
 result of a mistaken piety which was so impressed with the 
 sinfulness of fallen man that in all reverence it wished to 
 place Christ as far away as possible from manhood as we 
 know it; a piety that has left those enduring memorials 
 in art and legend which still exercise so potent an in- 
 fluence? Is not this attitude also partly due to a belief 
 in the omniscience and omnipotence of God, commonly 
 not carefully thought out nor accurately defined? The 
 belief is in a sense true in the transcendent sphere, 
 though only in a sense as we have seen, but it cannot be 
 true of the Godhead immanent in time and matter, if 
 
 1 Surely "hearing them and asking them questions" implies 
 listening to them and asking them questions childishly wise, not 
 posing them with mature dilemmas ?
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation \ 23 
 
 man is really free and if God really experiences process ; 
 as He must, if there is to be an ultimate union founded 
 on a common experience. To this fact we have before 
 referred, both in the present book and, at more length, 
 in Evolution and Spiritual Life. 
 
 If omnipotence and omniscience cannot be postulated 
 of the Godhead as limited by self-determined accept- 
 ance of the contingency of the cosmos He has created, 
 still less, surely, can it be imagined in the Godhead 
 Incarnate as a true human being. While clinging to our 
 belief in the Divinity of Christ without which the 
 Atonement dan have no meaning for us ; without which 
 we must be of all men most miserable, left still in our 
 sins: having a perfect Pattern, and no power to make 
 ourselves like Him we must cling equally to our belief 
 in His Manhood. If He was not true Man, as far as 
 human vision can see, we are no nearer to atonement 1 . 
 If He did not share our nature completely we cannot 
 enter into complete union with Him; we cannot pass 
 with Him through death into life eternal. The Atone- 
 ment depends equally upon His perfect Manhood and 
 His perfect Godhead. 
 
 1 Cf. Mackintosh op. cit. passim, e.g. " A real Kenosis is a moral 
 as well as a theological necessity: the impulse from which it 
 sprang was moral ; it is the moral constitution of Godhead which 
 made it possible; moral forces sustained the self-reduced Life on 
 earth and gave it spiritual value," p. 472. 
 
 " Every theory which accepts a real incarnation must deny that 
 the lowliness of our life is incongruous with Godhead," p. 474. 
 
 " We cannot think of the Incarnate One as confining Himself 
 from moment to moment, by explicit volition, within the frontiers 
 of manhood. That would simply lead back to the old untenable 
 conception of a krypsis by which the divine self in Christ veils His 
 loftier attributes, now less, now more, and is actuated in each case 
 by didactic motives. To return thus to a theoretic duality of 
 mental life in Our Lord against which all modern Christology has 
 been a protest, is surely to sin against light," p. 482.
 
 1 24 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 But if we accept His Manhood in the fullest possible 
 sense, not only do we find the key which unlocks the 
 mysteries of atonement, but we find light shed upon all 
 the processes of the tangled past. The windings of the 
 thread of consciousness end in comparative simplicity 
 when self -consciousness is reached. There is meaning 
 even in the tangle. 
 
 Let us take the physical side first, in. the conventional 
 way, though it is in fact impossible really to separate 
 the physical and the spiritual. 
 
 If Christ went through the ordinary stages of human 
 development, recapitulating the ancestral history of 
 the race, He became identified not merely with the 
 human race as it was then, but with all it had been in 
 the dim ages before consciousness became self-con- 
 sciousness. He took into His own Nature all the history 
 of past struggle, all the stages of groping blindly amid the 
 overwhelming press of a determined environment. He 
 was identified with the whole process of evolving spirit 1 . 
 
 And this was not a mere matter of outward, physical 
 form. He was very man, of the substance of His 
 Mother. Through His Mother the continuity of the 
 germ-plasm was preserved inviolate. The question of 
 the Virgin Birth does not enter into this. His substance, 
 and His Manhood's potentialities, were in fact the very 
 substance and the very potentialities that had run 
 through the whole chain of living organisms from the 
 first simple beginning of life. This is, of course, only 
 true, if the theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm, 
 generally upheld by biologists, is itself true, either in 
 
 1 This is at least suggestive in relation to the problem of the 
 lower animals. Whatever the truth as to their destiny and this 
 apparently we cannot know in the present life ; at any rate there 
 is no sign nor hope of progress in knowledge as yet we can at 
 least feel that Christ is linked with the whole evolutionary process, 
 and so with every creature that has borne its part therein.
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 125 
 
 its pure Weissmannian form or some modification of 
 that. But surely it is a very glorious and uplifting 
 thing to realise that Christ's Manhood took into itself 
 all the past history of life; that He was one with the 
 creation not only in His conscious, but in His pre-con- 
 scious existence upon earth. It lends much meaning to 
 St Paul's phrase "The whole creation groaneth and 
 travaileth together until now, waiting for the adoption, to 
 wit the redemption of their bodies "^bodies ; the means of 
 winning personality as well as of manifesting it to others. 
 
 At this point it clearly becomes necessary to consider 
 briefly the difficult questions involved in the doctrines 
 of Original Sin, and of the Virgin Birth. The two are 
 closely linked. 
 
 In a previous volume we discussed the problem of 
 original sin from the biological standpoint, and came to 
 certain definite conclusions 1 . We there saw reason to 
 believe that the whole human race was imbued with a 
 taint of positive evil, less by inheritance of the acquired 
 character of sin, which is to the biologist a questionable 
 proposition, than by a cessation of selection of the higher 
 moral type. Possibly also development in response to 
 a sinful environment, created by the evil doings of men, 
 has something to do with the unquestionable obliquity 
 of man's moral nature. As Wendell Holmes said long 
 ago, "For one man that squints with his eyes there are 
 twenty that squint with their brains" and we may add 
 20,000 that squint with their souls. The human race, 
 through this taint, was developing along wrong lines, 
 and, by analogy, one is inclined to say that of itself it 
 could not get on the right lines again. Certainly the 
 impossibility of retracing developmental steps made in 
 a wrong direction is a fact in the evolution of the body, 
 and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the same is 
 true of the spiritual evolution of the race, since in other 
 
 1 Evolution and the Need of Atonement, 2nd edn. pp. 143 seqq.
 
 126 Some Implications of the Jncarnation [CH. 
 
 ways this seems to be subject to the same laws as bodily 
 evolution. Jndeed, it is hard to see how it could be 
 otherwise, for evolution is one process ; the whole world 
 is a definite means to a definite end. 
 
 Thus we found indicated at least a possibility that 
 man was barred out from God not only by the imper- 
 fection involved in his own individual sins, but also by 
 a radical taint of imperfection in the whole human race, 
 due to the misdirection of conscious evolution. It is 
 true that with human beings a new factor has come into 
 play the will. But the will is a thing of the individual, 
 not of the race, and it is hard to see therefore, that it 
 can have any bearing on the existence of a race-taint. 
 
 If our analysis of original sin was just, or if there be 
 anything at all that is true in the doctrine of original 
 sin, it would seem as if Christ must either be affected 
 with the stain of humanity's misdirection of its own evo- 
 lution, or else as if there must be something not perfectly 
 and normally human in the nature of His Manhood. 
 
 The alternatives both involve serious difficulties. If 
 He was tainted with original sin, in the sense we have 
 given to the words above, how could He be exempt from 
 the consequences of the barrier between man and God 
 that it set up? If He was not so tainted, can He be 
 called perfect man? 
 
 Before discussing these difficulties it may be well to 
 face an objection that might naturally, though not, I 
 think, altogether legitimately, be raised to a discussion 
 of even the possibility of original sin affecting our Lord. 
 The objection lies in applying the word sin, however 
 reverently the question be considered, to any part of 
 the nature of the sinless Saviour. With this point of 
 view I have the strongest sympathy. It is certainly 
 right. But it only applies to the unfortunate phrase 
 original sin a legacy from earlier theology, with whose 
 literal meaning very many Christians of to-day entirely
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 127 
 
 disagree. Sin is the conscious misdirection of the will, 
 as we have so often said. It is failure in a sense, but only 
 in a sense. It is failure to do what is recognised as the 
 right. Sin cannot be inherited; only its consequences 
 can. A perfectly good man, perfectly good up to the 
 possibilities of his then stage, that is, might be entirely 
 sinless himself, and yet inherit the necessity to develope 
 along wrong lines, through the misdirection of human- 
 ity's evolution. The barrier which kept him from per- 
 fection might be real enough, even though he did right 
 himself, up to his lights, in every act of his life, and so 
 was personally sinless. This is a purely theoretical 
 matter, but it serves to show the point we want to 
 emphasise that the inheritance of the taint which 
 raised a barrier between man and God is possible for a 
 being perfectly sinless; that there is no question of the 
 blasphemous attribution of sin to Christ in discussing 
 the possibility of His inheriting something which we 
 have seen reason to believe may be inherent in all men. 
 Indeed, it is using an unfortunate phrase when we even 
 describe it as a taint. In those who sinned it was a 
 taint; in those who inherit the nature debarred from 
 perfection, it is a consequence a disability. Having 
 thus cleared away possible misunderstanding, we may 
 proceed to develope our argument. 
 
 Suppose that Christ did inherit the nature of a 
 humanity that possessed 'positive imperfection,' as we 
 have called it 1 ; would He not be thereby barred out 
 from God as man? And would not this disability make 
 the Incarnation of no avail as Atonement? Would His 
 Manhood be anything more than manhood as perfect 
 as it could be when clogged with the chain of such a 
 past? Of course, if we were wrong in believing that there 
 was anything of the nature of original sin and of positive 
 imperfectness due to misdirection of progress, the pro- 
 1 Evolution and the Need of Atonement, p. 144.
 
 128 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 blem ceases to have any meaning. And this is possible. 
 But we followed our thought out carefully, and it led 
 us to the conclusion that such a disability existed. It is 
 unsafe simply to assume we were wrong, when our con- 
 clusion brings us face to face with a difficulty ; especially 
 when the whole feeling of men for generations upon 
 generations has tended to establish the belief that a 
 disability is imposed upon the race by past sin ; even if 
 that belief is only in part intuitive; even if it is mainly 
 based on a false theory of creation. Assuming that we 
 were right in believing in the existence of original sin 
 in the sense defined, it is almost impossible not to answer 
 the above questions in the affirmative. Surely, Christ 
 came to earth to be the perfection of manhood, not 
 merely to be an example of the best that was possible 
 to manhood gone wrong, and eternally limited by that 
 going wrong. He took upon Himself manhood, with all 
 its limitations; He bore the burden of conscious isola- 
 tion from God upon the Cross, and the isolation of all 
 manhood was upon Him. But He was not Himself, 
 even as man, eternally barred out from God, else were 
 no atonement possible. His manhood passed, through 
 isolation, into perfect union with Godhead. But what 
 do we mean by saying that He experienced to the full 
 the isolation of manhood? I think we mean that as 
 man He entered so completely into the sense of isolation 
 that it filled His whole Being for the time, to the ex- 
 clusion of the personal sense of eternal life. We have 
 said 1 that "The second kenosis was the acceptance of 
 the voluntary misuse of the powers which progress had 
 brought and all its consequences, and acceptance of the 
 results of a choice of that which was not free in prefer- 
 ence to that which tended towards greater freedom. 
 It was the acceptance, not only of the necessary pain 
 of becoming, but of the penalty of failure. It was the 
 1 Evolution and the Need of Atonement, and edn, p. 166.
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 1 29 
 
 complete identification of the Godhead in Christ with 
 the process of development, as Head of the human race ; 
 but it was also the identification of God with the failure 
 of that process, in time, and under the then conditions." 
 Christ actually experienced upon the Cross the isolation 
 of essential manhood from His Godhead, in time, we 
 believe, through the identification of Himself with the 
 manhood of the whole human Yace. But nevertheless 
 His own manhood must have been perfect, otherwise 
 He would have experienced not merely the isolation of 
 others in Himself, but the isolation of His own nature 
 from His own nature. It was not really His manhood 
 that was isolated, but the manhood of all others with 
 which He had identified Himself. If His own manhood 
 had been imperfect there must have been an intrinsic 
 schism between that and His Godhead an unthinkable 
 thing. Had this been the case, His Manhood could never 
 have been taken up into His Godhead, and so man 
 could never, in union with Him, have passed through 
 death into life. Moreover, such an idea introduces 
 hopeless contradictions as soon as we begin to think 
 of the Holy Trinity 'after' the second kenosis the 
 Incarnation. 
 
 But on the other hand, if we reject the conception of 
 Jesus suffering under the inherited disability of the 
 human race, are we not faced with the dilemma, that 
 in this case His Nature differed from that of common 
 men, and that therefore men cannot be completely 
 identified with Him? Is He one with men as they 
 are? 
 
 In considering this we must distinguish carefully 
 between the race and the individual. The salvation 
 which Christ wrought is the salvation of individual 
 men, not of the race as a whole. That was made clear 
 in our discussion of the Atonement. Men are left free 
 to accept or not to accept the gift of God in Jesus. 
 
 MCD. 9
 
 1 30 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 Their freedom is not impugned. They must claim the 
 gift by the free action of their individual wills. There- 
 fore, we need not consider the race as a whole only 
 the individual. But nevertheless the individual is 
 subject to the disability of racial misdirection; he is not 
 exempt from the consequences of ' original sin.' Through 
 it the race is evolving along a path that can never lead 
 to perfection ; through it any individual member of the 
 race is misdirected in his own evolution. This point we 
 did not make quite clear in our discussion in Evolution 
 and the Need of Atonement. Individual as well as racial 
 evolution has to be considered, when once we begin to 
 deal with beings who are self-conscious, and are passing 
 into personal transcendence. Owing partly to the cessa- 
 tion of selection due to sin, the race is evolving along 
 wrong lines. But we believe that the destiny of all 
 individuals is the same union with God. Each indi- 
 vidual, being an eternal spirit, is himself to reach the 
 very goal. The goal of the race is the goal of its indi- 
 vidual members. In this the process has got beyond the 
 stage that obtains for the lower organisms, as far as we 
 can comprehend it. There, it seems as if the individual 
 but hands on the torch and itself drops by the way. 
 The human individual lights the torch of another, runs 
 by his side a little way, and then drops to rest. But he 
 picks himself up again and runs another stage, and per- 
 haps another and another, until he himself at length 
 arrives at the throne of God. Death does not end his 
 course. None are necessarily destined never to reach 
 that goal pace John Calvin and the Predestinarians. 
 Life may be a lottery, but no one draws a blank. 
 
 But if this is the case the misdirection of the race 
 becomes the misdirection of the individual. If the whole 
 race has got on to a wrong line of development, each 
 component individual must likewise be on the wrong 
 line; for the progress of a race of self-conscious beings
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 131 
 
 is the progress of its individual members; its hindrances 
 are their hindrances. 
 
 Each individual man, then, bears the burden of the 
 misdirection of the race through sin. If Christ did not 
 bear this same burden, can we say that He was com- 
 pletely identified with fallen humanity? The answer 
 to this question is implicit in two things we have said 
 already. The will has to be reckoned with when we 
 speak of any human being; and Christ's experience of 
 isolation was the experience of the isolation of manhood 
 from Godhead, in time, through the identification of 
 Himself with the manhood of the whole human race. 
 " It was not really His manhood that was isolated, but 
 the manhood of all others with which He had identified 
 Himself." His Will brought about the identification as 
 the necessary consequence of complete interpenetration. 
 In this identification He had the full experience of isola- 
 tion; but as we have already said it was the isolation 
 of the manhood that had failed, not of the manhood 
 that was perfect His own. This point is not ade- 
 quately discussed nor clearly thought out in Evolution 
 and the Need of Atonement (pp. 165 ff.). Indeed on p. 165 
 there is actual misstatement. The sentence "Suppose, 
 sinless Himself, He became in very fact, Man, born into 
 the full consequences of race-failure, living as man, 
 dying as man, suffering complete alienation from free- 
 dom and immortality as man" contains not merely 
 a careless confusion of thought but a definitely untrue 
 statement, so far as I can see, though it does not invali- 
 date the rest of the argument at all. Christ did accept 
 "the full consequences of race-failure"; He did "suffer 
 complete alienation from freedom and immortality as 
 man." But He was not "born into them." He was 
 Himself the perfection of manhood, yet increasingly 
 throughout His life, and fully at the moment of com- 
 plete realisation of His Mission, upon the Cross, He laid 
 
 9 2
 
 132 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 aside even the perfection of manhood at its then stage, 
 and through the act of His Will, identified Himself com- 
 pletely with fallen manhood. His own manhood re- 
 mained perfect, but He laid it aside, ceased to experience 
 it, and so identified Himself wholly and completely with 
 the human race as it actually was. We can therefore 
 be entirely united with His experience, we can pass 
 through death with Him ; and because His own manhood 
 was perfect, and so not alienated from God, with Him 
 man passes into union with God. 
 
 At first sight this view may appear to be tinged with 
 docetism. It may be said that we are making the sub- 
 stantial reality of His manhood an appearance only, 
 not a reality, when we claim that He only identified, 
 Himself with isolated manhood. The answer to this 
 objection is twofold. In the first place we contend that 
 He did actually, and not merely in appearance, experi- 
 ence manhood, becoming in very fact man ; perfect man, 
 however, yet with all a man's possibilities of failure and 
 imperfection. There is nothing docetic in this. In the 
 second place He identifies Himself with fallen manhood, 
 even though He Himself is the perfection of manhood, 
 by an exercise of His own Will. His Will makes Him 
 Man in the great kenosis of the Incarnation; His Will 
 makes Him experience man's isolation from God, though 
 He is not isolated in His own nature. And note that 
 this is a real isolation, and not an appearance only. 
 Through the penetrability of perfect humanity He can 
 enter into, and take His stand at, the position of the 
 sinner, making the sinner's experience His own, while 
 yet He remains Himself 1 . And the converse process, 
 which completes identification, the sinner making the 
 experience of Christ his own, we have held to complete 
 the essential moment of the process of atonement, man 
 
 1 See the discussion on penetrability in Evolution and Spiritual 
 Life, ch. vi.
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 133 
 
 entering into complete union with Christ 1 . In such a 
 view there is nothing docetic, nothing unreal. In keno- 
 sis and identification alike it is the Will of Christ which 
 supplies the motive power. 
 
 Now if Christ's Human Nature was perfect, there must 
 have been somewhere a break with the normal human 
 inheritance in order that the heritage of disability might 
 be escaped. And this leads us to the question of the 
 Virgin Birth. 
 
 No doubt some other means might have been chosen, 
 though it is hard to see what that means could have 
 been. 
 
 No doubt it is true that the whole matter is a mystery 
 which we cannot solve. But it does at least seem con- 
 gruous that the Divine nature of Christ should have been 
 emphasised, and that the break with the tradition of 
 disability should have been symbolised, by a miraculous 
 and Divine Generation, in which the Human and Divine 
 aspects are visible equally. Whether the Virgin Birth 
 was a fact or a pious interpretation is an altogether 
 different problem, which can, I think, only be solved 
 on the. grounds of historical evidence. But of its con- 
 gruity there can be no question. The birth of Christ 
 must in some sense have been miraculous if He was 
 God and if there is any truth in our contention that 
 original sin, even in the sense of inherited disability, is 
 a real thing. The Virgin Birth seems to emphasise this 
 truth, and point to the miracle, in a way which lays 
 stress on just the points that need stress. Anyhow, as 
 we have said, our object is to establish the congruity of 
 the miraculous conception, not its actuality. On the 
 latter point it would be impertinent to dogmatise, con- 
 sidering what divided opinions are held by scholars. 
 What it symbolises is the important thing, not the mode 
 
 1 Evolution and the Need of Atonement, and the present work, 
 passim.
 
 134 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 of the miracle. Probably, belief on this matter will 
 never be united. The whole is so tinged with the false, 
 and I would even say wicked, depreciation of hallowed 
 sexual intercourse, that is the legacy of a celibate priest- 
 hood, that dispassionate examination is difficult for 
 many. Mr Box 1 has recently given us a careful, if not 
 wholly unbiased, survey of the evidence, and one can- 
 not do more, as one may not honestly do less, than ex- 
 press the personal opinion that he makes a very strong 
 case in his defence of the Virgin Birth as an historical 
 fact. While deprecating any bitterness of contention 
 with those who equally honestly believe otherwise, re- 
 garding the evidence as inconclusive or dubious, one 
 ought at least to state, with all the force one may, that, 
 whether the mode of Christ's birth was that or not, at 
 least it involved a miracle. The doctrine underlying 
 belief in the Virgin Birth is true, whether the expression 
 of the truth followed that mode 2 or not. 
 
 This same doctrine of the complete limitation of 
 Christ to the powers of perfect manhood incarnate 
 under cosmical conditions helps towards an under- 
 standing of many questions that at one time and another 
 puzzle us. His eschatological teaching, which seems not 
 always to see clearly beyond the fall of Jerusalem ; His 
 human hunger, His human fatigue, His human griefs 
 and disillusionments, His inability to see into the future 
 (" If it be possible let this cup pass from me," and again, 
 "Of that time knoweth no man, not even the Son, nor 
 the angels, but only the Father"); even His human 
 fallibility in judging the character of Judas Iscariot 
 all these cease to provide difficulties when we accept 
 His Manhood as a real thing, and not an epiphenomenon 
 of Godhead. And we have seen already what clear light 
 is shed upon the mysteries of the Atonement. Even if we 
 1 The Virgin Birth of Jesus. 
 1 As the present scribe himself believes.
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 135 
 
 cannot understand it, we are not driven to explanations 
 that shock our moral sense or our rational intelligence 1 . 
 
 1 In this connection it will not be oat of place to quote the 
 weighed words of a recent writer to whom we have had occasion 
 to refer more than once; "This, however, brings up the question 
 whether the Son Incarnate can ever have known Himself to be 
 divine. Was the Kenosis such that it annulled even the conscious- 
 ness of a higher relationship ? Some writers have contended that 
 to the end Christ remained unaware of His being God in flesh, 
 urging that on no other terms can we assert the genuinely human 
 character of His experience. In particular, it has been held that 
 while sin was an impossibility for Jesus, we may conceive this 
 impossibility as having been hidden from Himself, so that He 
 faced each new conflict with that reality of effort, that refusal to 
 count the issue a foregone conclusion which is vitally character- 
 istic of moral life. And from this it might seem to follow that His 
 primary descent into the sphere of finitude had veiled in nescience 
 His eternal relationship with the Father. Yet we need not en- 
 tangle the two positions with each other. It can only have been 
 in mature manhood and perhaps intermittently that Christ be- 
 came aware of His divinity which must have remained for Him 
 an object of faith to the very end. Now, if incarnation means 
 divine self-subjection to the conditions of our life, it does appear 
 that even such a discovery on Christ's part of His own essential 
 sonship must inevitably suggest to Him the total impossibility of 
 moral failure. But while His assurance of victory can never have 
 been mechanical, or such as to dispense Him from vigilance, or 
 effort, or seasons of depression, it was none the less real and com- 
 manding. There is no reason why His consciousness of unique 
 intimacy with the Father, and of the crucial importance of Hi 
 mission, should not have imparted to Jesus, in each temptation, 
 a firmly-based confidence of victory, though He knew not in 
 advance how, or how soon, the final triumph would be vouch- 
 safed. 
 
 In any case, it is only by degrees that the full meaning of His 
 relationship to the Father, with its eternal implicates, can have 
 broken on Jesus' mind. The self-sacrifice in which His earthly life 
 originated drew a veil over these ultimate realities." (Mackintosh, 
 op. cit. pp. 480-481.) 

 
 136 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 One point of difficulty however remains. If Christ 
 was purely human in His Manhood; if upon earth His 
 was the divinity of manhood, not of Godhead; if He 
 laid aside His Godhead for a time, He could have no 
 memory of His Being in the Transcendent unity of the 
 Godhead. 
 
 If this be so, how are we to interpret His constant 
 references to His pre-existence : " Before Abraham was, 
 I am"; "I came forth from the Father, and again I go 
 to the Father"? Before we begin to consider this we 
 must clear our ideas of what we mean by the laying 
 aside of Godhead, as far as we may. 
 
 It is abundantly clear that the Holy Trinity cannot 
 have ceased to exist during the period of the Incarna- 
 tion. To believe that the perfect Being of God can ever 
 have been imperfect, is not merely inconceivable to 
 human reason, but contradicts the very fundamentals 
 of the idea of Godhead, making ultimate theistic thought 
 impossible. It is in flat opposition alike to intuition and 
 to intellectual belief. That the mediating Logos should 
 ever have ceased to coexist with the Father and the 
 Holy Spirit is impossible. The transcendent Godhead 
 was never anything but perfect and complete. 
 
 But creation itself involved in the very nature of 
 Godhead involved the immanence of the Godhead; 
 a self-limitation in determined conditions for the sake 
 of the freedom that was to be in the creature. Further- 
 more, immanence must be postulated of all the Persons 
 of the Holy Trinity. For consider. The creative Will 
 of the Father is mediated by the Logos. "Without 
 Him (the Logos) was not anything made that was 
 made." Although we state this in the phraseology of 
 revelation, the fact itself is implicit in the nature of 
 personality, as we have seen. But once the cosmos is 
 created, the Will of the Father is limited in regard to it, 
 by the very conditions of cosmical existence. Yet there 

 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 137 
 
 is purpose in the world. We cannot look on it as out- 
 srde the scope of the Father's Will. That purpose we 
 have seen to be the achieval of freedom by the creature; 
 when the freedom of the creature is come, the self- 
 limitation of the Father will be swallowed up in fulfil- 
 ment 1 . The Will of the Father in creation even if, 
 as seems necessary, creation is a perpetual process 
 is thus directed towards the ultimate freedom of His 
 Will in perfect harmony with the wills of other beings. 
 With them, thus, His Will is in process of becoming, 
 within the sphere of immanent existence. In other 
 words, the Father is immanent in His creation, as well 
 as the Logos who mediates His Will. Finally, since the 
 issue is the emergence of love in freedom, the Holy 
 Spirit must also be in process of becoming and must be 
 immanent, as our study of the nature of personality 
 shows. Thus we see that because the Divine Trinity is 
 a Unity, all the Persons of the Godhead must indwell 
 the world, in the immanent process. We must thus 
 look on the Trinity as at the same time immanent and 
 transcendent. 
 
 But further, because each Person is interpenetrated, 
 and determined as Himself, by the other Two, while yet 
 the stress of His nature is peculiar to Himself ; because, 
 in fact, the Persons are true hypostases distinctions, 
 each of which expresses the whole essence of Godhead 
 the immanent Father and Holy Spirit must have taken 
 part in the Godhead Incarnate in human flesh. This 
 is the truth which is misunderstood, and twisted out of 
 its proper significance, in the heresy of Patripassianism. 
 The Incarnation was the Incarnation of the Son, but in 
 the Son all Godhead is comprised, though the emphasis 
 of His Personality is not the emphasis of the Personality 
 of the Father or of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life,
 
 1 38 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 In the Incarnation, then, the Logos laid aside full 
 Godhead. 
 
 In so fax as we are able to understand what is beyond 
 understanding, since it is not wholly existent in the 
 sphere in which intellect (as we know it, and as opposed 
 to pure knowledge) moves, what meaning do we then 
 attach to the laying aside of Godhead by the Son? 
 Surely we mean at least this. The Son passed from 
 immanence into the complete limitation of humanity. 
 He no longer indwelt the world Himself in His own 
 hypostasis, though He still indwelt it, through the unity 
 of the Godhead, in the hypostases of the Father and the 
 Son. He no longer indwelt the world; He was in the 
 world and the world knew Him not, and His own re- 
 ceived Him not. He was still the Son. He mediated 
 the Will of the Father through the unity of the Holy 
 Spirit in fullest measure, in the complete limitation of 
 Godhead to the measure of the divinity of man; even 
 to being Himself caused. He limited Himself even to 
 the acceptance of the terminus a quo of human nature, 
 in order that humanity might reach its proper terminus 
 ad quern. He who was the Mediating Cause of all, 
 became caused Himself. He accepted the evolutionary 
 stages of childhood, even to its ignorance of the divinity 
 of human nature. To this He gradually won, as men 
 win knowledge. To the full knowledge of His own 
 divine Godhead He only won through death. This must 
 be so, if He became truly man; and unless He became 
 truly man, as far as I can see the atonement could not 
 have been consummated. 
 
 Yet all the while He was the Divine Logos, in the 
 realm of Transcendence. Only, His Incarnate Being 
 was distinguished completely from His Transcendent 1 . 
 
