love, by pity, is the personalization of a person who embraces
and comprehends within himself the other persons of which he is
composed.

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.
For where there is no consciousness there is no finality, finality
presupposing a purpose. And, as we shall see, faith in God is based
simply upon the vital need of giving finality to existence, of making it
answer to a purpose. We need God, not in order to understand the _why_,
but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate _wherefore_, to give a
meaning to the Universe.

And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that this
consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the
consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the
consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it
remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it.
Only thus is it possible to understand how in God we live, move, and
have our being. That great visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, saw or caught
a glimpse of this in his book on Heaven and Hell _(De Coelo et Inferno_,
lii.), when he tells us: "An entire angelic society appears sometimes in
the form of a single angel, which also it hath been granted me by the
Lord to see. When the Lord Himself appears in the midst of the angels,
He doth not appear as encompassed by a multitude, but as a single being
in angelic form. Hence it is that the Lord in the Word is called an
angel, and likewise that on entire society is so called. Michael,
Gabriel, and Raphael are nothing but angelical societies, which are so
named from their functions."

May we not perhaps live and love--that is, suffer and pity--in this
all-enveloping Supreme Person--we, all the persons who suffer and pity
and all the beings that strive to achieve personality, to acquire
consciousness of their suffering and their limitation? And are we not,
perhaps, ideas of this total Grand Consciousness, which by thinking of
us as existing confers existence upon us? Does not our existence consist
in being perceived and felt by God? And, further on, this same visionary
tells us, under the form of images, that each angel, each society of
angels, and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed, appear in
human form, and in virtue of this human form the Lord rules them as one
man.

"God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal,"
wrote Kierkegaard (_Afsluten