iio The Triunity of Personality [CH. 



third in one emotion; in the next, will; in the last, 

 thought. No one, separated and by itself, will balance 

 evenly; it will take up a certain position in relation to 

 externah objects; but if all three be imagined joined 

 together in such a way that the heavy thirds do not over- 

 lap each other, we shall have a perfectly balanced whole. 

 Let this whole stand for the personality, the individual 

 hoops for the hypostases. A crude illustration, and no 

 argument, if you will ! But if we are going to have spatial 

 images at all, I think this is closer to the truth than any 

 linear one. For the whole, perfect personality is, so to 

 speak, circular; complete and self -enclosing, with never 

 a ragged end to stick out. 



This point seems to me important. After all, the type 

 of an infinite regress to which philosophers raise objec- 

 tion is what we may call the linear type, as for instance, 

 in the problem of causality. In such cases the one term 

 B is dependent on the preceding term A, but A is not 

 dependent on B. Here unquestionably the idea of 

 infinite regress is not permissible. But in what we may 

 call the circular type, where A and B and C, etc., the 

 terms, each involve the others equally and reciprocally, 

 yet when artificially isolated show this peculiarity : that 

 A , B and C involve a, b and c, and a, b and c involve a', b' 

 and c' , and so on; a, b and c, a', b' and c' ' , etc., each 

 representing the same thing as A, B and C, only rarified, 

 so to speak I am not at all sure that objection can be 

 maintained. And this is certainly the type with which 

 we have to deal in considering the trinity of personality. 

 So long as the whole is not in time there is no First-in- 

 the-series ; and we have seen that the essential feature of 

 personality is that it is not itself in time, though it may 

 indwell the temporal conditions of a cosmos. 



Imagery apart, each hypostasis of the full personality 

 is complete, and identical with the rest in all but em- 

 phasis. Will, emotion, thought these merge into one 



