e which it nevertheless very
imperfectly satisfies, and therefore I would rather think God is a Person
in a far truer, higher, more complete sense than that in which any human
being can be a person. God alone fully realizes the ideal of
Personality. The essence of Personality is something positive: it
signifies to us the highest kind of being within our knowledge--not (as
is too often supposed) the mere limitations {56} and restraints which
characterize human conscious life as we know it in ourselves. If we are
justified in thinking of God after the analogy of the highest existence
within our knowledge, we had better call Him a Person. The word is no
doubt inadequate to the reality, as is all the language that we can
employ about God; but it is at least more adequate than the terms
employed by those who scruple to speak of God as a Person. It is at
least more adequate and more intelligent than to speak of Him as a force,
a substance, a 'something not ourselves which makes for righteousness.'
_Things_ do not 'make for righteousness'; and in using the term Person we
shall at least make it clear that we do not think of Him as a 'thing,' or
a collection of things, or a vague substratum of things, or even a mere
totality of minds like our own.[10]

LITERATURE

As has been explained in this Lecture, many idealistic writers who insist
upon the necessity of God as a universal, knowing Mind to explain both
the existence of the world and our knowledge of it, are more or less
ambiguous about the question whether the divine Mind is to be thought of
as willing or causing the world, though passages occur in the writings of
most of them which tend in this direction. 'God {57} must be thought of
as creating the objects of his own thought' is a perfectly orthodox
Hegelian formula. Among the idealistic writers (besides Berkeley) who
correct this--as it seems to me--one-sided tendency, and who accept on
the whole the view of the divine Causality taken in this Lecture, may be
mentioned Lotze, the 9th Book of whose _Microcosmus_ (translated by Miss
Elizabeth Hamilton and Miss Constance Jones) or the third Book of his
_Logic_ (translation ed. by Prof. Bosanquet), may very well be read by
themselves (his views may also be studied in his short _Philosophy of
Religion_--two translations, by the late Mrs. Conybeare and by Professor
Ladd); Pfleiderer, _Philosophy and Development of Religion_, especially
chapter v.; and Professor Ward's