Preliminary Considerations 13 



conception of the Godhead. Now God is revealed in the 

 Cosmos as possessed of Will, Power, Activity, Wisdom, 

 Righteousness, Eternity, Love. Either these are attri- 

 butes, representing simply His relations to the limited 

 world He has created, in which case we are left with the 

 hopeless difficulty of the Kantian Thing-in-Itself, un- 

 knowable, the bare formlessness that remains when 

 the attributes are stripped away or else in some way 

 they are expressions of His Real Nature. Anyhow, as 

 they stand, they are the characteristics which we should 

 postulate of an Eternal Personality, for they underlie 

 that capacity for fellowship which is the most satis- 

 factory definition of personality 1 , as we shall see later. 

 Unquestionably some of these terms do represent His 

 relation to other beings in the Universe of His creation ; 

 certain of them are normative, for instance, and these 

 are not for Himself, but for His creatures. On the other 

 hand it is clear that such terms as Eternity and Love 

 are for Himself as well as for His creatures. They are 

 absolute, not normative, and so are not attributes in 

 any exact sense. How then are we to escape from the 

 Kantian ding-an-sich? The attributes of God are cer- 

 tainly the manifestation, or rather the projection, of His 

 real nature into a cosmos that is in time and space, and 

 so is becoming. Nevertheless though they are attributes, 

 whose meaning is not for the Transcendent God, but for 

 His creatures 2 , and for Himself as immanently related 

 to His creatures; they are also the expression of His 

 Real and Eternal Being. Although we, in so far as 

 we are immanent, can only know Him through His 

 attributes, we are not thereby cut off from all knowledge 

 of Himself, for these represent the time and space 

 equivalent of His Real and Eternal Being. Moreover, 

 as we shall see 8 , we have a link with His Real and Time- 



1 W. Richmond, Essay on Personality as a Philosophical Prin- 

 ciple. * See ch. i. pp. 40-49. ' Ch. vi. 



