vii] The Awakening of Personality 209 



ditions of limitation, or that of God self-limited yet 

 realising itself in the same conditions. 



A few words may make clearer what we mean exactly 

 by personality coming into being for Bergson's de- 

 scription of the process as the inturning of the con- 

 sciousness upon itself, though true enough, leaves a good 

 deal unexplained. Our own reasoning has led us to 

 exactly that conclusion, though we expressed it in some- 

 what different terms, as the completion of triunity by 

 the subject becoming its own object. But this still 

 leaves the question of what consciousness is Bergson's 

 unconscious consciousness undetermined. That other 

 point on which Bergson lays stress the formation of 

 approximately closed systems is evidently a pheno- 

 menon germane to the whole question of consciousness, 

 and I cannot help suspecting that the roots of the com- 

 parative weakness shown by him in handling both these 

 matters lie very deep. May they not be due to his whole 

 theory that reality holds nothing of the already-made, 

 nothing transcendent; that no adequate provision is 

 made by him for the material of becoming? 



This material, we have argued, is simply the expres- 

 sion of a self-limitation of the Transcendent Godhead, 

 whereby He empties Himself of transcendence in one 

 region of His experience. In it the work is carried out 

 or rather, carries itself out in the main, though the 

 direction of progress of the whole is determined by the 

 nature of the Divine Environment. 



In the work itself one of the most salient features is 

 interdependence throughout ; the correlation of all living 

 organisms ; a certain unity that is the expression of God's 

 purpose. 



For the organism that is totally lacking in self-con- 

 sciousness there are no self-ends. For it are isolated 

 choices and volitions, the expression of the fact that it 

 copes with situations directly as they arise ; but the unity 



