in dealing with a world
of opposite kind--with the Whole, the Immeasurable, the Omnipresent,
and Omnipotent? Of what use are our sounding-lines in a bottomless
sea? How are we to apply our conceptions of personality to the
all-life, to that which transcends all limitations, to that which is
everywhere and yet nowhere? Shall we assign a local habitation and a
name to the universal energy? As the sunlight puts out our lamp or
candle, so our mental lights grow pale in the presence of the Infinite
Light. We can deal with the solid bodies on the surface of the earth,
but the earth as a sphere in the heavens baffles us. All our terms of
over and under, up and down, east and west, and the like, fail us. You
may go westward around the world and return to your own door coming
from the east. The circle is a perpetual contradiction, the sphere a
surface without boundaries, a mass without weight. When we ascribe
weight to the earth, we are trying it by the standards of bodies on
its surface--the pull of the earth is the measure of their weight; but
the earth itself--what pulls that? Only some larger body can pull
that, and the adjustment of the system is such that the centripetal
and centrifugal forces balance each other, and the globes float as
lightly as any feather.

Emerson said he denied personality to God because it is too little,
not too much. If you ascribe personality to God, it is perfectly fair
to pester you with questions about Him. Where is He? How long has He
been there? What does He do? Personality without place, or form, or
substance, or limitation is a contradiction of terms. We are the
victims of words. We get a name for a thing and then invent the thing
that fits it. All our names for the human faculties, as the will, the
reason, the understanding, the imagination, conscience, instincts, and
so on, are arbitrary divisions of a whole, to suit our own
convenience, like the days of the week, or the seasons of the year.
Out of unity we make diversity for purposes of our practical needs.
Thought tends to the one, action to the many. We must have small
change for everything in the universe, because our lives are made up
of small things. We must break wholes up into fractions, and then seek
their common multiple. Only thus can we deal with them. We deal with
God by limiting Him and breaking Him up into his attributes, or by
conceiving Him under the figure of the Trinity. He is thus less
baffling to us. We can handle Hi