14 Preliminary Considerations 



less Being, through our own transcendence; and the 

 experience which this brings confirms our belief that 

 even through His attributes we achieve true, if incom- 

 plete, knowledge of the Absolute God. 



If, then, God is Eternal Love, He is Eternal Recipro- 

 city; and Wisdom, Knowledge, Righteousness, Power, 

 Activity, Will, are simply the manifestations of this 

 Love in the sphere of becoming. For Love is active; 

 does involve will, knowledge, goodness, directed to- 

 wards, and existing for, any beings who are 'other' than 

 God, and who cannot as yet enter into the full recipro- 

 city with Him that is implied in the term Perfect Love. 



Now the type of the Absolutely Real is the unity of 

 self-consciousness. There is nothing so real, nothing 

 that conveys to us such a sense of absoluteness and 

 finality as the fact that I am, I will and I love, and that 

 I know that I am, I will, and I love. My will becomes 

 translated into action, and much of this action is in- 

 compatible with love as yet ; but even to ordinary men 

 with ordinary vision, love has a stability and value that 

 nothing else has. Through love we get away from time 

 altogether, and forget its very existence. 



For our hypothetical God-before-a-Cosmos then, we 

 are driven to define ultimate Reality as the experience 

 of self-consciousness. 



The realisation of such an experience, however, in- 

 volves a contradiction if we think of God as a pure Unity 

 without internal differentiation. A unity cannot be in 

 any sense reciprocative or indeed active, or anything 

 else at all but blank unity. God cannot be, or even ex- 

 perience, Love, if He is purely One, for He cannot love 

 Himself; there is no room for the reciprocity which is 

 the essential condition of love ; and hence He cannot be 

 Personal. If we assume that He is One and yet Personal 

 (that is to say, if we add to the concept of unity some- 

 thing else) we are still in a difficulty, for He ceases, i-pso 