 1 Except, of course, in so far as His human transcendence united 
 Him with the Transcendent God, in the same way that our 
 human transcendence unites us with God.
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 1 39 
 
 Does this seem a difficult, contradictory statement? 
 It is no more so than the doctrine, now universally 
 accepted by theologians, that the Godhead is immanent 
 in the world and in time and at the same time tran- 
 scendent in the eternal sphere. The two conceptions 
 differ only in degree, not in kind. The immanence is 
 completed in a fuller sense: that is all 1 . Of their ulti- 
 mate meaning we can understand little. Perhaps the 
 most we can do is to say that while the Transcendent 
 God knows all and sees the end completed and whole, 
 as well as knowing His own becoming, the Immanent 
 God knows only becoming, and cannot, in virtue of His 
 own self-limitation, know the end. Yet this form of 
 words is unsatisfactory, for it seems to imply a division 
 of the Godhead, which is not there; we can intuitively 
 grasp the correlative truths of immanence and tran 
 scendence, but we cannot express them in words, nor 
 formulate them so as to satisfy our intellect. 
 
 All we are concerned with here, however, is to show 
 that no fresh difficulty is introduced by the idea of the 
 complete kenosis of the Godhead in Christ*. It differs 
 only in degree from immanence. 
 
 A friend with whom I was discussing my rough 
 sketch of the chapters on personality, and the general 
 view therein developed of the triune nature of person- 
 ality, made the penetrating remark, " If you apply that 
 to the Personality of Christ you will be making God 
 Immanent in Himself." This criticism conveys both a 
 
 1 Sec ch. viii. 
 
 1 In considering immanence at all we are really brought up 
 against the problem of the consciousness of God. for it appears 
 as if there must be two consciousnesses, and that involves an 
 impossible dualism. In the consciousness of Christ the problem 
 reaches its most acute phase. This question will be discussed at 
 length in the final chapter, though it is touched upon in that on 
 Preliminary Considerations.
 
 140 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 true and a false idea. The true idea is, that if Christ 
 had emptied Himself of Godhead and become Man in 
 very fact, God must have been immanent in Him in 
 exactly the same sense that God is immanent in every 
 man who admits Him to fellowship as well as in the 
 world of inanimate matter. He indwells each part of 
 the cosmos, is limited by it, and through it is becoming 
 influenced by the changes of a finite experience. But, 
 since Christ was Perfect, God was not limited by Him 
 in any sense but that which is implicit in the durational 
 conditions of human existence upon earth; there was 
 no super-added limitation of sin. 
 
 The false idea is that God was immanent in God. 
 Christ is eternally the divine Logos; but on earth He 
 laid His Eternal Divinity aside and became Man. His 
 own Godhead, and the Godhead of the Father and the 
 Spirit, were immanent in His Manhood. His Godhead 
 was not immanent in His Godhead, for that He had laid 
 aside ; put it off, emptied Himself of it ; in becoming man. 
 To believe otherwise would be to involve ourselves in 
 a maze of unthinkable absurdities. Godhead is perfect 
 and complete, and cannot be immanent in Itself. "The 
 Word became (not adopted the form of) Flesh (Very 
 Man) and dwelt among us, and we saw His Glory, the 
 Glory of the Only Begotten of the Father" but we 
 only saw His glory in retrospective vision, when He had 
 taken it again. "His own received Him not" at the 
 time of His manifestation. Even His disciples only 
 comprehended His Divine Being after His Resurrection. 
 Peter might call Him "the Christ, the Son of the Living 
 God," but we must remember what the term 'Christ,' 
 and more especially what the term 'Son of God,' meant 
 to the Jew. In Daniel it is used of an angel (and from 
 this prophet the similar term ' Son of Man ' is derived, 
 or at least shown to be a term general in apocalyptic 
 literature) ; we find analogous usages in Genesis vi. 2, Job
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation \ 4 1 
 
 i. 6 and xxxviii. 7 ; and in Hosea the chosen are called 
 Sons of God, i. lo 1 . By analogy with other phrases also 
 we should hesitate to read into Peter's words 1 a more 
 definite meaning than "chosen messenger of God" or 
 "Messiah" for the phrase had this recognised signifi- 
 cance. Had the disciples understood really who He was, 
 they could hardly have been oppressed with doubt so 
 frequently; could hardly have been so disheartened by 
 the Crucifixion (cf. the disciples on the road to Emmaus). 
 The doctrine of immanence makes it clear, apart from 
 all other arguments, that Christ was truly man. 
 
 The Nicene Creed implies this in the words /cat <rap- 
 K(i>0evTa 8ta 7Ti/eu/4aTo<? ayiov e* Mapia? TT;? trapdevov, 
 Ka\ evav0pa>7rij<ravTa. The Athanasian creed, if not 
 quite explicit, is sufficiently so: Dominus noster Jesus 
 Christus Dei Filius Deus et homo est. Deus est ex sub- 
 stantia Patris ante saecula genitus; et homo est ex sub- 
 stantia matris in saeculo natus (from the position of the 
 emphasis, Deus... homo His Manhood is as His God- 
 head; part of His nature). Perfectus Deus, perfectus 
 homo; ex anima rationali et humana carne subsistens. 
 (His manhood is real and perfect manhood, not its form 
 or appearance.) Aequalis Patri secundum divinitatem ; 
 minor Patre secundum humanitatem (kenosis). Qui licet 
 Deus sit et homo; non duo sed tamen unus est Christus. 
 
 It is true that the point is confused afterwards by the 
 use of a questionable analogy. Nam sicut anima ration- 
 alis et caro unus est homo; ita Deus et homo unus est 
 Christus. This implies that the Manhood was the 
 fleshly envelope of a spirit that was God, and had not 
 emptied Itself of Godhead a statement in patent con- 
 tradiction of that a few verses before, perfectus homo. 
 
 1 Cf. Driver's Genesis, p. 82. Sanday, art. Son of God. in 
 Hastings' D.B. 
 
 * If they do not represent a later addition to the more simple 
 statement of the Marcan and Lucan accounts.
 
 142 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 But I cannot think this to be more than a confusion of 
 thought. If we believe in the Atonement it seems to me 
 that we must cling to the truth of the Incarnation; 
 must never let go our belief in the perfect humanity of 
 Jesus, and so in His kenosis. The Godhead was not 
 immanent in His Godhead; the statement involves a 
 contradiction; it was immanent in His Manhood, as it 
 is immanent in the manhood of each one of us. But 
 because limitation is part of the real experience of God, 
 being viewed by Him as part of the Whole which ex- 
 presses His Being in all its fullness, His complete limita- 
 tion in manhood does not make Him any the less really 
 God. The limitation is not in the plane of absolute 
 reality, nor of an eternal existence that is merely a 
 totum simul, but as part of a reality an eternal exist- 
 ence that is a whole because it expresses the activity 
 of Divine Being. 
 
 Having discussed what we mean by the laying aside 
 of Godhead we may now return to the questions we 
 asked in regard to our Lord's consciousness of His 
 Divinity and Mission, and His memory of existence in 
 the Eternal Unity of the Godhead. 
 
 In this matter Bergson's doctrine of Pure Memory 
 one of the fundamentals of his system will be found 
 decidedly helpful. The doctrine is so simple and satis- 
 fying that I cannot but believe that it represents a real 
 truth, if not the whole truth. Readers of Bergson's 
 philosophy will remember that he distinguishes entirely 
 between memory and perception, and does not say, as 
 many psychologists do, that memory is a weaker kind 
 of perception. Pure perception is entirely in the present ; 
 pure memory is entirely in the past. But the past is not 
 that which has ceased to exist ; it has only ceased to act. 
 The relation between action, perception and memory is 
 vital. Action is the means of progress. Perception en- 
 ables the vital impulse to react with the environment in
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 143 
 
 adaptation. Only that which is of use is perceived. We 
 see many things which we do not perceive at all, because 
 they are of no practical importance to us at the mo- 
 ment 1 . All the past also exists, in memory; but we are 
 only conscious of that fragment of it which will be of 
 practical use to us at a given instant^ We call up into 
 the present again into the moment of action what 
 will be of value. The brain is the mechanism by which 
 perceptions and memories can be brought to bear on 
 actuality; its complexity enables the organism to have 
 a choice in the mode of its response. 
 
 Now we saw in Evolution and Spiritual Life (pp. 182- 
 185), that memory cannot exist in transcendence, be- 
 cause it moves in the past, and is related to limitation. 
 But we have accepted the idea that Christ suffered 
 human limitation, and so being removed from the 
 simultaneity of transcendence to the time-series of a 
 human state, there would seem at first sight to be no 
 reason for denying that He had memory of the experi- 
 ence of transcendent unity. And this conception of a 
 memory of transcendent experience in Jesus is borne 
 out by many phrases of St John, such as those we have 
 
 1 Anyone who has practical acquaintance with psycho-analytic 
 work, or who is even fairly familiar with the literature of the 
 subject, will realise how many things occur in memory that have 
 never been perceived in the strict sense. In illustration of this I 
 may further quote the experience of a friend who dreamed one 
 
 night that the ss. was wrecked and her captain drowned. 
 
 (I forget the names, but they were clearly present in the mind of 
 the dreamer.) On opening the paper, the first thing that caught 
 her eye was an account of the wreck. She was horrified, believing 
 herself to be afflicted with second sight. It afterwards transpired 
 that an account of the wreck was given in the Stop Press column 
 of the previous night's paper, which she had not read, but which 
 was lying on a chest in such a position that her eyes roust have 
 rested on the paper as she passed through the hall, though she had 
 not consciously perceived it.
 
 144 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 already quoted, and " I and my Father are one " ; " I in 
 them and thou in me, that they may be perfected into 
 one"; "that they may all be one, even as thou. Father, 
 art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in 
 us." Indeed the whole of this seventeenth chapter of St 
 John's Gospel, as well as other passages, might be quoted 
 in opposition to any denial of Christ's memory of exist- 
 ence with the Father. And whether the words reported 
 were actually Christ's words or not, they must at least 
 convey the meaning which some of Christ's words 
 brought to the Evangelist in retrospect. Christ then, 
 certainly spoke as if He were conscious of complete union 
 with God, at times; though in the moment of isola- 
 tion (Eloi ! Eloi ! lama sabachthani) this consciousness 
 was completely absent ; and at many other times partially 
 so, as we saw in discussing His limitations. This is very 
 puzzling. Does it connote a realisation of His own 
 Divinity? If so how, being conscious of such union, 
 could He be perfect man ? How, if at one time He was so 
 conscious, through the coexistence of His divinity with 
 His humanity, could He lose the divine consciousness, in 
 part or completely at other times? Perhaps no real 
 answer can be given to this problem. 
 
 Yet a tentative effort to understand it may not be 
 wholly fruitless. 
 
 In the first place perfect manhood would give Him a 
 sense of union with the Father, such as no other man 
 ever experienced ; especially since, as we have seen, His 
 perfectness excluded the barrier of original sin which 
 divided other men from God. The mystic saint has 
 something of this experience even under the conditions 
 of fallen manhood. This would suffice to explain such 
 expressions as "I and the Father are One." But does it 
 suffice to explain such expressions as "Before Abraham 
 was, I am " ; "I came out from the Father and I return 
 to the Father"; "He that hath seen me hath seen the
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 145 
 
 Father," and others of the same kind? If not, what 
 explanation can we give? For it is hardly justifiable 
 to say here, as some critics do in regard to similar 
 problems, that the Evangelist in retrospect puts say- 
 ings into the mouth of Jesus which really represent the 
 understanding that came after His resurrection. Even 
 though there may be some truth in such a contention, 
 we cannot believe that he deliberately gave a false im- 
 pression for the sake of establishing a theological dogma. 
 Whatever Christ's actual words, He must have said 
 things that gave this impression ; otherwise the Gospel 
 of St John would never have been accepted at a time 
 when tradition was so fresh. And the sayings are so con- 
 gruous and so closely associated with the whole character 
 and ministry of Jesus that we cannot but believe that 
 they, or words like them, were actually spoken by Him. 
 
 On the other hand they seem quite definitely to con- 
 tradict other sayings, in which He expresses a sense of 
 dependence upon, and ignorance of the full purpose of, 
 the Will of the Father. 
 
 Any idea of a kind of alternation of the divine and 
 human consciousness is out of the question. It is irre- 
 concileable with His perfect manhood. We must find 
 some other explanation. 
 
 Now His Godhead and His Manhood were alike real; 
 and the manhood existed in the conditions of matter 
 and becoming. If as Man Christ could have had any 
 memory of transcendent union with the Father, the 
 difficulty would be solved. For, according to Bergson's 
 exposition, His memory could make use of the reality 
 which for Him, as a being experiencing duration, was 
 existent, yet in the past, bringing it into the present 
 again for the purposes of immediate action. 
 
 The value of this memory, in enforcing His teaching, 
 is at once obvious. He could speak with certain know^ 
 ledge, as one having authority, and not as the scribes, 
 ii CD. 10
 
 146 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 The question is, could He, as Man, have such a 
 memory? Would it not introduce the Godhead again 
 into His Manhood, and so make Him not perfect Man? 
 
 We must ask, in the first place, could such memory 
 be the same as our memory? Most of our memories are 
 memories of perception, and, for us, perception is 
 associated with the recognition of matter. Of experience 
 which takes place without the mediation of matter ex- 
 ternal to the personality we have little knowledge. But 
 we have memories not directly connected with percep- 
 tion. We can remember an emotion, for instance that 
 is, we can remember an internal state though such 
 memories are usually connected with a perception that 
 gave rise to them For instance, we can remember the 
 emotion of love of some particular person, or the beauty 
 of a particular scene or symphony. Those memories 
 are not memories of the perceptions themselves, but of 
 the emotions to which they gave rise. Even further, we 
 can remember the emotional state of some particular 
 epoch of our lives, without remembering any of the 
 perceptual experience that caused those emotions. We 
 can remember the religious sentimentality of adoles- 
 cence, for example, or the misery of doubt at a slightly 
 later period. Memory does not seem to be completely 
 tied up with perception; other experiences, such as 
 those of internal states, can be recalled. Therefore there 
 seems no ground for excluding the possibility of Christ's 
 memory of transcendent experience on the ground that 
 it was not perceived in the ordinary sense, but was 
 rather allied to emotion. 
 
 But this memory seems to have included the sense of 
 His uncausedness, as well as of the perfect unity of 
 transcendent Godhead (Before Abraham was I am). It 
 was a memory of absolute existence, such as no other 
 man could have. The difficulty is, could Christ have it 
 and yet remain Man? Could He bring what would be
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation \ 47 
 
 useful out of the storehouse of memory, to meet some 
 eventuality, and yet have resigned His Godhead and 
 become completely man? 
 
 Unquestionably, any of the views we have suggested 
 leaves us faced with a very grave difficulty, and one 
 which we cannot really solve. Perhaps we cannot do 
 more than say He must have been Perfect Man, and that 
 the record seems to show that such memoriesdid exist for 
 Him, during His earthly life, leaving all possibility of solu- 
 tion on one side. It is possible, of course, that the re- 
 cords wrongly import some of His own post-resurrection 
 teaching into the years of His ministry. But it is at 
 best a supposition a pis-atter. Again, one may say 
 that the whole process of the Incarnation is outside our 
 understanding, and that things which seem incompati- 
 ble to man may not really be so to God. But this evad- 
 ing of the issue is even less satisfactory than the last. 
 Even God cannot make a contradiction true, and it is 
 exactly a contradiction with which we seem to be faced. 
 True, opposites may be reconciled in a higher synthesis, 
 but the higher synthesis of Manhood and Godhead is 
 transcendent union, which is precisely what we do not 
 want here. We are concerned with Christ's Manhood, 
 and His Manhood alone, in the present connection. 
 Let us then attack the problem from the side of ordinary 
 manhood, as we have done before, and follow further 
 an argument we adumbrated a few pages back. 
 
 Men are intuitively conscious of union with God. In 
 some sense the kingdom of heaven is within them here 
 and now. They are conscious that they share the activi- 
 ties of a Spirit that is higher than themselves, and that 
 they have a life that is not purely material. In Christ 
 this intuition must have been far freer and purer; and 
 one can readily believe that it extended to the realisa- 
 tion of real and complete union with the Father, except 
 in the timeless moment of isolation. With the complete-
 
 148 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 ness of this realisation of union would come inevitably 
 the sense of eternal existence without any terminus a quo 
 as far as His transcendent ego was concerned. Even an 
 ordinary man feels at times some sense of union with 
 God, and then his sense of causedness is in abeyance. 
 The feeling of love and union ousts all else but itself. 
 May we not then believe that Christ realised His one- 
 ness with the Father, even to the extent of realising His 
 own eternal existence, without any memory of His own 
 transcendent experience? May we not believe that He 
 knew from this very realisation that He was before 
 Abraham, that He came forth, and must have come 
 forth, from the Father, because of the very perfectness 
 of His manhood ? May we not believe this, and yet hold 
 fast to the fact that He was very Man? Would such a 
 noble expansion of a form of knowledge that is common 
 to all men, make Him any the less man? I think not. It 
 may be said that all we have done is to use another word 
 to describe the same fact. Instead of calling His realisa- 
 tion a memory we now call it an intuition. This is true. 
 Nevertheless the two conceptions which the words in- 
 volve are poles apart. The one implies a consciousness 
 of Godhead that is- incompatible with perfect manhood; 
 the other implies no direct consciousness of Godhead, 
 but simply the completion of the human instinct of 
 union with God, that is in every man in some degree; 
 and from this completion, by a secondary mental pro- 
 cess, the realisation that He Himself was eternally one 
 with God, and not merely united with Him a second- 
 ary mental process in the realm of intellect. 
 
 If this analysis be true, we are driven to deny that 
 the Human Christ had any memory of existence with 
 the Father before His Incarnation, while His intuition of 
 perfect oneness with the Father led Him to the realisa- 
 tion that He must have been eternally one with Him. 
 And this conception is fully consonant with the view,
 
 iv] Some Implications of the Incarnation 149 
 
 held by most thoughtful Christians of to-day, surely 
 a reasonable view, when one remembers that His 
 ministry did not begin till He was nearly thirty years 
 old and with the outlines of the Gospel story, that 
 only with the passage of the years did He come to the 
 full understanding of His mission. 
 
 At any rate, we cannot gain more light along the line 
 of investigation we have chosen. 
 
 One cannot do more than express a tentative opinion 
 on a matter that is necessarily beyond our understand- 
 ing; but in honesty one cannot do less than state the 
 opinion to which one is impelled. It may not, and in- 
 deed cannot, be completely satisfactory; but it is worth 
 while to formulate views, even if incomplete and in 
 parts erroneous, that others may envisage the problems, 
 and abler minds lead us gradually nearer to the truth. 
 F. W. Robertson, more than seventy years ago, in His 
 sermon on "The Good Shepherd 1 " insisted on the need 
 for an honest facing of the nature of Our Lord's human- 
 ity 2 . We have been trying to examine some of the more 
 outstanding difficulties of our belief to the best of our 
 ability. The most we can hope is that we have cleared 
 the way for future thought, and have ourselves thought 
 carefully and reverently. However questionable our 
 conclusions may seem to some, the attempt will have 
 been worth while, if it leads them to formulate a more 
 satisfying theory. 
 
 Our own examination has led us to two definite re- 
 sults, (i) Christ was fully Man, with all the limitations 
 that are necessary to manhood, but without the dis- 
 ability which seems probably inherent in fallen man- 
 hood. He put on manhood, but it was perfect. Being 
 perfect, He could identify Himself completely with 
 
 1 Sermons, 2nd series. 
 
 1 See Storr, Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth 
 Century, pp. 416-417.
 
 1 50 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. iv 
 
 others, for perfect freedom is perfect service; the per- 
 fection of human freedom is the perfection of human 
 service; and service is self-limitation. Of His own will 
 He took upon Himself the burden of fallen manhood, 
 through the penetrability of personal being, and ex- 
 perienced its isolation. He was Man; He identified 
 Himself with "fallen" manhood. But He Himself was 
 perfect man, without the race-disability of manhood. 
 Otherwise He could not have brought about atonement, 
 for His Being would not have been as perfectly pene- 
 trable as is possible for manhood ; He could never have 
 drawn the whole world into the love of the Father. 
 
 (2) In His manhood it is doubtful if He could have 
 any memory of Transcendent Godhead, for if He had 
 He would not have been truly man. Those words of His 
 which seem to point to such a memory are probably to 
 be interpreted rather in the light of the intuitive know- 
 ledge of union with God that every saint possesses at 
 times and in some degree. They represent the experi- 
 ence which makes His teaching that the Kingdom of 
 Heaven is within us, and that we are even here and 
 now in eternal life, awaken in the heart an answering 
 certainty that nothing can shake. 
 
 NOTE. On p. 136 we quoted Jn i. 3 in its usual form. If we 
 accept the suggested emendation and read oi/St Iv. 8 ytyovtv tv 
 oflT<j5 furfj fiv, -our immediate contention is unaffected, while our 
 general discussion of the perpetual mediatorial activity of the 
 Son receives illumination and fresh cogency.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE INCARNATION (cont.) 
 
 ACCEPTANCE of the true 'Manhood of Jesus Christ in- 
 volves us in the difficulties of yet another problem, very 
 different in some respects from those we have hitherto 
 been considering, yet related to them. If He was Man, 
 passed through the stages of a man's development, 
 suffered the limitation of a man's intellect, in a word, 
 became as man becomes, we must try to trace out the 
 influence of these processes upon His Eternal Being. 
 For if the changes were real for Him, as they must have 
 been, we cannot simply say that because He is God as 
 well as Man, they can have had no effect upon that. To 
 say this would be to deny their reality. 
 
 We have already examined the question of the 
 memory of transcendent experience in the earthly life 
 of Christ. We must now do exactly the opposite; ex- 
 amine the earthly memory of Christ and see whether 
 and how it affects His transcendent Being. 
 
 Once more we can start with human experience and 
 argue from it with the more confidence, that, ex hypo- 
 thesi, Christ was perfectly human. Further, since we 
 believe that man, though human, has an eternal 
 destiny, and is already in part transcendent, both 
 sides of the problem are before us as we consider that 
 experience. 
 
 For this purpose we will glean what we can from two 
 of the most suggestive contemporary writers on memory, 
 Freud and Bergson. Working for different ends, looking 
 at life from opposed standpoints, the one expounding 
 a new scheme of materialism, the other, almost, a new 
 scheme of pantheism, we shall find that they yet supple- 
 ment and confirm each other in a remarkable manner.
 
 152 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 Freud's basal dogma is that every experience persists 
 in memory. The brain for him the brain 1 constitutes 
 the seat of memory, and mental processes are physio- 
 logical phenomena retains each least impression. The 
 past leaves its indelible mark. In waking life the effect 
 of many of these impressions is imperceptible except in 
 so far as they mark out and render easy a path of dis- 
 charge for the response to some stimulus, through 
 habit -formation. (For the brain has its paths, some 
 well-worn tracks, some little frequented, but none ever 
 overgrown and obliterated. Rarely in later life does a 
 discharge leap over the hedge, and trample out a new 
 way.) 
 
 This imperceptibility of the effect of so many stimuli 
 and their responses agrees well with Bergson's view that 
 we only remember that which at the moment we can use. 
 In dreams, however, the mind moves along the winding, 
 intertwined paths which in the day are so little used. 
 Every dream, says Freud and this is one of the central 
 moments of his teaching expresses a wish-fulfilment. 
 The mind wishes to repeat some experience; or to get 
 the complete fruition of some joy that was itself cut 
 short or unattained in waking life. 
 
 Simple dreams of wish-fulfilment occur in grown men 
 and women, but not commonly. Another factor has 
 come in. In children one finds them constantly. If a 
 child has not been over-drilled, his dreams are almost 
 always simple wish-fulfilments. Anyone who has 
 healthy young children may easily verify this state- 
 ment for himself. As far as we can judge, it is the 
 same with animals. We are all familiar with the joy- 
 ous hunting dreams of dogs, and their (presumably 
 victorious) dream-fights. 
 
 1 Or rather the region between the organic elements of the 
 brain-paths, whatever that may mean (Interpretation of Dreams, 
 P- 44).
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 153 
 
 But in the adult there is something more. Men do 
 not generally dream simple dreams. To explain this and 
 other things Freud creates a new entity, the Censor, 
 who is in very truth censor morum. Religion, social con- 
 vention, law, have created a code which governs our 
 very innermost selves far more despotically than we 
 imagine. Many desires are in opposition to this code. 
 We shrink from them. We repress them, refuse to let 
 them come into our consciousness at all ; these old, law- 
 less desires. And so it comes about that perhaps we do 
 not know we have some of them at all, for we have 
 never allowed them to come into consciousness. (It 
 must be clearly understood that the censor itself is an 
 unconscious agent 1 .) How then is it possible to dis- 
 cover their existence? In one way only. By their works 
 ye shall know them. They lie at the root of many 
 diseases ; those diseases are their great works. All the 
 phobias, the unreasoning fears that stalk after a man 
 unseen by all the rest of the world, fear of open spaces, 
 fear of closed rooms, other definite fears whose name is 
 legion, blank unassociated fear of fear; strange and 
 obscene fetish worship, of whose existence few but the 
 students of abnormal mind-states know; impotence; 
 physical weakness, mental weakness; many forms of 
 madness; paralysis of certain types; all these and end-, 
 less other diseases, down to the border-line between 
 eccentricity and disease where lie such things as the 
 comprehensive hospitality of the old maid towards 
 countless and often repulsive pets, are the great works 
 of repression-complexes. An example may serve to 
 illustrate the way in which a repressed idea finds outlet 
 in some distorted form, producing physical symptoms of 
 disease. Mr X. , a man of about thirty, was obsessed with 
 a perfectly formless fear. The paroxysms became more 
 and more frequent, and the result on his physical health 
 
 1 Appendix B. See also the illustrative case given below.
 
 154 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 was disastrous; all kinds of symptoms manifested them- 
 selves. Voyages, rest-cures, drugs were without avail. 
 Mr X. was dying of fear. Eventually he went to a nerve- 
 specialist who recognised the probability that some 
 repression underlay the physical symptoms. The clue 
 was in this case obtained by automatic writing under 
 light hypnosis. As a child of twelve Mr X. had been in 
 the room when his father had a fatal seizure of pulmon- 
 ary embolism in middle age. The shock of this had been 
 so great, and the memory of it so painful, that it had 
 been completely driven from the consciousness. Under 
 light hypnosis the doctor's questions recalled it : to the 
 "question "What are you afraid of?" came the reply 
 "Father's death 1 ." "Why?" "Shall die same." With 
 the approach of the age at which the father died, the 
 repressed fear of childhood became operative! The 
 patient had, of course, only to be told that this was the 
 origin of his formless fear, and that medical examina- 
 tion showed that there was no symptom of the disease, 
 to ensure complete immunity from the paroxysms of 
 fear; and restoration to normal health rapidly followed. 
 But we can trace the work of repression in lesser things 
 too. The slip of the tongue or pen has a clear meaning 
 for those who know how to interpret it 2 . A simple ex- 
 ample that happened in my own presence a few weeks 
 ago may illustrate this. One of the little boys of a lady 
 who has suffered all her life with great pain in the eyes, 
 has weak eyes, though otherwise he is exceptionally 
 muscular and vigorous. I know that she is always 
 
 1 The patient did not know what he had written. 
 
 * Cf. Freud, Psychopathology of Every-day Life; Ernest Jones, 
 Papers on Psychoanalysis ; Bernard Hart, Psychology of Insanity, 
 etc. ; as well as Freud's chief work The Interpretation of Dreams. 
 Many careful readers and students will doubtless come to the con- 
 clusion that here, as in many other matters, Freud extends his 
 generalisations beyond legitimate bounds.
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 155 
 
 haunted with a fear almost certainly unfounded she 
 does not speak of, that the boy will suffer as she does. 
 Someone was commenting on his skill in the gymnasium, 
 and his mother said, "Yes, he has wonderfully strong 
 eyes," she meant to say arms, but the repressed, and at 
 the time unconscious, wish that his eyes were as strong 
 as his arms, expressed itself, uncalled. 
 
 Again, if you agree with a man that he shall answer a 
 string of words, spoken one by one, each with the first 
 word that enters his mind, you will find that the exist- 
 ence of a repression-complex is indicated by a longer 
 interval, a peculiar, unexpected, word, or no word at 
 all. This pause is the work of the repression-complex, 
 or rather of the unconsciously-acting censor; and by 
 choosing your words, and by careful questioning ; by the 
 method known as free association, or by automatic 
 writing; best of all, in many cases, by the use of hyp- 
 nosis, you can often discover the nature of the complex, 
 even if it is entirely unknown to the person. Do you 
 cunningly object, "How do you know you are right?" 
 there is a convincing answer, " By the good pragmatic 
 test, that if a disease afflicts the man in question, having 
 discovered the hidden cause, you can cure the disease 1 . 
 It works, and that is the pragmatist's test of truth. In 
 such matters we are all pragmatists." Besides, even in 
 the case of normal minds, you can call up forgotten 
 incidents of early life with which some repression-com- 
 plex is associated, as any one who has any practical 
 knowledge of the methods of psychoanalysis knows. 
 
