IO2 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 



on the fact of limitation, whether self-imposed or im- 

 posed from without. They are the emotions of imma- 

 nence sorrow, fear, hate and all their congeners. But 

 themselves are free, or rather, find their ground in the 

 creative and self-renouncing nature of personal being. 

 They are not consequences of the material conditions of 

 limitation, nor caused by them, but both are alike de- 

 pendent on the nature of free personal being. 



But turn to an emotion such as pleasure. In pleasure 

 there is a great uprush of the sense of power of free- 

 dom. The creative self is acutely experienced. Limita- 

 tions are minimised. In a sense pleasure may be said 

 to be caused, but the statement by itself is onesided. 

 Certain sensations or feelings, which no doubt have 

 origin in perceptions, make me acutely conscious of 

 myself as controlling my own destiny. Pleasure is the 

 realisation of freedom, by the minimising of limitation. 



As we have said the highest emotion, which has an 

 absolute and timeless existence, is love. It is the most 

 acutely self-conscious and creative of all. It is conscious 

 of nothing but the subject and the object as interpene- 

 trative and mutually acting on each other. There is no 

 sense of limitation at all only the perfection of free- 

 dom. It is uncaused, by any external causation. We 

 are now speaking, of course, of perfect love in perfect 

 mutuality. At first it might seem that the love is caused 

 by the object. This is not so; it is merely directed to- 

 wards the object while it flows out from its own spon- 

 taneous self-generation. It is creative ; or rather, gives 

 rise to a creative impulse 1 ; it is also receptive ; but in its 

 perfection it is not limited, still less caused, by the 

 object towards which it is directed. It is causal crea- 



1 This creative aspect of love is familiar in the idealisations of 

 a lover. To the world his mistress is simply Ann Eliza Brown: 

 to himself she is unique; peerless, and almost perfect. And he is 

 right only no one else has the creative genius to understand it. 



