should not concern itself with mere subjective truths or representations, but with a real Divine Ego-One who can hear, and help, and save us? We have surely now seen that Biedermann's assumed freedom from arbitrariness (nicht willkürlich) has not kept him from—arbitrarily, as we think-ascribing to spirit, since he so holds the Absolute to be spirit, a freedom from limitation which he inconsistently denies to personality. But in this way is it hoped to avert the reproach of pantheism while thus denying the personality of God. But when Biedermann allows personality to be the adequate form of representation for the Christian idea of God, is it not a poor Personality that is so easily dissipated before the thought process?

Lipsius holds to an infinite will and consciousness as necessary to our thought-to spirit which is personal, self-conscious, and self-determining. The thought of His personality we reach (via eminentiæ) on the path of gradation or ascent (Steigerung): the thought of His absoluteness we reach (viấ negationis) by the path of negation. Lipsius sets forth at length the time and space difficulties in relation to the absolute consciousness and will. But he knows no way of reconciling the personality of Deity with His absoluteness, since our hold of the Absolute Personality is not due to objective theoretic knowledge of the Divine Essence—a knowledge which transcends us. Indeed, God's personality is to him a mere figurative

CRITICISM OF GERMAN DEVELOPMENTS.

311

expression (bildlicher Ausdruck), whose objective worth is not apparent to us. But then, the religious consciousness gives its testimony (Aussage) to the Divine Personality, and does so in the clearest possible manner, according to the language employed by Lipsius. In religious relations, according to him, God makes Himself known to the pious as personal Deity, as a THOU over against the human I, just as man in prayer places himself over against God. Yes, but if we can by not categories of thought lay hold of the transcendent reality, no immediate religious experience can prove the truth of the Divine Personality, or do more than bring us under the influence of a purely subjective illusion. Yet this is just the practical result to which Lipsius must be held to lead us, for he deems the critical understanding justified in all the artillery it directs against the notion of personality in God whenever that testimony of the religious consciousness is turned to metaphysical account in the interests of the objective being of God in Himself.

There need be no insensibility to the worth of Professor Pfleiderer's fine spiritualism in remarking that, while ranking himself among those who hold God as at least-whatever more He may be-personal, he straightway eviscerates personality in Deity of such real content as we find in the personality of man, self-determining and free. As to His freedom of agency, Pfleiderer's Deity stands

related, in a system tinged with Naturalism, to the world in such wise that He is precluded under any circumstance from miraculous interference. Finely, no doubt-though with what self-consistency is another matter-has Pfleiderer said that "if we are shut off from each other by the limits of individuality, in relation to God it is not so: to Him our hearts are as open as each man's own heart is to himself; He sees through and through them, and He desires to live in them and to fill them with His own sacred energy and blessedness.”

Let it be here said that we find no great colour of likelihood in the idea of those who think religious inwardness may be strengthened by the socalled pantheistic representations of God. To point to experience as showing the possibility of fervid surrender through the pantheistic intuition is to overlook of what weak sort such pantheism is. Such intuition, fancy-fed, as we find, where religious inwardness reigns, must be quite unacceptable to philosophic pantheism, which puts at a distance every determination of Deity. But can any philosophy of theism regard the religious interest as surrendering itself to denuded or undetermined Deity? Can it do without an actual Divinity, to Whom we owe not only life, but also the absolute worth imparted unto life by its supreme end being communion with the Deity? Can it forget that this implies such an active relation and influence, on the part of Deity toward us, as shall

CRITICISM OF IMMANENCE SYSTEMS.

313

overpass any mere relation of causality? Theistic Philosophy has pressed on to such conception of absolute personality as shall, in a true elevation (Aufhebung) or reconcilement, satisfy the Christian concept of God, the Scylla of the naked transcendence of Acosmism being shunned equally with the Charybdis of the stale transcendence of Deism. We do not find any conclusive force in the exception which has been taken to Dr Martineau's doctrine of Some-Transcendency, because of his holding creation to be an eternal act. We grant that transcendence may, everything considered, be thereby more difficult of conception; but the reasons urged do not seem to us to be sufficient to warrant theistic philosophy in abandoning transcendence as belonging to its complete conception of the personality and freedom of God as the supra-mundane, selfexisting subject. We are, therefore, with Lotze when he asks whether it is not effrontery to narrow down the Spirit of the universe to a series of events on this planet. Such a true and transcendent existence for Himself we must postulate for Deity, if we would not have the immanence tendencies of to-day leave us with no Deity but the impotent God of pantheism. It does not seem as though our spiritual life could rise to independence without raising itself to a supernatural or transcendent connection, although it must, for the maintenance of real contents, instantly return to the world that is here. In fact, it is this ceaseless movement be

tween the two which seems to fill our spiritual life with real contents, and to bring a constant deepening of our being. Our fundamental conception of reality must be so vast that the supernatural or transcendent is no mere ulterior thing for us.

It should in this connection be borne in mind. that the votaries of pure immanence-systems have not extricated themselves from the difficulty in which the fact of evil has placed them. For what place for evil should be found in a system of immanent reason only? It deserves to be more specifically noted than has yet been done by us that recent theistic philosophy has quite decidedly left behind the haltings of those who in recent years have predicated reason and freedom of the Absolute Being, to which they apply the term spirit, and from which they withhold true conscious personality. For it sees how manifestly they have failed as yet to distinguish with thoroughness between the accidents of personality and its essence, to the latter of which the limitation supposed to attach to personality does not belong. What more absurd than this treating personality as a limitation, when, in its self-developing and all-embracing activity, it really forms the outlet by which limitation is eluded! We regard the objections to the personality of God which have come from the theistic side as wanting in validity by reason of the fact that they set out from a representation of the infinity of God at once untenable—as we

pan