 But chiefest of all, dreams reveal to us the thing 
 which was repressed. The superficial content, the 
 apparent content, of a dream is determined by pre- 
 
 1 I would by no means say that you will be curing the disease 
 by the best or most expeditious way in a great many instances. 
 Even where the case is susceptible of psychoanalytic cure, treat- 
 ment by suggestion is often preferable, for many reasons.
 
 156 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 ceding events of working life, generally the events of 
 the previous evening; its real meaning lies deep in the 
 accumulation of material in the unconscious. Frag- 
 ments of unimportant happenings are irresponsibly 
 selected, though occasionally somatic stimuli provide 
 the immediate cause, and perhaps shape the dream. 
 Dreams appear most often motiveless and disconnected 
 when such fragments as can be remembered are con- 
 sidered by the waking mind, and they rapidly fade from 
 memory. This disconnectedness and impermanence is 
 due to more than one cause. Partly, dream-episodes, 
 except the simple dreams of wish-fulfilment, are really 
 without sequence, because the apparent content of the 
 dream is of little importance: has nothing to do with 
 the real meaning. Partly, as soon as the dreamer wakes 
 the critical moments of the dream are repressed from 
 consciousness by the censor. In sleep, the censor dozes, 
 and passes matter for publication whose disguise is too 
 transparent for this to be allowed when the whole mind 
 is fully awake. Therefore the censor does the next best 
 thing; he calls the dream in from circulation and wields 
 his blue pencil freely. What finally emerges is as futile 
 as were the articles of military correspondents in the 
 early stages of the war. 
 
 The true content of the dream lies deeper. It is 
 veiled in ambiguous symbols. Real meanings are often 
 expressed by their contraries. Fear, for instance, is a 
 wish inverted. All this is conditioned by the necessity 
 of escaping the eagle eye of the censor. 
 
 Thus, the interpretation of dreams is a matter for the 
 expert alone. Only those who have the requisite know- 
 ledge of psychology and physiology can attempt it. 
 
 Once more it may be asked how one can possibly tell 
 what is the true interpretation, if sometimes the inter- 
 pretation is straightforward, sometimes by contraries, 
 and if everything of importance is masked by some
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 157 
 
 visual symbol or some word-play depending on a silly 
 assonance? 
 
 Of course, often one cannot ; but often one can, and 
 here the answer is again the answer of the pragmatist. 
 The analysis of dreams is now used by specialists for the 
 diagnosis of certain types of disease. The repressed 
 complex, which, it must be remembered, never emerges 
 at all into consciousness, is discovered, brought into 
 consciousness, verified ; and with, or sometimes without, 
 further treatment, the disease is cured. If there is 
 treatment, it is based on the discovery of the repression- 
 complex. But the important point is, that the pudding 
 is proved in the eating. 
 
 Perhaps, since we all live in conditions that make im- 
 perative the repression of many potent desires, it may 
 seem strange that we do not all suffer from repression- 
 complexes, since these desires cannot ' abreact ' or be ful- 
 filled. But it is just here that the hopefulness of Freud's 
 discoveries comes in. If an illegitimate desire is faced 
 and fought, it can be directed into other channels. It 
 becomes 'sublimated 1 .' Sexual desire, to take the most 
 familiar instance (with which Freud's works are all 
 unduly permeated), may be sublimated into pure love, 
 if its existence is recognised. If, for instance the person 
 plunges into public work in order to forget a passion, the 
 force of the passion is poured straight in the work, and 
 not bottled up, to emerge later as a symptom, always 
 
 1 Some workers in this field are inclined to give a far less im- 
 portant place to 'sublimation' than is given by Bernard Hart, 
 for example. They contend that in most cases the mere fact of 
 facing and fighting an anti-social impulse brings the whole matter 
 so strongly into consciousness that repression does not occur in 
 normal subjects, and sublimation is rendered unnecessary. With 
 this I do not altogether agree. The acquisition of new functions 
 by organs is a common phenomenon, and I see no reason to sup- 
 pose that we have not here an analogous phenomenon.
 
 158 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 provided that the work is directly linked in his own mind 
 with the idea to be mastered. In the same way the passion 
 may be linked with an emotion, if the linking is done 
 consciously, and the substituted emotion is one that can 
 receive full outlet. If not, it will find some abnormal 
 and symbolic path of discharge, its natural path being 
 blocked. Extreme instances of this are familiar to all 
 medical attendants of lunatic asylums; less marked 
 cases constantly present themselves in ordinary life to 
 those who have the requisite knowledge. In one in- 
 stance I have recently come across, the discharge path 
 is a peculiar form of unconscious egomania. I may not 
 here enter into the details of the case, or explain why 
 it should have taken this particular form, but I know 
 enough of the history to be certain of my interpreta- 
 tion. 
 
 It is not possible, nor desirable, for our present pur- 
 pose to enter into more detail of this fascinating study; 
 the rough outline given is all that we requjre 1 . 
 
 Now in all Freud's work the mechanical basis on 
 which the mind operates is made abundantly clear. So 
 much so indeed, that Freud himself is betrayed by it 
 into the crudest materialism. 
 
 But a mechanical basis is exactly what we should 
 
 1 The serious student, if he has the requisite knowledge, is 
 strongly advised to study Freud's own works, if he be of strong 
 stomach, and also Dr Ernest Jones' Psychoanalysis Something 
 also may be gained from Munsterberg's Psychotherapy, and Dr 
 Wingfield's Introduction to the Study of Hypnotism, as well as 
 many other works. But those who have no medical knowledge, 
 or no special reason for wishing to pursue the matter further, will 
 find all that they require in Dr Bernard Hart's little shilling book 
 on The Psychology of Insanity, and they will be well advised to 
 content themselves with this. Even though the book is pro- 
 fessedly concerned with abnormal mental states, much informa- 
 tion about the structure of the normal mind and its complexes is 
 incidentally given.
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 1 59 
 
 expect, for, as we have seen 1 , only on such a basis is the 
 emergence of freedom in a determinate environment 
 possible. We expect determination as the necessary 
 basis of intellect. Freud's psychology only transgresses 
 the bounds of legitimate (not necessarily correct, be it 
 observed) inference when he endeavours to make con- 
 sciousness an epiphenomenon of the brain states. 
 
 The special problems that concern us at present are 
 rather (i) the meaning of memory on the mechanical 
 side, (2) the nature and function of the Censor. 
 
 (i) Bergson, as we have said more than once, divides 
 memory into habit and pure memory; the habit-phe- 
 nomena being localised in the brain, as a mechanism*, 
 the pure memory not. The past truly exists for the 
 individual, and that portion of it which may be of use 
 in a given conjuncture is brought into present conscious- 
 ness, and made effectual in practical life, through dis- 
 charge along a selected path. Pure memory moves in 
 the past moves, that is, amid that which exists but 
 has ceased to be useful and is directed, like habit, to 
 practical ends selecting what is of use and applying it: 
 bringing it again into touch with actual experience. It 
 is freer than habit ; for in this last we see the discharge 
 along a frequented path, of some familiar impulse gener- 
 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life, ch. iii. 
 
 1 A side-issue of some interest arises here. Is habit-memory 
 determined by a molecular pattern ; and is it heritable ? There 
 seems to be some evidence for the heritability of habits : we are 
 at times appalled by the fidelity with which the outgrown tricks 
 and habits of our boyhood are reenacted in our offspring, though, 
 of course, it is the somewhat similar environment that brings 
 them out. But habit-inheritance suggests the inheritance of an 
 acquired character. Probably we should be nearer the truth if 
 we assumed that a certain molecular pattern exists and is in- 
 herited ; that this makes imitation, and similar response to similar 
 stimuli, easy, and that by reiterated response the molecular 
 pattern becomes identical
 
 160 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 ated by a stimulus that has been often repeated 1 . All 
 this harmonises very well, up to a point, with the 
 Freudian view of repressions 2 . According to this latter 
 school, impulses which, for social or religious reasons, 
 cannot be satisfied in obviously appropriate action are 
 either repressed from consciousness in which case they 
 may, if potent enough, break out and be discharged 
 in some symbolic way; and then in extreme cases, 
 the man may become abnormal, or even insane or 
 else their character is recognised in consciousness and 
 they are bravely faced, instead of being relegated to 
 Mrs Grundy's Chamber of Impossible? when they 
 achieve discharge along a higher path, harmlessly. 
 In many cases these repressed desires are related to 
 habits, and serve as the trigger through whose operation 
 the path of habit is traversed by some impulse. Their 
 symbolic or sublimated discharge acts in the normal in- 
 dividual as a safety-valve, and so fulfils the utilitarian 
 function postulated by Bergson for all memories. Thus, 
 though repressed by the censor, and so never entering 
 into waking consciousness, they appear and function 
 in dreams, and also, without appearing, become causal 
 factors in the neuroses. 
 
 But, as Cunningham 8 points out, all the past, and so 
 all memory, is really directed towards the future. So 
 also even the repressed ideas. It is an essential point in 
 
 1 It is possible to define memory simply as potential ideas. I do 
 not think that such a definition clashes with Bergson's conception. 
 According to him the past does exist, and by memory is selected 
 from in so far as it becomes useful. According to the foregoing 
 definition the potential ideas would become actual when an end 
 could be subserved by their doing so. To the practical psycholo- 
 gist the new definition may appear the more useful ; to the meta- 
 physician perhaps the other. 
 
 See however Appendix A. 
 
 An Introduction to the Study of the Philosophy of Bergson.
 
 v] Some Implications of I he Incarnation 161 
 
 Freud's doctrine, that every memory persists. Indeed 
 he and his followers go so far as to make the impressions 
 of early infancy of far-reaching importance in determin- 
 ing the life, conscious and unconscious, of later years; 
 and in many ways the facts seem to bear out this view. 
 
 The past lives and is changed in the present. Thus 
 Bergson. 
 
 I am what I am because of my past ; but I am chang- 
 ing, modifying myself and being modified. Hence My- 
 self is the sum-total of my past experience, as related to 
 that of me which persists. The full meaning of the past 
 is only realised in the future. The past is ever operative 
 in the present for the sake of the future. Thus Cunning- 
 ham. 
 
 We see, then, that by introducing the idea of the tran- 
 scendental ego we at once find a means of harmonising 
 Freud and Bergson. Bergson, the pantheist, looks back 
 on the urging of the vital impulse ; Freud, the material- 
 ist, looks forward to the influence of the mechanism of 
 past mental states upon the mechanism of future mental 
 states. 
 
 For consider Freud's views. The associations found 
 in psychoanalysis seem purely mechanical, but all the 
 time there is an end, and a useful end, to be achieved by 
 those associations; a teleological significance is intro- 
 duced by Freud over and over again, implicitly and even 
 explicitly, into the conception of the psychic activities. 
 What, for example, could be more explicit than this 
 statement ; "This primitive mental activity must have 
 been modified by bitter practical experience into a more 
 expedient secondary activity 1 ' ' ? Here is teleology with 
 a vengeance! The past is utilised, as it must be, to 
 determine the present and the future. The past lives, 
 is, in the present, and the organism must act in accord- 
 ance with it, for there is the mechanical basis, and there 
 
 1 The Interpretation of Dreams. Trana. Brill, p. 446. 
 MOD. 1 i
 
 1 62 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 is an end in view the progress of the organism towards 
 something which Freud does not define, but which must 
 be adaptation, and which, hence, in accordance with 
 our earlier arguments 1 , I unhesitatingly call freedom. 
 And progress depends on what the organism is and has 
 achieved, and so on its whole past. 
 
 (2) What then is the censor? Freud himself com- 
 pares the objects of our 'internal perception,' as he calls 
 it all psychic formations, that is to the images pro- 
 duced by the lenses of a telescope, the lenses represent- 
 ing the psychic perceptions, and the censor correspond- 
 ing to the refraction of the light by the telescope-lenses 
 (op. cit. p. 484). Indeed he is inclined to believe in two 
 refractive systems or censors, that between what he, 
 in his peculiar terminology, calls the "unconscious" 
 and the " foreconscious " (which is itself not in con- 
 sciousness, but in which an accessible stream of psychic 
 reactions continually flows, doing mind-work, and giving 
 rise to fresh psychic formations) and that between the 
 foreconscious and the conscious (op. cit. p. 490). The 
 importance and the weakness of this idea of double cen- 
 sorship is discussed in an appendix. For our immediate 
 purpose we need only point out that ultimately the censor 
 is seen to be exercising a function which is directed to- 
 wards definite ends. Indeed, it seems to me that we 
 cannot define it except as the organism's recognition of 
 an end in life. It is the unconscious self -judgment of the 
 individual in his capacity of a believer in ends 2 . Certain 
 things cannot pass the censor because it or he im- 
 poses the claims of safety, of social utility, of religion. 
 
 In the animal and the child the phenomena of censor- 
 ship are absent. These only come with a stage of 
 development when other ends besides the immediate 
 
 1 Evolution and the Need of Atonement. 
 
 * See however Appendix A for a fuller discussion of the matter. 
 The problem is one which is essentially intricate and obscure.
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 163 
 
 satisfaction of the individual's impulses are recognised. 
 The child is still in the stage of development of the 
 social organism which is pre-social, pre-religious, except 
 in the most elementary sense. The complexities of 
 higher social and religious life are unknown, inoperative 
 as yet. Yet, on what are these claims of religion and 
 society based? Surely, directly at any rate, on the pro- 
 gress of man. The child has not got them because his 
 recapitulatory development has not reached this stage. 
 
 If they are based on progress, then since the very 
 existence of the power of progress involves purpose, 
 whose theoretic interpretation must be in terms of 
 teleology, as we have seen 1 , their existence must be due 
 to an end or aim in the life-process. The very existence 
 of the censor, the very existence of the power of sub- 
 limation, is evidence of purpose ; and more, of a purpose 
 that is recognised and acted upon. The purpose, the 
 end, is spiritual life. To that conclusion we were driven 
 at the outset of our investigation 2 . 
 
 Thus the Freudian mechanism is what we should 
 expect in organisms that are developing towards free- 
 dom on the foundation of the past, which in them is ever 
 present as an actual, modifiable existence; while the 
 Freudian censor is what we should expect as evidencing* 
 the unconscious self-judgment of an individual living 
 in a community whose ideals express, not the desires 
 and wishes of more primitive life, but the desires and 
 wishes pertaining to that stage of spiritual advancement 
 which the community has reached. There is no real 
 inconsistency between Bergson and Freud. The fact 
 
 1 Evolution and the Need of Atonement, ch. i. 
 
 * Ibid., cf. also Evolution and Spiritual Life, passim. 
 
 * Evidencing only, for Freud's censor is something different 
 from the whole spirit of man; it is an unconscious mechanism 
 which aids the operation of this last, which itself exercises a 
 censorship of a wider character. 
 
 II 2
 
 164 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 that repressions exist and that censorship exists cannot 
 for a moment be questioned by anyone who possesses 
 the slightest practical acquaintance with the facts. But 
 I cannot help suspecting that the censor, in Freud's sense, 
 has no real existence. It seems to me to be far more in 
 accordance with the evidence to say that, in any given 
 constellation of ideas, the censor is simply a second idea, 
 or a second potential idea, belonging to a 'higher' level 
 than that which it seeks to repress. In a hate-complex 
 the lower idea may suggest murder: the censor is the 
 higher, social, idea that murder is wrong in itself, or the 
 still higher, spiritual, idea that hatred is wrong. In a 
 man's sex-complex the lower idea is repressed by a 
 higher idea of the status and nobility of womanhood, 
 and so on. To say that the censor is a definite entity 
 seems to me wholly unjustifiable. It is far more reason- 
 able to contend that there are as many censors as there are 
 impulses to be repressed : that the censor represents the 
 mechanism of an unconscious judgment of each low im- 
 pulse by the whole organism as it opposes a noble impulse 
 to each ignoble one. For convenience, however, we will 
 retain Freud's term, while giving it this fresh meaning. 
 
 Let us now apply what we have said to the mind of 
 man in a more general way, in order that we may see 
 how to apply it to the mind of the Man Christ Jesus. 
 
 All a man's past exists; and existence means persist- 
 ence in the present. Nothing not the least, trivial 
 happening can fail of its effect, or be obliterated. Not 
 only does the man live over again in brief the whole 
 history of his evolution, the past which has been created 
 for him by his forbears: not only does that past enter 
 into the present during his unconscious life, and persist 
 as the foundation on which his being is erected ; but the 
 past which he himself has created for himself persists, 
 though, to a large extent, not in consciousness. Yet 
 alike in the past created for him and in the past he
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation \ 65 
 
 creates himself, there is much which belongs to lower 
 stages of being. There are many impulses that date 
 from preconscious times, which his spirit has outgrown. 
 There are many impulses, many yielding^, which truly 
 belong to stages left behind. Yielding voluntarily and 
 with open eyes to such anachronistic impulses con- 
 stitutes the positive act we call sin. Sin too, then, per- 
 sists in the ever-present past ever present, because, 
 through memory, it is ever active in the now. What a 
 man is and will be is largely determined by what he has 
 been. 
 
 Yet his growing spirit exercises censorship. He re- 
 cognises unconsciously as well as consciously that there 
 is much in his past that must not be imported into the 
 present. Often he commits the dread mistake of being 
 shocked. Lower impulses and past yieldings alike he 
 refuses to admit into consciousness. He dare not face 
 them, and packs them hurriedly out of sight. Instead 
 of realising that only on the basis of the past can the 
 future be built; instead of admitting to himself that, 
 though he may attempt to delude himself into a belief 
 that because he refuses to recognise them they have 
 ceased to exist, they have not done so really ; he actually 
 brings himself to think that out of sight is truly out of 
 'mind.' He forgets the truth that underlies the old 
 catch-word "Forgotten sin is not forgiven sin." 
 
 If only men could get rid of the terrible habit of being 
 shocked at facts ! No real being has caused anything 
 like the harm and misery that Mrs Grundy has been 
 responsible for, even though she be a veritable Mrs 
 Harris. Countless lives have been wrecked morally, 
 countless men and women who should have been 
 healthy have been driven into invalidism, by the con- 
 spiracy of silence. 
 
 We are brought up in an atmosphere of prurient 
 ignorance. We are taught nothing of the majesty and
 
 1 66 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 beauty of life that is founded on the struggles of millions 
 of past years, not one of which but has left its indelible 
 mark. We are left to grub out our knowledge from the 
 muckheap; and it is naturally associated with muck in 
 our minds. Few but the garbage-mongers and those 
 whom they have lured into believing in the desirability 
 of garbage, speak of the physical realities of part of our 
 life. If we ask for knowledge and true instruction we are 
 met with shifty avoidance of the issue. We are told 
 that no one talks of these things except very wicked 
 people. What wonder some seek elsewhere the know- 
 ledge that has been denied them by their guides? What 
 wonder that one and all associate facts that are in 
 themselves beautiful, with sin, or at least with a sense 
 of shame? What wonder that we -hesitate and use 
 periphrases when we in our turn are asked questions? 
 For we are blankly ignorant ourselves of the reali ty ; we 
 only know the sordid side we have been taught. And 
 if we do by chance find someone who will teach us 
 simply and cleanly as simply and cleanly as they used 
 to teach us mathematics at school in a perfectly matter 
 of fact way, what a help it is to us ! How we begin to 
 understand, and understanding, to reverence, the life 
 process ! 
 
 Thank God a change is already upon us. Clean, 
 matter-of-fact teaching about fatherhood and mother- 
 hood, about reproductive organs as well as about 
 stomachs and brains and blood-vessels, is at length 
 becoming fairly common. There is no fear that the 
 beauty and mystery and sacred secrecies will be lost. 
 These are far more appreciated where accurate know- 
 ledge exists, learned as simply as other knowledge, than 
 where natural interest has been fed first on lies and then 
 on filth self-gathered from the dunghill. 
 
 The result of the change will quickly become visible. 
 Nervous diseases will be less common, for instead of
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 1 67 
 
 obscene ideas accidentally or purposely garnered, and 
 subsequently driven with horror from the grundy-con- 
 sciousness which refuses to recognise them, only to 
 remain in the subconscious and form the node of a net- 
 work of repression-complexes, true ideas will be bravely 
 faced, and lower impulses sublimated. The higher will 
 replace the lower; the activities of organs will be trans- 
 formed, as is so often the case in evolutionary progress ; 
 love will more and more replace mere promiscuous 
 desire. 
 
 I have taken the case of sex because it is the most 
 fundamental, and as Freud clearly shows, it lies at the 
 bottom of many (though by no means of all, pace Freud 
 and Jung) repression-complexes in one way or another. 
 But what we have said is equally true of all other im- 
 pulses whose existence we refuse to admit, even to our- 
 selves, and drive into the sub-consciousness instead of 
 facing them. Repressed anger or hatred, or, worst of all, 
 jealousy, for example, have just the same evil result, and 
 are susceptible of the same relief; and so with other 
 things. Repression-complexes, and the diseases to which 
 they give rise, are the offspring of ignorance and moral 
 cowardice. All the past is operative, or potentially 
 operative, in the present. Memory is not solely a matter 
 of the past, though it moves in it; it is active in the 
 present and determines the future. What we shall be 
 depends on what we are, and this in its turn on what we 
 have been. 
 
 Once more we see the solidarity of man with all his 
 ancestors, since he recapitulates in development his 
 ancestral history. Once more we begin to understand 
 how, not the materiality of spirit, but the spirituality 
 of matter, is emphasised in the whole evolutionary pro- 
 cess. Memory is not a phenomenon of the brain; the 
 brain merely serves as the organ for mediation between 
 spirit and matter in this as in all other ways. It is the
 
 1 68 Some Implications of tke Incarnation [CH. 
 
 telephone exchange. The blockage of a discharge path, 
 whether through physical or psychic trauma, does not 
 destroy the memory, or even in any way affect the 
 spirit 1 . The pathetic decay of the faculties of aged 
 people is a decay of the mediating powers of the brain, 
 not the wearing-out of the spirit itself. Already the 
 spirit is losing touch with its material surroundings. 
 The soul is pluming itself for flight to a far country 
 where the struggle and the progress will go forward 
 among other conditions. The brain has served its turn 
 and is being discarded. It is a machine worn out. 
 
 The censor points towards higher things. It is the 
 means whereby we are enabled to forward consciously 
 (as well as unconsciously) the process that has gone on 
 through all the long history of unconscious evolution. 
 Organs take on fresh functions. Fins become legs, swim- 
 bladders become lungs, gill arches become tracheal and 
 laryngeal cartilages, rendering speech possible. But no 
 one suspects the fish of consciously aiding the change. 
 Now, however, man consciously and of his own free- 
 will acknowledges the claims of higher life. He sees 
 an end and strives for it. He recognises sexual pas- 
 sion as a basis of true love, sublimable into that. He 
 recognises the desire of possession as indefinitely legiti- 
 mate only when applied to spiritual things, and so his 
 acquisitiveness is directed towards the acquisition of 
 spiritual powers. He recognises ambition and pride 
 and knowledge as finding their true fulfilment only in 
 ambitious ideals of service, pride that will not stoop 
 to things mean and base, because of the high calling of 
 manhood, knowledge that sees beyond the appearance 
 into the reality. 
 
 All this must apply also to Christ in still greater 
 measure, if He was truly man. No repression-complexes 
 
 1 See Bergson's analysis of the facts of aphasia in Matter and 
 Memory.
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 1 69 
 
 can have distorted His mind; for He knew and faced 
 everything, He sublimated everything, making it true 
 and perfect. His love was pure and perfect. His anger 
 had no taint of self, but was a burning jealousy for the 
 goodness and nobility of man's spirit; a hatred of its 
 degradation. His ambition was for the salvation of men. 
 and their perfecting. His pride was the pride of humble 
 desire to do good. His knowledge was the knowledge 
 of man's great destiny. On all the foundation of His 
 sinless past was built His human character. All the past 
 abode with Him, and abides for ever. Therefore He can 
 enter into every phase of man's becoming with perfect 
 sympathy and understanding. Therefore He is as near 
 to us in childhood as in manhood. Therefore He is as 
 near to those whose brains have ceased to develope at 
 an early stage whom, because of their arrested de- 
 velopment, we call idiots as to those who have gone a 
 long way, as men count distance, along the stony path 
 of knowledge. In very truth He has taken the Manhood 
 into God. He is Perfect God; but superadded is His 
 perfect Manhood. 
 
 As the Athanasian Creed expresses it, He is equal to 
 the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the 
 Father as touching His Manhood. Yet inferior only in 
 a sense. He has Himself experienced the knowledge of 
 being caused. He has Himself become, in the conditions 
 of full Human limitation. Because He is Man, no experi- 
 ence of that becoming can ever die away. It lives in the 
 present of transcendent being. Christ is man as well as 
 God; He still experiences manhood, though manhood 
 perfected to its ultimate completion. And the manhood 
 He knows is the manhood He won for Himself, and the 
 manhood won for Him by the struggle of past ages. 
 
 "It behoved him in all things to be made like unto 
 His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful 
 high-priest in all things pertaining to God, to make
 
 1 70 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that He 
 himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to suc- 
 cour them that are tempted." "We have not a high- 
 priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our 
 infirmities." 
 
 This it is that is the glory of the Christian certainty, 
 that we know that all our Saviour's human past endures, 
 not as transcendent memory an impossible thing, 
 since memory is directed towards activity in the con- 
 ditions of limitation 1 but as an ever-present reality of 
 eternal Manhood. 
 
 Before leaving this part of our subject we may refer 
 briefly to a somewhat peculiar difficulty which most of 
 us feel at one time or another the difficulty of the 
 historic Christ, and the historic Pentecost. We may 
 be ready to admit as an abstract proposition that the 
 coming of the Godhead as individual Man is the only 
 means we can see of securing perfect union between men 
 and God through unity of experience. But none the less 
 it is rather a shock to find our abstract conceptions 
 actualised in the concrete, even though, or perhaps it 
 would be truer to say especially as, the concrete fact 
 occurred before our own abstract thought. It would be so 
 much simpler if our thoughts had come first, the histori- 
 cal event after. In fact our over-emphasised indivi- 
 dualism rather resents being forestalled in any of its 
 activities, and we forget that other individuals of many 
 creeds and races had reached much the same abstract 
 formula that we ourselves have achieved, even before 
 the Event. 
 
 We cannot help wondering, in short, how much our 
 own thought has been influenced by the traditional 
 interpretation of the historic Jesus. Abstract thought 
 does not seem to have received altogether fair play. 
 And perhaps this is even more true of the historic Pente- 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life, ch. vi. and supta, ch. iv.
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 171 
 
 cost. We must analyse our difficulty and try to get it 
 clearly formulated, before we can attempt to solve it. 
 For in truth it is generally present to our minds in a 
 very vague form. 
 
 We will begin with the problem of the historic Christ. 
 The first point that arises is clearly this: Why should 
 Christ have come at that time and no other, in that 
 nation and no other? It is all very well to say that the 
 Jewish nation was in some sense prepared for the coming 
 of the Messiah; that adds to the difficulty. How do we 
 know that Jesus was not hailed as the Christ for that 
 very reason? The fact that people were on the look out 
 for some such manifestation only weakens the Christian 
 position, for they would be sure to read miraculous 
 power into the doings of some wonderful man who 
 happened to be born at that time. Now this sort of 
 argument, though it lies behind a great deal of our 
 questioning, will not do at all. It is hopelessly muddle- 
 headed; and we must above all think clearly. In the 
 first place it simply throws overboard all our previous 
 abstract thinking and starts afresh, and very badly. 
 Either we were right or we were wrong in thinking that 
 we had reasoned to the need of a coming of God in 
 human form. If we were right, the fact that He was 
 vaguely expected in the land in which He came, the 
 fact that many other lands believed in similar comings 
 without associating them with definite historical hap- 
 penings to a definite, historical person, have nothing to 
 do with us. If we were right in our abstract argument, 
 there is no earthly reason why other people of other 
 times and nations should not have argued in the same 
 sort of way, though doubtless in a very inferior manner, 
 for we are unquestionably the people and wisdom was 
 at least born with us even if she will not die with us ! 
 If they did argue in the same sort of way, there is every 
 reason that they should have tacked their imaginings
 
 172 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 on to some mythical hero Baldur, Krishna, or whom- 
 soever it might be as in fact they did. But mark this 
 difference. The hero to whom they attached the doctrine 
 of incarnation was a hero of the distant past. Him to 
 Whom the first Christians attached the doctrine was a 
 man of their own circle. Many of us of to-day, who did 
 not know Jesus in the time of His Flesh, have to argue 
 first from abstract principles. But having come to a 
 favourable decision we have no right to object to the 
 fact that there was a historic Christ. If He must come 
 as true Man He must have come in some particular 
 nation and at some particular time. Now there are 
 excellent reasons adducible by our human understand- 
 ing, even, for His coming when and where He did. The 
 Jewish religion was as a fact purer and truer in its con- 
 ception of God than any other. The time was suitable 
 for a Divine intervention, however hopeless for the 
 stability of a merely human one, because the men of 
 that nation had reached a point where further enlighten- 
 ment was required if progress was to be maintained. The 
 conditions were particularly suitable for a Divine inter- 
 vention, however hopeless for the stability of a merely 
 human one, with the oncoming Rornan civilisation 
 carrying culture over a considerable part of the world. 
 The danger of narrow nationalism was escapable by the 
 very fact that the Jewish nation was so soon to be 
 scattered abroad. Christ could not be identified with 
 any particular form of civilisation. In short, if the con- 
 ditions were ideally unsuitable for the world-wide in- 
 fluence of a false Christ, they were ideally suitable for 
 the world-wide influence of a true Christ. Is this suit- 
 ability of condition then any real argument against the 
 Incarnation having taken place then, rather than at any 
 other time? The whole futile doubt apparently crum- 
 bles when we examine it. 
 
