106 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 



me to love freely. I am a freely loving being. I cannot 

 abstract each of these qualities and all that it implies 

 and leave a residue that is myself, for these qualities 

 make up myself. I cannot abstract them and leave pure 

 empty being; the residue would be nothing. Take 

 away will, intellect, and emotion from being and there 

 is nothing at all left. These make up that of which we 

 are conscious as being ; and the idea of a being that is 

 wholly unrelated to any consciousness is meaningless; 

 esse est percipi, at least, if percipi be referred to any 

 mode of consciousness of any being. But I can abstract 

 two of these qualities and yet leave being. A purely 

 creative being is thinkable ; a purely thoughtful being 

 is thinkable; a purely loving being is thinkable. Yet 

 each is incomplete, unable to act except as a machine. 

 One can imagine a machine that constantly turns out 

 organised objects; whose sole activity this is; and that 

 machine would therefore be. So too one can imagine a 

 being that simply thinks the relations of its others ; and 

 a being that simply experiences emotion in regard to 

 its others 1 . But each would be a mere machine without 

 spontaneity. Freedom only comes in when all three are 

 linked together. Freedom thus comes with the unity of 

 three different*. Unity is a system, which we may desig- 

 nate by the term Infinite Reciprocity. 



But further we must note that these incomplete beings 

 we have just been discussing are not in fact self-existent. 

 They can only exist, even in thought, in relation to their 

 others. For self-existence a unity composed of these 

 three thinkable beings is needed. And notice that it 

 must be a unity, not a mere union. It is because they 

 are one that they can be self-existent and self-satisfying 

 indeed that the beings can become selves at all. A 



1 Though the emotion would be a painful one: a sense of lack: 

 a yearning: since the being would not be free to act, or to experi- 

 ence an emotion that was creative. 



