viii] The Evolution of Transcendence 2 1 9 



started with an analysis of the Christian doctrine of the 

 Holy Trinity, and showed that it involved a Creative 

 Will, a Mediating Activity, and a Free Spirit by whose 

 reciprocal relation with both the Whole was substan- 

 tiated as One. Further, it was found that no one of the 

 three was independent of the others or could exist as 

 itself without them. Thus any form of Tritheism, such 

 as that commonly found in the popular expression of 

 Christian dogmas, was shown to be utterly untenable, 

 and false to the deepest insight. 



We then turned to the detailed analysis of human 

 personality, and there too found a triunity exactly 

 corresponding to that postulated of the Godhead by the 

 Christian faith. 



Indeed, the penetrability of personal existence is in 

 itself a strong argument for the plurality of persons in 

 the Unity of the Godhead ; for a personal differentiation 

 of the Absolute; for the conception that Unity itself is 

 made such by internal differentiation. The only other 

 thing this penetrability could mean would be the exist- 

 ence of an impulse towards impersonal union, either in 

 a society, in accordance with Durkheim's views 1 and 

 these views, in their naked positivism, have been ably 

 exposed by Mr Webb 2 (metaphysically, their basis is 

 the same that led Hume to scepticism and Comte to 

 Humanism, and they are open to the same objection, 

 that they really amount to an attempt to convince 

 people who do not exist that they do not exist, while the 

 very fact that they are worth arguing with proves that 

 they do, and that they are not mere social phenomena !) 

 or else in an Impersonal Essence, as in the extremest 

 tenets of pantheism. Both the one and the other of these 

 solutions leave out of account the fact that personality 

 is the most real experience we have. 



1 E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religions Life. 



* C. C. J. Webb, Group Theories of Religion and the Individual. 



