in] The Triunity of Personality 107 



personal self is thus composed of three ideal beings or 

 hypostases united into one, and thus is free to will, think, 

 love itself internally as its own other, as well as willing, 

 thinking, loving a plurality of others. We see thus that, 

 whether we consider human or divine personality, we 

 are driven to the conclusion that it must be made up of 

 three qualities, each made real, and saved from mere 

 abstraction, by the essential qualification of being. 



It is perfectly true that we can regard the three as 

 qualities of one entity, as they are in fact. We have 

 said that they cannot be self-existent otherwise. The 

 point is not that these are three entities composing one 

 real being, which is manifestly untrue, but that these 

 are three qualities, each of which can be thought of as 

 compounded with being; which cannot Jt>e thought of ab- 

 stractly, apart from being ; and which yet only compose 

 one real entity where they are combined. 



But though this leads us towards the Christian doc- 

 trine of the Trinity of the Godhead, it does not really 

 attain the full doctrine of the Trinity. The hypostases 

 seem to be beings, but not persons. We have a unity in 

 trinity and a trinity in unity; but the unity is a Person, 

 while the trinity is apparently made up of beings merely, 

 and only of beings through a process of analysis which 

 results in something remote from reality. 



This difficulty is in fact due, however, simply to 

 the artificial process of abstraction by means of which 

 we had to analyse the material of our problem. We 

 have already seen that Richmond rightly insists on the 

 impossibility of considering the will of a person as en- 

 tirely unconnected with thought and emotion ; and this 

 interdependence is equally true of thought and emotion 

 themselves. Into every creative process thought and 

 emotion enter ; every thought involves will and emotion ; 

 every emotion, thought and will. Practically then, when 

 we think of a transcendent personality that is to say, 



