5. Our intuitive conviction of the existence of a God of absolute perfection compels us to conceive of God as possessed of every highest quality and attribute of men, and therefore, especially, of that which constitutes the chief dignity of the human spirit, its personality.
Diman, Theistic Argument, 328—“We have no right to represent the supreme Cause as inferior to ourselves, yet we do this when we describe it under phrases derived from physical causation.” Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 351—“We cannot conceive of anything as impersonal, yet of higher nature than our own—any being that has not knowledge and will must be indefinitely inferior to one who has them.” Lotze holds truly, not that God is supra-personal, but that man is infra-personal, seeing that in the infinite Being alone is self-subsistence, and therefore perfect personality. Knight, Essays in Philosophy, 224—“The radical feature of personality is the survival of a permanent self, under all the fleeting or deciduous phases of experience; in other words, the personal identity that is involved in the assertion ‘I am.’… Is limitation a necessary adjunct of that notion?” Seth, Hegelianism: “As in us there is more for ourselves than for others, so in God there is more of thought for himself than he manifests to us. Hegel's doctrine is that of immanence without transcendence.” Heinrich Heine was a pupil and intimate friend of Hegel. He says: “I was young and proud, and it pleased my vain-glory when I learned from Hegel that the true God was not, as my grandmother believed, the God who lived in heaven, but was rather myself upon the earth.” John Fiske, Idea of God, xvi—“Since our notion of force is purely a generalization from our subjective sensations of overcoming resistance, there is scarcely less anthropomorphism in the phrase ‘Infinite Power’ than in the phrase ‘Infinite Person.’ We must symbolize Deity in some form that has meaning to us; we cannot symbolize it as physical; we are bound to symbolize it as psychical. Hence we may say, God is Spirit. This implies God's personality.”
6. Its objection to the divine personality, that over against the Infinite there can be in eternity past no non-ego to call forth self-consciousness, is refuted by considering that even man's cognition of the non-ego logically presupposes knowledge of the ego, from which the non-ego is distinguished; that, in an absolute mind, self-consciousness cannot be conditioned, as in the case of finite mind, upon contact with a not-self; and that, if the distinguishing of self from a not-self were an essential condition of divine self-consciousness, the eternal personal distinctions in the divine nature or the eternal states of the divine mind might furnish such a condition.
Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:163, 190 sq.—“Personal self-consciousness is not primarily a distinguishing of the ego from the non-ego, but rather a distinguishing of itself from itself, i.e., of the unity of the self from the plurality of its contents. … Before the soul distinguishes self from the not-self, it must know self—else it could not see the distinction. Its development is connected with the knowledge of the non-ego, but this is due, not to the fact of personality, but to the fact of finite personality. The mature man can live for a long time upon his own resources. God needs no other, to stir him up to mental activity. Finiteness is a hindrance to the development of our personality. Infiniteness is necessary to the highest personality.” Lotze, Microcosmos, vol. 3, chapter 4; transl. in N. Eng., March, 1881:191–200—“Finite spirit, not having conditions of existence in itself, can know the ego only upon occasion of knowing the non-ego. The Infinite is not so limited. He alone has an independent existence, neither introduced nor developed through anything not himself, but, in an inward activity without beginning or end, maintains himself in himself.” See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 55–69; H. N. Gardiner on Lotze, in Presb. Rev., 1885:669–673; Webb, in Jour. Theol. Studies, 2:49–61.
Dorner, Glaubenslehre: “Absolute Personality = perfect consciousness of self, and perfect power over self. We need something external to waken our consciousness—yet self-consciousness comes [logically] before consciousness of the world. It is the soul's act. Only after it has distinguished self from self, can it consciously distinguish self from another.” British Quarterly, Jan. 1874:32, note; July, 1884:108—“The ego is thinkable only in relation to the non-ego; but the ego is liveable long before any such relation.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:185, 186—In the pantheistic scheme, “God distinguishes himself from the world, and thereby finds the object required by the subject; … in the Christian scheme, God distinguishes himself from himself, not from something that is not himself.” See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:122–126; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 161–190; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit; Eichhorn, Die Persönlichkeit Gottes; Seth, Hegelianism and Personality; Knight, on Personality and the Infinite, in Studies in Philos. and Lit., 70–118.
On the whole subject of Pantheism, see Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:141–194, esp. 192—“The personality of God consists in his voluntary agency as free cause in an unpledged sphere, that is, a sphere transcending that of immanent law. But precisely this also it is that constitutes his infinity, extending his sway, after it has filled the actual, over all the possible, and giving command over indefinite alternatives. Though you might deny his infinity without prejudice to his personality, you cannot deny his personality without sacrificing his infinitude: for there is a mode of action—the preferential, the very mode which distinguishes rational beings—from which you exclude him”; 341—“The metaphysicians who, in their impatience of distinction, insist on taking the sea on board the boat, swamp not only it but the thought it holds, and leave an infinitude which, as it can look into no eye and whisper into no ear, they contradict in the very act of affirming.” Jean Paul Richter's “Dream”: “I wandered to the farthest verge of Creation, and there I saw a Socket, where an Eye should have been, and I heard the shriek of a Fatherless World” (quoted in David Brown's Memoir of John Duncan, 49–70). Shelley, Beatrice Cenci: “Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth, in the void world—The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!”
For the opposite view, see Biedermann, Dogmatik, 638–647—“Only man, as finite spirit, is personal; God, as absolute spirit, is not personal. Yet in religion the mutual relations of intercourse and communion are always personal. … Personality is the only adequate term by which we can represent the theistic conception of God.” Bruce, Providential Order, 76—“Schopenhauer does not level up cosmic force to the human, but levels down human will-force to the cosmic. Spinoza held intellect in God to be no more like man's than the dog-star is like a dog. Hartmann added intellect to Schopenhauer's will, but the intellect is unconscious and knows no moral distinctions.” See also Bruce, Apologetics, 71–90; Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 128–134, 171–186; J. M. Whiton, Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:306—Pantheism = God consists in all things; Theism = All things consist in God, their ground, not their sum. Spirit in man shows that the infinite Spirit must be personal and transcendent Mind and Will.
IV. Ethical Monism.
Ethical Monism is that method of thought which holds to a single substance, ground, or principle of being, namely, God, but which also holds to the ethical facts of God's transcendence as well as his immanence, and of God's personality as distinct from, and as guaranteeing, the personality of man.
Although