by his love, by his hunger for divinity, creates for
himself an image of God according to his own desire, and if according to
His desire God creates Himself for each of us, then there is a
collective, social, human God, the resultant of all the human
imaginations that imagine Him. For God is and reveals Himself in
collectivity. And God is the richest and most personal of human
conceptions.

The Master of divinity has bidden us be perfect as our Father who is in
heaven is perfect (Matt. v. 48), and in the sphere of thought and
feeling our perfection consists in the zeal with which we endeavour to
equate our imagination with the total imagination of the humanity of
which in God we form a part.

The logical theory of the opposition between the extension and the
comprehension of a concept, the one increasing in the ratio in which the
other diminishes, is well known. The concept that is most extensive and
at the same time least comprehensive is that of being or of thing, which
embraces everything that exists and possesses no other distinguishing
quality than that of being; while the concept that is most comprehensive
and least extensive is that of the Universe, which is only applicable to
itself and comprehends all existing qualities. And the logical or
rational God, the God obtained by way of negation, the absolute entity,
merges, like reality itself, into nothingness; for, as Hegel pointed
out, pure being and pure nothingness are identical. And the God of the
heart, the God who is felt, the God of living men, is the Universe
itself conceived as personality, is the consciousness of the Universe. A
God universal and personal, altogether different from the individual God
of a rigid metaphysical monotheism.

I must advert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists
between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the
one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the
continent or thing which contains, personality the content or thing
contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my
comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself--which
is in a certain way the whole Universe--and that my individuality is my
extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite. A hundred jars of
hard earthenware are strongly individualized, but it is possible for
them to be all equally empty or all equally full of the same homogeneous
liquid, whereas two b