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extent, therefore, infinity may be predicated of them. In short, determination is, on Fichte's system, synonymous with finiteness. His pure ego is too palpably conceived through abstraction ever to subsist really for itself, and in his search for the fundamental principle or "fact-action" (Thathandlung), which he sets out by seeking, he conducts us at once to a vain and void infinite and outgoing activity-a Being absolute, impersonal, and inconceivable. No satisfactory conception of personality may be reached by his process of hypostatising the Divine Self, but the honour is his of having looked the problem of Divine Being in the face, and grappled long and nobly with it. Having thus indicated so clearly our own view of his position, it will not be strange if we be found to agree with a judgment which says: "Fichte, the sublime idealist, was withheld from seeing God by no obtruding veil of a material universe. Fichte, if any man ever did, recognised the moral order of the world. But Fichte-living indeed the blessed life in God-yet annihilated for thought his own personality and that of God, in the infinity of this moral order." This practical denial of a personal Absolute by Fichte is growing more apparent to philosophical criticism, we certainly believe. Not less apparent ought also to be the facts of Fichte's implication in illicit ways of this very Absolute as personal, and the strangeness of such denial in a system that makes consciousness so absolute.

As for Schleiermacher, his speculative power came short of wholly transcending the Spinozan influence, which in its idea of substance still clave unto him, causing him when dealing with God— Who is, to use a phrase of his own, "the absolutely spaceless causality"—to oppose personality in fact while not in name. He preferred stress on the living causality of God, the term "personal" carrying for him limitations of the Deity which he did not attach to the epithet "living." His is the merit of having rendered evident the need to construct a doctrine of Deity that should possess the virtue of consistency. The attractive and rational mysticism of Krause was able, at the beginning of this century, to embody a theism which recognised the Divine Immanence in all the wondrous manifestations of its life, as Krause's writings-though unfortunate in their terminology-show. It was Krause's aim to unite the pantheistic world-view of idealism with the conception of Divine Personality. The Wesen or Essence as he likes to term the Deity-is to him no indifferent Reason, but the living and personal World-Ground. For personality-the thing if not without a certain aversion to the namehe found a place in God, when-like Baader-he would, in his "panentheism," seek a theism in which justice should be done to monistic elements. When Amiel, however, inveighs against what he calls the fanatical adherents of transcendence, than whose "dogmatic supernaturalism," he says, "the panen

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theism of Krause is ten times more religious," it becomes necessary to ask whether the fanatical tendency-why should such be?-has not become transferred in our time to the direction of immanence.

Not without some interest as preface or prelude of personality have been certain very recent efforts in Germany to view the consciousness of reality or transcendence as a new kind of consciousness-to take consciousness for this end from its psychological (Erfahrung) rather than its metaphysical (Vorgang) side, and find in the consciousness of reality as a transcendent thing a strictly psychological datum-one, too, of prime significance. Of course this consciousness is not the reality, but reality-which is the transcendent-is that from which the consciousness springs. Reality or transcendence is taken on this view to be the something of consciousness in its primary psychological aspect. On the problem of personality on which we are here engaged, there is good reason for gratefully recalling the noble note sounded by Julius Müller when he showed how a philosophy which could not do justice to “personality and freedom" as principles of real life is the "born foe of Christianity and theology, and excludes the idea of their harmonious progress or their mutual enlargement." He declared that a philosophy which truly realises the principle of personality in God and in man is "the natural ally of Christianity." To him our belief in God springs out of the consciousness of our own personality as

finite, yet as wholly unlike the world without us, and by him God is set above the laws of nature, so free and personal is He. Such were his affirmations touching theistic philosophy, even though it should, he said, be sometimes found to harbour contradictions respecting particular doctrines. Weisse, again, in his speculation-to which that of Rothe was so near of kin-held to an idea of Deity which made Him personal, but threefold was the personality in which He reached actuality-reached it in time as personality and love. I. H. Fichte was able, in treating of speculative theism, to postulate a rational and immanent, yet independent, Creator, and to speak of personality as the only real existence, the one true reality (das allein wahrhaft existirende). Dorner, Frank, and others have given explication to the positions of those who, recognising the merits of his idealism, cannot, with Hegel, make God only the World-Spirit (Weltgeist), and withhold from Him personality under fear of reducing or limiting His absoluteness. Finely has Dorner shown that definiteness in Deity does not mean limitation or imply imperfection, but the reverseperfection in Him on Whom all other existences depend. A limitation, he contends, God may be to us, but not we to Him, "the absolute Causality." Dorner contends for the Absolute Personality of God both from the ethical side of Will and from the side of Knowledge as Absolute Intelligence; and the guarantee of this Absolute Personality both

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he and Frank seek in the truth of the Triune God. This does also Sartorius,—to whom "God is love -personal, primal love,"-after his own fashion. This principle of love it was which Liebner also invoked in order to solve the apparent contradiction of more persons than one in the Godhead, and to give them still full personality through their unity. The Divine Essence had been already conceived by Nitzsch as Spirit, as Love and as Lord, comprehended as personal goodness (unendliches persönliches Gute). "If God be conceived as the primal Ego, and from this basis begets an objective alter Ego, this thesis and antithesis still remain severed or incomplete until a third Ego proceeds from the Divine essence through the medium of the second, and thus the personality is fully consummated." Also, by Rothe and Thomasius, the Divine Essence was represented as having absolute or perfect personality entering into its definition. Starting, in the Schellingian style, from the Absolute as Causa Sui, Rothe works, from a Deity Who is primarily indifferent Being, up to His actuality-in a timeless process in the twofold form of personality and nature. In his later positions, Rothe made the Divine potentiality-and not nature as he earlier held-the spring of His personality, which personality in its turn determined His further self-actualisation. Thomasius laid emphasis on the will element as an essential moment of the Absolute Personality, while Philippi-in an opposing spirit—emphasised

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