| LECTURE I. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPTION OF HUMAN PERSONALITY | Title page | LECTURE III. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPTION OF DIVINE PERSONALITY |
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We cannot, strictly speaking, define personality, for the simple reason that we cannot place ourselves outside it. ‘The “mystery ” that belongs to it, as Professor Green says, ‘arises from its being the only thing, or a form of the only thing, that is real (so to speak) in its own right ; the only thing of which the reality is not relative and derived. . We can only know it by a reflection on it which is its own action; by analysis of the expression it has given to itself, in language, literature, and the institutions of human life; and by consideration of what that must be which has thus expressed itself’ Looked at analytically[1], then, the fundamental characteristic of personality is self-consciousness [2], the quality in a subject of becoming an object to itself, or, in Locke’s language, ‘considering itself as itself,’ and saying ‘I am I.’ But as in the very act of becoming thus self-conscious [ p. 29 ] I discover in myself desires[3], and a will [4], the quality of self-consciousness immediately involves that of self-determination, the power of making my desires an object of my will, and saying ‘I will do what I desire.” But we must not fall into the common error of regarding thought, desire, and will, as really separable in fact, because we are obliged for the sake of distinctness to give them separate names. They are three faculties or functions of one individual, and, though logically separable, interpenetrate each other, and are always more or less united in operation. I cannot, for instance, pursue a train of thought, however abstract, without attention, which is an act of will, and involves a desire to attend. I cannot desire, as distinct from merely feeling appetite, like an animal, without thinking of what I desire, and willing to attain or to abstain from it. I cannot will without thinking of an object or purpose, and desiring its realization. There is, therefore, a synthetic unity in my personality or self; that is to say, not a merely numerical oneness, but a power of uniting opposite and alien attributes and characteristics with an intimacy which defies analysis. This unity is is further emphasized by my sense of personal identity, which irresistibly compels me to regard myself as one and the same being, through all changes of time and circumstance, and thus [ p. 30 ] unites my thoughts and feelings of to-day with those of all my bygone years. Iam thus one, in the sense of an active unifying principle, which can not only ¢ combine a multitude of present experiences in itself, but can also combine its present with its past. At the same time, with all my inclusiveness, I have also an exclusive aspect. ‘Each self,’ it has been well said, ‘is a unique existence, which is perfectly impervious to other selves—impervious in a fashion of which the impenetrability of matter is a faint analogue[5].’ Thus a person has at once an individual and an universal side. He is an unit that excludes all else, and yet a totality or whole with infinite powers of inclusion.
It is necessary to-emphasize this unity of our personality, on account of its controversial importance. Of course in ordinary life we all take it for granted ; but this very fact only makes people the more liable to be disturbed, when assured that it can be decomposed and explained away by modern physiological psychology. We cannot, therefore, lay too much stress upon the fact of its recognition by the general voice of both ancient and modern philosophy, as distinct from that of a small minority of scientific specialists, who have not really made any advance upon the position of Hume, or disposed of Kant’s answer to Hume. It is a point, moreover, on which critical philosophy is at one [ p. 31 ] with common-sense, while its opponents who attempt to resolve the unity into a multiplicity of impressions and desires, which, but for that unity, would have nothing to be impressed upon or desired by, maintain a paradox quite as incredible to the multitude as to the philosopher. And, whatever we may think of the ‘argument from_universal consent’ taken by itself, it must distinctly be allowed weight when it corroborates and is corroborated by philosophic analysis. ‘We meet,’ says Lotze, ‘with the word “soul” in the languages of all civilized peoples; and this proves that the imagination of man must have had reasons of weight for its supposition, that there is an existence of some special nature underlying the phenomena of the inner life as their subject or cause.’