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Thus the progress of Christian civilization has been the slow but brightening revelation of the gospel of Christ as "good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all the people;" "The poor have good tidings preached to them."

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CHAPTER XVI.

PERSONALITY.

75. Definitions.

I. A PERSON is a being conscious of self, subsisting in individuality and identity, and endowed with intuitive reason, rational sensibility and free-will. All beings constitutionally devoid of these characteristics are impersonal.

God alone is self-existent and independent, unconditioned and allconditioning. Finite persons are always dependent on him; but they are in the image of God as endowed with reason and free-will, and are also in some respects self-conditioning.

Hamilton remarks that while physical action is conditioned in space and time, the action of the human mind is not conditioned in space, but in consciousness and time. But because the mind is conscious of itself in all its acts and its consciousness is spontaneous and entirely within itself, it may be said to be, in this respect, self-conditioning.

A personal being has also intuitive knowledge of rational principles. Thus is opened to him those ultimate realities of reason, the True, the Right, the Perfect and the Good. He is therefore autonomic; the truth that enlightens and the laws that regulate thought and action are within himself. And the Good, which is the end to be acquired for himself, since it consists primarily in his own perfection, is within himself. And to this extent he is self-conditioning.

He also has knowledge of outward things, not as phenomena merely but as real beings, and of their real energies; by his rational intelligence he discovers the scientific principles and laws which regulate nature, and the cosmos or orderly system which it constitutes. In the light of reason he reads in nature the archetypal thoughts which it expresses and the rational ends which it subserves. Thus nature does not so much hem him in with limits as it opens a sphere to his thoughts and reveals to him the grandeur of his own reason.

In his rational sensibilities his being lies open to influences that come on him from the sphere of the spiritual; he becomes conscious of a presence and a power transcending sense and arousing him to interest in truth and right, in perfection and beauty, and in good which

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reason estimates as having worth and in comparison with which sensual enjoyment is held of small account.

In his will he is self-directing, self-acting and free. Here also nature, which seemed a restriction, is found to open a sphere of action in which man conquers nature and compelling it to reveal and surrender to him its powers and resources, develops himself and discovers and reveals his own powers.

In all these respects man is self-conditioning. And, as in the enlargement of his knowledge and the development of his powers he comes upon the conditions and limitations of his being, he finds them not ultimately in nature, but rather in his dependence on God and his subjection to his law. Thus the very limitations and conditions of his being reveal his greatness, as subject ultimately only to the supreme and absolute Reason, hedged about only with the truth and laws, the ideas and ends eternal in the divine wisdom and love, and bound within these flaming barriers to be a worker together with God in the universal moral system for the realization of its highest ends.

The component parts of this definition have already been considered and need no further explanation.

II. A Moral Agent is a person considered as under obligation to obey the moral law, with freedom to obey or disobey it, and thus responsible for his action and character as right or wrong. All moral agents are persons. An impersonal being cannot be a moral agent. A dog may neglect every duty required in the moral law; but it cannot be a transgressor of the law, for it is constituted incapable of knowing the law and destitute of the qualities of a free and responsible person.

There may be, however, persons or moral beings who cannot with strict propriety be called moral agents. A new-born infant is properly called a person or moral being, because it has the constitution of a person, though not yet developed into action. So the newly-born whelp of a tiger is properly called a carnivorous animal, though a long time may pass before it becomes capable of eating flesh. Yet this infant can hardly be called with propriety a moral agent until it is capable of the consciousness of moral obligation and of responsibility for its actions.

III. Nature is the whole of impersonal being considered as conditioned in space and time and the subject of continuous transition in the uniform and necessary sequences of cause and effect. Nature is always "becoming;" it is never for two successive moments in the same condition; everything in it acts only as it is acted on, and in necessity not in freedom.

"It must go on creating, changing,

Through endless shapes forever ranging,
And rest we only seem to see."

This continued transition in the necessary and uniform sequences of cause and effect is called the course of nature.

All personal beings are supernatural. By virtue of their personal attributes they are above the uniform course of nature, and act in freedom, not in necessity.