 But its real roots lie deeper, and this explains its
 
 v] Some Implications of I he Incarnation 173 
 
 extraordinary vitality. Our difficulty rests on the fact 
 that the eternal policy and plan of God enters into time, 
 and that God Himself enters info time. Here as else- 
 where, it is really the old spectre of clock-time that 
 haunts us. What we find trouble in believing is that 
 Christ should have come in a certain year of the Roman 
 Empire to redeem the world. And the difficulty would 
 have been the same in whatever year of whatever em- 
 pire He had come. Yet if He came as man at all He 
 must have come in some place and year, as we compute 
 space and time. We must not forget, however, that we 
 compute space and time in this way solely as a matter 
 of convenience, and that they have no absolute exist- 
 ence as we picture them, but are merely practical repre- 
 sentations of a reality that is quite different. That 
 reality is the fact that we experience change in duration. 
 And one of the two most certain facts of our experience 
 is change ; the very essence of our belief, and the central 
 moment of our thinking, is that the change is purposive, 
 not meaningless ; is directed towards an end. (The other 
 certain fact, of course, is that we are there to experience 
 the change, and ourselves endure in change.) There is no 
 more difficulty really in believing in the Incarnation as 
 an historic episode than there is in believing in the 
 immanence of God, which belief is a necessary of the- 
 istic thought. The trouble is that we cannot or will not 
 think clearly. True, immanence is an enduring process, 
 while the Incarnation was but for a short time; but that 
 only leads us back to the question whether the coming 
 of God as man was really necessary to the scheme of 
 creation. If it was, He could not have come in any 
 other way than this and yet been truly man. I cannot 
 help thinking that much of our difficulty lies in taking 
 the temporal series as being purely temporal. Time is, 
 after all, the medium in which we perceive the unfolding 
 sequence of real activity, but the sequence itself is not
 
 1 74 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 necessarily temporal, and the activity of which it is the 
 expression is certainly not temporal. There is no real 
 contradiction in the idea of an Eternal Series; for Eter- 
 nity is not merely all-at-once-ness; neither, of course, 
 is it mere duration without limits. Simultaneous 
 activity perhaps gives us as true a conception of eternal 
 life as any other phrase does, for in the term activity is 
 implicit the idea of order, purpose, an end achieved 
 through succession, while in the term simultaneous is 
 suggested, not exactly timelessness, but the all-em- 
 bracedness of the Activity in the Nature of the Eternal 
 Being. Christ's incarnation is an Eternal Datum of 
 God's Being. His coming in clock-time is our appre- 
 hension of Him, and His answering apprehension of our 
 needs; the centre of material disturbances whose spread- 
 ing waves, as they touch each human life, make it shine 
 with the Christ-light ; enabling us to see the thing hidden 
 from us before, that Christ is God Incarnate in every 
 man. The Incarnation is an eternal fact perpetually 
 renewed. Christ taught this; Paul taught it God in 
 us ; Christ in us. The Incarnation is an eternal process, 
 manifested perpetually in the human, creaturely being. 
 The Atonement is an eternal process, perpetually re- 
 newed as each soul finds its divinity, its union with 
 God, in self-abnegation. But both had to be perceived 
 as events in a temporal series : the light could only travel 
 in a suitable medium to set the matter gleaming; the 
 Nature and Being of God as Love, as self-surrender, had 
 to be brought into the temporal series of Becoming, in 
 the Atonement of the Divine Man, Christ Jesus. 
 
 The same sort of difficulty arises for our rough and 
 ready theology, in regard to the coming of the Holy 
 Spirit at Pentecost; but popular thought is perhaps 
 nearer to the truth here than it is in its attitude to the 
 Incarnation, because the conception of the Spirit seems 
 less defined. Christ is such a very definite and tangible
 
 vj Some Implications of the Incarnation* \ 75 
 
 Person. The coming of the Holy Spirit is not generally 
 felt to have been a coming in quite the same sense that 
 the coming of the Son of Man was a coming. Most men 
 feel that the Holy Spirit had always been in the world, 
 inspiring, guiding towards unity through freedom, and 
 that the Pentecostal gift was the realisation of His 
 Presence, the sudden vision of unity and freedom, the 
 sudden understanding of the truth, the beginning of 
 recognition of Him who was guiding and still would 
 guide into all truth. As in the old fairy-tales the fern 
 seed dusted on the eyes made visible things before un- 
 seen, so the sudden overwhelming understanding of 
 Christ opened the eyes of the apostles, dimmed by 
 sorrow and perplexity, to the understanding of the 
 things pertaining to the Kingdom of God. They saw 
 all the history of souls in a vivid present. Henceforward 
 the Holy Spirit was in them in a new manner. They 
 knew His presence. The Pentecostal gift was a gift of 
 open eyes; and there followed from it all the new powers 
 that sight brings. Such an event must have come at a 
 definite moment in time to a band of men who were 
 gathered together waiting for illumination, whose 
 nature they did not guess. Such an event, such a Pente- 
 cost, still comes, often at a definite moment in time, 
 sometimes by the gradual process of long years, to those 
 who are looking for it. The Pentecost, as Moberly says, 
 was the perpetual extension, or spiritual realisation, of 
 the Incarnation. 
 
 Looked at in this way, the historic facts of the Incar- 
 nation and the Coming of the Holy Ghost seem to me 
 each in its own way to lose all difficulty. They become 
 simply parts of the great scheme of Creation in which 
 God entered into limitation and change for the sake of 
 His creatures who were to be perfected in the eternity 
 of union with Him. They enter the temporal series, im- 
 pinging on common life, yet belong to the Eternal Series.
 
 176 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 We claim, then, that analysis of the effects of the 
 psychic processes on a man's development processes 
 and development that Christ must have Himself experi- 
 enced, if He was truly man leads us to fuller under- 
 standing of the solidarity of men with God. We claim 
 that if our belief that Christ took the Manhood into God 
 means anything at all, it must mean two things; that 
 the full experience, and the individual experiences, of 
 manhood, and no empty abstract thing to which we 
 attach a meaningless name of manhood, entered into, 
 and became a part of, His eternal Being; and that some- 
 thing was added to the experience of God which could 
 have been added in no other way, and which yet was 
 essential to the realisation of His creative activity in the 
 union of man with Himself. 
 
 These ideas raise two questions in our minds; 
 
 (1) With the first we began this chapter. Does any 
 memory, in the strict sense of His earthly life, yet linger 
 in the ascended Christ, and will such memory always 
 linger? 
 
 (2) How are we to reconcile the idea of an added, ex- 
 perience with the idea of a Transcendent God ; and more 
 especially how are we to reconcile the necessity of this 
 added experience for the fulfilment of creative purpose? 
 
 To the first question we must clearly answer both yes 
 and no. Yes, for this reason. Christ, we know, is with 
 us still. Those whose religious life is real and vital do 
 not merely believe it ; they know it as a certain fact of 
 experience. From day to day He lives with them, 
 guides them, comforts them, and opens to them fresh 
 vistas of truth. With them He indwells the sphere of 
 time. He draws from the deep well of His own humanity 
 living water to refresh them when the way is weary. 
 He enters into their humour, their appreciation of the 
 friendly oddity of their relations with others, their 
 loving delight in the whimsicalities of life. He loves life
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 177 
 
 as they love it, in spite of its limitations, for the precious 
 beginnings of understanding, the gradual breaking- 
 down of partitions. He is in every moment of their life, 
 gay and rollicking as well as sad. With them, and for 
 them, He still indwells the sphere of time and limitation. 
 With them He shares it, for them He accepts and re- 
 joices in it; content, because He is satisfied with the 
 travail as He watches and enters into each little forward 
 step of understanding. Therefore memory must remain 
 with Him as long as there are souls still moving on the 
 upward path ; as long as there are souls still unperfected. 
 If, as one is fain to believe, there are other spheres of 
 endeavour, other lives of approximation, planes of 
 higher, freer service, in the soul's journey of approach 
 by infinite gradation to the consummation of perfect 
 union with God, He must be there too. And in every 
 stage, as long as limitation endures, He must share that 
 limitation, and memory be for Him the means by which 
 He can keep perfect touch with every soul in every ex- 
 perience it has. His manhood is a perpetual reality, not 
 a past episode. This is not the placeto enlarge upon such 
 ideas of future existence, however closely one may cling 
 to them. They are speculative ; though not wholly un- 
 supported by evidence, even if such direct evidence as 
 exists is not perfectly convincing; and those who dis- 
 agree with them may dismiss them with this word. Only 
 we must urge that if Christ is truly with us in this pre- 
 sent, human life, then it would seem at least that His 
 memory of human conditions must enter into His deal- 
 ings with us. 
 
 But we answered no, as well as yes, and for this 
 reason. 
 
 Memory cannot persist, as we have reasoned else- 
 where, in transcendent Being 1 . We need not recapitu- 
 late the argument, but we may recall that it turned on 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Lift, chaps, v. and vi.
 
 I 78 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 the fact that memory moves in the past and is selected 
 from for the purposes of presentation, while transcend- 
 ence connotes an eternal now, without past or future in 
 its activities. If the premises be admitted, it is evident 
 that in the Transcendent Son the memories of the Christ- 
 life cannot persist ; only in so far as He is still the Christ, 
 indwelling time together with His fellow man (or fellow- 
 souls, if there be other grades of approach), can those 
 memories remain. We must however remember that, 
 in the chapters above referred to, we saw that the 
 results of memories must persist even in transcendence. 
 It is the experiences of A that make up the A -ness of A . 
 So, we are driven to conclude that the Christ-life must 
 leave an eternal impress upon the Eternal Son. And 
 this brings us to our second question; How are we to 
 reconcile such an added experience with the idea of 
 transcendence, and how could such addition be neces- 
 sary for the possibility of realising Creative purpose? 
 
 Now, we have already seen 1 that the Transcendent 
 Experience of God is complete, yet can be added to with- 
 out increasing, in the sense that others can enter into 
 and share that same perfect Experience. Complete it 
 must always be, since it is the perfect self-experience of 
 a perfect God. Yet in a sense it can be added to, since 
 the end of creation, which is the end of Eternal Love, 
 is that others should enter into and share that perfect 
 experience which for them is not only a self-experience, 
 but the experience of perfectly penetrable 'others' as 
 well. A experiences A , but he also experiences B and C, 
 not as separate units but as ' others ' into whose nature 
 and point of view he can enter fully. In the same way 
 he experiences God. But we must remember that the 
 converse is also true. God experiences A and B and C, 
 in like manner, as well as Himself. And this experience 
 seems at first sight to be something added. We must 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life, chaps, v. and vi.
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 1 79 
 
 however not overlook the fact that the idea of an addi- 
 tion involves time a before in which the added material 
 of experience was not there and that such a temporal 
 conception is inadmissible when we are dealing with 
 transcendent being. In fact, on such a view, we are 
 driven to conclude that Eternal Love, which is the 
 Nature of God, is always satisfied in an outpouring, 
 realising its own completion and satisfaction of return 
 from created beings as actual, even while the incoming 
 tide of reciprocating love is delayed, in the temporal 
 sphere, by the process of immanent becoming. That is 
 to say, the whole process would seem to be in truth 
 eternally now, though to men who inhabit duration a 
 virtual image of before and after floats between them 
 and the timeless light of Eternal Being. Reality is, so 
 to speak, refracted by duration, which acts as a concave 
 lens, and an image of the source is thus seen in a position 
 different from the true one. 
 
 There is no addition. The Love of God is simply 
 perfect and satisfied, in outpouring and return, in ex- 
 ternal and internal activity. That is its nature, and 
 creation is but the projection of its activity into the 
 sphere of becoming. 
 
 On this view the end is, even before process, for 
 the end is not of time. The activity of God is eternal, 
 purposive activity: Love's series, not Time's. To this 
 it may be objected that any such doctrine is Predes- 
 tinarian; irreconcileable with our doctrine of freedom; 
 definitely opposed to our view, so often stated, that if 
 the freedom of men is real, God cannot know any step 
 till it is accomplished. I think the objection is partly 
 superficial. It unquestionably is true that God cannot 
 know any step till it is accomplished, for the step is 
 process, and God cannot know process except by ex- 
 perience which means that He must share man's 
 experience of duration; a conclusion to which we have
 
 1 80 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 constantly been driven. But here we are reasoning not 
 about immanence and process, but about Transcendent 
 Being. It may well be that to the Transcendent God 
 the consummation is actual and present even while, in 
 time, process is incomplete. A's returning flow of love 
 may thus be reality for God in the sphere of Absolute 
 Being, even while in the sphere of duration A is still on 
 the lowest rungs of the ladder, and his actual future, 
 in time, all unknown and undetermined. Even as the 
 Incarnation was involved in the creation, while yet its 
 actualisation was a kenosis of the Godhead in Time 
 brought about by the operation of the Will of the Son 
 acting freely ; so the final perfection was involved in the 
 action (which is itself the nature) of God's creative love, 
 while yet the attainment of that perfection was only 
 possible by the free choice of men able to choose good 
 or evil as they listed a choice unknown and unknow- 
 able to God till it was made, since it was in time. All 
 conscious action is anticipatory ; sees the end before it is 
 actualised ; and yet a temporal series has to intervene, 
 with all its contingency. Yet constantly-renewed will 
 brings the desired end about, through inspiration of each 
 successive stage. 
 
 To reason about transcendence is a difficult, if not an 
 impossible task; but one may not set aside one's con- 
 viction that Transcendent Being must be eternally 
 complete as well as perfect ; and this being so, one must 
 try to set down some attempt tq reconcile the apparent 
 antinomies that are of necessity involved in the concep- 
 tions of Immanence and Transcendence. Still, the view 
 is unquestionably unsatisfactory, for it leaves the mind 
 dissatisfied. At what point does it break down? 
 
 That the Transcendent Experience of God must be 
 in itself perfect and complete is clear. That the intro- 
 duction of any time element, any idea of before and 
 after, into this Experience is inadmissible, is clear. And
 
 v] Some Implications of tke Incarnation \ 8 1 
 
 certainly creation does mean the entry of God into the 
 sphere of becoming, with all the attendant struggle and 
 pain. In the immanent sphere God does really suffer 
 and become as well as man, though all is perfect and 
 complete in transcendence. This is a contradiction, if 
 you will, but no more so than the coexistence of imman- 
 ence and transcendence in God and man; hardly more 
 so than the coexistence of freedom and limitation or of 
 mind and matter, and of these we are certain from our 
 immediate experience. 
 
 The necessity of all of immanence, of creation, of 
 limitation, of struggle and achievement, of time itself 
 lies in the very nature of Transcendent Love, with 
 which everything is now, 
 
 Some additional light on this problem altogether 
 beyond finite understanding as it is, yet apprehensible 
 because we are already in a measure transcendent is 
 thrown by our discussion on the nature of personality. 
 In all personal being, even in time, there is an interac- 
 tion of the three persons of personality, and so activity. 
 There never is that pure unity which means inertia or. 
 nothingness. If persons were purely units, we might 
 well despair, for we could get no inkling of the nature 
 of Eternal Being. If God were a Person too, and per- 
 sonality meant mere unity, there could be no possible 
 relation between us and Him, as far as I can see, for pure 
 unity has nothing outside itself, and God and we would 
 be mutually exclusive units. And this brings us to a 
 hopeless contradiction in terms. In short, if personality 
 meant unity there could be no reality such as we experi- 
 ence. All must be illusion. Apparent activity of every 
 kind would be unreal. Love would be unreal, personal 
 relations unreal, our very relations with the inorganic 
 world unreal. Only in the triunity of personality is 
 there room for activity. And activity we know to 
 exist.
 
 1 82 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 Let us then seek the solution on the lines of personal 
 relationship. Now the doctrine of the Trinity furnishes 
 us with just the element of personal intercourse in the 
 transcendent sphere that makes the activity and love 
 which Perfect Experience connotes, possible and in- 
 telligible. Surely the solution lies here that Perfect 
 Experience just means the activity of love. This, when 
 perfect, cannot be added to, yet others may enter in 
 and share it. For them this constitutes an addition to 
 experience, but not for God. They share God's experi- 
 ence, but God does not share theirs in any new sense, 
 for the experience was His all along. The only new point 
 is that they are there to share it. The experience is not 
 however made more perfect thereby, for it is perfect 
 eternally. The question therefore narrows itself to this; 
 does the entry of A, B and C into a sharing of the Per- 
 fect Experience constitute an addition for God, or is the 
 existence of a potentiality for such entry as a result of 
 creation equivalent to its actuality in the transcendent 
 sphere? Is the end really there before process? If so, 
 what is the use of process? we may ask. The end is real 
 before process, but it could not be so but for the fact 
 that process was to intervene, because the end the 
 creation of free personal beings involves the existence 
 of a durational series in which those beings win their 
 personality. 
 
 But such a conclusion seems still to involve the idea 
 of before and after in Transcendent Experience, though 
 I think this is a difficulty in the main due to our taking 
 the series which we perceive as temporal as being truly 
 temporal even when we have carried over the rest of our 
 thought into the eternal. We must no doubt be content 
 to leave the difficulty unsolved, or partly so. But it is 
 worth noting that this before and after has reference only 
 to A , B and C's participation in the Perfect Experience, 
 and not to the Experience itself. And A, B and C are
 
 vj Some Implications of the Incarnation 183 
 
 perceiving the temporal series, while the Transcendent 
 Experience is eternal. It is relative to A, B and C, not 
 relative to Transcendent Experience. This I believe is 
 the key, as we implied in the preliminary chapter. And 
 with this we must leave the problem, confessing it in 
 part unsolved, content only to have stated it 1 . 
 
 We need only remind ourselves that the need of 
 the creation of A , B and C, lies in the centrifugal and 
 altruistic nature of love, which demands expansion, 
 demands other subjects of the experience of love, not 
 because it needs them itself for its own fuller satis- 
 faction, but because its very nature demands that 
 others should enter into its bliss; not for its own sake, 
 but for theirs; and that so, creation is ever present 
 in, and belongs to, the eternal series of God's active 
 Being. 
 
 We return then to the question of the addition of 
 Christ's experience of humanity to His Divine Being. 
 In the light of what we have just said this presents less 
 difficulty than we might expect. Christ is the first- 
 fruits. In Him humanity first enters into the Perfect 
 Experience. By His bringing of Humanity into the 
 Godhead, the entry of other human beings becomes 
 possible, for there is the basis of perfect union between 
 God on one side and the souls of men on the other. And, 
 here too we see that before and after has reference, 
 not to the Experience of the Son, and so of the whole 
 
 1 The preliminary and final chapters were written after this one. 
 It will be noticed that the above problem is there dealt with in 
 a less tentative manner. Nevertheless, in accordance with th 
 plan of dealing with the various questions involved in our mode 
 of treating the Doctrine of the Trinity in a series of essays con- 
 verging on the doctrine, and then gathering up the threads, 
 I thought best to leave each essay substantially in its original 
 form, as I have stated in the preface, in order to show how 
 constantly one is brought up against the same questions.
 
 184 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 
 
 Transcendent Trinity, but to the Humanity which, in 
 Him, enters into that Experience, through the completion 
 of process. This I believe to be the true line of solution 
 of the difficulty. We can only indicate it, not fill out the 
 detail. The whole matter is too high for human reason- 
 ing. None the less it is our duty to face all problems 
 fairly and squarely, nor seek ease in vagueness. In all 
 search after knowledge the teaching of the Prophet holds, 
 "line upon line, precept upon precept. Here a little, 
 there a little," as well in knowledge of the things of 
 eternity as of the things of time. No effort to under- 
 stand, however humble and inchoate its beginnings, 
 is without fruit; and no man may stand aside and yet 
 hope to be of service to his fellows and to God. We 
 simply dare not forbear to search, nor to set forth such 
 little glimpses of truth as we believe we have gained. 
 Each puny lantern lighted by some spark of the glowing 
 Truth may serve to aid the footsteps of others who cry, 
 with Goethe, " More Light ! " Let this be our apology to 
 those who would have high matters left alone 1 . 
 
 One chief point is seen to be emerging ever more 
 clearly. There are not two totally different natures, God 
 and man. Man is becoming as God by throwing off 
 external limitation, God became man by putting on 
 limitation. As Man, Christ had a beginning, though as 
 
 1 Had the eighteenth and nineteenth of Prof. Pringle Pattison's 
 Gifford Lectures been published a year earlier this chapter might 
 never have been written. That which I was groping after he has 
 set forth with incomparable charm and lucidity. But since the 
 problem is approached from a slightly different angle, I have 
 allowed the chapter to stand practically unaltered after reading 
 those lectures, only inserting a few explanatory words that bear 
 the impress of his thought; for the conclusions are the same, 
 though the method 13 different. To re-write might have been to 
 gain in sureness, but it would have been to write a vision seen 
 with other's eyes, and not one's own.
 
 v] Some Implications of the Incarnation 185 
 
 God He is timeless, and wholly of Eternity. The identi- 
 fication of God with man starts with the real experience 
 of a beginning. After His life on earth Christ retook His 
 Timelessness ; yet there was included in that the reality 
 of experienced beginning and human limitation.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
 LEAVING the subject of the nature of Christ's experi- 
 ence, we turn for the time being to one of which the 
 immediate -connection with our subject is not at first 
 apparent. 
 
 As in some orchestral symphony heard for the first 
 time new phrases develope and explain what has gone 
 before and foreshadow what is yet to come, until, long 
 before the end is reached, the listener feels he under- 
 stands the Master's thought, yet sits in eager expecta- 
 tion till that thought has found its f ulfilment in sound ; 
 so it is, or so it should be, as we open the ear of mind or 
 heart to the developing harmony of the universe. But 
 again and again, in music, we are conscious of a sudden 
 chill. Our enthusiasm flickers and dies down, and the 
 succession of sounds has no meaning for us. Oftenest, 
 perhaps, the failure is the composer's. We thought him 
 great, and he turns out to be but another little tin god, 
 swollen to apparent power by an artificial pageantry of 
 state; one more puny monarch in a world of opera- 
 bouffe. But often the Master's magic is there; only, 
 our attention is caught by some failure of rendering. 
 Even so small a thing as a lagging 'cello, a drum not in 
 perfect accord with the beat, a flute that misses the key 
 by a fraction of a semitone, or wheezes bronchially, is 
 enough. A very little thing; but we can no longer under- 
 stand the Master's thought, nor even hear the harmony. 
 
 So, too, with our deepest searching into the develop- 
 ing harmony of the universe. Is our search intellectual? 
 There is some flaw in the thought of the philosopher,
 
 CH. vi] Immortality 187 
 
 and his system crumbles into dust. Or perhaps the flaw 
 is trivial and unimportant. If it annoys us, so that we 
 are constantly reminded of it, the result is the same. 
 Even more vitally true is this of a search that is not 
 merely intellectual but spiritual as well. -If we try to 
 find a perfect harmony of all the aspects of life, only too 
 often does some really unimportant point cause us to 
 lose our sense of proportion. We become obsessed, and 
 all appreciation, even of the fragments which before we 
 thought we had understood, falls away. One, as a child, 
 sees a pig killed sees its apparent terror and pain, and, 
 when he asks for explanation, is told that God wills 
 that animals suffer for the sake of providing men with 
 food, and from that moment hates religion, feeling that 
 it hypocritically orders the faithful to wear magic 
 spectacles through which the horrors of a hideous 
 world are made invisible. For such an one, if there is a 
 God He is not good. Another has prayed earnestly and 
 the loved one for whom he prayed has died, or taken to 
 evil courses. "Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name" 
 becomes a mockery, and Christ a self-deceiver or a 
 lying prophet. Another watches the struggles of a 
 parent in the clutches of chronic alcoholism, knows the 
 misery it brings and the hopelessness of the struggle, and 
 for him all talk of freedom is henceforth the meaningless 
 babble of a fool. 
 
 If these and similar ideas arise in early childhood, 
 when secrecy plays a great part in life, and the mind is 
 not ready to make wider observations, a complex may 
 be initiated which is difficult or impossible to eradicate. 
 Unbelief can hardly be reprehended in such a case, as 
 long as the life lived is good. Rather, one is inclined to 
 do homage to a noble life so debarred from enjoyment 
 and understanding; and one cannot but look forward to 
 the joy of such a soul when another life removes the veil 
 and the eyes see clearly. That there must be compensa-
 
 1 88 Immortality [CH. 
 
 tion hereafter cannot be doubted by anyone who knows 
 the love of God. 
 
 That such cases do exist I can vouch for out of my 
 own experience. That they are far commoner causes of 
 unbelief than we realise, I have little doubt. The in- 
 fluence of very early impressions upon the whole future 
 outlook and life is brought out more clearly every day by 
 medical research into psychology. And the responsi- 
 bility thrown upon those who have to do with young 
 children becomes more and more clear almost terrible. 
 A single great emotional shock may change the child for 
 life. 
 
 One of the commonest doubts to bring discredit upon 
 a spiritual interpretation of the universe is the doubt of 
 immortality. Whether early acquaintance with death or 
 the phenomena of mental decay be a cause of its wide- 
 spread existence I do not know; it seems probable. The 
 fact remains true; and that in spite of the almost uni- 
 versal yearning for life after death. Excellent reasons 
 for belief may be given not proofs, excepting those of 
 an authoritative religion, but reasons strong enough to 
 tilt the balance of probability down unmistakeably on 
 the side of survival and yet the doubt lingers. 
 
 Is it not at the least possible that one cause of the 
 doubt lies in the firm line which popular theology draws 
 between the nature of God and the nature of man ? We 
 are taught that God is everlasting; we are taught that 
 men may have everlasting life; yet no attempt is made 
 to show that everlasting life must mean the same thing 
 for God as for men, or else the words become meaning- 
 less. We are taught that God is good, and man is evil; 
 that God of His goodness saves man; makes him like 
 Himself and confers the gift of immortality; and those 
 who teach us thus do not see that in their very teaching 
 they make man so radically unlike God that no bare 
 assertion of authority can make one brought up in such
 
 vi] Immortality \ 89 
 
 a school of thought really believe in human immortality, 
 once he has begun to question it. He is soaked to the 
 core in a teaching that makes man different from God; 
 he is then ordered to believe that because God is eternal, 
 because Christ was God and was raised from the dead, 
 because death had no dominion over His Godhead, man 
 too must be immortal. Can we wonder that his intellect 
 takes up arms against such logic? Can we blame him if 
 he doubts? One thing is clear. If we are to give any intel- 
 lectual, as opposed to authoritative, ground for belief in 
 human immortality, we must start from the likeness of 
 men to God, not the unlikeness. Authority of church 
 and tradition is invaluable in its right place, but it will 
 not help the man who questions all authority but that 
 of his own intellect, and that of everyday pragmatism. 
 No doubt he is mistaken in so questioning; but there is 
 no use in simply telling him he is wrong. We must meet 
 him on his own ground and give him intellectual and 
 pragmatic reasons for accepting authority in the very 
 matter of which he is in doubt. Let us begin, then, by 
 summarising very briefly such a priori arguments for 
 immortality as are germane to our general treatment of 
 the Christian religion from the standpoint of evolution. 
 After that we shall be ready to attempt to show that 
 the harmony of the universe appeals to man as harmony 
 just because it does interpret all the longings of his heart, 
 just because he is himself attuned to it. It is because 
 man is like God, not because he is unlike, that his im- 
 mortality is certain. Even among a priori arguments 
 we may not admit any but those which are founded on 
 experience, if we are going to argue from an evolution- 
 ary standpoint. If we thus limit our scope we are de- 
 barred from using the perfectly valid arguments of 
 idealism pressed to its logical issue 1 ; we are debarred 
 from using the arguments from revealed religion ; we are 
 1 See McTaggart, Human Immortality and Prttxi&Unct,
 
 1 90 Immortality [CH. 
 
 perhaps even debarred from using the argument from 
 the uniqueness of individuality 1 . All these are, in a 
 sense, founded on experience, but the discussion of them 
 is bound to be along lines more or less remote from the 
 principles of evolution. 
 
