Preliminary Considerations 1 7 



Now, if we assume, as we have done elsewhere 1 , that 

 Eternal Love is of necessity externally creative, in order 

 that it may realise its self-abnegating nature through 

 other beings who may enter into and share the perfect 

 experience, it is clear that a dualism must be created, at 

 any rate in Time; for we have seen that to love, the 

 creature must be free, and to be free he must be placed 

 in conditions out of which he can win freedom. Further, 

 as long as there is anything of the clash of wills which 

 such conditions make possible between God and men, 

 and between men themselves, there must be plurality. 

 When men become perfect; their wills in full accord 

 with God's will; their love, like God's 2 , a perfect self- 

 abnegation ; their experience the same as God's a per- 

 fect reciprocity; dualism goes, and plurality vanishes 

 into, or rather is included in, a fuller unity 8 . Until then 

 there is the cosmos of God's self-limitation. This is the 

 material of His work 4 . 



In this cosmos is order, purpose, form; progress to- 

 wards freedom under the urging of the vital impulse 

 is manifest; there is that reduction or release of the 

 bonds of determination which Driesch calls entelechy. 

 This form, or order, we may compare roughly to the 



1 Evolution and Spiritual Life, passim. 



1 Vide infra, ch. vii. * Evolution and Spiritual Life, ch. vi. 



* A caveat may here be entered against the easy idealism which, 

 accepting over-eagerly the physical reasoning by which matter is 

 refined down and down till it is ultimately represented by stresses 

 in an all-pervading something, passes far ahead of legitimate 

 inference, and argues that matter is not matter at all, and that, by 

 an infinite fining-down of matter, we shall reach only spirit Matter 

 is matter, even if it is not so lumpy as we used to think, and to call 

 it spirit will not make it any the less matter. What this matter 

 is we do not know, and shall not till the coming of the Coccigrues. 

 All that we may say legitimately is, that it is the expression of 

 God's self-limitation, that it is radically unlike spirit, in that it is 

 not free; that it is the material of God's work and of man's. 



