Preliminary Considerations 15 



facto, to be self-existent. For what does this added con- 

 cept of personality mean but a reciprocity between God 

 and beings outside Himself? Only by taking the reci- 

 procity as internal can we make Him at once personal and 

 self -existent 1 . And internal reciprocity involves a dif- 

 ferentiation within the Godhead, which brings us once 

 more to the confines of Trinitarian doctrine; and it is 

 along these lines that we shall, and must, seek the solu- 

 tion of the problem. We have the fact before us that 

 the most real thing for us is the unity of self-conscious- 

 ness. We find that this unity involves an internal differ- 

 entiation. A similar differentiation must also exist in 

 ourselves, if we are truly self-conscious and self -existent, 

 apart from our relations with others and we shall find 

 that it does in fact exist. Knowing, then, that it exists 

 in ourselves, we find less inherent difficulty in postula- 

 ting its existence in the God Whom common experience 

 tells us to be Personal. 



With this assumption the difficulty of the ding-an-sich 

 goes, as we have said, for the attributes of God become 

 simply the projection of His Personal nature into time 

 and space conditions, and are true d-jravy cur para, reveal- 

 ing Him as the source of Radiance ; but further, as we 

 shall see, the very fact that we too are personal beings 

 gives us immediate reciprocal relations with His Trans- 

 cendent Personality, because all personal being is, in 

 itself, essentially transcendent in so far as it is truly 

 personal; and so we are not dependent solely on our 

 experience of God's attributes for our knowledge of Him. 



Not God's Will, not even His Purpose, but Himself 

 indwells the cosmos. Immanence is the result of creative 



1 It is for the purpose of establishing the need for internal 

 differentiation within the Godhead, if the Godhead is to be self- 

 existent, as it must be, that we have considered the abstract and 

 impossible conception of God-before-creation. Of course, as has 

 already been said, God must really be eternally creative. 



