erson" with the
idea of a substantial visible body, limited in extent, and animated
by an invisible something which we call Spirit, that we can think of
nothing as a person which does not also bring these ideas before us. Any
attempt to make us imagine God as a Person who does not fulfil [sic] the
conditions which our ideas attach to the word "person," is ipso facto
atheistic, as rendering the word God without meaning, and therefore
without reality, and therefore non-existent to us. Our ideas are like
our organism, they will stand a vast amount of modification if it is
effected slowly and without shock, but the life departs out of them,
leaving the form of an idea without the power thereof, if they are
jarred too rudely.

Any being, then, whom we can imagine as God, must have all the
qualities, capabilities, and also all the limitations which are implied
when the word "person" is used.

But, again, we cannot conceive of "everything" as a person. "Everything"
must comprehend all that is to be found on earth, or outside of it,
and we know of no such persons as this. When we say "persons" we intend
living people with flesh and blood; sometimes we extend our conceptions
to animals and plants, but we have not hitherto done so as generally as
I hope we shall some day come to do. Below animals and plants we have
never in any seriousness gone. All that we have been able to regard as
personal has had what we can call a living body, even though that
body is vegetable only; and this body has been tangible, and has been
comprised within certain definite limits, or within limits which have at
any rate struck the eye as definite. And every part within these limits
has been animated by an unseen something which we call soul or spirit. A
person must be a persona--that is to say, the living mask and mouthpiece
of an energy saturating it, and speaking through it. It must be animate
in all its parts.

But "everything" is not animate. Animals and plants alone produce in us
those ideas which can make reasonable people call them "persons" with
consistency of intention. We can conceive of each animal and of each
plant as a person; we can conceive again of a compound person like the
coral polypes [sic], or like a tree which is composed of a congeries of
subordinate persons, inasmuch as each bud is a separate and individual
plant. We can go farther than this, and, as I shall hope to show,
we ought to do so; that is to say, we shall find it e