Recent theistic philosophy of religion has brought out with more distinctness the freedom there is in all this from any pantheistic identification or fusion of the finite spirit with the Infinite, since the individuality of the human spirit here reaches "its intensest specification," and its true personality is neither absorbed in a Deity purely personal, nor sublimated into an efflux of One with but quasi Personality. For it has more jealously guarded the reality of what Martineau styles the "causal self" or human will, while and after it has become in voluntary surrender unified with the Divine Will, and has more zealously maintained the integrity of the central self, through whose supposed extinction the living individual, fleeing a morally indefensible avтáρκeια, really reaches, not extermination, and not absorption, but perfection and supreme realisation. It maintains, as we believe, in its integrity the soul, which, in its end-positing power, yields us the possibility of a spiritualistic metaphysic. It has not been able to lend countenance to the line of thought whereby Dr Royce seeks to suppress our individuality in "a wholly impersonal devotion," and merge our separate selves, as having "in this world no rights as individuals," in the Life Universal, for its ideal of perfection is one in which, on the contrary, it can never be said that "the whole is perfect," so long as the separate individualities do not find freest scope for the development of personality, as something wherein man is truly self-contained, in

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the harmony to be attained with the Universal Will. That which is an ego stands on a higher level than that-materiality-which is not, for, unlike the non-ego, it is, so to speak, part of the Divine Essence, existing at once in God and for itself.

We are well aware of the objection to our personality, urged by some able philosophers to-day, that it appears to involve the contradiction of our being finite and infinite,-for infinite our ideal self certainly is, at one and the same time. But it seems to us that the contradiction arises in reality very much from our conceiving progress of the finite individuality as a progressus ad infinitum rather than a progressus in infinitum. Why should there not be senses in which man, in virtue of his potencies and the earnest of his inheritance in the infinite, should be viewed as a true infinite? So, then, with whatever metaphysical difficulties beset, we hold fast to the fact of personality as, in our case, the great reality, and no mere appearance or transient phase. It is precisely through the depth and fulness of our grasp of this reality of the moral personality in us, that we come to an ever more profound hold of the Personality of God in all the glad strength of spiritual communion. And we are quite free to confess, for our part, that when our own thought has again and again confronted the vast nature system opened for us by our modern science, which seemed ready to drop over spiritual thought an awful night-cap or perpetual pall of

purest naturalism, and to render all supersensible realities as sheer a blank for us as for men covered in death's dreamless sleep, we have felt driven by always new and deeper necessities of thought and being to find our stay and corrective in falling back upon our own personality as for us the primal reality in which we confide, and on which we build a basis for our belief in the Divine Personality postulated by our self-conscious and rational thought. For if will, character, personality, belong to man, by what right shall we withhold these from that Eternal Self-consciousness which we call God? There is, in fact, nothing of greater consequence, whether for metaphysics or for religion, than just this maintenance through every difficulty of the supreme or final category of personality. It is the crown of theistic philosophy. Dr Elisha Mulford says, “As the personality of man has its foundation in the personality of God, so the realisation of personality brings man always nearer to God" (Republic of God,' p. 28). Just as Corneille makes the heroine of his 'Médée' say, when confronted with direst misfortune, that there remained to her at least herself, so theistic philosophy claims, amid the losses and fortunes of our modern thought, that there remains to it the self or personality. Yes, for all our science is simply helpless to explain this great, persistent fact of personality in us. Our embryological and structural connections and affinities with nature may be traced to the utmost, but

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the unexplained fact of personality abides, persists, through and after all. If that which persists in consciousness is to be taken as real, then nothing is more distinctly testified to than the reality of personality in man. Hence we find Ulrici, for example, driven by a psychological procedure to regard the self as the presupposition of the activity which for him marks consciousness.

There follows that actualising of the capacity for personality in the sphere of social life on which Green and others have insisted. But we have been here concerned first really to get the personal self or ego. And it is in such ways, we venture to think, theistic philosophy must still progressively realise all that for it is implied in human personality - what Professor Seth calls the "infinite progress of approximation." Hence we take it that what we see in recent theistic philosophy of religion is the more emphatic assertion of the fact that no theory of the universe can be for it satisfactory which does not take proper account of the nature of the self-conscious, self-determining, selfidentical ego, which forms the reality of which above all else we are sure. To man, as consisting essentially of such ego or soul, all inductive investigation of the facts of consciousness and life does certainly lead, and the recent witness of such phenomena as hypnotism, telepathy, and the rest, to the independence of mind has certainly not been less. emphatic. With this it must take full cognisance

REESS

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also of the relation which this finite but real personality of the ego sustains to that One, absolute, self-conscious Personality, Which, as we have now been insisting, becomes intelligible to it only as it has recognised its own positive personality—its relation, in other words, to that One self-existing Reality Which is the final resting place of the severest rational thought. That knowledge of the being or self which is ours is a knowledge or perception of simple existence of the self, but it is a knowledge of the self which carries with it a conviction of self-existent being or self sustained existence somewhere. For we are too consciously limited and dependent beings not to feel driven to the necessity of thinking such independent being on which the fact of our being depends. That independent or unconditioned and perfectly selfdetermining being is what we call God. As Lessing once said, "If I am, God is also: He may be separated from me, but not I from Him." My personality, as matter of fact, depends on His being a person. It is precisely here that the charge of vagueness and unverifiableness in the notion of personality in God has, as we believe, had its absurdity, in some measure, more thoroughly exposed, for the idea of personality is just one of the most real, rational, intimate, central, and abiding conceptions possible to us. No complexity of the notion can for a moment be allowed to obscure the fact that no notion stands more completely or more