[6] Philosophers have differed in the phrases by which they have described this unity, as well as in their views of the precise way in which we are aware of it. But these differences do not alter their agreement upon the fact. Kant, indeed, though the foremost to assert the unity of self-consciousness, goes so far as to deny that we can legitimately infer from it the existence of the soul as a separate substance ; but this denial, besides being qualified by what he says elsewhere, in his critique of the practical -reason, turns upon his peculiar doctrine of noumena, or things in themselves, the least satisfactory part [ p. 32 ] of his system. And, as Lotze remarks, ‘The identity of the subject of inward experience is all that we require. So far as, and so long as, the soul knows itself as this identical subject, it is, and is named, simply for that reason, substance… That which is not only conceived by others as unity in multiplicity, but knows and makes itself good as such, is, simply on that account, the truest and most indivisible unity there can be[7].’ But, though we can afford to be indifferent as to whether the word substance shall be used in this connexion or not, we must be on our guard against the fallacy which supposes that our notion of substance is first derived from the external world, an can thence I have been imported into ere For this is preposterous in the strict sense of the term. It puts the cart before the horse. There can be no question whatever that our whole idea of substance, as the permanent substratum which underlies and connects a variety of attributes into that unity which we call a ‘thing, is derived exclusively from our own experience of a permanent self, underlying (or understanding) all our affections and manifestations, Whether, therefore, we describe this understanding self as a substance or not, it is the only source from whence the conception of substance can have been derived, and of whatever meaning it may possess.
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Again, our self-consciousness involves, freedom, or the power of self-determination. Enough and to spare has been written on the freedom of the will, and it will be sufficient for our present purpose simply to summarize the situation. The freedom of the will, then, does not mean the ability to act without a motive, as some of its opponents still stupidly seem to suppose. But it does mean the ability to create or co-operate in creating our own motives, or to choose our motive, or to transform a weaker motive into a stronger by adding weights to the scale of our own accord, and thus to determine our conduct by our reason; whence it is now usually called the power of self-determination— a phrase to which St. Thomas very nearly approaches when he says, ‘Man is determined by a combination of reason and appetite (appetitu rationali), that is, by a desire whose object is consciously apprehended by the reason as an end to be attained, and he is therefore self-moved.’ For instance, I am hungry, and that is simply an animal appetite; but I am immediately aware of an ability to choose between gratifying my hunger with an unwholesome food because it is pleasant, or with an unpleasant food because it is wholesome, or abstaining from its gratification altogether for self-discipline or because the food before me is not my own. That is to say, I can present to my mind, on the occasion of appetite, pleasure, utility, [ p. 34 ] goodness, as objects to be attained, and I can choose between ‘them ; nor is it to the point to say that I am determined by my character, for my character is only the momentum which I have gained by a number of past acts of choice, that is by my own past use of my freedom; and even so I am conscious that at the moment I cam counteract my character, though morally certain that I have no intention so to do.
This is briefly what we mean by free-will; and it is a fact of immediate and universal consciousness, that is, of my own consciousness, corroborated by the like experience of all other men. When Bain compares it to a belief in witches (and the comparison is typical of many more), as being a fact of consciousness as long as it is believed, his misapprehension of the point at issue is. almost ludicrous. For the sense of freedom is an immediate part of my consciousness. I cannot be conscious without it. I cannot tear it out. It lies at the very root of myself, and claims, with self-evidence, to be something sui generis, something unique. So obvious is this, that most even of those who regard it as a delusion are obliged to admit that it is a delusion from which there is no escape, Further, upon this sense of freedom all law and all morality depend. To deny this is to play with words. And law and morality abundantly verify the legitimacy of their basis by the progressive [ p. 35 ] development in which they result. For you cannot gather figs of thistles, or a rational order of society from an irrational disease of mind. And, finally, the sense of freedom has maintained itself, from the dawn of history, against a spirit far more powerful than any which philosophy can raise—the spirit of remorse. What would not humanity, age after age, have given to befree from remorse? Yet remorse still stares us in the face, overshadowing our hearts with sadness and driving its countless victims into madness, suicide, despair, and awful forebodings of the after-world. Men would have exorcised it if they could; but they cannot. And remorse is only a darker name for man’s conviction of his own free-will.