Man, however, is implicated in nature. He is, indeed, an agentcause. But so also is a molecule or atom if it is endowed with the power of attraction and repulsion or any other inherent power. The molecule reveals its power only as it comes into relation to some other molecule. So man, though endowed with personal attributes, reveals them to himself and others only as he comes into relation to nature, which is the occasion of his exerting his energies and becoming conscious of himself as rational and free. But this does not imply that man's mind is a tabula rasa, a blank tablet passively receptive of whatever sensuous impressions may be imprinted on it from without; nor does it imply that the molecule and the human mind are the same in kind.

What man is, is not determined by that which excites him to action, but by the powers which he exercises and reveals when he acts. Power is common both to personal and impersonal beings; and contact with objects in nature is the occasion on which the power both of man and the impersonal thing are brought into action. But in the exercise of their powers the one reveals its impersonality, the other its personality. Man acts in the consciousness of himself as ever one and the same; by virtue of his rationality and his consequent susceptibility to rational motives he is able to direct his energies to any end which he has freely chosen and to call them into action at will. Man's body is itself a part of nature. Muscular contractility and other organic energies are forces of nature. But the man exerts these forces and directs them to his own ends, and through them-hand guided by mind-is able to use other forces of nature and compel them to effect what he has` willed and what nature without his intervention would never have effected. These powers in their very essence imply that man is distinct from nature and above it. In the very act of knowing nature and acting on it he distinguishes himself from nature, knows himself above it, and finds in it both the sphere of his rational intelligence and free activity and the resources and powers which he controls to his own service. He is a supernatural being. Lotze says: "The complete survey of the inward experience is the only way to ascertain with what essential qualities the soul fills out its own indivisible unity, which holds the manifold of its inner life together and develops the manycolored manifoldness of its characteristics. We have no other insight into the essence of the soul except what the observed acts of our own

consciousness guarantee; we know what the soul is by what it is able to know, to feel and to do."*

The Duke of Argyll suggests that man cannot know the supernatural till he has attained an exhaustive knowledge of the natural. If this is so he can never know the supernatural. Conscious individuality and identity, conscious reason and free-will are of the essence of personality. If a man does not know these in his consciousness of himself he can never know them. And personality in its essential significance is supernatural. This very suggestion of searching throughout nature for the supernatural presupposes knowledge of the supernatural.

It must be noted that the word nature is often used with other meanings. It is used to denote the constitution of anything, or its essential qualities; we speak of the nature of an alkali or of electricity, the nature of law, of a circle, of syllogistic reasoning, or of God. Supernatural is also used to denote the miraculous, the exertion on nature of a power not only supernatural but also superhuman. Nature is also used to denote the finite universe, including man; and the supernatural is identified with the absolute and predicated only of it. Then the dif ference between the supernatural and the natural becomes precisely the difference between the absolute and the finite. Then it becomes impossible to have any positive knowledge of the supernatural, or of the absolute as a supernatural being; for if man does not know the supernatural in knowing himself, he can never haye any positive knowledge of it, nor add anything positive to the idea of the absolute by affirming that it is supernatural. Imagination cannot create an idea the elements of which were never given in intuition. The logical result must be either agnosticism—the absolute as the ground of the universe is unknowable-or monism-the absolute is identical with the universe itself; and, whether the monism be materialistic or pantheistic, in either case the universe, identified with the absolute, contains nothing supernatural. Logically no bridge is left by which thought can pass to the knowledge of the absolute as the personal God. But if personality, as including reason and free-will, is in its essence supernatural, then we know the universe as including both a moral system of persons under moral law and therein supernatural, and a system of impersonal nature under natural law alone; and we may know the absolute being as the Supreme Reason governing the world in wisdom and love; that is, we may know him as the personal God in whose image as rational, free and personal, man exists. The objection that this implies that man would be exempt from the law of cause and effect rests on a misapprehension. The law of cause and effect is a principle of reason and

* Mikrokosmus. Vol. I., pp. 182-184.

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