 But with the argument from the experience of per- 
 sonal existence it is otherwise. This touches both 
 change, and persistence through change, since it deals 
 with that form of change which is progress, and further, 
 is conscious progress. 
 
 7 change. That is the most vital of realities for a man, 
 and the statement embraces both factors. The change 
 is there, but it is not mere change, but the change of a 
 person who so persists in his self-identity that we can 
 speak of him as 7 throughout. It is not x who changes 
 into y and y into z. If that were so x would change to- 
 day, y to-morrow and z the next day. There would be no 
 continuity for the experient, however definite a serial 
 continuity there might appear to be for an outside 
 observer. A series of numbers in arithmetical progres- 
 sion has a certain continuity for us; each term is in- 
 volved in the previous ones, and we can determine with 
 absolute certainty any future term. But this continuity 
 only exists for us; they are different numbers, and even 
 if they could 'come alive,' as in a child's dream, they 
 would still be different numbers, not one number that is 
 changing. 
 
 So too if change were all that we experienced there 
 would be no possibility of our experiencing anything at 
 all. It would not be our experience, for we should not 
 persist, nor have memories to enable us to relate our 
 various experiences. (This, incidentally, is one of the 
 strongest arguments against the doctrine of reincarna- 
 tion as usually held.) 
 
 1 See Royce's Ingersoll Lectures on The Conception of Immor- 
 tality.
 
 vi] Immortality \ 9 1 
 
 If there were no memory in a being that was still 
 undergoing change the consciousness would be so differ- 
 ent that it would be meaningless to speak of the same 
 personality at all 1 . The statement does not hold, how- 
 ever, of the completed and transcendent personality, 
 where, it seems, there can be no memory either, if Berg- 
 son is right in his analysis of the nature of memory. 
 
 The fact of everyday experience is that / change 
 that the same personality persists, though it is con- 
 stantly being added to. There is, then, something of me 
 that perdures through change, yet is constantly growing 
 and expanding through the additions which experience 
 of change brings. 
 
 I am immanent ; I indwell time ; but I am also tran- 
 scendent; I perdure, undestroyed by time's changes. 
 Part of me is not in time at all. Is this perduring but 
 illusion ? When earthly change ceases, shall I cease also? 
 Is human transcendence but a mirage that mocks the 
 traveller who thirsts to drink of the water of eternal life? 
 
 We can go back to the time-worn argument from the 
 intelligibility of the universe. Experience shows that 
 the world is ordered and intelligible. Life seems to be 
 dominated by rationality. To say that man will cease 
 to be himself when he ceases to act on the world's stage, 
 becoming something else, as Hamlet celebrates the end- 
 ing of a run by a gay supper, or Pepper's ghost becomes 
 a thirsty commonplace drinking beer in the 'wings,' is 
 to deny all real meaning to our chief experience: still 
 more, to say that he will simply cease to be. If person- 
 ality can be extinguished, the universe is not rational, 
 for all development is crowned with the emergence of 
 personality tends to it ; achieves apparent meaning in 
 it and personality itself becomes meaningless. The 
 age-long processes of evolution lead nowhither. The 
 oyster is as good for itself as Francis of Assisi for himself. 
 1 Cf. M. Benson, Th* Venture of Rational Faith, p. 202.
 
 192 Immortality [CH 
 
 Progress is illusion and change is simply process. In- 
 stead of a whole creation groaning and travailing and 
 waiting together, instead of the earnest expectation of 
 the creature, we are but as the beasts, and must all 
 perish together. 
 
 It may be said that we speak of the beasts that perish ; 
 why should we not ourselves perish too, to make way 
 for some nobler creature who may be fit for God's com- 
 pany? Is it true to say that the universe must lose all 
 meaning if man be not immortal? The answer to such 
 a question is easy. In the first place, are we sure that 
 the beasts do simply perish? Do we not rather trust the 
 goodness of God and believe that somehow life will be 
 made right for them as well as for us? Certainly many 
 of us do ; but this belief is really founded on our own be- 
 lief in personal immortality. Because we are sure that 
 God is just and loving to us, who believe ourselves able 
 to understand something of His nature, and who will one 
 day share His perfect experience, we are also sure that 
 God will prove j ust and loving to all His creatures. Since, 
 then, our belief in this matter is implicit in our belief in 
 our own immortality, we must turn to this once more. 
 
 We are self-conscious; we know ourselves as persisting 
 through our experiences. In this, as far as we can judge, 
 we differ toto coelo from the lower animals. They know 
 only their experiences, not themselves as experients. In 
 man there is thus a new thing; and with it comes the 
 power of understanding the apparent order and reason 
 of the wprld. We cannot treat man as in the same cate- 
 gory with the lower creatures. He is able to see himself 
 as an end. If he is wrong, if his enduring self is but 
 illusion, God has played him false. He stands convicted 
 before the bar of our moral judgment, illusion though 
 this be also; He is no God. If man's immortality goes, 
 God goes too. 
 
 This is, I think, a strong argument ; but yet it leaves
 
 vi] Immortality 1 93 
 
 us in some measure unsatisfied. And the same is true of 
 all the ordinary arguments for immortality. Why? 
 
 Press home this argument from the apparent reason- 
 ableness of the universe, and you find it is based on 
 anthropomorphism that much abused, innate convic- 
 tion that comes so near to the truth. For why do we 
 believe ourselves able to understand something of the 
 nature of God? Unquestionably, because we believe 
 that our best selves mirror God in little. And this is 
 simply the reverse of a thought whose obverse is crude 
 anthropomorphism. The savage pictures God as like 
 himself, having the passions of a man ; the philosopher of 
 to-day pictures man as like God. The essential, endur- 
 ing qualities of man's personality his will, his love, his 
 freedom the very quality of endurance itself, are just 
 the things that reason demands as postulable of God. 
 And of God man postulates them, because his own 
 actions are purposive and moral and loving, and there 
 seems to be the need of purpose and morality and love 
 in the Creator if the existence of these things in himself 
 is at all to be understood. Purpose and morality and 
 love are in the world, and we must needs contrive some 
 explanation of the fact. Obverse and reverse, both are 
 there also in the philosopher's subtler belief. The an- 
 thropomorphism of the savage is reached again by the 
 latest thinker. The argument returns full-circle on 
 itself, as any ultimately true argument must that in- 
 volves a final cause. God is like man because man is like 
 God. 
 
 It seems reasonable, but even yet we are unsatisfied. 
 The poet-pessimist complained that of making many 
 books there was no end, and that much study was but a 
 weariness of the flesh. The man who thought himself 
 born to set right a world whose times were out of joint 
 opened a book and found' Words, words, words.' So 
 here. Once more, why? 
 
 Ml'. '3
 
 194 Immortality [CH. 
 
 I believe that it is with the word like that doubt 
 creeps in. When Paul of Samosata contended that Christ 
 was like (o/uoto?) to the Father he was condemned. 
 Hosius of Cordova pleaded for the term 6fjioiovaio<t 
 the same in likeness; the wisdom of Athanasius later 
 supported the view; and it prevailed in spite of the 
 subtle arguments of Eastern metaphysicians. I would 
 make bold to say that we need an Athanasius to-day to 
 perform a like service on behalf of men in defining their 
 likeness to the Godhead, though certain reservations 
 must be made. It is not enough for us to be told that 
 we shall be like God one day, when we are made perfect. 
 If we are to share fully His perfect experience, which is 
 Reality, we must become of the same nature as He is. 
 If we are to become of the same nature as He, we must 
 now be of that same nature, since we are already per- 
 sons, capable of willing, of loving, of acting freely 1 . As 
 long as there is room for us to feel that our transcend- 
 ence is in any real way different from God's, so long will 
 the doubt haunt us that perhaps, after all, our persist- 
 ence through change, our perduring may have a time 
 limit set to it. Till we realise this we shall always doubt 
 the reality of our eternal life; we shall always fail to 
 understand Christ's teaching that the kingdom of 
 Heaven is within us now. 
 
 Such an idea may sound startling, even blasphemous, 
 to some. We must therefore try not only to justify it, 
 but also to show its necessity. We must see too exactly 
 what we mean by it, for the fact that God is the cause 
 
 1 The Genesis statement of the creation of man in God's image 
 and likeness, if it is to be taken in an ethical sense, as seems likely, 
 missed fire among the Jews, and its meaning was never appre- 
 ciated. Had it been understood the whole course of Christianity 
 as well as of Judaism might have been different. But we find 
 practically no further trace of it throughout the Old Testament. 
 Cf. Charles, Eschatology, p. 54.
 
 vi] Immortality 195 
 
 of man that He is uncreated, we created cannot be 
 overlooked. 
 
 We may take, first of all, the point to which reference 
 has just been made, for the difficulty it introduces is 
 fundamental. Can our timelessness be the same as the 
 timelessness of God? For there is this obvious differ- 
 ence, that for God there is no terminus a quo, for us there 
 is. Our timelessness has a beginning. This being so we 
 have a difference at once, and there seems no reason to 
 deny the possibility of an end as well as a beginning. 
 Once you postulate a beginning of timelessness there 
 seems little reason to stop short of setting a period to it 
 as well; and then timelessness becomes merely a mode of 
 securing continuity in the conscious organism a con- 
 venience of consciousness. 
 
 Now this, of course, is simply a matter of inaccurate 
 thinking. Timelessness is a quality, or, rather, an experi- 
 ence of being ; in arguing thus we are reifying it : making 
 it an entity. It is not timelessness per se that endures, 
 but personality. Timelessness or enduring is simply one 
 of the essential features of personality. 
 
 The right question for us to ask is not "Does timeless- 
 ness perdure endlessly? " but "Does personality connote 
 immortality in virtue of its characteristic quality of 
 timelessness? " a very different thing. Our difficulty 
 may then be stated thus. "Human personality has a 
 beginning; this does differentiate it from any idea of 
 Divine Personality we can form. Is there then any real 
 reason for our belief that it cannot also be different from 
 the divine in having an end? Does the fact that our 
 personality is in part transcendent mean that it is also 
 immortal?" Here we come to grips with the central 
 problem. In attempting to solve it we must fix our 
 attention on two things; the nature of personality, and 
 the link between immanence and transcendence as 
 qualities of personal being. 
 
 132
 
 1 96 Immortality [CH. 
 
 In regard to this last we have elsewhere argued 1 that 
 men are becoming more and more transcendent as the 
 experiences of change amplify and complete the last- 
 ing ego. I am constantly becoming; moving towards 
 greater transcendence as my freedom grows. I am con- 
 stantly passing from immanence to transcendence. But 
 the very fact that I recognise my immanence argues 
 my transcendence, since such recognition is only possible 
 for a self-conscious being, and self-consciousness in- 
 volves the knowledge of persistence through change. 
 That is to say, the realisation of both immanence and 
 transcendence is in fact the recognition of these as 
 qualities of personal being, not as things in themselves. 
 It is the ego which we qualify by these terms. 
 
 Similarly, we realise quite clearly the relation be- 
 tween the two. My experiences make me a freer, more 
 self -determining being. S avoir fair e comes from know- 
 ing and doing ; to possess savoir faire means to be fit to 
 cope with a new situation by drawing on what you are ; 
 and what you are depends on what use you have made 
 of your experiences. 
 
 Thus an essential feature of human personality is the 
 power of growth by experience and by addition. But 
 yet in this very growth lies the formation of personality. 
 Personality is in itself complete will, love, freedom 
 fulfil the whole circle of its activities. The passage from 
 immanence to transcendence is the formation of per- 
 sonality, not an essential quality of it. True, for the 
 satisfaction of the needs of Perfect Being it may be 
 necessary for it perpetually to go through the process of 
 becoming. This we have seen as the motive of the 
 creative act of God the reason of His passibility. But 
 here we have to do, not with the fulfilling of God's per- 
 sonality, but with the creation of man's. The imman- 
 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life, chaps, v. and vi.
 
 vi] Immortality \ 97 
 
 ence of God is thus totally different in origin; it is the 
 result of the perfection of His Personality, 4 not of its 
 imperfection. 
 
 Thus we become persons, perduring beings, through 
 making time-experiences our own; and to say our own 
 implies that we are personal in some degree. In becom- 
 ing persons we become transcendent. 
 
 Now we have already argued that the term person- 
 ality connotes a trinity, of which will, emotion, and 
 freedom are the three fundamentals. Of these three 
 each involves the others, rendering possible fellowship, 
 internal as well as external. This is what we mean by 
 personality, and we mean nothing more nor less by the 
 term. It does not matter whether we apply it to God or 
 men ; what it connotes is the same. 
 
 Let us remind ourselves why we arrived at this as a 
 definition. We saw that, however the mind of man was 
 analysed, whether by the methods of psychology or of 
 metaphysics, these three characteristics stood out as the 
 salient facts. We saw that they were all needed to make 
 up one personal being. And we saw, further, that in 
 man we find none in perfection, while all are increasing. 
 A man cannot will and create perfectly, he cannot 
 experience the full emotion of love, he is still limited. 
 Yet in will, in love, in freedom he progresses, and goes 
 on progressing. 
 
 On the other hand, again basing our arguments on 
 experience, we saw reason to believe that there is a God 
 Who wills to create, Who loves, Who is purely self-deter- 
 mined, even to the free acceptance of self-caused limita- 
 tion for the fulfilling of His personal nature in sharing 
 His personal experience. Assuming, that is, on the sure 
 ground of our earthly experience, that the universe is 
 rational, we found no possibility but this of an explana- 
 tion that at once satisfies us and embraces all the facts. 
 There must be a personal God, since there is a universe
 
 1 98 Immortality [CH. 
 
 in which freedom and love and self-determination are 
 being won by limited beings. 
 
 Now in arguing thus we implicitly maintain, what in 
 our religion we often explicitly deny, that the person- 
 ality of man is not merely like (o/tioto?) analogous to 
 the personality of God, but is identically the same 
 (opoiovcrios) the same in likeness as the personality 
 of God. All personalities are not one; we are not the 
 personality of God; to maintain this would be to close 
 our eyes to the most prominent feature of all person- 
 ality: its uniqueness and individuality. But when we 
 speak of the personality of man and of God we do mean 
 exactly the same thing by the term. Of course, we allow 
 that man's personality is incomplete; but in so far as it 
 is personality at all we mean that it is God-like. The 
 personality of men is the same as the personality of God. 
 Now when we speak, in common phrase, of a man as 
 having a marked personality, we mean that he is strongly 
 differentiated from his fellows, master of his fate in a 
 wider sense than they, and always the same. Years after 
 we last met him, if we meet him again we shall recognise 
 him, and feel that, however he may have grown, he is 
 the man we used to know. The idea of enduringness is 
 inseparably linked with the conception of personality. 
 More, we cannot reasonably give two meanings to the 
 word enduringness. When we speak of the personality 
 of God we mean the same as when we speak of the per- 
 sonality of man. We find the same triunity, the same 
 modes of functioning. If in all these things man and God 
 are the same, is it logical, is it reasonable to contend 
 that in the one quality of enduringness God differs from 
 man? We know as a fact of experience that man does 
 endure: this is really one of our reasons for contending 
 that he and God are alike personal. If we say that his 
 enduring has a period set to it, God's not, we implicitly 
 deny that man's personality is the same as God's ; all
 
 vi] Immortality 1 99 
 
 thought about personality becomes impossible; the 
 whole structure of religion falls about our ears, and with 
 it goes all possibility of seeing the universe as rational. 
 We are left with an ultimate confusion that gives 
 the lie to our experience that the world is rationally 
 ordered. 
 
 We are then left on the horns of this dilemma. 
 Either the personality of man is the same as the person- 
 ality of God, in which case man must be immortal, or 
 else the apparent rationality of the cosmos is illusory, 
 and ordered thought impossible. Can we hesitate be- 
 tween the two? 
 
 The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, looked at from the 
 manward end, becomes thus the most cogent of 
 arguments for human immortality. Because human 
 personality is already in part transcendent, it must be 
 immortal, since personality means the same thing for 
 God and man, and God is eternal. 
 
 We have still some minor difficulties, and two especi- 
 ally, to face. Of these the chief may be formulated in the 
 question we have already asked, and partly answered. 
 "How can it be maintained that the personality of 
 man is the same as the personality of God, since God 
 is uncaused, man caused? " Admitted, that there was 
 a time 1 when man was not, and therefore when human 
 personality was not. Admitted that God is the cause of 
 man's existence, and man in no sense the cause only 
 the result of God's existence. I cannot see that this 
 really affects the question of the qualitative identity 
 between the personalities of men and God, even apart 
 from the fact that we cannot conceive of God's person- 
 ality as being other than creative, and that thus we see 
 the created cosmos as part of a whole which is founded 
 in God's nature a cosmos which is a consequence, not 
 But see note on the necessary qualifications of this statement, 
 p. 12.
 
 2OO Immortality [CH. 
 
 an effect, of the Being of a God Who is the Ground of all. 
 The difference seems to be quantitative. Personality is 
 personality, however it came into being; and once it is 
 there it must have the qualities of its nature or it would 
 not be personality. Qualitatively, all personality must 
 be the same in possessing individuality, lastingness, 
 and the power of willing, loving, and acting freely. The 
 term connotes these things. Quantitatively, it may be 
 brought into existence, or be self-existent from eternity. 
 It is still personality, whatever its origin. And our diffi- 
 culty really arises in our ineradicable tendency to regard 
 the eternal series as temporal. In human relations we 
 assume this reality of personal being without feeling a 
 difficulty. My children are as much personal beings as 
 myself, though in a sense I am their cause. One of the 
 qualities of personality or rather, to speak more ex- 
 actly, the result of all the qualities of personality is 
 the power to create; and when there is only one thing 
 that is ultimately real, that is the thing which will be 
 created. The creation of a temporary illusion cannot 
 satisfy the creative need of a person. Creativeness is 
 one of the qualities of personality, just as enduringness 
 is. Paradox though it may involve, we mean this when 
 we speak of a person. 
 
 Thus we see that in human experience antecedent 
 existence is no bar to the reality and same-in-likeness of 
 the antecedent and the subsequently created person- 
 alities. Why should we then make this an essential dis- 
 tinction between the personal natures of God and men ? 
 The only real point of difference is that God Is, regard- 
 ed as in the temporal series, which is itself factitious, be- 
 fore all other persons, I am only before all subsequent 
 persons 1 . 
 
 Lastly, among minor difficulties, what of memory? 
 
 1 Again, see p. 12.
 
 vi] Immortality 201 
 
 We have said that if there is no memory linking up a 
 man's different existences, the consciousness will be so 
 different that it is meaningless to speak of the same 
 person; and we used this argument against the doctrine 
 of reincarnation upon earth. But we have all along 
 admitted the probability of other existences, of other 
 grades of being and stages of approach. Here is no real 
 difficulty however; for as long as there is becoming- 
 progress there must be memory, and with memory, 
 continuity of personal experience. Where the difficulty 
 does become real is at the point where man has been 
 made perfect; for we have argued that in pure trans- 
 cendence there must be pure simultaneity, and lience 
 no memory. 
 
 The problem is more apparent than real; and the 
 solution of it is involved in its statement. In pure 
 transcendence process in duration has ceased. The 
 individual is a self -identity whose nature is determined 
 by past experiences of process. All it is is in an eternal 
 now, in which there is no room for memory. It has 
 finally escaped from the temporal illusion. For, if we 
 define memory as potential ideas, no such things can 
 exist in simultaneous being, where the whole personality 
 eternally fulfills every activity, and nothing is latent. 
 On the other hand, if, with Bergson, we say that memory 
 exists in the past and is selected from in response to 
 present needs, we can only claim that in simultaneous 
 being everything is present; there cannot be at any 
 moment a reservoir of unused past. No doubt we do 
 not fully understand what such existence would mean; 
 but at least it is clear that where everything is in the 
 now there can be no question of lost identity. Absence 
 of memory can only involve a loss of individuality while 
 process is still going on in duration ; while there is any- 
 thing left uncompleted. 
 
 If the arguments we have just set forth are just, we
 
 2O2 Immortality [CH. vi 
 
 find a fresh value in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. 
 Instead of being remote from our daily experience it 
 impinges on it at just the point where we need it most; 
 for in it we find fresh cause for certainty of our immor- 
 tality.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE AWAKENING OF PERSONALITY 
 
 IN the lowest stages of organic life we find the organism 
 acting as a whole or unit, and as a whole or unit mani- 
 festing traces of freedom in its activities. Between its 
 various parts there is a coordination of process that 
 makes it obviously individual, while yet there is a large 
 measure of dependence on the stimulus of outside cir- 
 cumstance. 
 
 In the individual organism there is evident some de- 
 gree of choice, some first faint foreshadowing of volition, 
 though not conscious volition. Even a paramoecium 
 can store up habit-memories through repeated experi- 
 ence; even a crayfish can be taught to discriminate 
 between possible alternatives 1 . That this discrimination 
 exists means something else besides. There must be 
 some trace of freedom, or true choice becomes impos- 
 sible; and true choice, though in a very limited field, 
 there appears to be. The mechanistic theory of tro- 
 pisms, so dear to the German physiologist, who contends 
 that all activities, from the simplest to the highest, can 
 be interpreted in terms of chemical and physical stimuli, 
 has received so many rude shocks that even from the 
 point of view of natural science it would appear unten- 
 able; while the whole mechanistic theory is seen to be 
 hopelessly self-contradictory when it is examined in 
 relation to all the facts of experience, as Haldane, for 
 example, admirably shows 2 , not only because it is based 
 entirely on personal inferences and judgments from the 
 
 1 For an interesting summary of our present knowledge of the 
 psychology of the lower animals see E. M. Smith, Mind in 
 A nimals. 
 
 1 Mechanism, Lift and Personality. J. S. Haldane.
 
 2O4 The Awakening of Personality [CH. 
 
 data of sensation, so that the mind-factor comes in in- 
 evitably a fact which is a commonplace of philosophy 
 but because, if pressed, it is unable to explain the 
 simplest phenomenon of the living organism. 
 
 When we turn from the individual organism to the 
 race we find more or less steady progress in freedom. 
 Such progress is the key-note of evolution. As we move 
 upward we meet with a gradual change. Mere discri- 
 mination between possible courses of action becomes 
 definite volition, and something that we may term will 
 appears. 
 
 In the race, then, there is increasing freedom ; in the 
 individual this appears as increasing power of mani- 
 festing will. Something seems to indwell the whole pro- 
 cess of life, giving to it an intrinsic value far above its 
 apparent worth. 
 
 In all these early stages the creature is a unity in 
 itself, an individual with individual aims. But yet it 
 appears to be a part of some greater unity. The indi- 
 vidual is merged in the race. Although individual it is 
 not personal. Not being self-conscious, it cannot see 
 beyond the moment's needs, nor realise the worth of its 
 experiences as a whole. The organism only becomes a 
 personal being when of freedom and will is begotten the 
 consciousness that can say / will when it begins to 
 think itself as its own object. The perpetual realisation 
 of the self as its own object is one of the essential fea- 
 tures of personality; and till this comes there is no 
 personality 1 . 
 
 1 At first the insistence in Christian doctrine on the description 
 of the Son as "Eternally Begotten of the Father" strikes us as 
 strange and unnecessary; but the phrase acquires fresh meaning 
 and new importance when we realise its significance as a state- 
 ment of the Eternal Personality of the Godhead. If this internal 
 essential of personal being were at any time absent from the God- 
 heaci. God would not be Personal, but a pure Unity, almost un-
 
 vii] The Awakening of Personality 205 
 
 When once the organism has become a self, no long 
 time elapses before it becomes conscious of moral claims, 
 as we saw in our earlier studies 1 . Though the expression 
 of morality may change, its root-principle does not. 
 There is an absolute Ethic. The distinction between 
 right and wrong is absolute, though views as to the right- 
 ness and wrongness of particular acts are to a large 
 extent reflections of social conditions. 
 
 The fact of importance for our present inquiry is, that 
 the self-conscious organism does in fact become early 
 conscious of right and wrong, and has to make decisions 
 between conflicting impulses. 
 
 Christ's life constituted the full entry of God into all 
 the conditions of immanent, limited, human personality. 
 It was the second kenosis ; the issue and completion of 
 the kenosis of the Godhead in creation. We find Christ's 
 ministry beginning and ending with decisions between 
 conflicting impulses. In the Desert He had to choose 
 between a short and easy road to acceptance and king- 
 ship, and the via dolorosa of rejection and apparent 
 
 thinkable and meaningless. Actually the emphatic insistence on 
 the Eternal Begetting of the Son is the sheet anchor of the Chris- 
 tian belief that God is Personal. The phrase defends the perpetual 
 nature of the Processes of Divine activity. Though it may only 
 have been formulated as a safeguard against heresies that threat- 
 ened authoritative belief in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity; 
 though its full significance may have been little understood; it 
 remains one of the chief bulwarks against hopeless scepticism 
 a categorical affirmation of the fact that divine and human per- 
 sonality are alike, both being based on a triunity of active 
 functioning; and so, by implication, of the eternal nature of all 
 personality. For in emphasising this aspect of the Godhead it 
 emphasises the Godhead's Personal Being; and implicitly in all 
 Christian thought personality is held to mean one thing for God 
 and man alike that thing we call personality in man. 
 
 1 Evolution and the Need of Atonement and EvottUion mnd 
 Spiritual Life.
 
 206 The Awakening of Personality [CH. 
 
 failure; in the Garden came that choice again, when the 
 bitter cup was already at His lips. And we cannot 
 doubt that daily and hourly conflicts were His lot, as 
 Man, throughout His life on earth. 
 
 So much for facts. But can we avoid the belief that, 
 in an immanent God Who is Love, the suffering of evo- 
 lution, the constant misdirection of progress, must en- 
 tail a constant renewal of the will to endure, and that 
 things must not be set temporarily right, eternally 
 wrong, by a fiat of creative Power? Can Love see and 
 share suffering, weigh immediate loss against ultimate 
 gain, and yet not renew decisions constantly? 
 
 One cannot say too strongly how fatal any idea that 
 raises a real barrier between the nature and experience 
 of men and God must be to any solution of the Christian 
 problems. Unless men are able to become like God alto- 
 gether, they cannot be perfectly united with Him ; unless 
 God meant to make this possible, there is no conceivable 
 purpose in the Incarnation; unless personality means 
 altogether the same for God as for man, divine Person- 
 ality has no real meaning for us; it becomes merely a 
 term to cover ignorance. Unless our experience of pro- 
 cess is one with God's, our hope of immortality becomes 
 dim to vanishing; and, further, the hope of finding 
 meaning in the Universe becomes illusory. 
 
 While this matter is before our minds it may be well 
 to deal with an allied point. A quotation from Platt's 
 Immanence and Christian Thought will perhaps make 
 the matter at issue clear. "It is evident that when He 
 creates free spirits and preserves their personality 
 sacred as the finite likeness of His own, neither coercing 
 nor ignoring it, God limits Himself in a way He does not 
 when He creates and directs without let or hindrance 
 the physical universe. Here finiteness in a true sense is 
 assumed by God 1 ." Such a statement taken by itself 
 
 1 Platt, Immanence and Christian Thought, p. 243. The criticism
 
 vn] The Awakening of Personality 207 * 
 
 represents the sheer misconception of an ill-digested 
 dualism. There is, of course, a change for God when man 
 comes into being, for wills definitely opposing His will 
 begin to work. His potential limitation becomes actual 
 in a far-reaching sense. In this measure there is truth 
 in Platt's idea but in urging, even for a dialectical pur- 
 pose, the distinction as between an inorganic universe 
 and the wills of men he is guilty of a serious blunder, for 
 from the rigid determinism of matter up to the limitation 
 of the Incarnation you cannot isolate the stages of 
 creation. The whole self-limitation of God is implicit in 
 the first step of creation. 
 
 The utter untenability of any position which insists 
 on an objective reality in the cosmos apart from per- 
 sonal wills is ably shown from the standpoint of a scient- 
 ist, by Haldane 1 . He points out that the world is per- 
 ceived as something of potential use or hindrance to the 
 self, and we cannot separate it from our interest in it. 
 What we see in it is determined by our attention, which 
 itself depends on our needs as organisms. What we can 
 use in fact, ceases to be an ' other' for us, as we have so 
 often insisted, and is incorporated in ourself. " If I knew 
 more about the piece of stone its teleological determina- 
 tion would be more perfect. If, for instance, I knew its 
 exact chemical composition, and how to decompose it 
 with ease into its elements, its potential value to me 
 would possibly be greatly increased. And if I knew a 
 means of liberating the enormous stores of energy locked 
 up in the atoms of the stone, its potential value might 
 be almost incalculable. If, finally, I knew what lies 
 hidden behind the appearance of atoms, and energy, and 
 all the other physical and chemical appearances in the 
 
 we here make must not be thought to imply a general condemna- 
 tion of the book. On the contrary it may be recommended as 
 a valuable statement of modern views. 
 1 Mechanism, Life, and Personality.
 