We ground our belief in freedom, then, on two things—its immediate self-evidence in consciousness and its progressive self-justification in morality— the way in which its moral results approve themselves to the universal reason of mankind; and we are confident that no contrary argument can be constructed without surreptitiously assuming what it attempts to disprove. Lueretius was obliged to allow his atoms the power of swerving. And when Hobbes defines the will as ‘the last appetite in deliberation,’ he concedes by the latter word what he intends to deny by the former. And so with the later necessitarians, Their analysis is more elaborate and possesses the attraction for [ p. 36 ] certain minds of any attempt to explain the primary aspect of a thing ingeniously away. But they have been convicted again and again, either of ignoring the point at issue, or begging, in one phrase or other, the question to be proved ; while their success, if it were possible, would only land them in the old dilemma, that by invalidating consciousness they invalidate all power of reasoning, and with it the value of their own conclusions. ‘Non ragioniam di lor.’
But will acts, as we have seen, upon the n material supplied by desire ; and this desir desire; and this desire is a coessential element in our personality. Desire is the form which appetite necessarily takes in a rational being; it is appetite consciously directed to an end which reason presents, and may be called self-conscious appetite (the ‘appetitus rationalis’ of St. Thomas). And desire is, broadly speaking, of two kinds, desire of acquisition and desire of action, or, in other words, of food and exercise. We desire to incorporate and to assimilate with ourselves the various contents of our material, moral, and intellectual environment—as our food, our furniture, our property, our means of pleasure and of virtue and of knowledge. And we also desire to project ourselves into and modify that environ. ment, by exercising our wealth or power or skill or influence or mind upon it. And, though these two processes of reception and action are often [ p. 37 ] regarded as independent functions, it is important to notice that in fact they interpenetrate each other. An activity of the organism is involved in the simplest sensation, and more obviously in our every emotional and intellectual acquisition ; no experience being purely passive. And, on the other hand, every action must be stimulated by a motive; and though reason, as we have seen, plays an important part in the constitution of this motive, the receptive faculties contribute the material of of which the motive is to be made. Now this twofold process of desire, acquisitive and active, irresistibly impels us into communion with other persons. We are so constituted that we cannot regard inanimate property, uncommunicated knowledge, unreciprocated emotion, solitary action otherwise than as means to an end. We press on through it all, till we have found persons like ourselves with whom to share it, and then we are at rest. Thus all persons are ends to us, when compared with impersonal things, but in different degrees. For we have various desires, and each of them conducts us into a different kind of connexion with other persons. We may be more passive and receive sympathy from them, or more active and exercise influence over them. We may desire to share with them our pleasures, or our perplexities, or our work, or to exchange with them social amenities or intellectual ideas. And [ p. 38 ] in all these ways they may represent ends to us, but still, in a sense, only partial ends; satisfying, that is, some one class of our desires, some one mode of our activity, some one department of our complex being. But we instinctively seek more than this. We require to find in other persons an end in which our entire personality may rest. And this is the relationship of love. Its intensity may admit of degrees, but it is distinguished from all other affections or desires, by being the outcome of our whole personality. It is our very self, and not a department of us, that loves. And what we love in others is the personality or self, which makes them what they are. We love them for their own sake. And love may be described as the mutual desire of persons for each other as such ; the mode in which the life of desire finds its climax, its adequate and final satisfaction.
These, then, are the constituent elements of personality, as such—self-consciousness, the power of self-determination, and desires which irresistibly impel us into communion with other persons—or, in other words, reason, will, and love. These are three perfectly distinct and distinguishable functions, but they are united, as we have seen, by being the functions of one and the selfsame subject[8], and gain a peculiar character from this very fact. They are the thoughts of a being that [ p. 39 ] wills and loves, the will of a being that loves and thinks, the love of a being that thinks and wills; and each attribute may be said to express the whole being, therefore, in terms of that attribute.
