REAL PERSONALITY OR TRANSCENDENTAL EGO. 



157 



mental intuitions of Time and Space is " illusory," is to question 

 the validity of our primary intuitions. But, since all reasoning 

 rests ultimately upon premises given by intuition and consciousness, 

 to deny their validity is to deny that we have any standard of truth, 

 and to leave us nothing but Pyrrhonism — it is intellectual suicide. 

 It is also (as was pointed out by Sir William Hamilton) to cast a 

 a slur upon the character of God, by representing our Creator as a 

 deceiver. We can by no means accept the view that the notion of 

 succession is an illusion of our unfortunate minds, that Paul was haling 

 Christians to prison at the very same instant he was praying with 

 the Ephesian elders. Nor is it to be supposed that the Divine 

 Mind is without any notion of succession, that the Creator had no 

 design, no plan, no purpose, in giving existence to a universe, and 

 in history and providence no adaptation of means to ends. No doubt, 

 God " does not require time to think as we do," but it does not follow, 

 as the author seems to think it does follow, that " the forming of 

 this World and its destruction, the appearance of Man, the birth 

 and death of each one of us, are absolutely at the same instant ..." 

 The statements of Scripture are in apparent contradiction to this 

 strange hypothesis. The sacred Name Jehovah (Yahveh), by which 

 God was pleased to reveal Himself, signifies Existence — past, present, 

 future, and these three aspects, which thus meet us in the first Bible 

 book, meet us again in the salutation of the last book. The facts 

 that God created vessels of mercy unto glory and prepared them 

 for it, that He has intervened in the affairs of men and sent His Son, 

 the Saviour of the World, appear irreconcilable with the theory 

 that the notion of succession of sequence and order is foreign to 

 the Divine Mind. Though successive events be seen, by That Mind, 

 in one view, they are surely seen as successive, and their order is 

 seen also. 



The statement (p. 130) that a human being has two " personalities " 

 would imply that he has two wills. It is somewhat startling to 

 read (p. 137) that my real personality is omnipresent and omniscient ! 

 May I suggest the term " nature," instead of "personality," as better 

 expressing the author's true meaning 1 The idea (p. 131) that evil 

 and falsehood are merely the absences of goodness and truth is un- 

 tenable. These things are not opposites only, they are contraries. 

 On p. 132 occurs the curious phrase — " evolution of thought," which 

 might be taken to imply the absurdity that the conscious is a product 



