e with a sense of the mystery of the illimitable. I do not
read it as a confession of agnosticism, save in the sense in which all
philosophers are ready to admit that our knowledge of the ultimate
reality of existence is as mere ignorance compared with what we do not,
and cannot, know of it. I read it rather as a profession of the higher
theism, or, if you will, of the higher pantheism, for it is immaterial
how far we go in maintaining the Divine immanence, provided we
safeguard the sovereign fact of individuality and abstain from all
confusion of the human personality and the Divine.

There is prevalent a most erroneous impression that the Divine
immanence and personality are two irreconcilable conceptions, and that
to assert that the All is a person or an individual is at once to limit
its universality. Such is not the case, as an analysis of the
conception of personality will show. The philosophic term "person" is
utterly indifferent to the ideas of limitation or illimitation. Its
essential significance, its distinguishing note, is that of
self-sufficiency or self-subsistence, prescinding entirely from all
considerations of limits or their absence. Thus a stone, a plant, a
brick is an individual, because each is self-contained and is
sufficient for the constitution of itself in being, and were they
endowed with intelligence they would be further distinguished by the
honorific title of _person_. Man is a _person_, because a subsistent,
self-sufficing individual, furthermore endowed with reason. _A
fortiori_ is the All a person, because if the Supreme is not
self-sufficing, then nothing or nobody is. Hence we have to point out
in reply to the strictures of the opposite philosophic school that so
far from infinitude being an obstacle to individuality or personality,
the Infinite alone, in the strict sense of the word, can be called a
person, because in the Infinite or the All alone is absolute
self-sufficiency realised. From the very fact, then, of the
omnipresence of the Divine, because--

In my flesh his spirit doth flow
Too near, too far for me to know;

because, to use Emerson's language, "God appears with all his parts in
every moss and every cobweb," or Mr. Spencer's, which comes to
identically the same thing, "All the forces operative in the universe
are modes or manifestations of one Supreme and Infinite
Energy"--because of these momentous facts we ascribe personality to the
Infinite, with no d