But in speaking thus of personality as a thing that can be analyzed, as if it were inanimate or abstract, we must not forget that in fact it is essentially alive, and can only be known as living ; so that it is, perhaps, better described as an energy than as a substance. It lives and grows and develops character, as the will selects and appropriates to itself, or exerts its influence upon, the various material supplied by reason and desire. Consequently, there can be no stage in its existence when personality does not imply character, for which, indeed, in popular language it has almost become a synonym—as when we speak of a strong or weak or commanding personality. And the usage is instructive as bearing witness to the fact that a man’s character represents his whole self. He may be predominantly thoughtful or predominantly wilful or predominantly loving. But his character is not constituted merely by the salient feature, but by the fact that he has chosen to subordinate his other faculties to this one ; that he is a thinker who has bent his will and affections into the service of his thought, or a lover who has subdued his thought and will to his love. Or, to [ p. 40 ] put the same‘ thing in another way, the necessity for division of labour makes our ordinary thought and conduct mainly departmental. We specialize ourselves upon a particular science or subsection of a science, or an occupation which may be as limited as the manufacture of one piece of a machine—a wheel, a bolt, a screw. But we only follow these partial.pursuits with a view to the ultimate . satisfaction of our whole personality : special studies as a step towards the complete unity of knowledge, which can alone satisfy the mind, as we say, meaning the will and desires of the thinker; and manual or other industries, to gain the means of maintaining our life, and the home in which all its interests and instincts may find their scope; while even the departmental work itself will be a failure, unless we put our whole heart into it, making it a moral and emotional as well as a merely mental or mechanical act; whereas, if we do this, the most limited and finite occupation reacts upon and furthers the development of our entire character.
Personality, then, lives and grows, but, in so doing, retains its identity ; the character in which it issues, however versatile or complex, being never a disconnected aggregate, but always an organic. whole. Its unity may seem to vanish in the variety of experience through which it goes, yet only to reappear, enlarged, enriched, developed, or [ p. 41 ] impoverished and degraded, as the case may be, but self-identical.
We have now said enough in pee description of:a term that.does not admit of being precisely defined. And, in passing on to use it for controversial purposes, we must remember that this incapability of definition is a sign, not of its weakness, but of its strength; being a characteristic of all ultimate realities, just because they are so real—as Locke saw in the case of what he called ‘simple ideas.’ Every man is certain of his own personality, and has no need to be convinced of it ; though not every man has reflected upon it, to see what it implies. But its chief attributes are so obvious that, when once attention has been called to them, they cannot fail to be immediately recognized in their true light. And these, as we have. seen, are individuality, self-consciousness, self-determination, love and, as the result of their liying interaction, character.
Now y personality is the inevitable and necessary starting-point of all human thought. For wey dang cannot by any conceivable means get out of it, or behind it, or beyond it, or account for it, or imagine the method of its derivation from anything else. For, strictly speaking, we have no know ledge of anything else from which it can have been derived. If we are told that it is the product of pure reason, or unconscious will, or mere matter [ p. 42 ] or blind force, the answer is obvious—that we know of no such things. For, when spoken of in this way, reason and will and matter and force are only abstractions, and abstractions from my personal experience ; that is to say, they are parts of myself, separated from their context and then supposed to exist in the outer world ; or, to put the same thing in another way, they are phenomena of the outer world, which are supposed to resemble parts of myself taken out of their context. But it is only in their context that these parts of me have any real existence. Will, in the only form in which I know it, is determined by reason and desire. Matter, in the only form in which I know it—that is, in my own body—is informed by reason and desire and will. Reason, as I know it, is inseparable from desire and will. And when in my own case I speak of my ‘reason’ or my ‘ will’ apart, I am making abstraction of a particular aspect of myself, which, as such, has only an ideal or imaginary existence. Consequently, names which are given to phenomena in virtue of their resembling or being supposed to resemble these abstract aspects of myself, must be equally ideal and imaginary in their denotation. And I cannot in any way conceive a living and complex whole, like myself, to be derived from anything outside me which can only be known and named because it resembles one of my elements; when the element [ p. 43 ] in question must be artificially isolated and, so to speak, killed in the process, before the resemblance can be established. Abstractions must be less real than the totality from which they are taken, and cannot thus be made levers for displacing their own fulcrum. Personality, therefore, is ultimate ‘a parte ante.’
