Preliminary Considerations . 21 



Ground. The Ground is the Transcendent God, Whose 

 Nature is Love eternally. The consequence is perpetual 

 creative self-limitation immanence. Creation is not 

 merely the effect produced by a Causal God, for it is the 

 expression of His very Nature. Because He is what He 

 is, perpetually-renewed creation expresses His activity 

 of Love creation means limitation, limitation, im- 

 manence. Because God is Transcendent, He must be- 

 come Immanent. 



Having thus reached the conception of an immanence 

 in a Work which is itself seen as the collaboration of men 

 with God in working out His Will, we turn next to the 

 problem of degrees of reality, and to the question, not yet 

 touched upon, of whether the equation 7 = / is univer- 

 sally valid, so that we may fit these two matters into 

 their position in the doctrines of immanence and trans- 

 cendence. Then, after a few words about the immanence 

 and transcendence of man, we shall be ready to attempt 

 a conspectus of the widely diffused matters with which 

 we have been concerning ourselves, in the hope of 

 achieving some clear ideas which will guide us in our 

 further investigations. 



Some retraversing of the ground is here unavoidable, 

 if we are to make our thought lucid. We have already 

 indicated that the type and expression of absolute 

 Reality is the experienced unity of self-consciousness. 

 This experience is essentially transcendent, for it is of 

 the nature / = I and has no innate relations of change 

 or becoming ; though it has the internal relation of re- 

 ciprocity as an essential feature, the self being its own 

 object, as is implied in the term self-consciousness. We 

 have seen that if God is Love, the need of external 

 activity is at least intelligible, if not (as I think it is) 

 necessarily involved. At any rate we have the fact 

 that there is a cosmos, and that this does represent an 

 external activity of God, since the pantheistic interpre- 



