Preliminary Considerations 33 



The only thing we know that is active, permanent, 

 and yet essentially one is personality. It is active be- 

 cause it is in itself a reciprocity. The full meaning of this 

 we shall develope later, but it may be summed up by 

 saying that the completed personality is Love; while 

 even limited personality is best denned as capacity for 

 fellowship. By this at once the oppression of eternal 

 sameness is removed; and the external activity that 

 seeks to share the Perfect Experience becomes intel- 

 ligible, while yet that Experience remains the one 

 and indivisible Whole whose perfection cannot receive 

 addition. Eternal Life is seen as the sharing of God's 

 infinite Reciprocity. 



Now if Personal Being is the essence of unity and 

 permanence, any theory of what we have termed Box- 

 Immanence, any Pantheism, becomes impossible, for it 

 would entail the fragmentation of Eternal Personality; 

 and fragmentation means the destruction of that unity 

 which is fundamental for the very existence of person- 

 ality. If it be true that all that is in the cosmos is part 

 of God, He is no longer One, and so, no longer Personal. 

 Instead we have innumerable fragments persons who 

 manifest a unity within themselves that may itself 

 be fictitious nay, must, for what safeguard have we 

 against further fragmentation? and inanimate sys- 

 tems that have a mirage-like unity of their own. 

 Thought, knowledge, even activity, become meaning- 

 less and useless on any such system. And here, I think, 

 lies the weakness of the Neo-Hegelianism that finds its 

 unity in the sum total of finite, or at least microcosmic, 

 personalities. The very unity, activity and reciprocity 

 of each human personality, its permanence amid change, 

 its transcendence, demand imperatively a larger Per- 

 sonal Cause, whose activity of love brings the cosmos 

 into being. 



The only other conception of Immanence that seemed 

 MD. 3 