It follows from this that personality is also our canon of reality[9], the most real thing we know, and by comparison with which we estimate the amount of reality in other things. For, however difficult the notion of reality be to define, we may accept the evidence of language, in itself no mean metaphysician, to the general view that there are degrees of it. ‘ Quo plus realitatis … res habet, eo plura attributa ei competunt’ is a proposition of Spinoza on which Lotze rightly remarks that its converse is equally true—‘The greater the number of attributes that attach to anything, the more real that thing is’[10]; which is equivalent to saying, the greater the number of ways in which it is related to my personality. For example, a fear of ghosts may be a real enough obstacle to prevent a man from traversing a certain path. But a tree blown across it would be a more real obstacle, a wild beast more real, and an armed enemy more real still; because their respective oppositions would affect the man in an increasing [ p. 44 ] number of ways. So a living flower is more real than a dead one, for it has more attributes ; but if the dead one was given me by a friend it is the more real of the two to me, because it wakes more echoes in me and touches more of my entire being. For the same reason whatever affects me permanently or intensely is more real than a thing whose relation to me is momentary or slight. And, as nothing influences me so variously or intensely, Or possesses so permanent a possibility of influence as another person, personality is the most real thing which I can conceive outside me, since it corresponds most completely to my own personality . within. Hence each person is, as we have already seen, an end to me, and not a means to an end ; something which in that particular direction I cannot go beyond, and in which I am content to rest ; and the world of persons is in consequence more real to me than the world of nature or of books, Nor does this in any degree reduce ‘reality’ to a merely subjective experience ; because the same principle can obviously be, and invariably is, extended to what affects all persons and at all times in a similar way. And, if there is any obscurity in the above statement, it simply arises from the fact that, for the practical purposes of ordinary life, we are content with a more compendious view of reality ; ascribing it to whatever possesses two or three of its most prominent attributes, such [ p. 45 ] as persistence and the power of being seen or touched. But, on analysis, this can be shown to be only a convenient abbreviation for the more complete relationship to personality which we have described.
Now the significance of all this is that we are spiritual beings. The word spirit is indeed undefinable and may even be called indefinite, but it is not a merely negative term for the opposite of matter. It has a sufficiently distinct connotation for ordinary use. It implies an order of existence which transcends the order of sensible experience, the material order: yet which, so far from excluding the material order, includes and elevates it to higher use, precisely as the chemical includes and transfigures the mechanical, or the vital the chemical order, It is thus synonymous with supernatural, in the strict sense of the term. And personality as above described belongs to this spiritual order, the only region in which self-consciousness and freedom can have place.
Historically, then, man has always believed himself to be a spiritual being. Here and there at intervals the belief has been reasoned out of him. But there is no question that it represents his normal conviction. It is stereotyped, under one form or another, in every language ; it is assumed in his earliest literature; and is implied in the burial customs of even the palaeolithic age. Here, [ p. 46 ] then, is a solid fact, scientifically ascertained. Man believes himself to be spiritual.