 208 The Awakening of Personality [CH. 
 
 stone, I could completely adjust myself to it. Its teleo- 
 logical relations to me would be entirely transformed; 
 it would be wholly a part of myself, and the end of my 
 scientific study of the stone would be completely 
 attained 1 ." As we have seen from our special stand- 
 point; as Haldane the physiologist shows; and Kant, 
 and Hegel, and all the thinkers who are not self -de- 
 ceived into a belief that the scientific abstraction we call 
 matter is in its own form an ultimate reality; the 
 material universe can only be understood as the medium 
 in which a certain definite purpose is realised. That 
 purpose is the development of personality. The cosmos 
 is not self -existent ; only the personalities for whose self- 
 fulfilment it exists God's first, and then those of men 
 are that. It is instinct with purpose; the means by 
 which the Love of God is realised in creation. It only 
 exists for God as a self -limitation of His activity; for 
 men, at present, as an external limitation, through 
 which they yet achieve and realise their own person- 
 alities. And out of matter, both that which is proper 
 to himself as his body, and that which is external, each 
 man goes on to create his own cosmos of self-limitation, 
 for good and ill. For good, in so far as the self-limitation 
 is refusal to use what he has for unworthy ends that will 
 eventually raise a barrier between him and his own ful- 
 filment in so far, that is, as the object is creative. For 
 ill, in so far as he uses what he has for evil purposes. 
 Men are as gods, creating. Any thought which separates 
 God's creation of the universe from His creation of man 
 is hopelessly wide of the mark. As with matter, so too 
 with time and space. Both of these are judgments upon 
 the continuous process of becoming, in conditions of 
 limitation. And what is becoming is the personality 
 whether it be that of man, coming into being in the con- 
 
 1 Haldane, op. cit. pp. 112, 113.
 
 vii] The Awakening of Personality 209 
 
 ditions of limitation, or that of God self-limited yet 
 realising itself in the same conditions. 
 
 A few words may make clearer what we mean exactly 
 by personality coming into being for Bergson's de- 
 scription of the process as the inturning of the con- 
 sciousness upon itself, though true enough, leaves a good 
 deal unexplained. Our own reasoning has led us to 
 exactly that conclusion, though we expressed it in some- 
 what different terms, as the completion of triunity by 
 the subject becoming its own object. But this still 
 leaves the question of what consciousness is Bergson's 
 unconscious consciousness undetermined. That other 
 point on which Bergson lays stress the formation of 
 approximately closed systems is evidently a pheno- 
 menon germane to the whole question of consciousness, 
 and I cannot help suspecting that the roots of the com- 
 parative weakness shown by him in handling both these 
 matters lie very deep. May they not be due to his whole 
 theory that reality holds nothing of the already-made, 
 nothing transcendent; that no adequate provision is 
 made by him for the material of becoming? 
 
 This material, we have argued, is simply the expres- 
 sion of a self-limitation of the Transcendent Godhead, 
 whereby He empties Himself of transcendence in one 
 region of His experience. In it the work is carried out 
 or rather, carries itself out in the main, though the 
 direction of progress of the whole is determined by the 
 nature of the Divine Environment. 
 
 In the work itself one of the most salient features is 
 interdependence throughout ; the correlation of all living 
 organisms ; a certain unity that is the expression of God's 
 purpose. 
 
 For the organism that is totally lacking in self-con- 
 sciousness there are no self-ends. For it are isolated 
 choices and volitions, the expression of the fact that it 
 copes with situations directly as they arise ; but the unity
 
 2io The Awakening of Personality [CH. 
 
 of purposive progress does not exist for it. None the less 
 the unity itself does exist; only it exists for personal 
 beings alone for God and for us. 
 
 The purpose is there; we see it in the adaptation of 
 the race, we see it in the race's evolution ; we see it in the 
 close correlation between race and race of living things 
 the interdependencies of organised existence. God 
 sees it too, with far clearer sight. The approximately 
 closed system which is characteristic of the appear- 
 ance we call the material universe, as well as the unity 
 and solidarity that make the organic world, before 
 the emergence of self-consciousness, an almost closed 
 system, as well as the smaller and smaller units that 
 compose it, are alike the expression of the plan or pur- 
 pose of a Person ; the plan or purpose of God's Personal 
 activity. All unity, all solidarity, all appearance of 
 system that we know, is the expression of personal 
 activity. 
 
 Then human personality emerges, and is itself an 
 evident unity, whose activities again, viewed as a whole, 
 tend to form a nearly closed system once more. What 
 is the significance of this constant recurrence of sys- 
 tems? Should we be far wrong in saying that they 
 simply express the solidarity of fellowship that they 
 reflect the very Svva/jus of tcoiv<ovLa? In view of the 
 fact that all solidarity in every form in which it is known 
 to us as human beings is the impress of personality; in 
 view of the fact that we are driven to regard God as 
 Personal, and that solidarity appears in the unselfcon- 
 scious world we call His Creation; in view of the con- 
 ception of the nature of creative purpose we have been 
 driven to adopt ; I do not think that we can come to any 
 other conclusion. 
 
 The emergence of personality in the evolutionary pro- 
 cess is thus seen under the guise of recognition of purpose 
 both the purpose of the self-activities and the purpose
 
 vn] The Awakening of Personality 2 \ i 
 
 that is manifested in the whole cosmos while its pro- 
 gressive development becomes a growing acquaintance 
 with the full meaning of that purpose and solidarity. 
 As well as being the recognition of purpose in the cosmos, 
 it is the recognition that / have purpose. Before, the 
 purpose of another was blindly followed out in evolution 
 as a whole ; now the eyes see, and the self -purposes are 
 visualised in accordance with the purpose manifested 
 all around. 
 
 This, of course, simply brings us back to the recog- 
 nition of self-hood, but it gives fuller meaning to Berg- 
 son's phrase "the inturning of the consciousness on 
 itself." Bergson's "unconscious consciousness" is the 
 blind following out of purpose under the urging of the 
 vital impulse, or whatever else one chooses to call the 
 claim of the creature to increasing freedom; self -con- 
 sciousness is the recognition and self-chosen realisation 
 of that same purpose, whose ultimate object is fellow- 
 ship. 
 
 Let us, then, analyse this question of closed systems 
 in relation to the origination of personality a little more 
 closely. The operation of natural law appears always 
 to tend towards the formation of such systems, be they 
 atoms, planetary groups, animal colonies, or what you 
 will. This is very fully set out in L 'Evolution Criatrice. 
 The inorganic world consists of systems that are 
 practically closed or isolated. As Bergson points out, 
 this is not absolutely true. There are tenuous threads 
 that bind the organised universe into one whole. There 
 is unity, or the universe would not serve its purpose; 
 and we have found purpose preeminently characteristic 
 of all that exists. Similarly with the creatures that in- 
 habit the earth. Each group the organism and its 
 congeners, their prey and their enemies forms a nearly 
 closed system. Much of the environment -sum bears no 
 direct relation to the activities of the group. Bees have 
 
 14 a
 
 2 1 2 The Awakening of Personality [CH. 
 
 little relation with fishes. None the less we can see that 
 there is some relation; some of the tenuous threads do 
 link their destinies. Neither, for instance, could exist 
 if the radiant energy of the sun were withdrawn. Bees 
 are connected with other arthropods, and arthropods do 
 impinge upon the perimeter of fish-experience. The 
 universe does, in fact, evince a certain unity. 
 
 Nevertheless for practical reasons we treat systems as 
 closed or isolable. There is a harmony or adjustment 
 between the systems, but for many purposes we can 
 neglect it. In dealing with ultimate issues we cannot. 
 Each system is nearly closed, but there is a way of 
 escape. A process of evolution is actually going on in 
 the whole as well as in each part. 
 
 Now the isolation of a system represents the deter- 
 mination necessary for stability ; its openness, the possi- 
 bility of progress. As we have so often said, freedom can 
 only emerge from a basis of determination. We human 
 beings, with our self-determined actions, could not get 
 on at all if we could not rely on the nature of the effect 
 which some given action would produce. In the long 
 run, self-determination becomes the predominant factor 
 in life. We choose to do a thing, and do it. But our self- 
 determination is rational and proceeds orderly. We get 
 into tune with a larger harmony. As we have seen, this 
 harmony depends on the personal nature of God and of 
 ourselves, and represents the self-limitation which is 
 expressed in interpenetration. You cannot win to 
 fellowship without finding your self in self-loss. You 
 can only gain your life in losing it. Personality is a 
 system at once open and closed closed, in that it is 
 established in perfect reciprocity and completely satis- 
 fying experience; open, in that it perpetually craves 
 that others should share that experience, and, acting on 
 this, perpetually expands. 
 
 Let us take an analogy to illustrate further the parts
 
 vn] The Awakening of Personality 2 1 3 
 
 played by external- and by self-determination, in the 
 earliest stages of the development of personality. At 
 first a state lives by a process of barter. Later a token- 
 currency is accepted in lieu of goods in kind, for reasons 
 of practical convenience. This closes the community, 
 making a unit-state, which involves great gain, but also 
 debarring it from any but a very limited trade in kind 
 with other unit-states which have adopted a different 
 currency. An inter-state currency becomes essential. 
 Once this gold basis is established, import and export 
 can be carried on, so long as imports do not exceed ex- 
 ports. When this inter-state currency becomes recog- 
 nised as the only basis of exchange, internally as well 
 as externally, the unit ceases to be isolated, and it can 
 command all commodities. 
 
 Apply this to groups of organisms. Let imports and 
 exports represent the results of freedom issuing in crea- 
 tive work. Let the gold basis be self-determination 
 true choice; the token currency the vital impulse. 
 
 Imagine what would happen if the gold basis were 
 absent, and yet the limitation of natural economic laws 
 did not exist. In exchange for exported necessaries each 
 unit would be flooded with useless tokens which had no 
 relation to the life of the state, and which no one within 
 it would accept. It would also tend to be flooded with 
 imported luxury-articles of no necessary use to itself 
 as well as necessary articles, as inevitably happens in 
 trading, for which it had exchanged the only currency 
 of which its members understood the meaning. The 
 result would be utter chaos. Everything turns upon the 
 international gold basis. 
 
 So with the organism. Till self-determination is won 
 there must be external limitation by rigid laws, or the 
 issue will be chaos. When the meaning of activities is 
 understood as part of a whole; when the ideas of solid- 
 arity, of purpose, of the organic relationship of indi-
 
 214 The Awakening of Personality [CH. 
 
 viduals, of the interpenetrative nexus of life, begin to 
 dawn, self-determination comes, and order that pro- 
 ceeds from within. Till then the order must be imposed 
 from without. In nature the final issue indicates that 
 order is imposed with a purpose, and purpose implies, 
 we have argued, a Personal God. The purpose is fellow- 
 ship. 
 
 Now self-determination, and its correlative self- 
 limitation, presuppose the recognition of the self. At 
 first the activities of the creature are separate occur- 
 rences. Stimuli producing pure sensation give rise to the 
 suitable impulse which issues in the right response. 
 Somewhere in the region between the sensation and the 
 impulse lurks a trace of freedom ; we have seen that even 
 before self-consciousness the creature is winning its way 
 to greater control of matter. But this freedom is the 
 freedom of the vital impulse, not of the individual 
 organism. The race progresses, not the individual; the 
 latter is a machine growing more perfect in its responses 
 to repeated stimuli by habit, its own organisation being 
 such as to render this inevitable. As we go up the scale 
 the sensations and resulting impulses develope into true 
 cognitions and conations. None the less, until they are 
 unified by emotion until the freedom expresses itself 
 in the unifying medium of self-hood there is nothing 
 possible for the individual but external limitation. The 
 laws of biological economics must impose that order 
 which the creature cannot impose upon itself. Limita- 
 tion is the only alternative to chaos; and this must be 
 imposed from without until the stage of self-limitation 
 is reached. When this dawns the other may be gradu- 
 ally relaxed; but until self-determination is perfect there 
 must be dual control. 
 
 We now begin to see the index of true freedom in self- 
 limitation ; and the process of winning freedom becomes 
 identical with the process of self-imposition of laws that
 
 vir] The Awakening of Personality 215 
 
 have a universal currency. Wrong laws bring their own 
 immediate retribution in the chaos which ensues. 
 
 Bergson's" inturningof the consciousness upon itself," 
 which he postulates as the beginning of self-hood, as- 
 sumes a fresh complexion. The beginning of self-hood 
 is self-control. Possibly we see this dawning in animals 
 such as dogs, which li ve under the stimulus of a personal 
 environment. They seem to begin to judge between 
 the courses of action. A well-trained dog will not steal 
 mutton from the dinner-table even in the absence of his 
 master. 
 
 Self-control involves the conception " I am I " ; it re- 
 lates the thought "I can" with "I will" and "I will 
 not." At first there is vague appetition want, not / 
 want. When the creature reaches the stage of this train 
 of mental states; want want something else more 
 (say approval, or satisfaction in having followed a par- 
 ticular course) therefore must not; there is a definite 
 judgment of values, and a judgment implies a judge. 
 Thus it would seem that the personality is initiated at 
 that stage when a judgment of values appears; when 
 there is recognition of the possibility of two courses and 
 a balancing of their relative desirability. Such a judg- 
 ment involves the existence of an emotion proper, for 
 we may define an emotion as a tendency to act con- 
 sciously in a certain manner for a certain reason that is 
 consonant with the character of the person. We may 
 notice that this definition also involves the existence of 
 the self; and thus, from a slightly different standpoint, 
 we see that the arrival of personality in the evolutionary 
 process coincides with the replacement of simple appeti- 
 tion by emotion. 
 
 These two conceptions may serve in some degree to 
 render Bergson's statement about the inturning of the 
 consciousness on itself less vague and difficult to grasp. 
 Judgment of values, involving the change from mainly
 
 2 1 6 The Awakening of Personality [CH. vii 
 
 external to mainly internal determination of the path 
 to be followed ; emotion replacing appetition ; these are 
 the signs by which we may recognise the initiation of 
 personality. 
 
 With these the system grows more open, including a 
 larger range. Each closed system among men tends to 
 expand first the family, then the tribe, then the nation, 
 then the universal brotherhood, last of all the true 
 fellowship of eternal selves perfected, and linked with 
 God and with each other in perfect mutuality. The 
 limitations of external circumstance are replaced by 
 self -limitation ; freedom is found in self-determination. 
 Men find their life in losing it. Their true self wins to its 
 own in the self-abnegation of perfect fellowship. 
 
 We have argued that the basis of evolution of per- 
 sonality lies in the self-control that comes with the 
 freedom of the true alternative, with judgments of 
 value and the emotions that accompany them. The 
 aspect of this which is concerned with transcendence we 
 will leave to the next, and final, chapter.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF TRANSCENDENCE 
 
 THE time has now come when the various suggestions 
 we have made must be gathered up into a whole, the 
 many partial theories built together into one structure. 
 Till this is done we can form no judgment of our con- 
 structive work, nor attempt any fresh synthesis of the 
 everyday phenomena of conscious life. 
 
 We began with an examination of the theories of 
 Immanence. Box-Immanence we rejected as leading 
 either to pure pantheism, or else to the insoluble riddle 
 of the thing-in-itself, which leaves man wholly out of 
 touch with Reality; and we showed that both of these 
 are contrary to our experience. We are true, self-deter- 
 mined beings, not merely parts of God; and we know 
 that we are not barred out from knowledge of Reality 
 by any external unpierced wall, but only, and only in 
 part, by our own limitations. We touch Reality, even 
 though we do not grasp it. 
 
 Body-Immanence we rejected on the ground that the 
 word body has too definite and limited a meaning, 
 though there is much to be said for this form of expres- 
 sion. 
 
 Instead, we proposed the term Work-Immanence. 
 Work implies first a Creative Mind and so a Creative 
 Thinker; then the material; then the expression of the 
 creative idea through the emergence of an entity which 
 satisfies that Idea. The Creative Thinker is the Trans- 
 cendent God; the thought or idea an expression of His 
 Essential Being as Love, of the need of Love's fellowship, 
 expanding in ever widening circles of being, all sharing 
 the Perfect Experience. The material is the expression
 
 218 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 of the truth that fellowship must begin as self-limitation, 
 and must be limitation until it is returned upon its 
 centre in perfect reciprocity. The work is the gradual 
 realisation of the idea as an actual experience; the 
 entity is that which, by sharing the Perfect Experience, 
 confirms its perfectness. 
 
 The problem of the apparent double consciousness 
 that seems inevitable where transcendence and imman- 
 ence coexist was met in part, but only in part, by an in- 
 sistence on the importance of recognising degrees in 
 Reality; by showing that partial experiences are only 
 partial when they are considered out of relation to the 
 Whole, through a process of abstraction inevitable for 
 limited beings, but not inevitable for God. This mode of 
 looking at the problem in no way detracts from or neglects 
 the reality of partial experience, but lays stress on the 
 fact that it is only real because of its relation to the 
 whole ; so that for God, who sees the Whole, the partial 
 experiences have a truer reality than for man, through 
 His full understanding that they are not real with a self- 
 subsistent reality apart from all else. We cannot grasp 
 them in their fullness; He can. 
 
 Because phenomena are real for Him, we come into 
 touch with His own Nature, on the planes of relative 
 reality, through His attributes. These do not manifest 
 His absolute Being, but they are the true functioning 
 of His nature; its expression in the region of limitation. 
 We are not confined to a knowledge of God's attributes 
 while Himself remains far away and unknowable, for 
 they are His manifestation in conditions that are real 
 for Him as well as for us. 
 
 We then turned to the central motive of our discus- 
 sion, and endeavoured to show that every self-con- 
 scious, active unit must be personal, and that person- 
 ality could not exist as such if it were simply one, with- 
 out any internal manifold. To demonstrate this we
 
 viii] The Evolution of Transcendence 2 1 9 
 
 started with an analysis of the Christian doctrine of the 
 Holy Trinity, and showed that it involved a Creative 
 Will, a Mediating Activity, and a Free Spirit by whose 
 reciprocal relation with both the Whole was substan- 
 tiated as One. Further, it was found that no one of the 
 three was independent of the others or could exist as 
 itself without them. Thus any form of Tritheism, such 
 as that commonly found in the popular expression of 
 Christian dogmas, was shown to be utterly untenable, 
 and false to the deepest insight. 
 
 We then turned to the detailed analysis of human 
 personality, and there too found a triunity exactly 
 corresponding to that postulated of the Godhead by the 
 Christian faith. 
 
 Indeed, the penetrability of personal existence is in 
 itself a strong argument for the plurality of persons in 
 the Unity of the Godhead ; for a personal differentiation 
 of the Absolute; for the conception that Unity itself is 
 made such by internal differentiation. The only other 
 thing this penetrability could mean would be the exist- 
 ence of an impulse towards impersonal union, either in 
 a society, in accordance with Durkheim's views 1 and 
 these views, in their naked positivism, have been ably 
 exposed by Mr Webb 2 (metaphysically, their basis is 
 the same that led Hume to scepticism and Comte to 
 Humanism, and they are open to the same objection, 
 that they really amount to an attempt to convince 
 people who do not exist that they do not exist, while the 
 very fact that they are worth arguing with proves that 
 they do, and that they are not mere social phenomena !) 
 or else in an Impersonal Essence, as in the extremest 
 tenets of pantheism. Both the one and the other of these 
 solutions leave out of account the fact that personality 
 is the most real experience we have. 
 
 1 E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religions Life. 
 
 * C. C. J. Webb, Group Theories of Religion and the Individual.
 
 220 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 At this point we broke off to examine the nature of 
 Christ's consciousness. This was necessary, since here 
 we find the coincidence of Godhead with Manhood, 
 brought about by the complete veiling of Godhead in 
 Flesh; God manifesting the fullness of Godhead in its 
 complete surrender; Himself emptying Himself and 
 counting Godhead not a prize a real surrender, made 
 by full acceptance of conditions that start from the 
 lower degrees of Reality as the only things known; of 
 those conditions in which men begin their childhood. 
 
 Many problems were discussed, with the main pur- 
 pose of showing that Godhead was not separated by an 
 impassable gulf from even evolving manhood, because 
 process is real for God as well as for man. We tried to 
 face boldly the grave difficulty of Christ's Godhead, and 
 found a partial answer in the conception of His perfect 
 Manhood, taken in conjunction with this same reality 
 of process. The answer, however, was only partial, and 
 we have yet to endeavour to make it as complete as is 
 possible to human understanding. His Manhood must 
 be perfect ; there must be no withholding, no reservation, 
 in the kenosis. And the results of it must be eternally 
 real, for man and for God, even though nothing new is 
 added to God's being. 
 
 This dilemma too found its answer implicit in the 
 wholeness of Reality, which is the truest expression of 
 the meaning of eternal life. 
 
 All these points we pressed home by showing how 
 Christ must have been limited by the mechanism of 
 human conditions. To do this we selected the most 
 purely determinist of all psychological writers, and, 
 while pointing out the fallacies of his theoretical super- 
 structure 1 , accepted his facts, and showed that they in 
 no way detracted from our conceptions of Christhood, 
 
 1 Appendix A.
 
 vm] The Evolution of Transcendence 221 
 
 or of Godhead, but rather made it fuller, gave greater 
 depth to our understanding of Christ's perfect Man- 
 hood. 
 
 Next we turned to the ordinary conception of human 
 immortality, and tried to analyse the intuition on which 
 it is based. From this study one chief point emerged 
 that any doctrine which laid the chief stress on the un- 
 likeness of man to God was doomed to failure. Our hope 
 of immortality rests on the fundamental likeness, iden- 
 tity even, between the experience of men and God 1 . 
 
 Finally we discussed the shadowy region in which 
 Personality has its beginnings, and tried to give a more 
 definite meaning to Bergson's phrase "the inturning of 
 the consciousness upon itself." 
 
 It now becomes clear that, all through, our examina- 
 tion has tended towards one conclusion that man's 
 experience, including his self-experience, partial though 
 it be, is yet the same as God's, differing in degree only, not 
 
 1 It is exactly here, in the self-identity and the absoluteness of 
 all personality, that we join issue with Tuck well (Religion and 
 Reality, p. 152). "We do not say that the Absolute is a Person, 
 because, as we have said, so far as we understand the legitimate 
 significance of the word Person, it always imports finitude. It is, 
 we hold, properly employed only where we distinguish the / from 
 a Thou; it has, therefore, always a social reference, a mutually 
 exclusive or negative meaning towards other selves. The Abso- 
 lute, therefore, as all-inclusive, cannot be said without a contra- 
 diction to be a Person, but may, we contend, accurately be termed 
 in respect of its spirituality and unity a Perfect Self." This is 
 going back to the days before Lotze, and the most it indicates is 
 the ' Spiritual College ' of McTaggart. Our whole argument baa 
 led us to postulate mutual inclusiveness. not exclusiveness. as 
 characteristic of personality, and we have seen that every per- 
 sonality is internally substantiated as I and Thou, through a 
 third relation which establishes its freedom. In short, TuckweU 
 unintentionally but exactly defines the necessity for a doctrine 
 of the Trinity.
 
 222 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 in kind, from the Perfect Experience, and destined to 
 become identical with that. 
 
 Man is immanent and transcendent; man's experience 
 of reality takes cognisance of degrees, yet is one whole; 
 man is triune because he is personal; we know that man 
 is in eternal life already, and will experience it ever 
 more fully because he sees already process and being as 
 one whole, which whole is comprehended in the perfect 
 experience of God, while yet each man's experience is 
 his own; his self -identity indestructible. 
 
 We have, so to speak, woven some portions of a tap- 
 estry. They must now be joined so that we may trace 
 the pattern, grotesquely inadequate though it must be; 
 so that we may see how they limn a crude sketch of the 
 Whole which is the Ultimate Reality. Many fragments 
 will be lacking; a few of these we must weave and set 
 in place. The largest of the missing fragments is that 
 which completes the picture of the evolutionary aspect 
 of personality, and this we must first supply. At best our 
 tapestry will be no closer to a photographic record than 
 is that of Bayeux. Below the main motive many crea- 
 tures will be represented whose relation with the rest is 
 unexplained, yet which somehow are necessary to the 
 whole. 
 
 The ground-work of all is this that creation must be 
 the creation of something new. If this be not the case, all 
 we have said of the nature of personality, all we have 
 said of Reality, crumbles to ruin, and we are left to 
 grope blindly in the dust-cloud of that great fall. If 
 personal experience, with its judgment of the shapes 
 and forms and purposes of Appearance, be unrelated to 
 Reality, we have no criterion at all, and even our judg- 
 ment of the structure of Appearance is valueless. If, on 
 the other hand, we can make true value-judgments, 
 touch Reality in its appearances, trust our intuitive 
 knowledge that the form of things does really bear
 
 vin] The Evolution of Transcendence 223 
 
 relation to their true content; if, in a word, we can trust 
 our inmost consciousness that there is purpose in the 
 Universe, then all creation of God and man is the crea- 
 tion of a new thing, made necessary by the nature of 
 the old, and fulfilling the demands of its wholeness and 
 self-existence. The Universe is no kaleidoscope, whose 
 many turnings bring eventually a repetition of a self- 
 same pattern; no perpetual cycle of an evolution that 
 becomes, and indeed is, only involution. Personal 
 beings characterise the latest stages of the cosmic pro- 
 cess. The knowledge of reality, and the self-knowledge 
 which gives its unique character to personal experience, 
 preclude all thought of man's mere geological signifi- 
 cance. An age of man comparable to the age of giant 
 reptiles is unbelievable because irrational. In man we 
 can find some explanation of the giant reptiles, if an in- 
 complete one ; in the giant reptiles we find no explana- 
 tion of man. Evolutionary series even the bund-alley 
 occupations of the failures must be studied in the 
 light of the end; and the end is personal being. Creation 
 has led to something new, and something eternal. Any- 
 thing else would mean an activity that is meaningless, 
 as all activity without purpose, all activity which leads 
 to the making of something in itself valueless, must be. 
 Such activity could not satisfy any need at all in a 
 creator. 
 
 If there be an Eternal Creator at all as there must 
 be Creation must then lead eventually to something 
 that is new and eternal. A question here arises, whose 
 answer is implicit in every stage of our argument : 
 Could the stages, even the human stage, be passing 
 time-phases in the development of something far greater 
 than we can even begin to understand? Though the 
 answer be implicit throughout we may state it explicitly 
 though briefly here. No! No, because men are personal, 
 and know themselves to be parts of a great, real Whole
 
 224 7^ Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 that is not in the future, but now; that is though it is 
 becoming; that cannot end, because it is Real. No, 
 because the universe is so constituted that its appear- 
 ances betoken an underlying Reality. No, because we 
 men are so constituted that we can make value-judg- 
 ments; distinguish, and feel our communing with, that 
 Reality. No, because ourselves are creators, and under- 
 stand the meaningfulness and satisfying nature of crea- 
 tive action. No, because only through knowing our- 
 selves as part of that Reality is it real for us at all. Each 
 further argument we set out will only make this more 
 self-evident, once the truth is in our mind. Reality is 
 the experience of God, but it is not only that. It is the 
 experience of men as well, for the nature of the experi- 
 ence is fellowship. Fellowship involves self-surrender as 
 well as creation ; involves the union of individuals, who 
 without it would be mere individuals. All this is real 
 to us now, with a reality that is timeless. Fellowship, 
 Love, is ever new, ever increasing, ever satisfies. It has 
 no past or future; only a vivid present. It is ever ex- 
 panding in creative activity. It finds a perfect expres- 
 sion of the self in selflessness which is yet utterly self- 
 conscious, without a trace of self-loss. No easy doctrine 
 of mere transmigration of souls to other earthly lives 
 with lost identity can explain the self. That could 
 satisfy neither the needs of a Personal God nor the needs 
 of personal men. Stages there must be, infinite ap- 
 proach ; but it must be the same person that approaches. 
 There must be something new to satisfy the expansion, 
 the centrifugal activity, of personal Being, but the new 
 thing must be eternal. If not, as has been said, we are all 
 out of touch with the real, and the world is out of joint. 
 The evolution of personality is wrapped up with the 
 evolution of transcendence, which itself means a growing 
 appreciation of the wholeness of Life. In the evolution 
 of transcendence we must seek the key to man's nature;
 
 vin] The Evolution of Transcendence 225 
 
 and, starting from the nature of immanence, it is with 
 this we must therefore deal next. 
 
 A being becomes truly personal as soon as it can en- 
 visage itself as simply being, apart from the temporal 
 series in which, for the most part, its activities are real- 
 ised. For such a being the temporal series grows more 
 and more, not an illusion, but a partial appearance, a 
 mirror-image darkly seen, of the Eternal series which 
 expresses activity without introducing before and after. 
 Eternal life is appreciation of the Now. Immanence 
 looks to the future for completion, regarding the tem- 
 poral series ; transcendence knows the Whole in spite of 
 temporal limitation, because it acts and moves in the 
 Eternal series. 
 
