Preliminary Considerations 19 



God's experience, and He indwells it, but it is in man's 

 too, and he indwells it. The work is God's as He frees 

 Himself from His self-limitation, but it can only be 

 brought to completion through the free cooperation of 

 men's wills; the work is man's too, as he frees himself 

 from eternal limitation. 



Is man in God, then? or will he be when all is com- 

 pleted? Is pantheism thus far true? Obviously, no; 

 and for the same reason that the Box-Immanence 

 theory is impossible. The type of absolute Reality and 

 Unity is self-consciousness-personality and person- 

 ality cannot fragment 1 . If the doctrine of pantheism 

 were true the universe would be a fragment of God, the 

 work would be a fragment of God, men would be frag- 

 ments of God and the unity of God's personality 

 would be lost. God's personality would be only in 

 process of becoming, or, at best, there would be a 

 perpetual alternation of kenosis and fulfilment ; an aim- 

 less activity ; the systole and diastole of a cosmic heart- 

 beat that led to no true activity, because to no end. 

 There would only be potential unity. God, by creating, 



1 But the student of abnormal psychology may object that we 

 do actually meet with the fragmentation of personalities in the 

 pathological condition known as dissociation. I think the answer 

 lies in the fact that the state is pathological. There is a failure 

 of coordination among the neurones which leads to an alternation 

 in the phases of manifestation of the personality. One part and 

 then another predominates. But the failure is in the mechanism, 

 as is shown by the fact that the mechanism can be set right by 

 suitable treatment. Moreover, the cases themselves show clearly 

 enough that although the memory of one phase may be absent 

 from consciousness during another, as in the case of Miss Beau- 

 champ, it yet acts as a determining factor working in the sub- 

 conscious. The memories of one state are, I think, never wholly 

 absent : they can be evoked and brought into consciousness under 

 hypnosis, and on this fact is based the treatment which leads to 

 the restoration of the normal state. 