Critical analysis justifies the belief. And it should be borne in mind that an analysis which justifies a universal conviction has an immense presumption in its favour, and therefore a cumulative force ; while one of an opposite tendency must to a great extent be neutralized, if it cannot after all discredit in the popular mind the conviction which it claims to have explained away. ‘E pur se muove.’ In the present case, the unity of our self-consciousness, with the further sense of freedom that it involves, is its own evidence. It knows itself to differ, toto caelo, from all that we call material. Space and time, for instance, are necessary conditions of material existence, including that of my own material organism. But I am conscious that in knowing things I take them out of space and time, and invest them, so to speak, with an entirely different mode of existence, which has no analogue outside my consciousness, Multiplicity and movement are essential characteristics of the material world, whereas I am conscious of being permanently self-identical and one. Otherwise I could be no. more aware of multiplicity and movement than my bodily senses are of the earth’s revolution, as they are carried with it in its course, Necessity or determination from without is characteristic of the material world, one event producing [ p. 47 ] another in endless continuity of causation; whereas I am directly conscious of being self-determined ‘from within—a source of original activity, a free agent, a will.
These are not, of course, independent arguments proving my spirituality as their conclusion; for if so regarded they would obviously beg the question. But they are reasons which my self-consciousness sees, on examination, for its own spontaneous verdict about itself. Man lives first, and thinks afterwards. He is implicitly aware of his spirituality ; and, when cross-questioned, can only make explicit the evidence which he finds within him for the fact. Materialism, on the other hand, cannot explain away either this time-honoured testimony of consciousness, or the grounds on which it is found to rest. All its attempts to do so are mere efforts of imagination, whether we examine them from the metaphysical or the physical side. For the assertion that what we call spirit is a mode of matter, or derived from matter, must mean from such matter as we know; otherwise it would merely be dealing with the unknown, and have no meaning at all. But matter, as we know it, is always in synthesis with spirit, a synthesis in which each of the two factors acts and reacts upon the other. Objectivity, externality, extension, motion and all such terms imply a subject as their necessary correlative ; for to think at all is to relate an object [ p. 48 ] to a subject, and to obliterate the relation is to cease to think. Consequently, to speak of matter, or force, or generally of the objective element in knowledge as existing by itself, or out of relation to a subject, is to speak of it otherwise than as we know it, and to use words without a meaning[11]. Yet this is precisely what the materialist does; and in so doing he is the dupe of his own imagination. He first isolates by abstraction certain elements of his total experience, and calls them ‘force’ or ‘matter’; he then substantiates or solidifies these ‘ abstract ideas’ through his imagination, till they look as if they existed by themselves, and so is able to picture them as creating the mind by which, in fact, they have been created. The same thing may be stated, in a way which is more obvious to many minds, from the physical point of view; and is so stated, with some authority, by Du Bois-Reymond. ‘The complete knowledge of the brain,’ he says, ‘the highest knowledge we can attain, reveals to us nothing but matter in motion.’. . . ‘What conceivable connexion exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and on the other the, to me, original and not further definable but undeniable facts, “I feel pain, feel pleasure ; I take something sweet, smell roses, hear organ-sounds, see something red,” and the just as immediately resulting certainty, [ p. 49 ] “therefore I am”?.. It is impossible to see how from the co-operation of the atoms consciousness can result. Even if I were to attribute consciousness to the atoms, that would neither explain consciousness in general nor would that in any way help us to understand the unitary consciousness of the individual[12].’ Lotze[13] further enlarges upon this last point, and disposes of the mechanical analogy which would resolve the unity of consciousness into a resultant of a number of separate forces, by reminding us that in mechanics the various forces in question must act simultaneously upon one and the same material point; so that in the present case the unity which is to be explained will have to be already presupposed. This impassable gulf, then, between matter and thought, which all philosophically minded men of science admit, is another aspect of their inseparable connexion as viewed by the metaphysician. And when Cabanis, and others after him, call thought a secretion of the brain, they merely conceal this gulf under the cloud of an imaginative phrase which, as Fichte says, ‘has never conveyed a thought to any man, and never will.’ The witness of our consciousness, therefore, to its own spirituality never has been and never can be explained away by materialism. From the physical point of view [ p. 50 ] we cannot, of course, say more than that it never has been explained, because physical science cannot go beyond its experience; and if, therefore, the physical point of view were the only one, there might always remain the possibility of an explanation being some day discovered. It is, in fact, act, upon this possibility that the materialist rests. The process in question is as yet inconceivable, he will admit, in the sense that it cannot be pictured by the mind; but that is merely because as yet we have had no experience of it; we have not gone deep enough into nature’s laboratory to see it at work; but meanwhile there are so many analogies in its favour that we may expect its discovery will one day come. If the major premiss of all this could be granted the conclusion would be fair enough. And hence the paramount importance of emphasizing the metaphysical view of the question, which, by exhibiting the necessary limits of all possible experience, can alone convert the ‘has not been’ into ‘ cannot be.’