 Let us then start as we must with the material. 
 Whatever be the nature of matter and, as we have 
 said, no amount of rarefying of matter by physical abs- 
 tractions will make it any the less matter we see that 
 it expresses the nature of God in self -surrender; in self- 
 limitation for the sake of others. Matter, per se, is 
 meaningless; it only acquires meaning from the purpose 
 that it evidences. Looked at as part of a whole, as the 
 means whereby the temporal series acquires significance 
 in relation to the eternal, it has its place, fulfilling an 
 inescapable need. There must be self-limitation, there 
 must be determination, if something new and eternal 
 is to come into being; and matter, whatever its real 
 nature, expresses this, and fulfils the need. Matter is the 
 material of God's work, the necessary evidence that His 
 self-limitation is real when He makes a man. 
 
 In, and as the result of, these conditions, men come 
 into being. 
 
 But we, to share God's experience, must be self- 
 limiting; and the creation presupposes such a sharing 
 eventually. 
 
 To be self-limiting men must be free; love must 
 
 MCD. 15
 
 226 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 satisfy their inmost being and be to them the great 
 reality of their life. Love must be won; its processes 
 learned from the inside by progressive discovery. The 
 oneness of all phenomena as parts of Being must be 
 realised; and to achieve this men must see all as part 
 of themselves they must be first oppressed with the 
 full sense of the otherness of things, before they can 
 begin to know true immanence which sees the obverse of 
 limitation as mediation ; which sees purpose and a valid 
 aim in the constraint imposed by external conditions, 
 and, so seeing, begins to lose the oppression of deter- 
 mination from without. 
 
 Men, then, cannot even begin to be immanent till they 
 are self-conscious, for immanence means the absorption 
 of 'otherness' in mediation, and to recognise otherness 
 at all involves the recognition of self-hood. In truth 
 all these things self-consciousness and recognition of 
 otherness ; transcendence and immanence involve each 
 other, and are different aspects of one stage. Other- 
 ness cannot be recognised as such without self -conscious- 
 ness; self -consciousness carries with it as correlative 
 the stable, timeless, ego-consciousness of transcendence ; 
 and all otherness is seen as at least the material of im- 
 manence, for the 'other' is recognised as potentially 
 usable to mediate self-ends. The nexus is close. 
 
 Phenomena, then, are recognised as being not merely 
 dead factors exercising immutable control over us. It is 
 true, they do shape man's destiny. He becomes what 
 he becomes for better adaptation to the conditions of 
 his being. But all the while he is the master, they the 
 slaves who minister to his needs. They are recognised 
 as mediators of the self-realisation of the ego. 
 
 Through external limitation men are led on to free- 
 dom and find they have clutched a bubble. Freedom 
 itself is valueless, and in their long progress they have 
 learned to make value-judgments.
 
 vin] Tke Evolution of Transcendence 227 
 
 Here, too, as everywhere, is no actual pause, no break. 
 Insensibly, and side by side with growing freedom, 
 grows the understanding that freedom by itself is va- 
 lueless, because purposeless. A free mankind does not 
 suddenly pause in its labours and ask, appalled, What is 
 this freedom we have won? Individuals do, nations do, 
 after some great cataclysm; but for men as a whole 
 there is slow growth of comprehension in this, as in all 
 else. Freedom is no sooner gained than it is freely 
 tossed away. New limitations are embraced limita- 
 tions that proceed from within, not from without. The 
 self-determination of freedom is the starting point of per- 
 sonality; its goal is the self-limitation which is inextricably 
 intertwined with creative love. 
 
 Here is the initiation of an immanence akin to God's, 
 for it is full of purpose. Through external limitation 
 men win to self-limitation; and self-limitation, though 
 it be immanence, is yet rooted and grounded in trans- 
 cendence; for it is love fellowship that brings it to 
 pass. The will, the emotion, the thought have taken 
 action, identifying their good with a principle which 
 formulates the very nature of God. 
 
 There is a kind of double consciousness at this stage, 
 for in it coexist external limitation.together withachieved 
 freedom imposing its own purposive restrictions on the 
 self. There is consciousness of the ego as ultimately 
 real, and consciousness of the phenomena as also real. 
 
 Yet in fact the two do not clash; and that, because 
 there is some measure of appreciation of the Whole lying 
 behind and synthesising our dual experience. We do 
 know what purpose means, however dimly we can see 
 the purpose in the whole. 
 
 The evolution of personality, then, though wrapped up 
 in the evolution of transcendence, begins with imman- 
 ence, when the material is recognised as material 1 . This 
 
 1 This is only another way of putting our previous gtatement 
 
 15 a
 
 228 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 personality deepens and widens, achieves form as our 
 immanence shapes the work, which it does, be it noted, 
 through the expression of a creative idea. So, finally, 
 there emerges an entity a self which expresses and 
 confirms the purpose of that idea, as the completed 
 being of living, reciprocal Love a being that is ab- 
 solute and not of time. 
 
 The evolution of personality begins with immanence; 
 yet it could not so begin but for transcendence the 
 knowledge of self-purposes that are real. Before the 
 dawn of creaturely self-consciousness there was imman- 
 ence, but it was God's, not the creature's. On this point 
 we were not clear in an earlier work 1 . Yet, when once the 
 conception of this occurs to the mind, its obvious truth 
 precludes the possibility that one is mistaken. Before 
 self-consciousness has dawned at all life can experience 
 nothing but otherness, and even that is not known, for 
 the knowledge of otherness connotes the knowledge of 
 self as well, and this knowledge is a necessary condition 
 of the true immanence which signifies purposive action 
 in and through the recognition of matter as a means 
 to an end, so that otherness is absorbed in mediation. 
 Before this self-knowledge begins life must be but a 
 bundle of needs and perceptions, as Hume wrongly 
 claimed to be the case with man needs and perceptions 
 that are related to no self, but provoke only the instant 
 response of self-preservation. Self-preservation, and the 
 altruistic urging of the vital impulse that is all there 
 is in a life that is not personal ; consciousness is merely 
 the clearing-house for needs, not being conscious of 
 
 that "self-determination is the starting-point of personality," be- 
 cause the raison d'lire of freedom begins to be grasped in true 
 immanence, as purposive; even though the discovery that the 
 purpose is only achievable through self-abnegation does not come 
 till later. 
 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life.
 
 vm] The Evolution of Transcendence 229 
 
 itself. Only God is conscious, and waiting, active not 
 passive; Immanent because of His Transcendence. 
 
 Here once again we come face to face with the diffi- 
 culty which, latent or patent, has dogged us all the 
 while as we pursued our train of reasoning the diffi- 
 culty of the double experience of God. We, rightly, have 
 approached it along the line of the degrees of Reality, 
 but this is not enough. The very fact that we meet it 
 again here shows it is scotched, not killed. We will, 
 therefore, follow the rule that has been pur guide 
 throughout and try to set the difficulty down clearly and 
 fully while keeping our fresh material before our minds, 
 in spite of the repetition that such a proceeding involves, 
 believing that in clear statement solution is generally 
 to be found. 
 
 God is Immanent. Therefore He experiences process 
 and is in the temporal series, wherein are before and after , 
 and in which we have to face all the problems of deter- 
 minism, as well as those of limitation 1 . In Transcendent 
 
 1 Tuckwell's mode of expressing the relation of immanence and 
 transcendence in man as a principle of exfoliation is at least 
 suggestive. "And so" he writes "all that happens to us, all that 
 we hear and see, all that we think and feel, all that we call our 
 history and experience is the exfoliation, under the form of time, 
 of what is already implicit within us. Hence, let us repeat, we 
 must regard time, not as real, not as ' the stuff ' of which we are 
 made, but only as the form of our exfoliation. Time is within us, 
 we are not in time. Our ego is non-temporal. And so we do not 
 move or flow. We do not travel through life leaving our past 
 behind us, as we leave the stations, the telegraph-posts, the 
 villages and other objects behind us as we journey through the 
 country by rail. All we experience is ever within us. If we think 
 otherwise we are once more greatly deluded by a metaphor. To 
 call life a journey is a useful and often beautiful figure of speech 
 when employed for religious edification ; but it is totally mislead- 
 ing if transferred to the sphere of metaphysics. What, then. I 
 remember is in me still. It happened in time; but what happened
 
 230 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 Reality there is no determinist problem, for freedom and 
 love express and realise themselves in ebb as well as flow, 
 and love shows greatest where freedom is least. Self- 
 limitation, self-abnegation, suffering, are eternal impli- 
 cations of love. The problem only becomes insistent 
 when we regard the Eternal from the standpoint of the 
 temporal. Absolute Freedom is not, in fact, a thing 
 determined in the past and then rehabilitating itself in 
 an illusive garment of contingency,' but a present ex- 
 perience which is not least expressed in limitation, so 
 that be self-assumed. The Eternal Now is the perpetual 
 reaffirmation of self -existent Being; and the only Being 
 that can be at once self-existent, active and whole, yet 
 interpenetrative with others in love to the obliteration 
 of otherness, but not of identity, is the triune Being of 
 Personality x . Everything is in what we must term the 
 
 to me in time and time itself are both alike in me. I, therefore, 
 own my past still, it qualifies me still. It is mine, because it is 
 my very self exfoliated. It was in me implicitly before it happen- 
 ed, it is in me in its details now that it has happened. And I have 
 neither left it behind me, nor am I carrying it along with me as 
 I travel on. 'For indeed 7 do not move, I exfoliate or evolve." 
 Religion and Reality, p. 197. And again, "We conclude, then, 
 that the ego is transcendental. It is not in time; still less is it 
 time itself or a mere stream of temporal consciousness. Our past 
 experience is not over and done with, it is ours still; and it is ours 
 still because the ego is eternal," ibid. p. 181. Our attention has 
 already been directed to this line of argument in our discussion 
 of memory as conceived by Freud and Bergson. In Tuckwell's 
 statement the danger of pantheistic determinism is not altogether 
 avoided; and indeed it is latent throughout the work from which 
 we have been quoting. The fault lies in inadequate realisation of 
 the fact that our transcendence is a consequence of the nature of 
 God as Personal Being; that God's Being is the Ground. 
 
 1 A parallel line of thought, developed in most lucid detail, yet 
 not the same because the triunity of personal being is not brought 
 out, will be found in the nineteenth of Pringle Pattison's Gifford 
 Lectures.
 
 vin] The Evolution of Transcendence 231 
 
 simultaneous series of Eternity simultaneous because 
 there is no before or after (Pringle Pattison's state- 
 ment that "the past and the future are essentially 
 relative, and indeed negative, conceptions, the no-more 
 and the not-yet; but the 'is' of the present, if we take 
 it as we do in action and in all direct experience, is not 
 infected by the same relativity, and hence there is in it 
 something comparable to eternity 1 ," exactly expresses 
 what we are striving to say) a series because the 
 activity is real ; not merely seen as such through the re- 
 fracting medium of immanent existence; and activity is 
 essentially serial. 
 
 God is Transcendent and sees the Whole, and every 
 part fulfilling its relation to It. As such, He sees His own 
 Immanence as an integral and necessary part of that 
 Whole; and it is real to Him. More, its process in the 
 temporal series is real; and cosmic contingency the 
 constant reafnrmation of life's freedom to escape the 
 determination of a real past that is no-more in a real 
 future that is not-yet is present fact for God*. 
 
 How can these two consciousnesses co-exist as one ? If 
 they do not, then God has two consciousnesses, and this 
 is an impossible contradiction. As before we will turn 
 back to the known, experienced, case of man, and argue 
 through this, and through the link of Christ God in 
 manhood to the absolute consciousness of God. 
 
 We men find immanence real enough. The incorpora- 
 tion of matter for the purpose of discharging our activities 
 the disappearance of its otherness through purposive 
 subordination this is our every-day experience. 
 
 1 Op. cit. p. 369. 
 
 Cf . the statement (Preliminary Considerations, p. 3 1 ) that " the 
 end is before process for the Transcendent God. but the stages by 
 which that end is reached are not within His transcendent know- 
 ledge, for they are not in the plane of transcendence but of limita- 
 tion."
 
 232 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 Yet we know the temporal and spatial series the 
 causal series in which effect follows cause inevitably, 
 according to the law of limitation to be only a part in 
 a whole that is more absolutely real. We emphasise our 
 innate knowledge of this in the pragmatic distinction 
 partly false though it be we draw between the natural 
 and the spiritual. Though the emphasis of our life is 
 often wholly on the temporal series, for practical rea- 
 sons, we can and do see the eternal as well. We do, as 
 a matter of fact, see the end, in some degree, in virtue 
 of our transcendence, even though the future stages to 
 that end are wholly unknown to us. This, we have 
 already argued, must be true of God. 
 
 Yet there is no question of a double consciousness in 
 us, even though in some degree, and at some time, we 
 see the whole as being-accomplished (note the idea of 
 completeness and finality that this present-past phrase 
 suggests). We do this through our transcendent con- 
 sciousness, yet all the while we know that things are 
 working out in Time in duration serially. 
 
 One can, in fact, and does, accept without any sense 
 of incongruity these two irreconcileables of immanent 
 and transcendent knowledge in oneself. 
 
 Let us admit the truth of this, and turn to the parallel 
 God-consciousness. 
 
 One can understand that, God being perfectly Trans- 
 cendent, He sees everything as being-accomplished, al- 
 ready present as a Whole. The life-struggle, the pain, 
 the self-surrender, are as integral and necessary parts of 
 that Whole as is His own self -experience, for they are 
 implicitly demanded by His character as Love. The 
 temporal series, that is to say, is a necessary part of the 
 whole; just as the light -giving of the moon is an integral 
 part of what the moon represents to us. Yet we know 
 that the light is only there because the sun shines on 
 her; it is the reflecting power of real moon that makes
 
 vin] The Evolution of Transcendence 233 
 
 the sun's light visible. So for God, the temporal series is 
 real, and contains contingency, even while reality is con- 
 ditioned by something more absolutely real; even while 
 in a higher plane He sees the whole. 
 
 Moreover, His transcendent consciousness is really 
 saved from pure passiveness, which would be nothing- 
 ness, by the coexistence of His immanent consciousness. 
 Transcendent consciousness alone could not be self- 
 existent unless it were substantiated by immanence, for 
 both are parts of one active whole. That whole is Love 
 or Fellowship, and Love is active; cannot rest content 
 with pure self-experience, but must ever be creating 
 something new. If it could rest content and self-ab- 
 sorbed it would not be Love. Self-surrender, renuncia- 
 tion, and so immanence, are part of Love's Being. God 
 must be eternally creative, or He would not be Himself; 
 and our eternal life is to participate in that creative 
 activity through perfect communion. The creative- 
 series is absolute and eternal for Him; even though 
 change and duration are real, and His experience is 
 receiving addition in time, in order that it may be sub- 
 stantiated as itself and retain its eternal character as 
 being simply whole and perfect. 
 
 In His transcendent experience the stress is on the 
 Whole; but the Whole is only a whole because the ex- 
 perience of self -surrender, and of the immanence and 
 time-series this connotes, is real too, on a lower plane. 
 
 What do we mean by "on a lower plane"? Simply 
 that immanence is derivative, however true it be to say 
 that it is essential to the substantiation of Transcendent 
 Love. Because of Transcendent Love, immanence ex- 
 ists love's work. Transcendence preserves its character 
 by, but does not owe it to, immanence, while immanence is 
 solely conditioned by the higher reality of transcendence, 
 apart from which it has no point of contact with the absolute 
 and unconditioned.
 
 234 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 Now another point looms up and apparently leads us 
 away from our argument concerning the dual conscious- 
 ness. We shall find, however, that so far from leading 
 us away, it is immediately seen as another road of ap- 
 proach. 
 
 If union between God and men is to be complete, God 
 must as we have so often said experience the same 
 as men 1 . For Him, too, there must be experience of con- 
 ditions where the stress is on the temporal series. To 
 this end God becomes Incarnate, as true Man. For 
 Christ, as for other men, eternal and temporal are both 
 present, in their differing degrees of reality. 
 
 None the less, the question of dual consciousness 
 reaches its acutest form in the Incarnation. Christ was 
 man. We have argued that unless His experience of 
 manhood was identical with ours the Incarnation and 
 Atonement would seem to be pointless, because not ful- 
 filling the only condition that could make them valid 
 for their purpose. God must have divested Himself of 
 Godhead's powers when He became Incarnate. Yet 
 Christ was God, we say, and God remained Transcendent 
 and Immanent apart from Christhood. If Christ had no 
 knowledge of His self-identity with Godhead how could 
 He be God at all? We lately dismissed the theory of 
 
 1 Even, as the Man Christ Jesus, to the possibility of sin. The 
 struggle, the possibility of limiting divine immanence by an ill 
 will, must have been actual for Him. The distinction which Platt 
 appears to draw (Immanence and Christian Thought, in. 6) between 
 human and divine immanence cannot be maintained in the ulti- 
 mate resort, for God, as Christ, must experience the full nature 
 of humanity's limitations, yet Christ must be God. This same 
 error becomes very prominent where Platt by implication iso- 
 lates the creation of the physical universe from the creation of 
 man, distinguishing between the types of immanence that they 
 involve (ibid., p. 243). Any loss of touch with the Wholeness of 
 Reality must be fatal to our thought.
 
 vin] The Evolution of Transcendence 235 
 
 transmigration on just these grounds that without 
 conscious identity, identity is meaningless. 
 
 We will face this last point first, for if really depends 
 on a confusion of thought. The doctrine of transmigra- 
 tion is an ethical doctrine which attempts to solve the 
 moral problem of the universe by desiderating successive 
 incarnations. Our objection was, that the moral pro- 
 blem was left unsolved if the being was not aware that 
 in each stage he was receiving the due reward of deeds 
 in former lives, because there would merely be an entity 
 that was rewarded or punished for another entity's 
 doings. Without experienced continuity the moral pro- 
 blem is no nearer to solution, because in each stage the 
 being is conscious of his own sufferings and joys, but not 
 of any previous existence whose actions determined 
 these. From this point of view we urged that a re- 
 incarnation would not be the reincarnation of the same 
 person. Further, it is important to note that each 
 successive incarnation is imposed from without, as a 
 judgment of the value of previous existence by an im- 
 partial and exterior judge. 
 
 All this is totally inapplicable to the Incarnation of 
 Christ. The problem here is not a moral one, and no 
 question of an outside Being imposing certain conditions 
 of Incarnation comes in. God ' chose ' for Himself, as a 
 necessary part of the whole, implicit in the self-deter- 
 mination of his Being as Love, that He must become 
 Incarnate. Without Incarnation the complete identity 
 of experience between God and men, which is the neces- 
 sary presupposition of perfect union, would be impos- 
 sible ; so creation would be vain. 
 
 Thus, though Christ did not experience the full con- 
 sciousness of the Eternal series, God did experience the 
 full consciousness of Christhood. The greater includes 
 the less, but not the less the greater. There is no question, 
 then, of dual consciousness or of lost identity, but only
 
 236 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 of the fulfilling of self-limitation. The possibility of all 
 this is characteristic of personality, for Koivwia means 
 self-limitation in its first movement self-limitation 
 which vanishes in the fulfilment of reciprocity. 
 
 Let us turn back once more to man and see if, in the 
 light of what we have just said, we can gain further 
 illumination on the difficulty of Christhood. 
 
 We must not forget that, because God is immanent, 
 He is necessarily incarnate in each of us. This is not an 
 incarnation that could fulfil the union between man and 
 God, however, for it is only through communion with 
 our individually unique spirits that He is incarnate ; it is 
 so to speak a mediate, not an absolute or immediate in- 
 carnation; and the communion cannot be perfect, be- 
 cause of sin. None the less He is incarnate in us, and in 
 us Christ dies daily and the world is daily redeemed 1 . 
 
 God is also Indwelling Spirit, and the Transcendent 
 One. All processes make up one Whole. Further, in 
 us is found the same absence of full consciousness of the 
 Eternal series that we found in Christ, and yet some- 
 thing of the same touch with the Eternal, through the 
 Transcendent God, and necessarily so, if Christ was 
 true man ; the experience of man and of Christ must be 
 identical. When we men enwrap ourselves wholly in 
 reasoning about the temporal series we fail to grasp the 
 eternal at all. Yet when we reach out to the eternal the 
 temporal remains real to us, and indeed only becomes 
 the more important as we realise its inter-relations with 
 the Eternal Whole the relativeness of its reality. 
 Evolving personality means for us evolving self-limi- 
 tation ; and when we discover this final purpose of free- 
 dom we become immanent in, instead of being merely 
 limited externally by, the material which we subordinate 
 to our will. 
 
 Sonship in man is indeed begotten only of fatherhood 
 1 Cf. Pringle Pattison, op. cit. p. 270.
 
 vin] The Evolution of Transcendence 237 
 
 of conscious will and it is only realised through the 
 perpetual indwelling of spirit. This lost sight of, will 
 becomes aimless; mediating activity is directed to no 
 goal; true unity is gone. Indwelling is the realisation 
 of sonship, as fulfilling the active will of fatherhood. 
 Fatherhood can only be itself through the coexistence 
 of the other two. Personality is a whole, and being whole 
 itself, can reach out and touch the wholeness of Reality, 
 which is itself Personal self-experience, even though it 
 cannot embrace and comprehend it fully, till outside 
 limitation be wholly swallowed up in transcendence and 
 in the self-limitation that comes with that. 
 
 This is only another way of stating what we have 
 already said that human personality is only estab- 
 lished when true immanence begins purposive in- 
 dwelling when the phenomenal series is recognised as 
 temporal, contrasted with, yet complementary to, the 
 eternal series. Immanence and transcendence are abso- 
 lutely correlative and complementary, because of the 
 nature of personality. Fatherhood, sonship, and spirit- 
 hood are the basis of Koiwvla, whether for God or 
 man. Personality is the ground-work of Love: the 
 capacity for fellowship; and man's personality is the 
 same as God's. 
 
 We see, then, that the problem of a double conscious- 
 ness in God is artificial the result of a pragmatic 
 necessity for beings who live and act in a material en- 
 vironment to deal with parts as if they were the whole, 
 to treat the relatively real as absolute reality. 
 
 This practical necessity Infiltrates our thought in a 
 thoroughly undesirable way. We cannot help doing in 
 thought what we are accustomed to do when some chain 
 of events calls for action, namely, ringing round a 
 certain number of ideas about obviously related con- 
 crete facts as a closed system, deciding that these alone 
 are relevant, and making them the foundation of our
 
 238 Tke Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 thought, just as if thought moved in the same plane as 
 physical actions. 
 
 If we will only admit all the facts we see here the 
 simple truth that there cannot be two consciousnesses 
 in God, one of immanence, the other of transcendence, 
 because there are not in our own experience; which 
 experience is that of personality, and is, so, in touch with 
 the Whole which is itself conditioned by Personal Being. 
 We ourselves do not experience these two things as 
 separate. It is a matter of attention only. Sometimes 
 we concentrate on one, sometimes on the other; but 
 when we attend to the one we are perfectly aware that 
 the other is in the background, and that its presence 
 bulks equally in the completeness of the whole. 
 
 We say it is a matter of attention. Attention of what ? 
 Of the ego. The ego is a whole. And it is only a whole 
 because it comprises relations fellowship xoivcavia', 
 in short, because it is personal, and so a part of the Real 
 Whole. 
 
 God, too, is Personal; and we have seen that person- 
 ality has only one meaning. Our personality we know 
 as incomplete, but otherwise identical with that per- 
 sonality which gives the only full reality to our concep- 
 tion of Deity. We are conscious of our personality as 
 absolute, in spite of its incompleteness a consciousness 
 that would be paradoxical if personality were not the 
 Ground of Reality in the absolute sphere. Once more, 
 we know no such double consciousness as we have been 
 discussing in ourselves. Why then attribute it to the 
 Deity? Why should not His consciousness of Imman- 
 ence and Transcendence be complementary too : a matter 
 of attention, which involves no paradox because of the 
 triune, active nature of His Being? 
 
 So too with Christ. Does not the same answer hold 
 as good when God identifies Himself wholly with human 
 nature in one specific Man, as when He identifies Him-
 
 vin] The Evolution of Transcendence 239 
 
 I self, as far as our freedom offers willing harbourage, 
 with each individual man? Godhead reached the full 
 measure of immanence in Christhood, that is all, and 
 reached it from the same end as man. Christ went 
 through the experience of unconscious life within His 
 mother ; God as Christ emptied Himself even of person- 
 ality, and won it again in human-wise, that He might 
 be one with humanity to the full, through the experience 
 of the gradual dawning of consciousness in a world of 
 'others'; and through the experience of the incorpora- 
 tion of otherness, in the realisation of mediate activities, 
 through immanence. Christ had no dual consciousness, 
 but was as a man in all things. Neither had the Trans- 
 cendent God a dual experience. He plumbed the depths 
 of immanence, but He plumbed them because they were 
 a necessary part of the Eternal Whole which is Reality. 
 
 That God became Christ at a historic period of time 
 is a necessary implication of the fact that the time- 
 sequence is real in the plane of limitation. Time is real 
 for man, and so it is for God, though it does not belong 
 to the plane of absolute Reality. In immanent Christ- 
 hood God subjected Himself to Reality as known to 
 evolving personality, and eternal truth became expressed 
 in the time-series. The Historic Christ was inevitable. 
 
 We find personality to be active fellowship. It is 
 saved from the impenetrable isolation of pure unity 
 through the three-fold nature which substantiates it as 
 itself, and so, as One. Being threefold it can be itself, 
 as fellowship, through internal activity, and is thus self- 
 existent. Nevertheless, because love is in its essence 
 centrifugal, craving that the perfectness of all its ex- 
 perience should be shared, it must ever be externally 
 creative. Though personality is self -existent, the idea of 
 God-before-Creation contains acontradiction, since, with- 
 out being creative, God could not be a Person. Does 
 this seem a paradox that God should be self-existent,
 
 240 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. 
 
 yet only be so by creating others to share His existence? 
 Does not such a statement imply that His existence is 
 conditional, not absolute? Only, surely, if we draw an 
 unreal line between Being and Process, forgetting that 
 Being t's Process, since only active Being has any 
 meaning. God is the Ground, but the consequence is 
 involved in the very nature of the Ground. Transcend- 
 ence cannot be isolated from immanence, or it ceases 
 to be transcendence. Personality cannot be isolated 
 from creative activity, or it ceases to be personality. 
 Personality is self -existent because it is the complete and 
 active whole. God s Love apart from any attributes 
 (or self-manifestations); but yet He would not be Love 
 if He did not manifest Himself as such through His 
 attributes. The attributes are the essential index of His 
 Absolute Being. Process flows inevitably from Being 
 to fulfil the wholeness of Reality. This it is that the 
 doctrine of the Holy Trinity brings out. God is One 
 because He is Three. He is Three because He is self- 
 existent Love. He is self -existent Love because He eter- 
 nally makes, substantiates and vindicates Himself as 
 Love through perpetual self-surrender, self-limitation, 
 in order to share His Being with others who shall be able 
 freely to participate in it. The Whole is whole simply 
 because its wholeness is perpetually reaffirmed by pro- 
 cess. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is simply the 
 affirmation of the basal truth that God is Personal. 
 
 In man we see process fulfilling its purpose. Men 
 start in conditions of external determination by the 
 'otherness' of matter. They win to self-determination 
 through the concurrently achieved knowledge of trans- 
 cendence and immanence. Their growing freedom is 
 signalised by growing, purposive self-limitation. All 
 the evidence points to the final completeness of this self- 
 limitation for the sake of xoivtavia. When it is com- 
 plete, man's experience must become identical with
 
 vin] The Evolution of Transcendence 24 1 
 
 God's, for complete immanence implies complete trans- 
 cendence. 
 
 The identity of the experience of human personality 
 and divine personality the identity of Reality for man 
 and God is the guarantee of human immortality. Men 
 cannot simply enjoy a vicarious immortality in some 
 higher, worthier descendant, because immortality is a 
 personal experience, and personal experience deter- 
 mines the nature of Reality; because the Kingdom of 
 Heaven is within us even now, and we already know 
 eternal life. The plurality with which we are in daily 
 contact is but the index of a process in us that is yet un- 
 finished. In completed, perfect union with God the 
 Oneness of the Whole will be vindicated and shine forth 
 as the great light illuminating all dark places, yet we 
 shall retain the self-identity which is the hall mark of 
 personal Being. 
 