It might indeed be thought that, after all which Kant and his successors have said upon the subject, materialism would be, by this time, a thing of the past. But it is not so. ‘Strictly considered,’ says Lange, its well-known historian, ‘scientific research does not produce Materialism ; but neither does it refute it,… nevertheless, in actual life and in the daily interchange of opinions, scientific inquiry by [ p. 51 ] no means occupies so neutral or even negative an attitude towards Materialism as is the case when all consequences are rigidly followed out… . After all the “confutations” of Materialism,.now more than ever, there appear books of popular science and periodical essays which base themselves upon materialistic views as calmly as if the matter had been settled long ago.’ These complacent reiterations of an untenable position he goes on to attribute to ignorance of critical philosophy on the part of many scientific specialists. And as no one could accuse Lange of obscurantism his conclusion should carry weight. ‘There are only two conditions, he continues, ‘under which this (materialistic) consequence can be avoided. The one lies behind us: it is the authority of philosophy, and the deep influence of religion upon men’s minds. The other still lies some distance ahead: it is the general spread of philosophical culture among all who devote themselves to scientific studies[14].’ And until this spread of culture comes, the authority of philosophy, represented as it is by an august catena, reaching from Plato to the present day, should command at least as much respect among the students of science and their uncritical admirers as is willingly conceded by the layman to the expert in all other departments of life and thought. For the authority of philosophy is like [ p. 52 ] the wisdom of the aged ; it does not supersede independent thought, but it supplies guidance and protection to those whose leisure for thought is limited or whose capacity is still immature; while, further, the general agreement of philosophers on any point creates a very strong presumption of its truth. In the present case, it may fairly be maintained that there exists an overwhelming majority of philosophers who, amid many differences, are agreed upon the spiritual character of man. And the object of the above survey has been simply to give prominence to those fundamental points in our personality for which there is at least enough philosophic authority to give the ablest adversaries pause, as well as to indicate the lines of analysis, or of argument, on which they rest. It should be noticed, in conclusion, that though personality, as above described, is the one thing which we know best in the world, it is also the most mysterious thing we know.[15] ‘Grande profundum est homo.’ There are ‘abysmal deeps of personality’ which startle us at times by the vastness of the vistas which they half disclose. We are dimly aware of undeveloped capabilities within us—capabilities of energy, intelligence and love— which we cannot conceive ultimately frustrated and functionless; germs without a future, seeds without a fruit; and which, therefore, irresistibly [ p. 53 ] point to immortality as the sole condition in which a personal being can find scope. ‘In point of fact,’ says Lotze—and the quotation will indicate our whole subsequent line of thought—‘ In point of fact, we have little ground for speaking of the personality of finite beings ; it is an ideal and, like all that is ideal, belongs unconditionally only to the Infinite. Perfect personality is in God only ; to all finite minds there is allotted but a pale copy thereof; the finiteness of the finite is not a producing condition of this personality, but a limit and hindrance of its development [16].’
| LECTURE I. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPTION OF HUMAN PERSONALITY | Title page | LECTURE III. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPTION OF DIVINE PERSONALITY |