 The difficulty of Ultimate Truth lies in its vast sim- 
 plicity. It takes all the running that we can do to stay 
 in the same place, if we try to follow philosophy. But 
 after running the Red Queen lets us rest awhile, and even 
 refreshes us with a dry biscuit or two. The biscuits may 
 be nourishing, but they cannot quench our thirst. Not 
 to the Philosophic Queen do we turn when we really 
 need the water of life. None the less the killing race to 
 keep up with her, the dry nourishment that is our re- 
 ward when we are allowed to pause, the first shock of 
 disappointment when we find ourselves still under the 
 same tree, have their uses. We must take exercise if we 
 would remain healthy, and it is a great thing to know 
 that all our wanderings end in the familiar scenes, where 
 we shall find those who are too young, or too old, or too 
 feeble to run, waiting to welcome us under the shadow 
 of the old Home-Tree; to find that they were right after 
 all when they said that all our running could not get us 
 further; and to sit down and munch our reward, the dry 
 
 MOD.
 
 242 The Evolution of Transcendence [CH. vin 
 
 knowledge of why they were right, with thankfulness, 
 knowing that the joy of quenching our thirst with living 
 water will be the greater. 
 
 The Ultimate Truth is that " God is Love " ; from this 
 we start out, to it we return again, and find that all the 
 while we were under its shadow.
 
 APPENDIX A 
 
 NOTE ON FREUD'S CONCEPTION OF THE 
 CENSOR 
 
 THE psychology of Freud and his school, although so 
 far-reaching and possessed already of so large a litera- 
 ture, periodical and other, is yet so new that it is ex- 
 tremely difficult to frame a satisfactory critique of any 
 part of it. This is especially the case for those who ap- 
 proach it with prepossessions in favour of any idealist 
 or even libertarian philosophy, for Freud himself, like 
 most, I believe, of his followers, is an uncompromising 
 materialist and determinist. 
 
 Perhaps the most obvious flaw in his determinist 
 philosophy is that to which attention has already been 
 drawn. Whatever its nature, whatever the factors that 
 determine its activities, the censor undoubtedly urges 
 us forward to some end. This, as we have seen, Freud 
 himself admits (see p. 161). When we ask to what end, 
 the answer can only be "progress," and we are brought 
 up once more against the familiar question "What is 
 progress?" to which question we found a clear answer, 
 from biological considerations, in the earlier chapters of 
 Evolution and the Need of Atonement. And this new psy- 
 chology does not seem to me to introduce any fresh 
 factor that would make us revise our conclusions; it 
 merely teaches us more of the mechanism. 
 
 The matter cannot be dismissed thus lightly, however, 
 for in the idea of progress itself there is no necessary 
 accompaniment of freedom. Only if we can show that 
 progress is, and connotes of necessity, progress in free- 
 dom, can we free ourselves from the incubus of deter- 
 minism. And all the evidence of psycho-analysis points 
 
 16 a
 
 244 Note on Freud's Censor [APP. 
 
 towards the purest determinism at first sight. We must 
 therefore discuss these points in more detail. 
 
 In one case which I have come across within a few 
 days of writing these lines, not personally, but which 
 was related to me by the doctor who is treating it, with- 
 out, of course, giving any clue as to the identity of the 
 patient, the end for which the censor is working is 
 suicide. Unfortunately, from the nature of the case, 
 which those acquainted with the treatment and meaning 
 of repression-complexes may readily make a guess at, 
 I cannot, in a book of the present kind, discuss the 
 symptoms and their origin in detail. But I will attempt 
 to draw such conclusions as I can without doing this 1 . 
 
 The patient had no inclination towards normal 
 pleasures even within perfectly legitimate bounds. He 
 had however a strong leaning towards abnormal ones, 
 which leaning was completely repressed into the un- 
 conscious. This repression, combined with other com- 
 plications to which detailed reference is needless for the 
 present purpose hatred of a brutal uncle (with whom 
 the patient lived) dating from childhood; an equally 
 early poison-complex associated with mercury, to which 
 in later years a suicide-complex associated with morphia 
 became attached ; an anti-religious complex dating from 
 the fifth year resulted in acute physical illness of a 
 grave character. 
 
 When the cause of the repression was brought into 
 consciousness, under treatment, it immediately pro- 
 duced intense loathing. The final result was, that the 
 patient felt himself entirely cut off from all human 
 fellowship 2 , and the only refuge seemed to be suicide. 
 
 1 The details of the case have been slightly altered, and much 
 has been omitted and suppressed, in order to prevent any likeli- 
 hood of recognition, but the main peculiarities are still clearly 
 indicated. 
 
 1 This was partly the result of brutal suggestions on the part of
 
 A] Note on Freud's Censor 245 
 
 The difficulty was further increased by a dissociation of 
 personality of long standing. In the predominant per- 
 sonality all memory of the cause of the trouble was re- 
 pressed by the censor, while its results the suicide im- 
 pulse remained. Hence the great difficulty of treating 
 the case. For example, as long as the mercury-complex 
 could be kept in memory, all danger of suicide was 
 avoided ; but it was constantly destroyed by the second 
 personality, and the associated morphia-complex pro- 
 duced repeated attempts at suicide. The same was true 
 of the uncle-complex, which induced fear of crowds. In 
 both instances we have an example of re-repression by 
 the second personality a unique case, as far as I know. 
 Whether it will prove possible either to recombine the 
 dual personality, or to reinforce the will-to-live in the 
 dominant personality by suggestion, or to instate the 
 attraction towards normal pleasures, remains to be seen. 
 The case is still under treatment, but the prospects are 
 dark 1 . Its interest for us lies in the fact that the censor 
 is here playing a maleficent part, urging towards suicide, 
 and seems to be totally independent of the higher will of 
 the patient. In reviewing the problems suggested by this 
 fact, we may first note that the influence of the censor 
 is directed still towards an end, though an unsatisfac- 
 tory one; it is still purposive. Secondly, we observe 
 that the case is entirely abnormal, since we have to do 
 with a split personality. But even allowing for these 
 facts its difficulty must be recognised. The character- 
 istic action of the censor is clearly marked, and is un- 
 
 the uncle that everyone would hate him and he would always be 
 alone another childhood memory. 
 
 1 There are now indications of a re-combination of the two 
 personalities. Some memories of minor complexes have ceased to 
 be repressed in the dominant personality, and there is some 
 ground for hoping that the two may be ultimately fused, when all 
 danger will be at an end.
 
 246 Note on Freud s Censor [APP. 
 
 questionably directed towards an end which is not for 
 the progress of the patient ; and further, it seems to be 
 absolutely determined. 
 
 On the other hand before the patient seem to lie two 
 possibilities, and two only ; the greater evil of abnormal 
 pleasure from which his soul revolts, and the lesser evil 
 of suicide. I cannot help suspecting that it is a false 
 reading of the evidence to say that the impulse to suicide 
 is due to the feeling of isolation. I am inclined to think 
 that, if all goes well, time will show that the real source 
 of that impulse is not fear of isolation, but the reverse, 
 the fear of over-intimacy of a particular kind that is 
 dreaded fear of temptation 1 . If this be the true inter- 
 pretation, the difficulty vanishes. The censor becomes 
 once more a moral agent, and not purely determined. 
 
 Another possible explanation is, that the censor con- 
 cerned is that between the unconscious and the fore- 
 conscious (Freud's terminology), not that between the 
 foreconscious and the conscious, if Freud is right in his 
 theory of the double censorship. 
 
 But is he? The function of the censor seems to be to 
 prevent certain psychic formations from entering con- 
 sciousness. But the foreconscious is no more conscious 
 than the unconscious. (We must remember that Freud 
 gives a special meaning to the term unconscious, and 
 that neither his unconscious nor his foreconscious is in 
 consciousness. Both come under the term unconscious 
 in ordinary psychology.) If then there is a censor be- 
 tween the unconscious and the foreconscious its function 
 must be totally different from that of the true censor. 
 If one can attach any meaning at all to the idea, this 
 lower censor must simply represent the inhibition of un- 
 
 1 Closely associated with this is an anti-religious complex a 
 hatred of Christ dating from the fifth year, due to a brutal 
 attack by one who called himself Jesus and threatened eternal 
 damnation. Escape from the results of this complex is unlikely.
 
 A] Note on Freud's Censor 247 
 
 conscious acts that would tend to undesirable habit- 
 formation. Such an inhibition may be conceived as 
 active in the lower animals, and even in man, though 
 the evidence for this type of inhibition, if it exists, is un- 
 known to me. Undesirable acts are doubtless inhibited, 
 and we call the inhibitory mechanism by what name we 
 like; but to call it a censor seems to me unjustifiable, 
 since the word censor connotes the mechanism which 
 prevents certain kinds of psychic material from entering 
 consciousness, and no consciousness comes in in this case. 
 Would it not indeed be truer to say that the sphere of 
 action of the one censor 1 extends to the unconscious as 
 well as the foreconscious? That is intelligible at least; 
 Freud's suggestion seems to me unintelligible. If there 
 is a lower censor, and this censor does represent inhibi- 
 tions that occur in animals as well as men, clearly the 
 difficulty of the case we are considering vanishes, for 
 consciousness is not involved directly in the repression 
 which is tending towards suicide, and where there is no 
 consciousness there can be no moral problem. Merely, 
 the mechanism is faced with a dilemma, and owing to 
 diseased conditions in the brain-paths the morally 
 wrong solution if morality comes in, which it does not, 
 except by unjustified projection of the onlooker's mind 
 into conditions he only partly understands is adopted. 
 But such an explanation seems to me to be far-fetched, 
 and to depend on the very doubtful existence of a hypo- 
 thetical lower censor, which can only be stated to be a 
 censor if one gives a meaning to the word differing en- 
 tirely from its normal one. Let us then see on what 
 grounds Freud assumes the existence of this queer 
 phenomenon. 
 
 Freud's greatest contribution to psychology is his de- 
 monstration that consciousness is not coextensive with 
 psychic processes; that unconscious psychic processes 
 
 1 In the sense in which we have elsewhere denned it (see p. 162).
 
 248 Note on Freud 's Censor [APP. 
 
 exist and play a vast part in our life, and that the con- 
 sciousness is really an organ for perceiving psychic pro- 
 cesses. Given, then, these unconscious psychic forma- 
 tions, he is compelled, by the analysis of dream states 
 and of hysterical and other psycho-neurotic phenomena, 
 to adopt a belief in the existence of two layers (so to 
 speak) of these formations, of which he terms the most 
 primitive, and indeed the primary one, the unconscious, 
 the other, in which the streams of psychic process flow, 
 he terms the foreconscious. It is impossible to give the 
 reasons for such an assumption here, but the facts 
 appear to justify it. He then finds a resistance which 
 prevents wishes, for example, which are in the uncon- 
 scious from entering the more active stream of the fore- 
 conscious. To this resistance he applies the name of 
 censor. But why? Apparently because he finds a 
 similar resistance checking the intrusion of undesirable 
 psychic formations into consciousness, and fails to see 
 how totally different the nature of the two inhibitions 
 must be, since their function is so different. For what 
 does he mean by consciousness? What is its object? 
 Freud himself, the determinist, speaks of the censor as 
 "the criticising instance... which directs our waking life 
 and determines our voluntary conscious actions" (italics 
 mine) 1 . Here is a contradiction indeed ! And it exactly 
 represents, in a few simple words, the contradiction that 
 runs all through his work. He cannot get away from 
 voluntary actions, but because there is a psychic mecha- 
 nism, he speaks of them as determined. Because this 
 theory is presented in his own mind as schematic, he 
 must banish contingency by introducing his schematic 
 system of layers of consciousness, each with its inhibi- 
 tions, as a true and complete picture of reality or if 
 not complete, only falling short by the absence of detail 
 in some matters. Scientifically, he is right to abstract 
 1 Op. cit. trans. Brill, p. 428.
 
 A] Note on Freud's Censor 249 
 
 in this way; the business of science is abstraction, and 
 only by abstraction can formal knowledge increase; but 
 to cany over the abstraction into the realm of meta- 
 physic, as he does by implication, and more, is unpar- 
 donable. This failing is manifest throughout his work 
 in regard to the censor. The tacit assumption through- 
 out is that the censor's function is to guard conscious- 
 ness; it is the conscious life that is endangered by the 
 things that get repressed; it is for the sake of conscious 
 life that they are repressed at all. The explicit state- 
 ment is that the censor does not exist in the child; for 
 the child's consciousness is not y^et developed sufficiently 
 to feel the pressure of social and other influences. And 
 in face of these facts, we find the assumption that cer- 
 tain things are excluded from the foreconscious, kept in 
 the unconscious (the material of the foreconscious being 
 itself not in consciousness) , by a censor ! This for the 
 sake of completeness in the theory put forward ! I do 
 not quarrel with any of the facts. There may well be a 
 barrier between the unconscious and the foreconscious, 
 but for sanity's sake let us remember that these things 
 are abstractions; for clarity's sake let us attach the same 
 meaning to the word ' censor ' throughout. And above 
 all, for the sake of the dignity of human reason, let us 
 not confound a useful scientific abstraction with reality. 
 In face of Freud's inconsequent and muddled reifica- 
 tion of abstractions, and confusion of terminology, I 
 cannot think we shall gain much light on our difficult 
 'case' by referring the repression to the very dubious 
 censor between the unconscious and the foreconscious, 
 thus tacitly assuming a censor of a sort in animals. The 
 whole conception of a censor seems to me to have mean- 
 ing only in reference to consciousness. To confound a 
 very helpful hypothesis with the known habit -formation 
 directed towards the Avoidance of pain or injury in all 
 living organisms, as Freud definitely does, seems to me 
 
 16 5
 
 250 Note on Freud's Censor [APP. 
 
 to be courting disaster. No doubt a mechanism such as 
 he describes must exist for this purpose. No doubt, also, 
 the avoidance of injury to the psychic arrangements 
 by harmless discharge in dreams, etc., is due to some 
 analogous (probably to a development of the same) 
 mechanism. But this must not be confounded with the 
 censor, to which its functions are ancillary. 
 
 However this may be, it seemed well to quote the 
 facts of this specific case for the sake of honesty. But 
 I cannot feel that they can justly be used as an argument 
 against the teleological function of the censor, consider- 
 ing how open they are to various interpretations, and 
 considering also how clearly that function comes out in 
 the majority of Freud's cases of repression -complexes. 
 
 Next we may consider the objection that, allowing 
 the function of the censor to be directed towards pro- 
 gress, there is still no evidence of freedom. 
 
 This contention receives support from other facts of 
 which knowledge has been gained by the study of 
 psycho-analysis. For instance, very many, if not all, 
 lapsus linguae et calami have a definite meaning, and 
 reveal the existence of repressed wishes or thoughts 1 . 
 And again, if you ask a person to say a number, however 
 large, it can often, perhaps always, be proved that a good 
 reason for saying that number, of which he was totally 
 unconscious, existed in his mind. Indeed psychoanalysts 
 will go so far as to say he could not have said any other 2 . 
 
 On the other hand, if one argues thus one neglects the 
 undeniable fact that, though a certain number rushes 
 first into one's mind, one may reject it consciously and 
 give another. In an experiment upon myself the first 
 number that entered my mind was 473, and I was able 
 partly, though not fully, and certainly not conclusively, 
 to discover the reasons for this by psycho-analysis. But 
 
 1 C. F. Freud, Psychopathology ofEvery-day Life," and E. Jones, 
 Papers on Psychoanalysis. * Ibid.
 
 A] Note on Freud's Censor 251 
 
 at the same time I was perfectly conscious that I might 
 have rejected this number, and said 10 or 25 or 32 in- 
 stead or indeed anything else. Thus all the psycho- 
 analysts manage to prove, as far as I can see, is that left 
 to itself, without the checking action of consciousness, 
 the brain and memory interact automatically and deter- 
 minately. Many thanks to them for the information! 
 I suspect most of us knew it before 1 We have already 
 argued that the development of freedom, whether of 
 mind or body, whether of intellect or purposive move- 
 ment, was inconceivable except on a determined basis 1 . 
 The determinist cause is not forwarded one millimetre 
 by this work of the new psychologists. Determinists are 
 still up against the irrefragable certainty of mankind that 
 men can choose. All they have succeeded in proving is, 
 that if a man deliberately abstains from choosing he does 
 not choose. The moment I refuse to say 473, and say 
 some other number instead, I exercise my power of 
 choice, and add one more to my evidences of freedom. 
 This kind of reasoning shows that we are exactly 
 where we were before the theory of psycho-analysis 
 dawned to irradiate the world. We have the incontro- 
 vertible fact that men believe themselves and other men 
 to be free in some measure, and that the whole fabric of 
 society rests on this belief. We have the incontrover- 
 tible fact of evolutionary progress. We have the incon- 
 trovertible fact that progress connotes increasing con- 
 trol over one's environment and one's destiny. We have, 
 finally, the strong presumption that the progress of the 
 race is made certain and even determined by the in- 
 terplay of environment and vital impulse. All these 
 matters I have discussed at length in my previous books. 
 Frankly I cannot see that these new factors have any 
 bearing on the general argument there adopted, and I 
 see no reason whatever to modify it. 
 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Lift, ch. iii.
 
 APPENDIX B 
 
 NOTE ON SOME CONCEPTIONS OF PRIMITIVE 
 RELIGION, AND THEIR POSSIBLE RELATION 
 WITH TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE 
 
 AT an early stage men apparently began to feel after 
 something that could only be satisfied by assuming a 
 dual nature in Godhead. It is difficult to trace this in 
 detail, or even to be certain of the facts, for the essen- 
 tials of early theology are not defined, and are besides 
 overlaid with the dramatic necessities of myth, and with 
 magic; while everything is confused, in the primitive 
 pantheon, by a manifold repetition of persons who over- 
 lap each other. Even this fact is perhaps instructive. 
 The need of divine sympathy and providence in every 
 happening of life is reflected in numberless minor deities 
 created to satisfy men's minds. Even to-day we see the 
 same thing, prominent as when Erasmus wrote his 
 Naufragium, in the appeal of the uneducated Roman 
 Catholic to the most suitable Saint for help in some 
 emergency. 
 
 In the polytheistic stage each God is looked upon as 
 One; yet there is a great spirit who is also One. Pure 
 unity leaves something unsatisfied, even in the primitive 
 mind. Hence the persistence of a pantheon full of com- 
 plex relationships, long after the idea of one great 
 Causal God has dawned. We find this everywhere, in 
 Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia, North America, India, 
 Mexico, as well as Rome. Pure Unity does not, appar- 
 ently, suffice. Again an attempt is made to satisfy the 
 craving of the soul, itself not recognised, by postulating 
 duality in the chief God of the moment ; though this is 
 done with but an elementary understanding of its 
 meaning. 
 
 For two obvious reasons the means by which this is
 
 APP. B] Note on some primitive conceptions 253 
 
 accomplished takes a characteristic form. The two 
 aspects become male and female; and they are not 
 truly fused, but represented by deities united in 
 marriage. Men feel themselves allied to the gods, be- 
 cause they themselves can create life. Naturally, a 
 simple anthropomorphism connects the mode of divine 
 creation with human. But since like produces like in 
 human experience, the marriage of the great gods gives 
 issue to the lesser. Further, men and earthly things 
 are generally regarded as the result of a divine fiat. Man 
 knows that he can create at his will, even if only houses 
 and weapons and offspring, and he argues that the gods 
 do the same; but that, having more powers, they can 
 create men and animals. Marriage thus typifies divine 
 creative activity, and implicitly recognises the volitional 
 and mediatorial aspects of all creation. Very dimly is 
 the likeness of men and gods understood in its deeper 
 significance. Crude anthropomorphism shows that it 
 is there, none the less. More subtly is it implied in the 
 similarity between the generative powers of gods and 
 men; and the recognition that, besides like generating 
 like, in both gods and men is the possibility of creating 
 unlikes. Men can create unorganised tools ; but the gods 
 can create matter itself, and living animals, by virtue 
 of their superior powers. Among men the best that 
 even magicians can do is make a human marriage 
 fertile or call up pre-existing spirits; but magicians 
 are hampered by an earthly tenement. The marriage 
 of the gods, then, typifies creative activity, but it does 
 more. It indicates the close bond that exists between 
 the nature of gods and men. 
 
 Our meaning may be illustrated by a few examples. 
 
 Isis was the wife of Osiris. Osiris later became confused 
 
 with Ra, the sun-god; Isis with the Moon-goddess, 
 
 according to Diodoms Siculus 1 . The great rite of Osiris 
 
 1 Diodorus. i. quoted by Fraaer.
 
 254 Note on some primitive conceptions [AFP. 
 
 ended with the erection of the Tatu pillar; and his 
 emblem was a tree, often stripped, of which facts more 
 anon. Juno was the wife of Jupiter, who was originally 
 worshipped as an oak his sole image on the Capitol 1 . 
 Hera was the wife of Zeus, who was represented by an 
 oak at Dodona 2 . So too Freya was the wife of Thor, 
 whose emblem is a hammer. The Asherah were symbols 
 of a goddess; the male and female elements are here 
 blended. Hindu mythology is so complex that to give 
 a single instance that is characteristic is difficult, for no 
 single deity in practice 8 is regarded as supreme, but we 
 may take the marriage between Lakshmi and Vishnu as 
 an example. Vishnu is frequently worshipped in the 
 guise of a pillar* the famous iron pillar at Delhi is a 
 well-known example or in the guise of a tree as, for 
 example, the sacred tree in the inner court of the great 
 temple at Puri 6 . Indeed Vishnu created the sacred 
 linga which formed the centre of the world 8 . His very 
 name, Vishnu, said in the Puranas to be derived from 
 the root vis, to enter, is suggestive. For the pillar, the 
 tree, the hammer, are ithyphallic symbols, representing 
 the power of generation, while the ring represents the 
 power of bringing forth. The one is causative, the other 
 mediatorial. 
 
 We find traces of this perhaps in the very god-names 
 themselves. It is sometimes said that the 'I' which 
 
 1 Fraser, Golden Bough, 11. p. 291, edn 1890. 
 
 1 Ibid. ii. 291. 
 
 3 Cf. Wilkins, Modern Hinduism, p. 39. "Another noticeable 
 feature of Hindu worship is the way in which each deity is ad- 
 dressed as superior to the rest. Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, Krishna, 
 Sakti, each, in turn, is regarded as the supreme, and the others 
 are said to have sprung from, or are manifestations of, the one 
 adored." 
 
 * Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, p. 50. 
 
 Wilkins, op. cit. pp. 112, 117. Ibid. p. 91.
 
 B] Note on some primitive conceptions 255 
 
 occurs in so many forms of the name of God is really the 
 symbol for a god or king, representing the power of 
 causing life. The god or king is the life-giver. It also 
 represents the unity of the god. 
 
 But soon it becomes combined with the feminine 
 symbol. IOVE, IOVAH. IOSHUA, IUNO, IUPITER. 
 probably show the two aspects of the divine nature in 
 the god-name IO. The two are combined in the orb 
 of our regalia $ , and in the ark of Isis j,, which may 
 represent the crescent moon, as perhaps does the open 
 O, or U in IUNO, IUPITER; and they may survive in 
 the broad arrow, Neptune's trident, the fleur-de-lys, etc. 
 This is at least suggested, I know not with what justi- 
 fication, in a letter from Mr H. A. Harris to the Numis- 
 matic Circular, Sept.-Oct. 1916. For us, the interesting 
 point lies in the combination of the two symbols in the 
 name of, or to represent one god. We seem to find a 
 similar significance in the planetary symbols for Jupiter 
 and Venus, and $ commonly used by zoologists to 
 denote male and female. The Logos-doctrine of Philo, 
 and the Demiurge of Persian and Gnostic theology, show 
 the existence of another aspect of the same mediatorial 
 conception; though both implicitly affirm a certain 
 degree of derivativeness, and so of inferiority, when 
 they are pressed to their logical issue. 
 
 On the whole it is true to say that the causative and 
 mediatorial functions are quickly recognised as activi- 
 ties of one being; men instinctively rebel against their 
 separation in two gods, however closely united in the 
 ties of wedlock. 
 
 But we can go still further. In very many religions 
 at any rate there is a brooding deity behind, less defi- 
 nitely pictured and again liable to be blended here is the 
 interesting point with the creator. Brahma lies behind 
 the Hindu pantheon. The spirit of God broods over the 
 waters. The Mana of savage religions is more than the
 
 256 Note on some primitive conceptions [APP. 
 
 magical rapport, to which Andrew Lang compares it 1 ; 
 it is a Spiritual Principle that lies behind everything 2 . 
 I imagine there are few, if any, religions in which this 
 Spirit cannot be traced, though it loses itself in the 
 idea of the Great Spirit or Supreme God, or sometimes 
 in the Demiurge 8 . We thus find three Divine Activities 
 vaguely resembling the three Persons of the Trinity 
 early distinguished by an instinctive theology, one 
 creative, another mediatorial, another all pervading. 
 We also find a marked tendency to fuse these into one, 
 as the need for unity grows upon man. Is it too much 
 to say that even among the Hebrews, with their com- 
 paratively pure monotheism, the remains of the older 
 thought are traceable in the sacred name of lahweh? 
 though it must be confessed that the Hebrew letters 
 miT, with their omission of the vowel sounds, show no 
 evidence of it as indeed might be expected, when we 
 remember the intense horror of the Hebrews for any- 
 thing that suggested idolatrous symbolism. Finally, 
 although among the great thinkers, whether Buddhist, 
 Hindu, or Roman Catholic, the unity of the Godhead 
 overshadows every other conception, yet among the less 
 educated we have clear evidence of the more primitive 
 stratum where the three aspects are visualised as iso- 
 lated divinities. Nay, it is not a great overstatement 
 to say that Protestant Christianity is quite definitely 
 tritheistic in all but name, except among the deepest 
 thinkers. 
 
 We find, then, that the sense of need for a godhead 
 that is dual in function, however multiple in actual 
 imagination, rests first upon a vague understanding 
 
 1 The Making of Religion, p. 199. 
 
 ' Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, passim. 
 
 H. G. Wells' Veiled Being shows an instructive return to 
 these more primitive conceptions (God the Invisible 
 metaphysically, to Kant's thing-in-itself.
 
 B] Note on some primitive conceptions 257 
 
 that creation has a causative and a mediatorial aspect. 
 It is quite true that this notion is based on inadequate 
 physiological conceptions, only partially sound But the 
 point is, that something in the human mind found a 
 satisfaction in the idea of duality that it did not gain 
 from the idea of pure unity, and fuller knowledge has 
 not banished it. A unifying principle, too, hovers in the 
 background, indicating clearly enough that the human 
 mind demands unity as well as duality, though it tries 
 to gain this queerly enough through the conception of 
 an impersonal essence of some kind, in which the two 
 creative aspects are sometimes unified, while sometimes 
 it seems to provide but a third kind of spiritual reality, 
 impersonal, and coexistent with the personal gods. It 
 may be said that to argue thus is to import unjustified 
 subtleties into a primitive conception that is, after all, 
 very simple. Male and female are needed for human 
 creation; well then, what more natural than to ima- 
 gine male and female necessary for, or at least symbolic 
 of, divine creation? Such a contention does not take 
 account of the vital fact that the dual conception per- 
 sists when man is no longer primitive. I believe that 
 the true way to gain insight into primitive religion is to 
 focus one's attention on the germ of truth, as it grows 
 into a great stem; not on the fallen leaves of dead years. 
 Leaves, as they fall, rid the tree of waste products; 
 their loss is a mode of excretion. Fetishism has gone, 
 or is going, but the truth of fetishism survives, and we 
 may read it in the words imputed in the Logia to Christ, 
 "Raise the stone, and thou shalt find Me; cleave the 
 wood, and I am there." Animism is dead, but its truth 
 remains in the doctrine of Immanence, and in the theory 
 of the relation between body and mind 1 . Sacrifice is 
 dead, but its truth lives on in sacrament and atonement. 
 It is sounder to trace the development of a germ of truth 
 > Cf . MacDougall, Body and Mind.
 
 258 Note on some primitive conceptions [APP. B 
 
 that lies hidden in the humblest religion than to lecture 
 on the outrageous externals that doomed a fossil belief. 
 Evolutionary biology would not have gone far if students 
 had merely had their attention directed to the pompous 
 futility of the glyptodonts, the comic inadequacy of the 
 dodo, or the irritating perversity of the vermiform ap- 
 pendix. In Comparative Religion and in Biology alike, 
 it is the fact of progress that matters : the fact that each 
 shows a process of unfolding. To lay stress on freakish- 
 ness alone shows hopeless lack of grasp. So here. We 
 have in Christianity a dual conception of the activity 
 of God; we find a dual conception of all creative activity 
 permeating earlier religions. Surely it is the part of a 
 wise man to admit that there is a direct connection and 
 sequence between the two, however freely we have to 
 admit that the grounds on which primitive man postu- 
 lated duality were inadequate and mistaken. The fact 
 that in duality he found satisfaction of an instinct, how- 
 ever vague, is what really matters. I believe that a true 
 instinct also underlies his search for a unifying principle 
 in an all-pervading spiritual essence, even if he goes 
 wrong in making the personality of the gods derivative 
 and not primary. He feels the need of unity, of duality, 
 and of personality in the Godhead, and in his simple way 
 he offers the best solution he can. 
 
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